How Do I Get Excited About Ravnica?

[Grimmnist]

My group recently started a new campaign set in Ravnica and I am having trouble making and roleplaying a character, which is quite unusual for me. While I am very familiar with D&D lore and lots of high fantasy I never learned the lore of MtG (though I like the art and have played a bit), and skimming through the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica nothing really excited me. I am interested in hearing other people's perspectives on what they like from this setting.

I don't like any of the guilds, this is not to say that they are bad by any means but rather none of them appeal to the type of characters I tend to make. Each of the guilds is very flawed and with conflicts between them I don't see the guilds as a beneficial institution. My DM recommended against playing guildless and since the core book is called the Guildmaster's Guide I would feel silly not playing one, at the end of the day probably just going to roll a Rakdos since it's the most chaotic guild so easiest to ignore the guild hierarchy.

[Sigreid]

You could be one of the barbarians out to tear it all down.

[Gilrad]

The book also mentions that players can have a variety of reasons to belong to a guild:

Zealously believing in the goals, message, and purpose of the guild,

Opportunistically a member for the benefits it provides,

Grandfathered/raised in the guild but not really connecting to it,

Seeing it as a job but not really trying to go too deep into the structure...

[Zanthy1]

Some guilds do not have a strict hierarchy, Rakdos as you said being one of them. Gruul plays much like any tribal association, the strongest are at the top and things are divided into clans, but you have pretty much fair reign so long as the Azorious or Boros don't come knocking.

But i'll also echo what was said earlier, being in a guild does not mean you align 100% with it, it just means one aspect appealed or appeals to your character, and thus you signed up for that reason. Doesn't mean another guild wouldn't be interesting, but you may be less inclined to leave the comfort of home for something that may appear nicer until you actually experience it.

Going guildless is an option, though if your DM advised against it there may be a reason specific to their campaign. If I was DMing the major downside of being guildless is being excluded from guild specific events and the like. However being guildless is better than being from a rival guild, so unless the whole party decides to go the same guild, it shouldn't really affect much game play

[Madfellow]

I'd advise you to talk to your DM and explain that you're not really interested in the guild hierarchy business. If you can't play guildless, then explain to your DM that you and your character aren't really motivated by upward mobility in their guild. Figure out the type of character you want to play, and then go with the guild that most closely matches their capabilities and personality.

And there's nothing wrong with that; in any type of game, there's going to be some aspect that at least one player doesn't engage with. For me, playing Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) was a bit of a slog because a large portion of the game was domain management and, well, Conquering.


I don't like any of the guilds, this is not to say that they are bad by any means but rather none of them appeal to the type of characters I tend to make. Each of the guilds is very flawed and with conflicts between them I don't see the guilds as a beneficial institution.

Yes, each guild is flawed in some way, but then so are people. No institution is perfect because institutions are made up of people, and no person is perfect. The guilds are very much a double-edged sword in that they each provide a vital function to the city or to its people, but at the same time their monopoly on magic cleanly divides the population into haves and have-nots. The Guildpact has prevented full-scale war for 10,000 years and brought about an "end to history," but has also locked the world into a perpetual cold war state of conflict and social stagnation.

That said, some guilds are more benevolent than others. Selesnya, Boros, and Azorius are devoted to upholding the peace and general well-being of the city and its people. Simic and Izzet are devoted to advancing the cause of science, and using knowledge to make the world a better place. Gruul, Golgari, and Rakdos are devoted to freedom and looking out for the little guy. Orzhov and Dimir... well they're clearly in it for themselves, but it's in their interests to keep the city functioning and the people happy.

So I'll bring it back around. What kind of character do you want to play?

[Chronos]

Rakdos is only interested in "looking out for the little guy" in the sense that you need to see him clearly to put the sacrificial dagger in the right place. Oh, and you want the crowd to see him clearly when you do it, too.

Yes, they put on spectacles for the masses, but for every audience member, there's always the added edge that they might be next.

[Crucius]

The Gruul don't really identify themselves as a guild. They are more a collection of tribes with the intent to tear down the institutions. Maybe that could work?

D&D beyond has a fun little video series by Ari Levitch on youtube that quickly explains what the guilds are about, in a more OoC kind of way than the descriptions found in the book.

[ChildofLuthic]

So to build off what others are saying, you don't have to be 100% aligned with a guild's mission/ethical stance. In fact, I would even say that it adds a bit more excitement if you're at odds with something in your guild, and you're working to change it. I really want to play someone that joined The Cult of Rakdos to try to make it focus more on political satire and fighting oppression. You could do a similar thing with the other guilds, even the "good" ones - a paladin who who believes in the democratic nature of the Azorius Senate but hates the legalism, or a do-gooder fighter who joins the Boros Legion but secretly wishes it was more egalitarian and less hierarchical.

