If you're sick of Ravnica stuff, well, tough. Because here's another post about it!
Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica (and I think I'm going to start abbreviating it to GGR because none of those are particularly short words) gives you many suggestions on creating characters from each of the ten guilds and adventures based around them.
One thing they also suggest is how to build a party in which every member is part of the same guild.
It's an interesting concept - my inclination is of course to make a multi-guild party - I might even require it if and when I run something in the setting. On the other hand, there are certainly advantages to having a party composed entirely of same-guild members.
D&D organized many podcasts and streaming games to do one-shot adventures - ten one-shots, one for each guild. I've listened to the Dimir one and part of the Rakdos one.
Immediately, one interesting fact presents itself - standard heroics need not apply. While the Dimir group wound up doing some pretty straightforwardly good stuff (I see the Dimir self-image as morally neutral at worst, even if they wind up being evil in fact) the Rakdos group was pretty on-board for the whole murder and mayhem thing.
D&D is of course a flexible system, and there have been evil parties long before Ravnica. But the point is that if you have a single-guild group from one of the more morally questionable guilds (I still think that every guild has a share of good people, though some clearly have more than others) you can totally have a whole campaign in which the goals are evil. Given the monsters and NPCs that are affiliated with each guild, you have plenty of good or neutral antagonists for your monstrous players to slaughter.
The single-guild group seems really well-suited to a one-shot, though by necessity doing so would mean not having a chance to expose the party to the whole of the world. If you are doing a one-shot, you can easily use some of the adventures or adventure spaces in the book. I'm pretty sure that the Dimir one simply re-purposed the Golgari mansion, flipping it back right-side up and using it for some intra-guild intrigue.
There is plenty of room for distinct characters in each guild - as I said in an earlier post, if you play around with the Magic colors as an alternative or supplement to alignment, you can think of a guild's color pair as a kind of spectrum upon which your character can fall.
Still, for a long campaign, the potential conflicts of interest and inter-guild intrigue that could come from having a mixed-guild party would give tremendous fuel to a dungeon master. If you simply look at the number of contacts a four-player party would have, you have a huge stable of NPCs to build stories around. And having players in different guilds would allow you to have some players shine in situations they might not otherwise.
As an example, let's say your Abjuration Wizard is an Azorius Law Mage. They have a low charisma, being a bookish and shy individual. But if the party needs to get some file hidden somewhere deep in New Prahv's archives, you could say that the Azorius really don't care about how charismatic you are, and instead they care about how many rules and regulations you can quote. Suddenly, Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception checks are all based on Intelligence, which your Wizard has in abundance, while your Rakdos Bard, the charming dummy who is usually the face of the group, sits back and lets the professional bureaucrat handle things.
It's a similar idea to one I saw some clever D&D commentator mention (I can't remember if it was Web DM or one of Zee Bashew's animated spellbook videos) how using extra abilities like Honor or Sanity can allow you to flip the script in similar ways.
One thing you will need to think about for a multi-guild party is giving them a story that each member will feel invested in. You can definitely put them in situations in which their philosophies and guild loyalties clash (in fact, I fell that's practically a requirement) but unless you're going with a purely episodic campaign, you'll probably want to come up with a threat that ties them together.
Obviously this can be the overstepping of one of the guilds - preferably one that none of the party members is in. Each guild has its own potential campaign-level threats (as an example, you could have the Simic achieve evolutionary perfection and unleash the Tarrasque upon Ravnica,) and simply having the party gradually uncover such a plot, maybe misdirecting by having the party chase one guild only to realize it's a plot by another one. You can definitely use the Orzhov or Golgari as really obvious villains only for it to turn out to be a red herring, potentially unveiling the true villain as someone who one would assume was good - the plot of the original Ravnica block, for example, had what was initially thought to be a Dimir plot turn out to be the machinations of the Azorius Senate's previous guildmaster, who intended to parlay the chaos into greater powers for his guild (if I recall the story correctly.)
But a threat from outside the guild is also a great reason to have the guilds cooperate. The Nephilim - ancient gods who existed prior to the guilds and very much fit the Great Old One type - could be the big bads threatening the peace. You could also bring in other multi-planar threats from the Magic multiverse like the brilliantly diabolical Elder Dragon Nicol Bolas (who is at least as powerful as Tiamat,) the Lovecraftian monsters called the Eldrazi, or potentially Magic's most storied and classic villain (ok, Nicol Bolas might arguably take that place,) the Phyrexians, a plague/people dedicated to the body-horror-fueled merging of organic and machine life.
Of course, given that Ravnica is now an official D&D setting, you could also easily search through the rogue's gallery of D&D for good extra-planar threats. Maybe Demogorgon shows up in Ravnica and you need to team up with Rakdos to show that two-headed bastard that there's only room for one demon lord in Ravnica.
If you are going with a single-guild group, a long-term campaign could see their efforts to overthrow the balance of the guilds. While that might be a tough sell for lawful guilds like the Azorius, you could easily have other guilds decide that the time to strike is now, and perhaps your campaign ends with the order of Ravnica totally overthrown.
If you want to restore some status quo after such a campaign, perhaps you allow them to achieve their triumph only to then demonstrate through catastrophic consequences that the ten guilds exist for a good reason, and then the party needs to spend the rest of the campaign cleaning up the mess they've made. Such a campaign could easily put the party in combat with the various guild leaders and would likely require the super-powerful magic that only high-level characters get access to if they do want to undo the damage.
What strikes me about Ravnica as a setting is just how easily so many different types of campaigns jump out to me. Not only is each guild a sort of genre in and of itself, but the interactions between them provide an exponentially higher number of story hooks.
Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Ten Years Since Wrath of the Lich King
It has been ten years since Wrath came out now, which is pretty crazy. I associate it a lot with a big move in my life - when I left the east coast after graduating college and moved out to Los Angeles.
Wrath was such an impactful expansion that it is sometimes strange to think how close it was to vanilla. At this point ten years ago, World of Warcraft itself was only as old as Warlords of Draenor is now (roughly.)
While opinions differ of course, for a large number of players, Wrath of the Lich King was WoW's best expansion for about eight years - Legion might have finally unseated it, but Wrath's legacy is huge.
Now, Wrath's content has certainly aged. Northrend tends to feel a bit tedious now, though I think that's largely due to the fact that we've had access to it for a full decade.
Wrath was both revolutionary and evolutionary. What do I mean by that?
First off, world content was improved tremendously: you can see now that questing through Outland versus questing through Northrend is a totally different experience. While Outland sends you across zones to kill every last thing in your way for low-droprate quest items, Wrath really tried to tell interesting stories with its quests. Drakuru's two-part deception and betrayal, Loken's devious plot to get you to help him trap Thorim, the whole build-up to the Wrath Gate incident, and one of my personal favorites, the haunting mystery of Matthias Lehner - all stories told through quests.
The Lich King was an incredibly iconic villain - not only did he have that Sauron-style "dark lord" archetype down to an art, but in contrast with previous villains (like Illidan, whose appearance in Legion was partially just meant to be an opportunity to let him actually be a character - and let Liam O'Brien chew the scenery in the best way,) we actually got to see the Lich King enough to realize how much of a threat he was. The Halls of Reflection dungeon sold the Lich King's power better than any other encounter I've seen, where he's just this implacable force of death inducing panic in us as we desperately try to run away.
It also gave us our first new class after vanilla's launch, the Death Knight, which has remained popular ever since (I sometimes think that if I were going to start all over again I'd main a Blood DK - thankfully my DK is my second-priority character so I still have time to play him a decent amount.)
