With Theros and Ravnica Both Now Official D&D Settings, We Should Have Official Rulings on Planar Travel

A few weeks ago, one of the players in my Ravnica game told me they were still trying to figure out the bonus spell they'd be getting for taking the planeswalker feat. When I heard this, I was confused. Other than Plane Shift (unlocked only at 13th level or higher, to put it on par with other 7th level spells for pure casters) the special feat I'd designed said nothing about getting things like Bless or Burning Hands.

What had happened is that the player in question had googled the feat, and I think (not unreasonably) assumed that I was using what they had found: another homebrew Planeswalker feat for D&D games set in Ravnica (or, now, Theros.)

I reminded them to look at the google doc I had provided with the text of the feat, but it did make me think that it'd be nice to get an official answer.

While both are set in magical fantasy multiverses, the truth is that Traditional D&D and Magic the Gathering treat planar travel in quite different ways.

In D&D, first off, you can go to other worlds while still on the same Plane. Every mundane world (mundane if you don't count all the wizards and monsters, but like... places where normal people live that aren't entirely made of magic) exists within the Prime Material Plane. While the "inner planes" are focused more on things like the elements and the kind of mania of the fey and the depressive shadowfell, the outer planes of the multiverse, where the gods tend to come from, is built along solid lines of good and evil, law and chaos.

Traveling between these planes isn't easy, but it's the sort of thing that students of magic can accomplish with enough diligence - spells like Plane Shift, Etherealness, and Astral Projection all allow for travel between any of the planes for groups of people. They're high-level spells (7th or higher, I believe) but not unattainable.

In Magic, planes are a different concept. Each individual world in Magic is its own plane, and some places that even might have a large human/humanoid population are still quite otherworldly from our perspectives. While within one of these planes, there can be subdivisions (like Nyx and the Underworld for Theros,) actual travel between the planes themselves is limited only to individuals with what is called a Planeswalker Spark (this wasn't always the case, but has been since the "Mending" at the end of the Time Spiral arc, with the Dreadhorde invasion in Ravnica a notable and kludgy exception.) (Also the cosmic horror monsters known as the Eldrazi, but in true eldritch fashion, these things break all the rules.)

Being a planeswalker is a sort of mix between being a Jedi and a Mutant from X-Men. Only a rare number of people actually have a spark (I believe it's about one in a million) and only a small number of those people ever see that spark ignite (again, one in a million, meaning that among the entire multiverse population, there's a 1 in 1,000,000,000,000, or one in a trillion, chance that you'll actually be a planeswalker - which actually makes it shocking when you get more than one person from any given world. Maybe Dominaria's just special.

Anyway, while in the earlier history of Magic you could build things like interplanar airships (the Weatherlight being the famous example,) these days with the exception of the Kaladesh-built Planar Bridge and an army of zombies encased in magical "Lazotep" coating to survive the journey using it, you just have to be a planeswalker to go elsewhere.

Which poses a challenge for DMs who want to take advantage of the multiple settings. Especially given that we now have two books, I can't imagine there are many DMs who don't want to have their Ravnican characters go to Theros or their Theran characters go to Ravnica at high levels.

But we don't have any official word on this.

As written, neither book talks at all about the multiverse, which would seem to allow people to run these settings as if they're just in the prime material plane of the main D&D multiverse. I could imagine, for example, just throwing in the towel and ignoring concepts like Planeswalkers and saying that Rakdos is just another demon lord from the Abyss.

But I find that deeply unsatisfying.

So as I see it, there are a few options:

Break the Mending:

In the "Break the Mending" option, you basically roll things back. Planeswalkers are once again figures of profound and godlike power, and while they can zip from world to world with a thought, a dedicated-enough wizard could also summon creatures from other planes and travel between them through relatively ordinary magic.

In a lot of ways, I like this version (perhaps dropping the "Jace is a God now" concept, but keeping the "planar travel isn't all that unique") because it lets players use all the spells in the D&D books without any weird restrictions.

The only downside I see to this is that it either dilutes what it means to be a planeswalker (if Jace is a wizard who can travel the planes, how is that different from Joe Izzet who just hit level 13 and got Plane Shift?) and also suggests that the players should only have access to planar travel if they go with a Wizard, Sorcerer, or Warlock (maybe Druid? Druids get Plane Shift too, right?) It's pretty clear to me that Garruk and Vivian Reed are Rangers (if Garruk isn't a straight-up Barbarian, that is). The new planeswalker Basri Ket is either a Fighter or Paladin, and Gideon Jura is clearly a Paladin. So I think there needs to be a way for non-casters and half-casters to get access to planar travel. Hell, the Ur-Planeswalker himself, Urza, was an Artificer!

Make Planeswalkers a Greater Feat:

In Mythic Odysseys of Theros, the concept of "supernatural gifts" allows players to make mythic characters from level 1 onward. These work a bit like feats you take at 1st level (they also describe how a player could just literally take a level 1 feat and flavor it as a supernatural gift) that can have various big implications for the character over time.

One such feat you could provide is allowing player characters to choose to be a planeswalker - or at least to have a planeswalker spark.

I've got something along those lines in my game, though I've made it its own feat, which is a design concept I'm still thinking of iterating on.

The problem I see with this is that, under post-Mending lore, you can't take anyone along with you when you planeswalk (though I think you can take objects - obviously you bring your clothes along, and Gideon brought the Blackblade from Dominaria to Ravnica, for all the good it did him). So if one or two party members take this feat and the others don't, you either force any planar travel to split the party or you need to come up with some lore-breaking exemption that allows them to bring friends along (which is how I'm currently doing it.)

Everyone's a Planeswalker!:

This might be the most elegant solution, though not without its flaws. I've found that Magic's story has tended to focus far more on Planeswalkers as the central figures, instead of, as they used to, on Legendary creatures. It makes sense, given that a planeswalker is much easier to make a recurring character when you're changing settings every set. But it does feel to me that there's a lot more personality afforded to these figures than the individuals who are bound to their home planes.

Still, this solves a lot of problems. Essentially, rather than making a feat players choose, they'll simply all get the ability to planeswalk at a certain level - or better yet, after a certain in-game event.

This allows you not to worry about explaining the lore reasons why certain characters are able to show up in other planes, and it keeps the planeswalker characters from feeling like they've given up something to provide planar travel for the group.

Ultimately, though, given WotC has published multiple setting books in the Magic multiverse, it'd be nice to get some official word on how they'd recommend handling this.