Renown and Ravnica Campaign Structure

I've only really run one D&D campaign, but it has been going for a few years, and I've learned a lot about the benefits and challenges of free-form sandboxes, linear adventures, and letting players improvise (though I'm of course still learning.)

What I find quite interesting about Ravnica, and specifically the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, is the inherent structure it lends to a campaign.

Each guild functions as a faction in which a player can earn renown. You'll generally only earn renown in your own guild (unless you're Dimir, in which the guild you've infiltrated thinks you're one of them.) Doing quests and missions for your guild will earn you greater status within it - you'll start to be able to bring NPCs and allied monsters with you when doing things for your guild (and sometimes just whenever.)

You can, of course, run a campaign with all the party members being part of the same guild. What this means is that the party should probably rank-up in renown at the same rate, gaining many of the same benefits.

On one hand, the book structures gaining renown as a resource to gather. Each mission you complete for your guild nets you, essentially, a renown point, or sometimes two. Ranks get unlocked at certain rates of renown, with the very earliest benefits coming at three renown.

I think there's a good question to be asked as to just how much such a mission entails.

I tend to like longer, more complex and multi-stage adventures. Right now my party is in the middle of some more episodic adventures, but for example, the one that they are about to start has four combat encounters and a bit of environmental and social interaction to get there - I suspect that we'll take two to four sessions to get through it.

Actually, it's for a faction that is partially inspired by the Rakdos - a faction that I created to allow chaotic evil characters to serve as heroic and altruistic function on my world - but that's just a coincidence.

The thing is, if you were to have missions like the ones I design, and they only awarded one renown point - and that only going to the party member who is in that guild - it means that it would be nearly impossible to hit those higher ranks.

So rules as written for Ravnica are for either a single-guild party, or one that does almost exclusively very short-term episodes, or both. Getting four party members in different guilds to 50 renown (which is where the ranks cap out) would likely make hitting level 20 seem quick and easy.

So I would recommend accelerating tasks for the guilds as you go. There are tangible benefits even at the first rank (which generally requires 3 renown) that you might want to build to slowly, but I think you could start being more generous with renown as the campaign goes on. A mission or quest could be broken into smaller component parts that each reward a renown, or perhaps you could just give bigger chunks of it as the players did higher-level missions.

To be fair, I think hitting the highest levels of renown is meant to be something level 20 players could still work on. You don't want a bunch of level 5 characters to already have access to swarms of NPCs under their command.

While Ravnica is set up very nicely for short adventures and quests, and you could certainly run a very episodic campaign, I'm always a fan of the longer, serialized stories.

You could approach this a couple ways:

One is the Buffy approach - you take episodic stories that touch on or brush up against a larger plot. Yes, you might just be clearing some Izzet lab of renegade weirds, but you also happen to find that one of the dead researchers had a note about some argument between Ral Zarek and Niv-Mizzet, giving you further insight into some grand plot involving Nicol Bolas (look the names up if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Another is a more strictly serialized approach - every plot is directly connected, but they take you all over the city. If it's a plane-threatening bad guy your party is trying to stop, it might be that anything you do to stop the big bad (like Nicol Bolas, for example) is going to please your guild, regardless of whether it's in their typical wheelhouse. This would allow members of different guilds to earn renown on the same adventures, which gives you some of the best of both worlds.

Of course, if your big bad is a member (or guildmaster) of a guild, it might be easy to have plenty of adventures themed around the villainous guild, and any guild that opposes it (which is basically the other 9 in many cases) would reward renown for foiling their plans.