This was also an expansion in which Blizzard started to play with difficulty. While BC had introduced 10 and 25-player raiding and heroic dungeons, Wrath added new raid difficulties to allow less hardcore players to get to see content. This was a bit of a rocky road, though. Naxxramas, which had been an infamously difficult raid during vanilla, was brought back as a very simple starter raid that left a lot of hardcore players feeling bored while they waited for Ulduar (though that patience was rewarded with a raid that is often considered the best they've ever done.) In Trial of the Crusader (admittedly one of the least popular raids they've done,) they formalized difficulties. The result (helped by the later addition of Raid Finder) is that players can see the raids without being in a committed hardcore progression guild, where once fights like Kil'jaeden (the one in Sunwell Plateau) were seen by only a tiny fraction of the players.
Wrath also introduced the dungeon finder, which admittedly has been seen as something of a mixed bag - Cataclysm would be criticized for making it feel as if there was no point in leaving Stormwind or Orgrimmar. While at max level they've clearly tried to steer away from it - Mythic dungeons, which cannot be queued for, largely play the role LFG used to - for low-level characters who want to run a dungeon, it's a blessing. Prior to dungeon finder, the chance of getting a group for, say, Uldaman, was really low (my friends and I would just run each other through low-level dungeons on our higher-level mains.)
We also got dual-spec, which of course is less relevant now given how easy it is to swap specs these days, but the amount of gold a hybrid character would have to spend to re-spec every time they wanted to solo or run a dungeon would was pretty absurd. I leveled by Paladin all the way to 80 in Prot spec, and I can tell you that soloing took a while.
It was in Wrath that we started to get lots of really interesting hints about the nature of the world, too. Some rather silly quests in Borean Tundra introduced the concept of the Curse of Flesh, which in retrospect is a huge part of Warcraft lore. The Keepers of Ulduar turn out to have been extremely important to Azeroth's history. And of course we got a much better sense of the capabilities and nature of the Old Gods when we faced the second (and last so far, though my money is on N'zoth showing up at the end of BFA) of these monstrosities.
Wrath also gave us the very first in-game cutscenes. The Wrath Gate Incident was a shocking moment, not just in the story but also as a new and cinematic way of showing major events. Wrath would also inaugurate the first raid-closing cinematic, which has now become a tradition (though Legion kicked it up a notch by giving us a full cinematic at the end of every tier raid. I assume we'll get a cinematic at the end of Dazar'alor and then after Azshara's Eternal Palace.)
More controversially, that final cinematic gave us the first really big "huh?" moment in WoW's major plot points. As the ghost of Terenas insisted that there must be a Lich King, we watched as Tirion Fordring crowned Bolvar Fordragon as the new leader of the Scourge - a move that a lot of people have speculated about and maybe doesn't make total sense (would the Scourge really be more dangerous without tactical and strategic leadership?) This also kind of became a tradition, between the similarly baffling "the dragon aspects were originally empowered to stop one of the dragon aspects" after Cataclysm to the somewhat more sensible but still questionable decision by Illidan to stay behind at the Seat of the Pantheon (is he really contributing that much with all the other Titans collectively locking down Sargeras there?)
We got an evolving environment with the Argent Tournament grounds in northern Icecrown in a plot that unfolded over a couple patches, which we hadn't really had before.
The point is, it was a big expansion. The nostalgia a lot of people have for classic WoW is something I might feel a bit more for Wrath of the Lich King. That being said, in the past decade we've come a long way. There are some moves I've been less of a fan of (particularly the move away from currency-based gearing toward pure RNG, though it looks like Blizzard is finally starting to swing the pendulum back that way in 8.1.) But overall I think that the game has improved in myriad ways.
I can't say Wrath was the most innovative expansion - Burning Crusade probably takes that cake - but between the great story, far greater class balance than ever before (in Vanilla and BC there were certain classes you just couldn't DPS with,) and accessibility all combined to make a really great expansion. It's also the expansion that led to the high watermark of WoW subscriptions - while it technically hit that mark during Cataclysm, the precipitous dropoff during Cata suggests that most of that continued rise was out of the expectations set by Wrath.
As a veteran player, I really do think that Legion finally unseated Wrath as the best expansion, but I still think the Scourge are the best villains the Warcraft universe has ever had, and Arthas as the Lich King was the perfect mix of tragedy and menace. Wrath was the period I found my current guild, and I can look back on it with great fondness.
So happy 10th Anniversary, Wrath of the Lich King!
Wrath was such an impactful expansion that it is sometimes strange to think how close it was to vanilla. At this point ten years ago, World of Warcraft itself was only as old as Warlords of Draenor is now (roughly.)
While opinions differ of course, for a large number of players, Wrath of the Lich King was WoW's best expansion for about eight years - Legion might have finally unseated it, but Wrath's legacy is huge.
Now, Wrath's content has certainly aged. Northrend tends to feel a bit tedious now, though I think that's largely due to the fact that we've had access to it for a full decade.
Wrath was both revolutionary and evolutionary. What do I mean by that?
First off, world content was improved tremendously: you can see now that questing through Outland versus questing through Northrend is a totally different experience. While Outland sends you across zones to kill every last thing in your way for low-droprate quest items, Wrath really tried to tell interesting stories with its quests. Drakuru's two-part deception and betrayal, Loken's devious plot to get you to help him trap Thorim, the whole build-up to the Wrath Gate incident, and one of my personal favorites, the haunting mystery of Matthias Lehner - all stories told through quests.
The Lich King was an incredibly iconic villain - not only did he have that Sauron-style "dark lord" archetype down to an art, but in contrast with previous villains (like Illidan, whose appearance in Legion was partially just meant to be an opportunity to let him actually be a character - and let Liam O'Brien chew the scenery in the best way,) we actually got to see the Lich King enough to realize how much of a threat he was. The Halls of Reflection dungeon sold the Lich King's power better than any other encounter I've seen, where he's just this implacable force of death inducing panic in us as we desperately try to run away.
It also gave us our first new class after vanilla's launch, the Death Knight, which has remained popular ever since (I sometimes think that if I were going to start all over again I'd main a Blood DK - thankfully my DK is my second-priority character so I still have time to play him a decent amount.)
This was also an expansion in which Blizzard started to play with difficulty. While BC had introduced 10 and 25-player raiding and heroic dungeons, Wrath added new raid difficulties to allow less hardcore players to get to see content. This was a bit of a rocky road, though. Naxxramas, which had been an infamously difficult raid during vanilla, was brought back as a very simple starter raid that left a lot of hardcore players feeling bored while they waited for Ulduar (though that patience was rewarded with a raid that is often considered the best they've ever done.) In Trial of the Crusader (admittedly one of the least popular raids they've done,) they formalized difficulties. The result (helped by the later addition of Raid Finder) is that players can see the raids without being in a committed hardcore progression guild, where once fights like Kil'jaeden (the one in Sunwell Plateau) were seen by only a tiny fraction of the players.
Wrath also introduced the dungeon finder, which admittedly has been seen as something of a mixed bag - Cataclysm would be criticized for making it feel as if there was no point in leaving Stormwind or Orgrimmar. While at max level they've clearly tried to steer away from it - Mythic dungeons, which cannot be queued for, largely play the role LFG used to - for low-level characters who want to run a dungeon, it's a blessing. Prior to dungeon finder, the chance of getting a group for, say, Uldaman, was really low (my friends and I would just run each other through low-level dungeons on our higher-level mains.)
We also got dual-spec, which of course is less relevant now given how easy it is to swap specs these days, but the amount of gold a hybrid character would have to spend to re-spec every time they wanted to solo or run a dungeon would was pretty absurd. I leveled by Paladin all the way to 80 in Prot spec, and I can tell you that soloing took a while.
It was in Wrath that we started to get lots of really interesting hints about the nature of the world, too. Some rather silly quests in Borean Tundra introduced the concept of the Curse of Flesh, which in retrospect is a huge part of Warcraft lore. The Keepers of Ulduar turn out to have been extremely important to Azeroth's history. And of course we got a much better sense of the capabilities and nature of the Old Gods when we faced the second (and last so far, though my money is on N'zoth showing up at the end of BFA) of these monstrosities.