[Yora]

If you're not feeling it, don't get invested in the setting. Try to get invested in the events and NPCs of the campaign that you are playing. That's the parts that actually matter.

[Throne12]

Well start with a character build them and think about there Personality then look at the guilds then.


So what kind of character do you want to play?

[Tetrasodium]

It provides us with a bunch of monsters not designed around forgotten realms & greyhawk so GMs who run other settings like eberron & dark sun now suddenly have a bunch of options for creatures that more readily adapt to their preferred setting. I say that in all seriousness without a hint of sarcasm.

[GreyBlack]

My group recently started a new campaign set in Ravnica and I am having trouble making an roleplaying a character, which is quite unusual for me. While I am very familiar with D&D lore and lots of high fantasy I never learned the lore of MtG (though I like the art and have played a bit), and skimming through the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica nothing really excited me. I am interested in hearing other people's perspectives on what they like from this setting.

I don't like any of the guilds, this is not to say that they are bad by any means but rather none of them appeal to the type of characters I tend to make. Each of the guilds is very flawed and with conflicts between them I don't see the guilds as a beneficial institution. My DM recommended against playing guildless and since the core book is called the Guildmaster's Guide I would feel silly not playing one, at the end of the day probably just going to roll a Rakdos since it's the most chaotic guild so easiest to ignore the guild hierarchy.

So.... what I would do is literally just think about what your character wants more than anything else/ what your character's end goals are and go from there.

Does your character want military might and power? Join up with the Boros.

Spy network? Go with the Dimir.

Just wanna smash stuff? Gruul.

Political power? Azorius.

Basically, just build the character you want, and then look at the guild benefits and figure out which one gives you what you want.

[Misterwhisper]

Step 1: Play a caster.

Step 2... ummm yeah that is it.

[Sception]

Try looking into original ravnica lore on mtg wikis. The guildmaster's guide doesn't do the best job of explaining what the guilds do and are supposed to contribute to ravnican society.

Eg, orzhov is depicted as a mafia and nothing more, but they also provide legitimate & needing banking and spiritual services. Ravnica's economy would grind to a halt without them, and the streets would be overrun with hungry ghosts.

The Golgari are depicted as villains rotting the city from below, but their main thing is recycling and farminh, collecting the city's garbage and composting it into mulch on which they grow the vast mushroom beds that form the staple diets of much of the city's population, especially the poor. Without them the streets would be choked with reguse and the corpses of the starved.

The gruul are depicted as brute barbarians out to destroy the city, but what they mostly destroy is the crumbling remains of abandoned sections of it, leveling dangerous blighted ruins and making room for new construction.

Even if the leaders of the guilds have lost sight of the original purposes of the organizations they control, not everyone who is part of those guilds has done so, and there plenty of individuals working to reform their guilds, returning them to their beneficial roles in society. Playing such a reformer provides strong character motivation not only for why you're a part of the guild you choose, but also for why you'd be willing to work with a party of individuals from rival guilds, sometimes against the ambitions of poweeful figures within your own.

[CantigThimble]

Try looking into original ravnica lore on mtg wikis. The guildmaster's guide doesn't do the best job of explaining what the guilds do and are supposed to contribute to ravnican society.

Eg, orzhov is depicted as a mafia and nothing more, but they also provide legitimate & needing banking and spiritual services. Ravnica's economy would grind to a halt without them, and the streets would be overrun with hungry ghosts.

The Golgari are depicted as villains rotting the city from below, but their main thing is recycling and farminh, collecting the city's garbage and composting it into mulch on which they grow the vast mushroom beds that form the staple diets of much of the city's population, especially the poor. Without them the streets would be choked with reguse and the corpses of the starved.

The gruul are depicted as brute barbarians out to destroy the city, but what they mostly destroy is the crumbling remains of abandoned sections of it, leveling dangerous blighted ruins and making room for new construction.

Even if the leaders of the guilds have lost sight of the original purposes of the organizations they control, not everyone who is part of those guilds has done so, and there plenty of individuals working to reform their guilds, returning them to their beneficial roles in society. Playing such a reformer provides strong character motivation not only for why you're a part of the guild you choose, but also for why you'd be willing to work with a party of individuals from rival guilds, sometimes against the ambitions of poweeful figures within your own.

This is excellent info here.

It's also worth pointing out that you don't need to be an extremist for the guild.

