While I don't play the game anymore, I've always loved Magic: The Gathering's constant creation of new planes. Every world has to abide by a few rules dictated by the mechanics of the game - the biggest being that it has to have swamps, islands, plains, forests, and mountains, and cultures and creatures that fit into the five colors of mana that represents in some way - but they go to very different conceptual spaces with them.
Ravnica, my favorite of their settings, and one in which I'm currently running a big D&D campaign, for example, is a world that is just one enormous city dominated by ten extremely powerful guilds that each have their own goals as well as purposes they fulfill for the city.
While Magic spent its first several years only on its original world, Dominaria apart from a few trips to a couple other planes that were still part of a Dominaria-centric story, things started to change after ten years with the introduction of Mirrodin, the first set to take place on a new plane (in fact, a literally new plane, as it was created by one of the characters from the earlier story arc) that committed to a very serious thematic identity - in this case a world of metal in which organic life all carried with it some element that would, elsewhere, be considered artificial.
Since then, the number of known planes in the Magic multiverse has utterly exploded.
The popular settings have gotten revisits. Three blocks (meaning "sets of sets") have been released for Ravnica, and we've now gone to the gothic-horror world of Innistrad twice, the Greek-mythology-inspired Theros twice, and are preparing for a return to the adventure-world ravaged by eldritch abominations, Zendikar, for a third time.
However, before that, we've got Ikoria.
The set's name is Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths, and the world seems quite exciting. There seems to be a lot of inspiration here from Japanese "kaiju" movies, as well as anime/manga like Attack on Titan, though the human cultures of Ikoria seem less specific to a real-world region (as far as I can tell).
Essentially, a bit like on Innistrad, humans are definitely not on the top of the food chain here, as there are profoundly massive monsters who regularly threaten human civilization. The result is that humans have fortified themselves in various cities, trying to evade the monsters with massive walls or building the city out of floating balloons so that they can move out of the migration paths of the creatures.
The set seems to be built both around having these very large creatures, and a mechanic where you can combine the features of various creatures to make an even bigger monstrosity. It also seems to have a three-color "wedge" theme like Tarkir, with a different monster type for each "triome."
Personally, my main interest in Magic planes is as future destinations once my players' characters' planeswalker sparks ignite (which will not be for a while - they're only about to hit level 5, and that won't happen until level 13). I am already imagining some kind of massive kaiju fight on the walls of Drannith (a major location on Ikoria).
No comments:
Post a Comment