Wrath also gave us the very first in-game cutscenes. The Wrath Gate Incident was a shocking moment, not just in the story but also as a new and cinematic way of showing major events. Wrath would also inaugurate the first raid-closing cinematic, which has now become a tradition (though Legion kicked it up a notch by giving us a full cinematic at the end of every tier raid. I assume we'll get a cinematic at the end of Dazar'alor and then after Azshara's Eternal Palace.)
More controversially, that final cinematic gave us the first really big "huh?" moment in WoW's major plot points. As the ghost of Terenas insisted that there must be a Lich King, we watched as Tirion Fordring crowned Bolvar Fordragon as the new leader of the Scourge - a move that a lot of people have speculated about and maybe doesn't make total sense (would the Scourge really be more dangerous without tactical and strategic leadership?) This also kind of became a tradition, between the similarly baffling "the dragon aspects were originally empowered to stop one of the dragon aspects" after Cataclysm to the somewhat more sensible but still questionable decision by Illidan to stay behind at the Seat of the Pantheon (is he really contributing that much with all the other Titans collectively locking down Sargeras there?)
We got an evolving environment with the Argent Tournament grounds in northern Icecrown in a plot that unfolded over a couple patches, which we hadn't really had before.
The point is, it was a big expansion. The nostalgia a lot of people have for classic WoW is something I might feel a bit more for Wrath of the Lich King. That being said, in the past decade we've come a long way. There are some moves I've been less of a fan of (particularly the move away from currency-based gearing toward pure RNG, though it looks like Blizzard is finally starting to swing the pendulum back that way in 8.1.) But overall I think that the game has improved in myriad ways.
I can't say Wrath was the most innovative expansion - Burning Crusade probably takes that cake - but between the great story, far greater class balance than ever before (in Vanilla and BC there were certain classes you just couldn't DPS with,) and accessibility all combined to make a really great expansion. It's also the expansion that led to the high watermark of WoW subscriptions - while it technically hit that mark during Cataclysm, the precipitous dropoff during Cata suggests that most of that continued rise was out of the expectations set by Wrath.
As a veteran player, I really do think that Legion finally unseated Wrath as the best expansion, but I still think the Scourge are the best villains the Warcraft universe has ever had, and Arthas as the Lich King was the perfect mix of tragedy and menace. Wrath was the period I found my current guild, and I can look back on it with great fondness.
So happy 10th Anniversary, Wrath of the Lich King!
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Sylvanas and the Wrath Gate
In a recent interview with Alex Afrasiabi, WoW's Creative Director, he responded to players finding Sylvanas' even darker turn to be out of character by pointing out that she ordered the Wrath Gate incident.
For those of us who remember it (the quests that followed were broken by Cataclysm's revamp, so they were only available during Wrath) that's a pretty shocking reveal.
Here's how it played out back then: Quests in Dragonblight ultimately led to the cutscene as they do now, but afterward players were sent by Alexstrasza to bring Saurfang his son's armor and Varian Bolvar's shield.
The Alliance was sent on a diplomatic mission to Orgrimmar (along with Jaina, who was still a staunch advocate of peace between the factions) while the Horde went back to talk with then-Warchief Thrall.
What they discovered in Orgrimmar were Forsaken refugees and a city on lockdown. Sylvanas was in exile after Varimathras and Grand Apothecary Putress had kicked off a coup in the Undercity right as the Wrath Gate incident went down. Sylvanas had fled with her life and those who were loyal to her.
Both factions then besieged the Undercity - the Horde attacking its front gates and the Alliance assaulting the back-door sewer entrance. The Alliance mission was to find and kill Putress, discovering many of the Apothecary Society's horrors along the way. Meanwhile, the Horde made for the throne room where they confronted Varimathras, who was attempting to open many portals to the Twisting Nether to allow the Legion to invade.
After both fights were complete, Varian, disgusted by what he found in the Undercity's Apothecary Quarter, charged into the throne room and declared that he could not abide by the Horde's tolerance for these atrocities - prisoners kept in cages and murdered with blight, horrifying carrion worms bred in the sewers, and abominations being manufactured from the bodies of the dead. Considering Thrall responsible - he was Warchief, after all - Varian attacked. It was only when Jaina froze everyone in place and then forcibly teleported the Alliance forces out of the city that the battle was over, but the war that wouldn't end until the Siege of Orgrimmar had basically started.
Up until this point, Sylvanas seemed to have plausible deniability. She was clearly tolerant of her apothecaries' heinous actions, but the attack on combined Alliance/Horde forces at the Wrath Gate seemed plausibly against her wishes given that they culminated in a coup against her. Varimathras had a clear motivation to stab her in the back, and Sylvanas does not seem likely to condone the use of her throne room to summon in the demons of the Burning Legion.
It's possible, of course, that Afrasiabi merely meant that she had ordered the development of the blight, rather than telling Putress to kill Horde soldiers, which makes her culpable if not precisely responsible.
If she did order it, though, what was the motivation? She did have to flee into a brief exile after Varimathras took over the city. Did Varimathras take advantage of the situation and attempt to outplay her?
Or is it possible that Sylvanas outplayed everyone?
Varimathras was Sylvanas' chief lieutenant prior to this, but he was a demon and she had to assume he was always plotting to betray her. Is it possible that she orchestrated all of this to give her an excuse to destroy him? It seems a risky ploy, though. Was she relying on both factions attacking his loyalists? Was the coup merely a way to filter out any potential traitors? Sylvanas clearly fears betrayal - see her massacre of her own people in Arathi Highlands - so maybe this was effectively a big purge.
Still, I worry that this development - which feels suspiciously like a Retcon, regardless of what Afrasiabi claims - robs Sylvanas of her nuance. Especially as a racial leader, Sylvanas is most interesting when she has redeeming qualities to off-set her villainy. That moment of vulnerability in Undercity, not to mention drawing a line between what is acceptable for the Forsaken to do versus what is not, makes both Sylvanas and the Forsaken more interesting. It's part of why the whole "Burn it" moment felt so jarring - we had expected Sylvanas to be a bad person, but not so unambiguously evil.
For those of us who remember it (the quests that followed were broken by Cataclysm's revamp, so they were only available during Wrath) that's a pretty shocking reveal.
Here's how it played out back then: Quests in Dragonblight ultimately led to the cutscene as they do now, but afterward players were sent by Alexstrasza to bring Saurfang his son's armor and Varian Bolvar's shield.
The Alliance was sent on a diplomatic mission to Orgrimmar (along with Jaina, who was still a staunch advocate of peace between the factions) while the Horde went back to talk with then-Warchief Thrall.
What they discovered in Orgrimmar were Forsaken refugees and a city on lockdown. Sylvanas was in exile after Varimathras and Grand Apothecary Putress had kicked off a coup in the Undercity right as the Wrath Gate incident went down. Sylvanas had fled with her life and those who were loyal to her.
Both factions then besieged the Undercity - the Horde attacking its front gates and the Alliance assaulting the back-door sewer entrance. The Alliance mission was to find and kill Putress, discovering many of the Apothecary Society's horrors along the way. Meanwhile, the Horde made for the throne room where they confronted Varimathras, who was attempting to open many portals to the Twisting Nether to allow the Legion to invade.
After both fights were complete, Varian, disgusted by what he found in the Undercity's Apothecary Quarter, charged into the throne room and declared that he could not abide by the Horde's tolerance for these atrocities - prisoners kept in cages and murdered with blight, horrifying carrion worms bred in the sewers, and abominations being manufactured from the bodies of the dead. Considering Thrall responsible - he was Warchief, after all - Varian attacked. It was only when Jaina froze everyone in place and then forcibly teleported the Alliance forces out of the city that the battle was over, but the war that wouldn't end until the Siege of Orgrimmar had basically started.
