I was good in the last series of entries and avoided my urge to save my favorite for last, but here, in the penultimate story hook post (I'll confess that part of the reason for my rapid updates yesterday was election anxiety - but this isn't a politics blog) I'm going to talk about the Izzet League and save their fellow Grixis guild (I didn't play during the Alara block so Shards feel less intuitive to me than Guilds) for the final spot.
If you're familiar with World of Warcraft (and if you read this blog, you likely are,) I can't really think of a better analogue for the Izzet than their Goblins and Gnomes. Ravnica doesn't have Gnomes, but you can certainly make a Goblin character who fits in here.
The Izzet are one of two super-science guilds in Ravnica. But while the Simic Combine focuses on biomancy, the Izzet are arguably the more conventional of the two, being interested in magic and technology and the intersection between the two. Discovery and experimentation are their greatest ideals, and they place a very high value on intelligence.
More than any of the other guilds, the Izzet guildmaster (and parun, meaning its founder, which puts his age at over 10,000) is central to the identity of the guild. Niv-Mizzet, a red and blue dragon who is also a wizard, is extremely egotistical, but he is smart enough that the ego is sort of justified. He is constantly working on myriad projects, and only he can keep the details of them all straight.
In terms of aesthetics, the Izzet are very steampunk, its researchers wearing magitek-like armor and their laboratories all powered by steam vents.
The Izzet are in charge of construction in Ravnica, but their expertise in technology has given the city steam power and heat, and while I don't think it says explicitly, you could even imagine them providing electricity, breaking Ravnica out of the typical medievalism you find in most of the game's settings.
The Izzet are great catalysts for stories because they are always working on some exciting new project, and the possible results of such experimentation is practically limitless. Time travel, planar travel, opening portals to extra-planar threats, all manner of reality-warping, or just plain old explosions that kill you just as dead as anything else can be the result of Izzet experimentation.
But if you want lower-key stuff, you can always look at the practical side of things. Given their projects, the Izzet will probably be a good source for fetch quests - whether it's a one-session adventure that takes you into some mini-dungeon or a campaign-spanning project that requires many rare components.
The Izzet are also susceptible to sabotage, and you could easily have their projects threatened by nefarious individuals, requiring your intrepid adventurers to protect or investigate what has happened.
As villains (and a lot of those campaign-level stories mentioned three paragraphs above could be the result of villainy,) the Izzet are a great mad-scientist kind of guild (though this works just as well for the Simic.) For instance, you could have some Izzet researcher who is balking at a new Azorius regulation limiting his dangerous experiments and decides to just let loose on the city. In fact, this actually would work really well for a superhero/supervillain style narrative (which, come to think of it, would actually work great in Ravnica regardless of which guilds you use...)
An Izzet villain could be intentionally malevolent, but you could also easily have Izzet villains who don't think they're doing anything wrong - they're just so obsessed with getting results from their experiments that they have lost track of any regard for the safety of the citizens.
Wild and unexpected things are likely to happen with the Izzet - as villains or allies. If your party establishes a comfortable home base, an Izzet experiment going wrong could easily allow you to, well, blow it up.
Environments:
As the Red and Blue guild, the Izzet lands are Mountains and Islands. Their mountains are likely massive towers bright with activity - steam and flames bursting out of smokestacks and vents, lightning rods capturing atmospheric electricity, and explosions from the many labs within. Their islands, which in Ravnica tend to be canals, aqueducts, and other waterways, are probably either used for power-generating mills or pumped into their labs to produce steam or cool overheating systems. Indeed, the combination of Red's heat with Blue's water really makes steam a big element of the guild, and their territories are probably cacophonous with all the industrial activity and explosive experimentation.
All right, and with that, we've done the nine guilds of Ravnica! What a journey it's been. Well, the book comes out on Friday in game stores, so until then, we should...
What's that?
There's a tenth guild?
And the public has been aware of them since the first Ravnica block twelve years ago?
Ok then. We'll close things out with my favorite guild, House Dimir.
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