An Hour and a Half to Ravnica

I'm killing time waiting for people to show up for my Ravnica "1"-shot (the quotes are because we're all fairly certain this will turn into a larger campaign.) The game is starting at level 18, with all the local characters (one is an import from the Forgotten Realms, and I've got a whole plot built around that) with all the characters in guilds already at 25 renown, so this is going to basically skip ahead to the Avengers rather than start with the solo films, if that metaphor works (I also realize that that can be a dangerous move, like if you look at how things went with DC.)

Anyway, Ravnica's a very different world from the standard medieval fantasy of most D&D settings. I'm going to be leaning hard into the kind of Magepunk feel that Magic has cultivated for a while now. My version of Ravnica, while architecturally more in line with Prague, Budapest, or Paris, is going to feel very much like 1980s-Today New York City.

For instance, the adventure begins at an Izzet Lab that's between a Whole Foods-like Selesnya grocery store and the "Flaming Angel" bar and grill, operated by a retired Boros legionnaire. There'll even be a sad little "educational overlook" that looks out over Zonot Seven across the street that's owned by the Simic and has that kind of run-down, made in the 60s or 70s and not updated since kind of feel.

Personally, while I love fantasy as a genre, I think that the feudal medievalism is played out. I mean, I love Game of Thrones (even if the last season has been super rushed and because of that fact the recent turn in episode 5 felt not-quite-earned to me even if I do see how it was the final rug-pull coming all along) but to me, the Dark Tower is the biggest fantasy influence on me, with its mashup of Westerns, futuristic sci-fi, and late-20th-century urban creepiness.

Ravnica could certainly feel more medieval with a different DM - you might, inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, really highlight the machiavellian scheming and intrigue, as if Varys and Littlefinger were the main models for characters in it.

But I'm really more interested in seeing the medieval stuff give way to modern-by-another-path. Indeed, much as Eberron has that Magepunk/Dungeonpunk feel, I'm pushing that for Ravnica. And the fact that it's one big city lets me play a lot with the oddness of living in New York (I went to college there) and how when you're on Manhattan, it feels like the city goes on endlessly in all directions. In Ravnica, it literally does.

Obviously, big cities have existed since, like, Babylon. But I think that the density of this particular urban environment only really has precedent in the past few centuries, and perhaps deserves more inspiration from futuristic sci fi like Judge Dredd's Megacity One. Or, obviously, Trantor from the Foundation series or Coruscant from Star Wars.

The Guilds as the real powers of the city also mean that we can do away with Dukes and Lords and such - there's no king in Ravnica. Indeed, it's actually a place with theoretically high social mobility - though that seriously depends on your guild affiliation.

The general way I like to talk about my taste in fantasy is "fantasy with American accents." So much of the genre is born out of the Arthurian tradition, but while I love Europe and even particularly England (though recent politics both there and here make me depressed,) I feel a very strong effort to make really fundamentally American fantasy, and a large part of that is ditching the feudal and medieval environments that have come to define it.

Mind you, I certainly don't begrudge anyone who likes that. But for the stuff I create, which includes riffing on this established setting, I really want to try something different.