Up until this point, Sylvanas seemed to have plausible deniability. She was clearly tolerant of her apothecaries' heinous actions, but the attack on combined Alliance/Horde forces at the Wrath Gate seemed plausibly against her wishes given that they culminated in a coup against her. Varimathras had a clear motivation to stab her in the back, and Sylvanas does not seem likely to condone the use of her throne room to summon in the demons of the Burning Legion.
It's possible, of course, that Afrasiabi merely meant that she had ordered the development of the blight, rather than telling Putress to kill Horde soldiers, which makes her culpable if not precisely responsible.
If she did order it, though, what was the motivation? She did have to flee into a brief exile after Varimathras took over the city. Did Varimathras take advantage of the situation and attempt to outplay her?
Or is it possible that Sylvanas outplayed everyone?
Varimathras was Sylvanas' chief lieutenant prior to this, but he was a demon and she had to assume he was always plotting to betray her. Is it possible that she orchestrated all of this to give her an excuse to destroy him? It seems a risky ploy, though. Was she relying on both factions attacking his loyalists? Was the coup merely a way to filter out any potential traitors? Sylvanas clearly fears betrayal - see her massacre of her own people in Arathi Highlands - so maybe this was effectively a big purge.
Still, I worry that this development - which feels suspiciously like a Retcon, regardless of what Afrasiabi claims - robs Sylvanas of her nuance. Especially as a racial leader, Sylvanas is most interesting when she has redeeming qualities to off-set her villainy. That moment of vulnerability in Undercity, not to mention drawing a line between what is acceptable for the Forsaken to do versus what is not, makes both Sylvanas and the Forsaken more interesting. It's part of why the whole "Burn it" moment felt so jarring - we had expected Sylvanas to be a bad person, but not so unambiguously evil.
Monday, November 12, 2018
What to Bring to Ravnica
I have now read Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica cover-to-cover. It does a great job of introducing the world of Ravnica to D&D, providing five new playable races, two new subclasses, ten guilds that serve as new character backgrounds as well as factions that can provide some significant rewards over the course of a campaign.
The book provides a lot of interesting ideas for long-term plots as well as really fantastic resources for one-shots (or episodic adventures that could fit into a larger campaign.)
But what can we bring to Ravnica that isn't there?
My first thought is races: Ravnica has merfolk and viashino - both Magic standbys. Their merfolk (who didn't appear in the original set - Vedalken were their main blue non-human humanoid race) are the variety that has legs and is amphibious rather than waterbound, so what I would do is simply include the Tritons from Volo's Guide to Monsters. I might alter the lore a bit - while the Tritons tend toward Lawful Good, Merfolk in Magic settings tend toward Neutrality (perhaps leaning toward Lawful.)
Additionally, Viashino are represented in some of the book's adventure hooks as lizardfolk, and I would again just emphasize a bit of the different flavor. While Lizardfolk are pretty emphatically true neutral as described in Volo's, the Viashino, being a Red race, are very much on the chaotic side of the alignment system.
There are monster lists broken down by guilds that mention stuff in this book as well as the Monster Manual, and also include a few Volo's and Mordenkainen's creatures as well, so you're actually pretty decently covered for that.
One thing you might consider doing if you're feeling really ambitious is to convert the recent Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into a Ravnica adventure. Swap out the Zhentarim for House Dimir, make the Cassalanters into Orzhov oligarchs, make the Breghan D'aerth a squadron of Golgari Ochran assassins, and perhaps make the Xanathar "Guild" a guildless gang with ambitions to be recognized as a true guild of Ravnica.
Another thing you might try is to expand into other Magic worlds. Using planar travel (or teleportation magic - I can't remember if Plane Shift allows travel between two separate worlds of the Material Plane) you might have your party leave Ravnica (maybe searching for Jace so that he'll come back and do his freaking job) and track him across other worlds like Innistrad, Zendikar, or Dominaria. There are Plane Shift articles for each of these worlds (and more) that are sort of precursors to the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica that could be very useful tools in this.
Jace does not have a stat block in the book, despite his important role in the world. I'd recommend that if you're going to have a planeswalker character, you'll definitely want to give them a high challenge rating (I think 20 at a minimum) and obviously give them the ability to cast plane shift innately at least once a day (if not at will.) Any planeswalker is probably going to be some variety of spellcaster, though not all have to be pure casters, like Gideon Jura is probably a paladin.
Plane-traveling villains from D&D might also find themselves in Ravnica. While there's no area equivalent to Chult as described in Tomb of Annihilation, I could definitely see Acererak building a horrible dungeon within the Undercity (though I think the most fervent Rakdos cultists would probably think it was just a really good fun-house.)
I also think you could re-skin a lot of Ravenloft adventures (like all of Curse of Strahd) as some kind of Dimir mind-prison - escaping a domain of dread might all be a kind of mental struggle against a Dimir Lobotomist trying to mess with your brain.
EDIT: Another thing I thought of! Slivers! In Magic, Slivers are a super-invasive symbiotic species that are kind of single-clawed serpents with horned heads that each provide their own enhancement to their fellow slivers. For example, a Winged Silver gives all slivers (including itself) the ability to fly, while an Armored Sliver might increase all slivers' health or armor by a certain amount (both values are amalgamated into "toughness" in Magic.) You could build a really interesting encounter in which the party needs to quickly slay the slivers providing the most dangerous abilities or perhaps have a fight against a very simple creature grow far more complex as more slivers with new abilities join the fray. This would require some careful planning and design work, but might wind up being really fun.
The book does what it needs to - it's not an adventure or particular story, but instead gives you a broad and diverse world that you will be free to fill with your own stories.
I hope that we see more of these sourcebooks come out (perhaps for more traditional D&D settings like Dark Sun, but updated for 5E.) But even if I'm very committed to my homebrew setting, I feel a very strong urge to run a short, couple-session adventure set in Ravnica. And if I can find someone willing to DM a full Ravnica campaign, I already have a strong concept for a Dimir Vedalken Enchantment Wizard ready to go.
The book provides a lot of interesting ideas for long-term plots as well as really fantastic resources for one-shots (or episodic adventures that could fit into a larger campaign.)
But what can we bring to Ravnica that isn't there?
My first thought is races: Ravnica has merfolk and viashino - both Magic standbys. Their merfolk (who didn't appear in the original set - Vedalken were their main blue non-human humanoid race) are the variety that has legs and is amphibious rather than waterbound, so what I would do is simply include the Tritons from Volo's Guide to Monsters. I might alter the lore a bit - while the Tritons tend toward Lawful Good, Merfolk in Magic settings tend toward Neutrality (perhaps leaning toward Lawful.)
Additionally, Viashino are represented in some of the book's adventure hooks as lizardfolk, and I would again just emphasize a bit of the different flavor. While Lizardfolk are pretty emphatically true neutral as described in Volo's, the Viashino, being a Red race, are very much on the chaotic side of the alignment system.
There are monster lists broken down by guilds that mention stuff in this book as well as the Monster Manual, and also include a few Volo's and Mordenkainen's creatures as well, so you're actually pretty decently covered for that.
One thing you might consider doing if you're feeling really ambitious is to convert the recent Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into a Ravnica adventure. Swap out the Zhentarim for House Dimir, make the Cassalanters into Orzhov oligarchs, make the Breghan D'aerth a squadron of Golgari Ochran assassins, and perhaps make the Xanathar "Guild" a guildless gang with ambitions to be recognized as a true guild of Ravnica.
