Wednesday, November 7, 2018

House Dimir Story Hooks

House Dimir has been around as long as the other guilds, but until relatively recently (I can't remember how long it has been in the in-universe timeline, but the reveal was part of the first Ravnica block) it was a total secret. Rumors may have existed, but the public generally considered there to be nine guilds in Ravnica, and presumably didn't think in terms of Magic's color pie to realize that they were missing a Black and Blue guild.

For so long the Dimir have existed as the ultimate hidden conspiracy. A clandestine organization that employs stealthy spies and assassins as well as spellcasters who are capable of erasing a target's memory, the Dimir have honed their secrecy to a lethal edge.

Secrets define the Dimir, and even now, in an era where the Dimir have a public face, there's still a sort of tendency in Ravnica to pretend they don't exist.

Fun story: ever since I got a Royal Assassin in my first 60-card, Revised Edition pack of Magic cards in 1993 or maybe 1994, I've been a fan of black. I got a Lord of Atlantis in another pack soon after, and blue was always my favorite color, so I started playing a Blue Black deck (once I figured out that you should actually stick to fewer than five colors unless you had some real tools to make that work.) I added red once I got a copy of (the Chronicles version of) Nicol Bolas, but Blue Black tended to be my favorite color combo. When Ravnica: City of Guilds came out, I forced myself to start with the colors I played the least of (this was once I started playing Magic Online,) and so I went with the Red and White Boros. But then I started to see the flavor of House Dimir and while I liked Boros a lot, I just had to make a control/evasion deck which I called "The House Always Wins." It didn't always win, but it was one of my most consistently powerful decks. But I fell in love with the flavor of House Dimir, and I think it's had a profound effect on my writing. Anyway...

The Dimir have been outed, but the public face they have crafted provides many good story hooks for an adventure or campaign.

First off, I think that two genres function very well with the Dimir as a major element. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that of a Film Noir detective story.

And I'm talking here about the Dimir serving as allies, or perhaps such stories working with a Dimir player character. See, the thing about being an ancient conspiracy that controls all knowledge is that there is no one better at uncovering the truth than the Dimir.

In Ravnican society, the Dimir can act as couriers and librarians. But in my version of the world, I'd add private detectives as well as journalists - indeed, I'd probably have a newspaper called the Observer (with a Dimir symbol as the O) as a popular publication within the city. Because the Dimir have agents everywhere, they are uniquely positioned to expose corruption in the other guilds.

It is ironic in some ways, but the guild that keeps the most secrets is the best at unveiling those of other guilds.

An investigation into anything from police brutality within the Boros to embezzlement in the Orzhov, or possibly much larger conspiracies that threaten the plane itself, would be a great plot to involve the Dimir in.

Noir works great for the petty stuff, but the genre that I think works even better for the Dimir is the conspiracy thriller.

Stuff like Three Days of the Condor, the Parallax View, or even the nonfictional All the President's Men are great inspiration for this sort of plot. Indeed, Deep Throat would be a fantastic inspiration for a Dimir operative who is friendly to the party. Or you could have that hypothetical Dimir newspaper be the equivalent of the Washington Post, taking down a corrupt leader who has been covering up their crimes.

But this is a fantasy setting, and so I suggest you also get into far crazier conspiracies. The X-Files is a good reference point.

The thing that's great about the Dimir is that they are both capable of being the guild fighting to expose the grand conspiracy (like in the current block, where they're taking the lead on opposing Nicol Bolas' attempts to place his agents in leadership positions of the guilds) while also being a perfectly good conspiracy for the party to expose.

Dimir villains can be a ton of fun - between shapechangers, necromancers, and masters of illusion, enchantment, and divinations magic, the Dimir are going to keep your party paranoid and always leave them wondering if what they are actually doing is all by the House's designs.

The fact that the guildmaster is a shapechanger means that even if you have your campaign-ending final boss fight against Lazav, you could easily imply that either what you fought wasn't the real Lazav or that Lazav wasn't even truly the guildmaster, and that there is someone else pulling the strings from higher up (such as the ghost of the vampire Szadek, the guild's parun (founding guildmaster) who died in the first Ravnica block.)

I would recommend that if you want the Dimir to show up as major villains (or even allies) in your campaign, you should build up slowly to them. Dimir operatives infiltrate every other guild as a matter of course, and having a grand reveal in which several seemingly unrelated and friendly NPCs turn out to be Dimir could be a great moment in the game.

A Dimir villain might also turn out to be using the party to do something good, and is simply playing the villain in order to spur them to action. Fake-outs will play well - I imagine a party finally arriving at Duskmantle, the secret headquarters of the guild, only to discover that after a huge effort to find this mythical place, they realize that it's actually a fake that was constructed to lure them into a trap.

Environments:

As the Blue and Black guild, Dimir lands are Islands and Swamps. Islands, as we've said, translate into canals and aqueducts in Ravnica. Foggy docks and perhaps canal-side cafes where operatives meet to speak in code with one another are great "island" locations for the Dimir. (I'm also really found of the idea of a bookshop with secret back rooms hidden by bookshelves.) Their "swamps," which take the form of undercity sewers, are likely either nondescript and mundane but with hidden passages to actual meeting places, or they might be cavernous spaces that seem totally abandoned but hide functional buildings among the rubble of previous ages of the city.

Second only to the Golgari, the Dimir know the Undercity well. But while the Golgari use it to hide their massive numbers and wage civil wars that the rest of the city doesn't even know about, the Dimir primarily use it because the remoteness and the darkness allows them to hide their operations. The Dimir have some undead (typically skeletons and ghosts) that work for them, but they also have what in Magic are called Horrors, and generally translate to aberrations in D&D terms. Unspeakable and incomprehensible beings are the perfect sort of creature to work for a guild that prefers to play things close to the vest.

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