Managing Dimir Characters at the Table

Hey, have I mentioned House Dimir is my favorite Ravnica guild? I have? Ok, well anyway...

In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, each guild functions as a player background and a faction with which one can gain renown and thus acquire new privileges and rewards. House Dimir has these functions, but in addition you pick a second guild that you have infiltrated. While I feel there ought to be an option to play as one of the openly-Dimir-affiliated couriers, journalists, private investigators, or librarians, the main fantasy they are reinforcing with the background is that of the infiltrator.

A Dimir character will thus generally behave as they would in a different guild. In D&D's official Ravnica stream, the Broken Pact, for example (EARLY EPISODE SPOILERS) one of the party members is revealed to actually be a Dimir operative after appearing until then as a member of another guild. I guess I'll keep it vague, though if you know Ravnica, it's not terribly hard to guess which one it is.

But this provides a bit of a conundrum, or perhaps simply a stylistic choice for how you want to run the game.

Do you let the other players know?

Now, if the players are good at curbing their metagaming instincts, you could simply make it common knowledge and just have the players play their characters as if they don't know. In the Broken Pact, they have the advantage of having an audience to fool, so while I believe the other three players were aware, the first couple episodes treated the Dimir party member simply as if they were part of a different guild.

This is, honestly, probably the easiest way of doing it. Simply give the player occasional messages and meetings with contacts and potentially use that as a potential reveal within the party - something that will be a particularly big moment if you have an otherwise single-guild party.

A single-guild party consisting of all Dimir characters can also work quite well, and removes the need to keep things secret between players (unless you want a truly farcical level of lying and cover-ups.) Indeed, you could have a group that, to NPCs, appears to be a motley group of mixed-guild folks, only for it to turn out that it's all Dimir operatives.

But let's say you want a challenge. Maybe you want to keep it all a secret.

This starts at character creation. If you're having your session 0 with everyone present, simply announce that if a player wants to play a Dimir character, they should come tell the DM in private and simply roll their character as if they were a member of the guild they've infiltrated. Other players peering over the Dimir player's shoulders might find it surprising that their Selesnya Cleric has proficiency in stealth and deception, but that's on your Dimir player to keep on the down-low.

Where this gets particularly challenging is in play. One thing I highly recommend is out-of-game communication with your players. There's nothing in the rules that everything has to happen at the table, and so if you want to have your Dimir player receive their instructions in a way that the rest of the party doesn't know about, simply do it via text messages or in meetings outside the game.

For actions that do have to happen in-game, like using the Dimir-only cantrip Encode Thoughts, you can work out a signal ahead of time, like scratching one's temple a certain number of times.

Over the course of a long campaign, it seems like a player's party should probably eventually discover their true guild affiliation, but you should make them earn it, and allow the Dimir player to cover their tracks.

Giving your Dimir character secret objectives is a huge part of the fun of the idea - maybe there's an NPC that the party just wants to talk to, but the Dimir character has to ensure that they die, or better yet, get their memory erased. This then becomes a challenge for the Dimir character to achieve their objective without revealing what they've done.

With the rather broad spread of alignments amongst the guilds (and the potential for heroes and villains in each,) Ravnica has a great deal of potential to see players clash in their objectives and desires. But that's usually going to be more overt - a Dimir operative is going to try to achieve their own goals without anyone noticing. And that should present an interesting challenge, both for the player to do so and the DM to make it possible - and also possible to fail.