Another thing you might try is to expand into other Magic worlds. Using planar travel (or teleportation magic - I can't remember if Plane Shift allows travel between two separate worlds of the Material Plane) you might have your party leave Ravnica (maybe searching for Jace so that he'll come back and do his freaking job) and track him across other worlds like Innistrad, Zendikar, or Dominaria. There are Plane Shift articles for each of these worlds (and more) that are sort of precursors to the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica that could be very useful tools in this.
Jace does not have a stat block in the book, despite his important role in the world. I'd recommend that if you're going to have a planeswalker character, you'll definitely want to give them a high challenge rating (I think 20 at a minimum) and obviously give them the ability to cast plane shift innately at least once a day (if not at will.) Any planeswalker is probably going to be some variety of spellcaster, though not all have to be pure casters, like Gideon Jura is probably a paladin.
Plane-traveling villains from D&D might also find themselves in Ravnica. While there's no area equivalent to Chult as described in Tomb of Annihilation, I could definitely see Acererak building a horrible dungeon within the Undercity (though I think the most fervent Rakdos cultists would probably think it was just a really good fun-house.)
I also think you could re-skin a lot of Ravenloft adventures (like all of Curse of Strahd) as some kind of Dimir mind-prison - escaping a domain of dread might all be a kind of mental struggle against a Dimir Lobotomist trying to mess with your brain.
EDIT: Another thing I thought of! Slivers! In Magic, Slivers are a super-invasive symbiotic species that are kind of single-clawed serpents with horned heads that each provide their own enhancement to their fellow slivers. For example, a Winged Silver gives all slivers (including itself) the ability to fly, while an Armored Sliver might increase all slivers' health or armor by a certain amount (both values are amalgamated into "toughness" in Magic.) You could build a really interesting encounter in which the party needs to quickly slay the slivers providing the most dangerous abilities or perhaps have a fight against a very simple creature grow far more complex as more slivers with new abilities join the fray. This would require some careful planning and design work, but might wind up being really fun.
The book does what it needs to - it's not an adventure or particular story, but instead gives you a broad and diverse world that you will be free to fill with your own stories.
I hope that we see more of these sourcebooks come out (perhaps for more traditional D&D settings like Dark Sun, but updated for 5E.) But even if I'm very committed to my homebrew setting, I feel a very strong urge to run a short, couple-session adventure set in Ravnica. And if I can find someone willing to DM a full Ravnica campaign, I already have a strong concept for a Dimir Vedalken Enchantment Wizard ready to go.
Sunday, November 11, 2018
Now That We Have the Book: Alignment, Colors, and Ravnica
Magic is defined by its five colors. No game mechanic has been more important to the function of the game (ok, maybe lands and mana - though that's closely related) and it has given Magic a wonderful richness in flavor. Every world has these five elements, but the roles that each plays can be very different.
In particular, I like the fact that, while some colors might be seen as the "good guys" more often and some (one in particular) might be seen as the "bad guys," this is not a hard and fast rule.
Take the Kamigawa Block, for example, where the bad guy of the story was the very White-mana Lord Konda and its hero (admittedly more of an antihero) was the Black-mana Toshiro Umezawa.
Perhaps it is because I played Magic long before I played D&D, and perhaps it's because I tended to play Black, but I've always found the idea of nuanced and unexpected behaviors in fantasy creatures to be very cool. While even in Magic a demon is extremely unlikely to be a good guy, it's technically possible, just as an angel can be a villain (ok, I feel like this is less surprising given that the whole "fallen angel" archetype is pretty hardwired into Western culture.)
D&D has a long and storied history of its two-axis alignment system, which I've heard described as the moral and ethical scales (as someone who has always held ethical integrity as a great virtue, I realize I'm pretty Lawful) and that system allows for things like its sixteen outer planes and provided distinctions for beings like Devils as opposed to Demons, giving you interesting consequences like the fact that you can technically have a mutually beneficial deal with a devil if you've got a good enough lawyer to draft the contract.
But again, Magic is my first fantasy game - hell, it might be the thing that really got me into fantasy in the first place - and I love the five colors so much.
So it got me thinking: should a Ravnica-based game use them instead of alignment?
In a sense, if a player isn't guildless, they are picking two colors simply by virtue of the way the guilds were first constructed. As amazing as the flavor of the guilds is, one can remember that their entire genesis was purely a mechanical one - a way to define the personality of each two-color combination.
The guilds blend their colors seamlessly, for the most part, and part of the genius of the card set was that it felt like MTG had just doubled its colors.
As such, though, I think that you might have to limit a character's color options if they are going to serve as an alignment to single colors. That nearly halves the options you'd get in D&D's classic nine-alignment grid, which is less great.
On the other hand, the combination of a single-color alignment and a guild choice would provide some nuance.
Take two Boros characters. One might be a White Boros Paladin, whose intentions are all totally altruistic with an attitude that "I fight today so that there will be peace tomorrow." On the other hand, you might have a Red Boros Wizard who feels a visceral thrill in battling agains the forces of evil. Thus, within the same guild you could have some serious tension as to what their true purpose is - or less dramatically, you'd simply have some different attitudes within the guild.
As another example, a Red Rakdos Swashbuckler Rogue might really just want freedom and the ability to express themselves, whereas a Black Rakdos Fiendish Warlock might really enjoy the power they feel by breaking other people under torture.
Now, I'll confess that I nearly wrote in the last paragraph that the Rogue might be Chaotic Good while the Warlock is Chaotic Evil.
Still, I do think there's some value in thinking about the colors that make up the guilds, even if the book intentionally makes no mention of the "color pie" so as not to make D&D veterans worry they're going to have to learn a bunch of new Magic rules (they don't.)
At the very least, you're going to get a solid way of saying what kind of guild member you are. I think it would also be a cool way of playing a character who is clearly in the wrong guild, and working through that problem by maybe realizing they need to change. I imagine a Blue character who joins the Boros (maybe because their family or friends were staunch Boros members) expecting to have a desk job where they can analyze evidence and track down leads. When this character discovers that the Boros are much more about marching around, fighting, and projecting their righteous will across the city, they'll probably find themselves depressed - the nerd in a guild of jocks.
Maybe over the course of this character's adventures, they come to realize that they're in the wrong place. Perhaps they decide to instead apply for the Azorius Senate, where things are much more proper and someone's intellect is respected as much as their brawn. Or perhaps they find themselves contacted by the Dimir, and thanks to resentment they've felt against their muscle-headed colleagues, they decide to start siphoning information about Boros troop movements to their Dimir superior.
Or they decide to become a scientist instead and join either the Simic or the Izzet.
Naturally, I think that developing a character beyond the simple descriptors of alignment, traits, ideal, bonds, and flaws is a good thing to do - every character I plan to play (I've only really played one - DM problems, amirite?) has a couple-page backstory (can you tell I like to write?) So there's no reason that standard D&D alignment needs to clash with this color alignment.
Some combinations would be tricky, though. Could you be a Lawful Neutral Red character? (Again, Boros kind of solves this, where you could have someone who is lawful, but zealous and passionate about it.) What about a Neutral Good Black character? (Very tricky, though I could see a benevolent necromancer in such a role.)
Still, it might be a way to add both a little more Magic flavor to your D&D game and also add a little shade and nuance to the way you think about your character.
In particular, I like the fact that, while some colors might be seen as the "good guys" more often and some (one in particular) might be seen as the "bad guys," this is not a hard and fast rule.
Take the Kamigawa Block, for example, where the bad guy of the story was the very White-mana Lord Konda and its hero (admittedly more of an antihero) was the Black-mana Toshiro Umezawa.
Perhaps it is because I played Magic long before I played D&D, and perhaps it's because I tended to play Black, but I've always found the idea of nuanced and unexpected behaviors in fantasy creatures to be very cool. While even in Magic a demon is extremely unlikely to be a good guy, it's technically possible, just as an angel can be a villain (ok, I feel like this is less surprising given that the whole "fallen angel" archetype is pretty hardwired into Western culture.)
