Saturday, November 10, 2018

How to Plunder Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica

I love the Ravnica setting and I was really excited to see it made an official D&D plane (even if that raises very tricky problems about the multiverse(s).) But given that I'm in the middle of a years-long campaign (they're getting close to level 9!) in my own homebrew setting, I don't know when I'll have a chance to truly have a bunch of guilded players adventuring around the Tenth District.

So what can we steal from this book for our own settings or perhaps established settings that we're playing in?

First off, I think you can justify things in two ways: one is that these elements just appear in different forms in other settings - it's just coincidence or some unknown natural law that brings, say, Vedalken into existence in multiple planes (much as it does in the worlds of Magic.) Another is that you can have Ravnicans arrive in your worlds through planar travel. Given how important (and missing) Jace Beleren is on Ravnica, you could easily have Ravnicans arrive on another world of the prime material plane searching for him or possibly hoping to expand their guild's influence elsewhere in the multiverse (remember that the guilds, being powerful institutions in a planet-sized city are likely to be larger and more powerful than most empires.)

But what do I recommend taking?

Let's start with the obvious:

GGtR has new races, class options, and monsters/NPCs. Allowing players to play as Minotaurs, Centaurs, Loxodons, Simic Hybrids, or Vedalken in a different setting could give them just the option they've been looking for. You might need to re-skin these races if you're just stealing the stats without creating a canonical connection between the worlds (particularly the rather guild-specific Simic Hybrids.)

Monsters can of course easily be re-skinned, not that they need too much work, and of course NPCs could fit with certain archetypes that exist elsewhere in fantasy. There are also a handful of spells and magic items that you could incorporate into the game as well.

One invaluable thing that the book provides is a set of chapters on guild-based adventures that contain a map for a mini-dungeon (something you could easily do in one sitting) for each guild. These spaces are perfect for many different kinds of adventures and provide a number of suggestions that, again, could work within those archetypes and genres.

Finally, I think that the use of factions and renown is expanded upon in interesting ways in this book. While Waterdeep: Dragon Heist of course also uses the system to flesh out the city (it's either clever strategy on the part of Wizards or a happy coincidence that they released an urban adventure book and Ravnica as a new setting so close to one another. You could probably translate Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into Ravnica: Zino Heist pretty easily.

But to the point: if you want to play with the idea of players getting serious rewards for working with a faction in your world, take a look at the ideas they have in here. The Contacts tables also provide a lot of inspiration for NPCs that are important to the player characters, giving each member of the "main cast" a number of "supporting characters" that will provide you with a lot of interesting NPCs and always give you easy ways to start up an adventure.

One thing I really like is the idea that earning a certain rank in a guild gives you the means to live a certain lifestyle. You can thus focus on the money earned in adventuring to be spent on adventuring while not having to worry about paying for the inn or food.

While I'm hoping that I'll be able to run a true Ravnica-set game at some point in the not-too-distant future, I'm sure that elements from the book will make their way into my Sarkon setting. I already have a few factions that could easily use Rakdos, Dimir, and Orzhov elements (what can I say? I play black.)

No comments:

Post a Comment