Guild identity is at the core of Ravnica as a D&D setting. What began as a mechanical concept in Magic (namely: we want a multicolor set where people only play two colors in their deck, so let's build identities around those ten color pairs) became one of the key defining traits of the setting (the other key trait, I'd say, is the fact that the entire world is a single vast city, meaning that explorers are literally just finding new neighborhoods and districts that people "downtown" have never heard of.)
In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, this is reflected through various character backgrounds, with one for each guild.
And to an extent, I think this is useful, given how distinct Ravnica is from other D&D settings. For example, if you have a player who wants to come up with a Wizard character who lives in a remote tower in some uninhabited forest, you might force them to re-think that character by limiting them to these character backgrounds. That Wizard ain't going to have the sort of isolation they're looking for unless they can create a demiplane to steal away to, because Ravnicans have about as much privacy and personal space as people who live in Tokyo (having not been to Tokyo since I was six, I'm going to own up that I just picked it as a famously dense city.)
But while the backgrounds to a great job of officially linking a character to a guild, I'd also say that there's room to wiggle.
Generally, the book recommends using other backgrounds if players, for some very strange reason, want to play Guild-less characters in a Ravnica campaign. Granted, half the world's population is "Gateless," but surely given how the guilds are one of the big things of the setting, you'd want to pick one for your character, right?
But I think you could make allowances for characters who are members of their guilds, but didn't quite come up in the same way.
The simplest way of implementing this is simply to allow players to use these other backgrounds but still benefit from being members of the guild factions. You might also grant them access to the guild expanded spell list and perhaps throw in a guild insignia in their starting equipment.
The main thing that inspired this thought was House Dimir.
The Dimir Operative background is built around the notion that you've infiltrated another guild. Indeed, you can even play it that way with your fellow players, perhaps allowing the DM to reveal it in a cool way.
But the Dimir do have a small public face - the librarians, book sellers, and private investigators (and, in my version of Ravnica, journalists.) So it seems a little disappointing that there's no option for player characters to be that kind of Dimir member.
Of course, Dimir faction rewards are also less tangible and more plot-focused than other guilds, presumably given the assumption that you'll also be earning renown with the faction that you've infiltrated. So DMs might want to come up with good rewards for Dimir members who are openly wearing the blue-and-black.
I do think one should be cautious, though. If you have a player who is not terribly familiar with the setting, you might, for example, find a player who wants to play a Fiendish Warlock from the Cult of Rakdos. But let's say they pick up the Sage background and play it as a scholar of forbidden, demonic rituals whose patron is hidden from the world. That's not exactly on-brand for the Rakdos, who would never hide the demonic nature of their guild. You'd run the risk of losing Rakdos' showbiz and entertainment element. Now, if you were to re-work it so that the Sage background is instead someone who works for the Cult as essentially a "dirt miner," looking through old records to find embarrassing secrets of the rich and powerful as material for the next big satirical revue, it could work fantastically.
Backgrounds are, of course, something that the game explicitly encourages you to customize - even in Adventurer's League you can swap out some of the elements to get what you want. So while it's a great "third choice" at character creation after race and class to align yourself with a guild, it's also pretty obvious that any of the guilds will want members with diverse experience and expertise. Boros Legionnaires use intimidation to get criminals to surrender, but surely some of them will instead try to calmly persuade a bad guy that maybe it'd be safer for everyone to just relax and work things out.
Given the sheer number of D&D games I'm lined up to play in the near future, I think my eventual Ravnica game is probably not going to happen for a while, but I'm eager to figure out exactly what shape it will take.
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