D&D has a long and storied history of its two-axis alignment system, which I've heard described as the moral and ethical scales (as someone who has always held ethical integrity as a great virtue, I realize I'm pretty Lawful) and that system allows for things like its sixteen outer planes and provided distinctions for beings like Devils as opposed to Demons, giving you interesting consequences like the fact that you can technically have a mutually beneficial deal with a devil if you've got a good enough lawyer to draft the contract.
But again, Magic is my first fantasy game - hell, it might be the thing that really got me into fantasy in the first place - and I love the five colors so much.
So it got me thinking: should a Ravnica-based game use them instead of alignment?
In a sense, if a player isn't guildless, they are picking two colors simply by virtue of the way the guilds were first constructed. As amazing as the flavor of the guilds is, one can remember that their entire genesis was purely a mechanical one - a way to define the personality of each two-color combination.
The guilds blend their colors seamlessly, for the most part, and part of the genius of the card set was that it felt like MTG had just doubled its colors.
As such, though, I think that you might have to limit a character's color options if they are going to serve as an alignment to single colors. That nearly halves the options you'd get in D&D's classic nine-alignment grid, which is less great.
On the other hand, the combination of a single-color alignment and a guild choice would provide some nuance.
Take two Boros characters. One might be a White Boros Paladin, whose intentions are all totally altruistic with an attitude that "I fight today so that there will be peace tomorrow." On the other hand, you might have a Red Boros Wizard who feels a visceral thrill in battling agains the forces of evil. Thus, within the same guild you could have some serious tension as to what their true purpose is - or less dramatically, you'd simply have some different attitudes within the guild.
As another example, a Red Rakdos Swashbuckler Rogue might really just want freedom and the ability to express themselves, whereas a Black Rakdos Fiendish Warlock might really enjoy the power they feel by breaking other people under torture.
Now, I'll confess that I nearly wrote in the last paragraph that the Rogue might be Chaotic Good while the Warlock is Chaotic Evil.
Still, I do think there's some value in thinking about the colors that make up the guilds, even if the book intentionally makes no mention of the "color pie" so as not to make D&D veterans worry they're going to have to learn a bunch of new Magic rules (they don't.)
At the very least, you're going to get a solid way of saying what kind of guild member you are. I think it would also be a cool way of playing a character who is clearly in the wrong guild, and working through that problem by maybe realizing they need to change. I imagine a Blue character who joins the Boros (maybe because their family or friends were staunch Boros members) expecting to have a desk job where they can analyze evidence and track down leads. When this character discovers that the Boros are much more about marching around, fighting, and projecting their righteous will across the city, they'll probably find themselves depressed - the nerd in a guild of jocks.
Maybe over the course of this character's adventures, they come to realize that they're in the wrong place. Perhaps they decide to instead apply for the Azorius Senate, where things are much more proper and someone's intellect is respected as much as their brawn. Or perhaps they find themselves contacted by the Dimir, and thanks to resentment they've felt against their muscle-headed colleagues, they decide to start siphoning information about Boros troop movements to their Dimir superior.
Or they decide to become a scientist instead and join either the Simic or the Izzet.
Naturally, I think that developing a character beyond the simple descriptors of alignment, traits, ideal, bonds, and flaws is a good thing to do - every character I plan to play (I've only really played one - DM problems, amirite?) has a couple-page backstory (can you tell I like to write?) So there's no reason that standard D&D alignment needs to clash with this color alignment.
Some combinations would be tricky, though. Could you be a Lawful Neutral Red character? (Again, Boros kind of solves this, where you could have someone who is lawful, but zealous and passionate about it.) What about a Neutral Good Black character? (Very tricky, though I could see a benevolent necromancer in such a role.)
Still, it might be a way to add both a little more Magic flavor to your D&D game and also add a little shade and nuance to the way you think about your character.
Saturday, November 10, 2018
How to Plunder Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica
I love the Ravnica setting and I was really excited to see it made an official D&D plane (even if that raises very tricky problems about the multiverse(s).) But given that I'm in the middle of a years-long campaign (they're getting close to level 9!) in my own homebrew setting, I don't know when I'll have a chance to truly have a bunch of guilded players adventuring around the Tenth District.
So what can we steal from this book for our own settings or perhaps established settings that we're playing in?
First off, I think you can justify things in two ways: one is that these elements just appear in different forms in other settings - it's just coincidence or some unknown natural law that brings, say, Vedalken into existence in multiple planes (much as it does in the worlds of Magic.) Another is that you can have Ravnicans arrive in your worlds through planar travel. Given how important (and missing) Jace Beleren is on Ravnica, you could easily have Ravnicans arrive on another world of the prime material plane searching for him or possibly hoping to expand their guild's influence elsewhere in the multiverse (remember that the guilds, being powerful institutions in a planet-sized city are likely to be larger and more powerful than most empires.)
But what do I recommend taking?
Let's start with the obvious:
GGtR has new races, class options, and monsters/NPCs. Allowing players to play as Minotaurs, Centaurs, Loxodons, Simic Hybrids, or Vedalken in a different setting could give them just the option they've been looking for. You might need to re-skin these races if you're just stealing the stats without creating a canonical connection between the worlds (particularly the rather guild-specific Simic Hybrids.)
Monsters can of course easily be re-skinned, not that they need too much work, and of course NPCs could fit with certain archetypes that exist elsewhere in fantasy. There are also a handful of spells and magic items that you could incorporate into the game as well.
One invaluable thing that the book provides is a set of chapters on guild-based adventures that contain a map for a mini-dungeon (something you could easily do in one sitting) for each guild. These spaces are perfect for many different kinds of adventures and provide a number of suggestions that, again, could work within those archetypes and genres.
Finally, I think that the use of factions and renown is expanded upon in interesting ways in this book. While Waterdeep: Dragon Heist of course also uses the system to flesh out the city (it's either clever strategy on the part of Wizards or a happy coincidence that they released an urban adventure book and Ravnica as a new setting so close to one another. You could probably translate Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into Ravnica: Zino Heist pretty easily.
But to the point: if you want to play with the idea of players getting serious rewards for working with a faction in your world, take a look at the ideas they have in here. The Contacts tables also provide a lot of inspiration for NPCs that are important to the player characters, giving each member of the "main cast" a number of "supporting characters" that will provide you with a lot of interesting NPCs and always give you easy ways to start up an adventure.
One thing I really like is the idea that earning a certain rank in a guild gives you the means to live a certain lifestyle. You can thus focus on the money earned in adventuring to be spent on adventuring while not having to worry about paying for the inn or food.
While I'm hoping that I'll be able to run a true Ravnica-set game at some point in the not-too-distant future, I'm sure that elements from the book will make their way into my Sarkon setting. I already have a few factions that could easily use Rakdos, Dimir, and Orzhov elements (what can I say? I play black.)
So what can we steal from this book for our own settings or perhaps established settings that we're playing in?
First off, I think you can justify things in two ways: one is that these elements just appear in different forms in other settings - it's just coincidence or some unknown natural law that brings, say, Vedalken into existence in multiple planes (much as it does in the worlds of Magic.) Another is that you can have Ravnicans arrive in your worlds through planar travel. Given how important (and missing) Jace Beleren is on Ravnica, you could easily have Ravnicans arrive on another world of the prime material plane searching for him or possibly hoping to expand their guild's influence elsewhere in the multiverse (remember that the guilds, being powerful institutions in a planet-sized city are likely to be larger and more powerful than most empires.)
But what do I recommend taking?
Let's start with the obvious:
GGtR has new races, class options, and monsters/NPCs. Allowing players to play as Minotaurs, Centaurs, Loxodons, Simic Hybrids, or Vedalken in a different setting could give them just the option they've been looking for. You might need to re-skin these races if you're just stealing the stats without creating a canonical connection between the worlds (particularly the rather guild-specific Simic Hybrids.)
