Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Orzhov Syndicate Story Hooks

Ah, the Orzhov. The Orzhov have three really strong identities that all come with their own story hooks. First off, the Orzhov are Ravnica's bankers and tax collectors. Money defines so much of the guild, and it means that the Orzhov are the ultimate decadent elite. While their Magic colors are White and Black, the real color that defines them is gold (which, in Magic, is what they use for multi-colored cards, so hey, it works!) Money flows in to the Orzhov like rivers into the ocean, and the Orzhov derive a great deal of power by choosing whom they choose to give that money to.

But lest the rest of Ravnica rise up in revolution against these bloated (often literally) plutocrats, the Orzhov also serve as one of the great religious forces. Using respect for clergy as a way to prod the populace into handing over their gold, the Orzhov cultivate a baroque aesthetic that awes the people into compliance. But despite the cynicism with which they use religious iconography, the Orzhov do hold to a kind of faith in the sanctity of their church - those within their organization are to be taken care of as if they were family.

And that's where the third aspect of the Orzhov comes in - it's the mafia of Ravnica. The Orzhov have many different rackets running, and while they primarily use them to get rich, they also use them to enrich their environments and to protect their own. Like the Mafia (at least as romanticized in film,) they sort of see their organization as its own, separate society within the larger society. Even if they are brutal to those on the outside, they have a set of rules that those within must follow when it comes to interacting with one another.

In terms of story hooks, the Orzhov make excellent villains. But before we get to them, it's worth considering how they might be allies of the party.

Like some criminal organizations, their deeper corruption rarely extends to the kind of street crime that really endangers the public. The Orzhov might employ the party to keep their streets clean of thieves and gangs so that the Boros or Azorius leave them alone. Yes, the Orzhov might be an overall drain on society, but the chaos that might ensue if they were not in power might make them worth the price.

Given that the Orzhov are also the bankers of Ravnica, it stands to reason that villainous individuals might break into their vaults to steal dangerous things. You might have the Orzhov contact the party about a delicate matter and reveal that they had been holding onto some artifact of terrible destructive power, but that the armed caravan that was transporting it to the vault was hit by unknown assailants and the thing has gone missing.

You might also have to deal with an ambitious member of the guild who is trying to overthrow its leadership, and the party winds up getting swept into an intra-guild conflict (this works particularly well if you have an Orzhov party member.)

And given that the Orzhov do make an effort to maintain good PR, they might hire some adventurers to do some charitable work with full Orzhov backing (and likely a lot of publicity around it.)

But let's move on to the Orzhov villains.

First off, the Orzhov are one of the guilds that practice necromancy, and so you could easily have a rather classic Lich villain as a member of the Orzhov. Because they are so wealthy and powerful, you can easily have such a villain insulated from the party by a veritable army of guards and thugs.

There's also a great excuse to have Eyes Wide Shut levels of decadence - while that might seem more of a Rakdos thing, you just know that behind closed doors the city's most wealthy and powerful people get up to some freaky stuff, likely involving a lot of coerced or exploited people.

The Orzhov employ thrulls - constructs made from dead people (less of a Flesh Golem than being kind of warped and mutated after death to become a new thing.) While they seem to be under control, in a different Magic setting, Thrulls were actually one of the most unstoppable and dangerous creatures that existed, scaring off one of Magic's big bads, the Phyrexians. Having the Orzhov thrulls go out of control and starting something that looks a bit like a zombie apocalypse could also be an option here.

The Orzhov are also fantastic red herrings. Because they are so overtly decadent and greedy, they would be very easy to frame for various misdeeds within the city. You could easily have a campaign that starts with the party in conflict with the Orzhov until a big shift when we find out that it wasn't them this time.

Environments:

As the Black and White guild, the Orzhov environments are Swamps and Plains. In Ravnica, swamps are generally represented by the sewers and the undercity. Given how highfalutin' the Orzhov are, I'd imagine that their undercity holdings are less of the fetid sewers and more like hidden underground vaults and private homes where they can engage in dalliances that would not look so good if the public saw what they were up to. A literally underground club with a speakeasy vibe to it would really fit in the Orzhov version of a swamp. On the other hand, their swamp territories might also reflect the dirty side of their activities - dungeons where they keep debtors or dumps where the bodies that maybe weren't good enough to become thrulls were unceremoniously dumped - perhaps even after the Orzhov promised the person an ornate burial plot.

Their plains would probably be their grand cathedral squares, with massive and ornate temples and probably lots of statuary and gold - all to proclaim the glory of the Orzhov and their position at the top of Ravnica society.

No comments:

Post a Comment