Monsters can of course easily be re-skinned, not that they need too much work, and of course NPCs could fit with certain archetypes that exist elsewhere in fantasy. There are also a handful of spells and magic items that you could incorporate into the game as well.
One invaluable thing that the book provides is a set of chapters on guild-based adventures that contain a map for a mini-dungeon (something you could easily do in one sitting) for each guild. These spaces are perfect for many different kinds of adventures and provide a number of suggestions that, again, could work within those archetypes and genres.
Finally, I think that the use of factions and renown is expanded upon in interesting ways in this book. While Waterdeep: Dragon Heist of course also uses the system to flesh out the city (it's either clever strategy on the part of Wizards or a happy coincidence that they released an urban adventure book and Ravnica as a new setting so close to one another. You could probably translate Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into Ravnica: Zino Heist pretty easily.
But to the point: if you want to play with the idea of players getting serious rewards for working with a faction in your world, take a look at the ideas they have in here. The Contacts tables also provide a lot of inspiration for NPCs that are important to the player characters, giving each member of the "main cast" a number of "supporting characters" that will provide you with a lot of interesting NPCs and always give you easy ways to start up an adventure.
One thing I really like is the idea that earning a certain rank in a guild gives you the means to live a certain lifestyle. You can thus focus on the money earned in adventuring to be spent on adventuring while not having to worry about paying for the inn or food.
While I'm hoping that I'll be able to run a true Ravnica-set game at some point in the not-too-distant future, I'm sure that elements from the book will make their way into my Sarkon setting. I already have a few factions that could easily use Rakdos, Dimir, and Orzhov elements (what can I say? I play black.)
First Look at Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica
I got Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica today!
I'm only a bit of the way through it - right now I'm going through each of the guilds, and their mechanical function is becoming apparent:
Guilds combine player backgrounds and factions to become something as definitional to a player character as their race and class. While you can play guildless characters (using other backgrounds,) I think that any Ravnica game I ran (at least the first one) would require that everyone choose a guild.
The book also gives guidelines of what sort of class combinations would make sense for mono-guild parties, though again, I'd encourage players to be a little more of a motley crew (the Rakdos member would probably wear actually motley.)
Guilds come with background-like benefits, but they also function as factions with a renown system. While I think that system ought to be optional in other settings, the role of the guilds in Ravnica is so important that I think that any proper Ravnica game should include it.
One thing I'd be concerned about is that a mixed-guild group might find it hard to advance to the higher tiers of renown within their respective guilds. That might simply be the price they pay and reflect the difficulties of reaching across guild lines, but I think a DM might become a little more generous with the amount of renown that they award for completing different tasks.
These rewards range from friendly NPCs who assist you on official guild business or magical items to bigger story-based things like having enough of a reputation to talk with the highers-up in your guild. There's no explicit method to become the Guildmaster yourself, but you can become quite a major figure in your guild, such that the guildmaster might know you personally and even seek out your advice.
While very few D&D races exist in Ravnica (basically just humans, elves, half-elves - which makes sense given the previous two - and goblins,) there are myriad additional races they've introduced: the blue-skinned intellectuals called Vedalken, the biomancy-enhanced Simic Hybrids, Minotaurs, Centaurs, and elephant-people called Loxodons.
I'd recommend allowing Tritons (from Volo's) to work as Ravnica's Merfolk (in Ravnica, Merfolk are amphibious and have legs, like Tritons) and allow Lizardfolk (also from Volo's) to serve as Viashino (who are basically lizard-people.) I'd even suggest digging through the Plane Shift articles like the one for Zendikar or Ixalan that have vampires as a playable race, as you'll find such bloodsuckers (or mind-suckers) within the Orzhov and Dimir guilds.
There's so much ground to cover in this book, and I've really only scratched the surface.
There is actually a section like my character options posts from a week or two ago, giving players good recommendations for classes and class options based on their guild. The book is a bit more conservative with its class recommendations, such that some guilds even lack any healing-capable classes, suggesting instead that they use alchemists to provide healing potions (though this ceases to be a problem if you have a mixed-guild party.)
There are obviously a lot of ways you could go about character creation here, but I really think that starting with the guild is a good choice. From there you can pick a race and class (for which they have recommendations) and move on.
One fun thing is that guilds each have guild spells that get added to the list of spell options for anyone with Spellcasting or Pact Magic. Most are existing but flavorfully-appropriate spells, but there are a handful of new ones, like the Dimir-only cantrip "Encode Thoughts," which creates a little ethereal strip of parchment with your current thoughts (or those of someone whose mind you are reading with magic) encoded into it that can then be read by others who know the spell.
Again, I'm only a couple chapters in, but I'm really excited about this book. The Dimir Operative background feature is one that I was literally laughing out loud about - you become a member of a second guild, but are secretly a Dimir Operative who has infiltrated it - and it encourages you not to tell the rest of the party! (If you've been watching the Broken Pact stream, I am pretty sure that College of Whispers bard Velma is actually Dimir, as opposed to Orzhov.)
Leafing through the rest of the book, there is a section about the Tenth District, which is where most of the guilds have their headquarters, as well as the Chamber of the Guildpact, which is the true center of Ravnica's government and where the Living Guildpact, Jace Beleren, has his office (as a planeswalker, Jace is almost never in, which means that his magical ability to keep the guilds in balance is usually not functioning, leading to greater tension in the city.)
There are also suggested story hooks and maps to buildings, sorted by guild. There is also a short adventure designed to show off the city in which a low-level party deals with a goblin gangster.
There are also magic items, including a Mizzium Apparatus that replicates the Wizard's School of Invention from Unearthed Arcana that didn't make it into the book proper.
While perhaps not quite on the scale of Mordenkainen's or Volo's, there are a fair number of monster and NPC stat blocks that should be invaluable in fleshing out the world. Most of these beings are affiliated with particular guilds, but of course a lot of stuff in the Monster Manual can get mixed in as well. There are stat blocks for each of the guildmasters, which should all provide challenging boss encounters for high-level parties - the highest challenge rating is Niv-Mizzet, at 26, while others like the Obzedat Ghost Council is a group of 5 CR 8 ghosts (but likely any encounter with them will involve many minions to protect them - including Orzhov Thrulls who are designed to intercept attacks.)
Of course, given the players' relationships with these guilds, any of these creatures could just as easily serve as allies instead of enemies, and the proportion of stat blocks that belong to NPCs rather than monsters is quite high. Indeed, as one ascends in rank within their guild, they can often get several NPC followers who will help them with guild business.
Given that Ravnica is becoming a true D&D setting, I recommend each Dungeon Master make it their own, potentially throwing in elements from other worlds - maybe they've used planar travel to get there or perhaps your version of Ravnica is different than the canon one. Tieflings would make great Rakdos performers, and I could totally imagine a Beholder being a high-level operative for House Dimir. Like I said earlier, a lot of D&D stuff can be re-skinned to work for Ravnica. The Tarrasque's stat block could function for one of the ancient, pre-guild gods of the plane known as the Nephilim, and its arrival within the biggest, densest city in the multiverse (unless that's Sigil) would be a catastrophe of campaign-capping proportions.
I'm still reading (since I started writing this post I've moved into the "city layout" part of the book,) and so I'll have some additional thoughts I'm sure. I'd be very excited to run a game set here, though there will be a lot for DMs to keep track of. I highly recommend having a prominent place in your notes to keep track of players' renown with their guilds, and finding ways to regularly award it to them - though this is something that can be spread out over the course of a campaign, so maybe it's best if it's a slow trickle.
I think you can probably build a campaign that is very episodic in nature by simply coming up with tasks for the party to do for their various guilds. But naturally I think it'll be more fun if there's something bigger brewing. Given the differences in alignment and flavor among player characters, I really recommend tailoring the story to the party. My inclination is always going to be to fill things with mysterious intrigue - classic Dimir stuff - but if your party is a group of Gruul, Rakdos, and maybe Izzet, you might instead focus on their anarchic struggle against an oppressive government - the Azorius making for ideal villains.
Personally I think that it'll be best if your party is composed of very different guilds - think something like Selesnya, Rakdos, Izzet, and Dimir - and play up the tension between their competing philosophies. This will likely force you to think carefully about who your campaign's big villain is, to come up with something that all four such players would consider a threat that needed to be stopped.
Naturally, just because a player is a member of a guild does not mean you can't have villains within those very guilds. Golgari are easy, as there is always a bit of backstabbing and intraguild conflict, but any guild can potentially have corrupt or misguided members in its ranks.
Anyway, I'll talk more about story once I've read what they have to say about it.
I'm only a bit of the way through it - right now I'm going through each of the guilds, and their mechanical function is becoming apparent:
Guilds combine player backgrounds and factions to become something as definitional to a player character as their race and class. While you can play guildless characters (using other backgrounds,) I think that any Ravnica game I ran (at least the first one) would require that everyone choose a guild.
The book also gives guidelines of what sort of class combinations would make sense for mono-guild parties, though again, I'd encourage players to be a little more of a motley crew (the Rakdos member would probably wear actually motley.)
Guilds come with background-like benefits, but they also function as factions with a renown system. While I think that system ought to be optional in other settings, the role of the guilds in Ravnica is so important that I think that any proper Ravnica game should include it.
One thing I'd be concerned about is that a mixed-guild group might find it hard to advance to the higher tiers of renown within their respective guilds. That might simply be the price they pay and reflect the difficulties of reaching across guild lines, but I think a DM might become a little more generous with the amount of renown that they award for completing different tasks.
These rewards range from friendly NPCs who assist you on official guild business or magical items to bigger story-based things like having enough of a reputation to talk with the highers-up in your guild. There's no explicit method to become the Guildmaster yourself, but you can become quite a major figure in your guild, such that the guildmaster might know you personally and even seek out your advice.
While very few D&D races exist in Ravnica (basically just humans, elves, half-elves - which makes sense given the previous two - and goblins,) there are myriad additional races they've introduced: the blue-skinned intellectuals called Vedalken, the biomancy-enhanced Simic Hybrids, Minotaurs, Centaurs, and elephant-people called Loxodons.
I'd recommend allowing Tritons (from Volo's) to work as Ravnica's Merfolk (in Ravnica, Merfolk are amphibious and have legs, like Tritons) and allow Lizardfolk (also from Volo's) to serve as Viashino (who are basically lizard-people.) I'd even suggest digging through the Plane Shift articles like the one for Zendikar or Ixalan that have vampires as a playable race, as you'll find such bloodsuckers (or mind-suckers) within the Orzhov and Dimir guilds.
There's so much ground to cover in this book, and I've really only scratched the surface.
There is actually a section like my character options posts from a week or two ago, giving players good recommendations for classes and class options based on their guild. The book is a bit more conservative with its class recommendations, such that some guilds even lack any healing-capable classes, suggesting instead that they use alchemists to provide healing potions (though this ceases to be a problem if you have a mixed-guild party.)
There are obviously a lot of ways you could go about character creation here, but I really think that starting with the guild is a good choice. From there you can pick a race and class (for which they have recommendations) and move on.
One fun thing is that guilds each have guild spells that get added to the list of spell options for anyone with Spellcasting or Pact Magic. Most are existing but flavorfully-appropriate spells, but there are a handful of new ones, like the Dimir-only cantrip "Encode Thoughts," which creates a little ethereal strip of parchment with your current thoughts (or those of someone whose mind you are reading with magic) encoded into it that can then be read by others who know the spell.
Again, I'm only a couple chapters in, but I'm really excited about this book. The Dimir Operative background feature is one that I was literally laughing out loud about - you become a member of a second guild, but are secretly a Dimir Operative who has infiltrated it - and it encourages you not to tell the rest of the party! (If you've been watching the Broken Pact stream, I am pretty sure that College of Whispers bard Velma is actually Dimir, as opposed to Orzhov.)
Leafing through the rest of the book, there is a section about the Tenth District, which is where most of the guilds have their headquarters, as well as the Chamber of the Guildpact, which is the true center of Ravnica's government and where the Living Guildpact, Jace Beleren, has his office (as a planeswalker, Jace is almost never in, which means that his magical ability to keep the guilds in balance is usually not functioning, leading to greater tension in the city.)
There are also suggested story hooks and maps to buildings, sorted by guild. There is also a short adventure designed to show off the city in which a low-level party deals with a goblin gangster.
There are also magic items, including a Mizzium Apparatus that replicates the Wizard's School of Invention from Unearthed Arcana that didn't make it into the book proper.
While perhaps not quite on the scale of Mordenkainen's or Volo's, there are a fair number of monster and NPC stat blocks that should be invaluable in fleshing out the world. Most of these beings are affiliated with particular guilds, but of course a lot of stuff in the Monster Manual can get mixed in as well. There are stat blocks for each of the guildmasters, which should all provide challenging boss encounters for high-level parties - the highest challenge rating is Niv-Mizzet, at 26, while others like the Obzedat Ghost Council is a group of 5 CR 8 ghosts (but likely any encounter with them will involve many minions to protect them - including Orzhov Thrulls who are designed to intercept attacks.)
Of course, given the players' relationships with these guilds, any of these creatures could just as easily serve as allies instead of enemies, and the proportion of stat blocks that belong to NPCs rather than monsters is quite high. Indeed, as one ascends in rank within their guild, they can often get several NPC followers who will help them with guild business.
Given that Ravnica is becoming a true D&D setting, I recommend each Dungeon Master make it their own, potentially throwing in elements from other worlds - maybe they've used planar travel to get there or perhaps your version of Ravnica is different than the canon one. Tieflings would make great Rakdos performers, and I could totally imagine a Beholder being a high-level operative for House Dimir. Like I said earlier, a lot of D&D stuff can be re-skinned to work for Ravnica. The Tarrasque's stat block could function for one of the ancient, pre-guild gods of the plane known as the Nephilim, and its arrival within the biggest, densest city in the multiverse (unless that's Sigil) would be a catastrophe of campaign-capping proportions.
I'm still reading (since I started writing this post I've moved into the "city layout" part of the book,) and so I'll have some additional thoughts I'm sure. I'd be very excited to run a game set here, though there will be a lot for DMs to keep track of. I highly recommend having a prominent place in your notes to keep track of players' renown with their guilds, and finding ways to regularly award it to them - though this is something that can be spread out over the course of a campaign, so maybe it's best if it's a slow trickle.
I think you can probably build a campaign that is very episodic in nature by simply coming up with tasks for the party to do for their various guilds. But naturally I think it'll be more fun if there's something bigger brewing. Given the differences in alignment and flavor among player characters, I really recommend tailoring the story to the party. My inclination is always going to be to fill things with mysterious intrigue - classic Dimir stuff - but if your party is a group of Gruul, Rakdos, and maybe Izzet, you might instead focus on their anarchic struggle against an oppressive government - the Azorius making for ideal villains.
Personally I think that it'll be best if your party is composed of very different guilds - think something like Selesnya, Rakdos, Izzet, and Dimir - and play up the tension between their competing philosophies. This will likely force you to think carefully about who your campaign's big villain is, to come up with something that all four such players would consider a threat that needed to be stopped.
Naturally, just because a player is a member of a guild does not mean you can't have villains within those very guilds. Golgari are easy, as there is always a bit of backstabbing and intraguild conflict, but any guild can potentially have corrupt or misguided members in its ranks.
Anyway, I'll talk more about story once I've read what they have to say about it.
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