Maybe the most extreme azorious officers will give out code violations for putting a foot on the wrong cobblestone, but there are also plenty of lawmages who are just beat cops and lawyers trying to make sure that they can prevent serious crimes and keep the innocent from being accidentally punished.

Some Boros soldiers are Judge Dredd style shoot first ask questions later wacko cops, but many others will be people who just want to keep the peace and will use their fearsome reputation to prevent fights from starting and only draw their weapons if absolutely necessary.

Some simic are mad scientists creating monstrosities, but others are just civic engineers trying to make the city work, just in a different way than our engineers. If there's a part of the city where it's difficult to keep plants or use beasts of burden then they can go find the best plants and animals for the people there and perhaps modify them to fit better in that environment. Our civic engineers try to match roads, buildings and vehicles to the weather and terrain in an area, simic engineers try to match plants and animals to the weather and terrain in an area.

[TundraBuccaneer]

I advice to search for youtuber named adam koebel he did a read through of the ravnica book, and he just spouts ideas as he reads through the book. I myself have only seen the part he talks about races, backgrounds, and classes and have never been in contact with magic or ravnica and got really exited and wanted to play it even though there isn't really room now for a other campaign in my life. To me it felt like a free brainstorm without the effort of an actual brainstorm.
I hope this can help you.

[Thrudd]

You should randomly determine the elements of the character you're having trouble choosing. If you don't really have a preference for any of the options, assign each guild a number and roll a die. Then imagine how/why your character got into the guild, what they think about it, etc.

[Grimmnist]

Try looking into original ravnica lore on mtg wikis. The guildmaster's guide doesn't do the best job of explaining what the guilds do and are supposed to contribute to ravnican society.

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. I hadn't really considered what they contribute to society, definitely a flaw with the tone of GGtR, this does leave me with a follow up question: Why do the guilds contribute to society in such an extremist manner?

Several people pointed out that most guild members aren't extremists so maybe the reputation is only from a small minority. It is also possible that most the guild leaders being immortal beings have very different senses of ethics.

How does color alignment effect the guilds? I know the basic attributes of each land type in MtG so my question is along the lines of asking why each have their particular colors. Why are there 10 guilds, and why is each a 2 color combo (other than as a card game mechanic)? Did the guild's alignment and purpose lead them to the color combo they have, or did they start with the colors and build up a system from there?

[DeTess]

How does color alignment effect the guilds? I know the basic attributes of each land type in MtG so my question is along the lines of asking why each have their particular colors. Why are there 10 guilds, and why is each a 2 color combo (other than as a card game mechanic)? Did the guild's alignment and purpose lead them to the color combo they have, or did they start with the colors and build up a system from there?

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/founding-city-2018-08-27 this article describes the design process behind the original Ravnica sets in short, and links to more in-depth articles.

edit: I don't know if the guide mentions this, but in the worlds lore, the guild system was designed, rather than something organically coming into being. There wasn't some kind of proto-guild system that slowly turned into the current guilds over time through evolution and accretion of new developments. No, one day a sphinx named Azor, who had more power than sense, and more ideas than patience to properly work any of them out decided that Ravnica needed ten guilds to run all of it. And so there where 10 guilds. And he saw that it was a horribly flawed system, smacked some bandaids on them, then called it a lost cause and buggered of to another world to try a new idea.

[Grimmnist]

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/founding-city-2018-08-27 this article describes the design process behind the original Ravnica sets.

That has interesting information but it seems very focused on fitting theme to card game mechanics. MtG has great lore for a competitive TCG but it seems all the lore is designed around the rules of that specific game. This leads to another qualm I have about the Ravnica setting, as a fantasy fiction fan and a DM, I like the lore of a world to make sense for the medium in which it is portrayed. For example in the Lord of the Rings films they cut a lot of content from the books, but I feel most of the cuts made sense for the movie they were trying to make (e.g. Tom Bombadil, love him in the books but a 30 minute merry singing section might not have been the best scene on the silver screen). I am certainly going to give Ravnica a fair shot, but I am concerned that the design process seems to be based on card game mechanics and we are not playing a card game.

Edit- Just saw your edit, thanks for that info, I didn't know that. That answers quite a few of my questions, though my concern above still stands.

[CantigThimble]

How does color alignment effect the guilds? I know the basic attributes of each land type in MtG so my question is along the lines of asking why each have their particular colors. Why are there 10 guilds, and why is each a 2 color combo (other than as a card game mechanic)? Did the guild's alignment and purpose lead them to the color combo they have, or did they start with the colors and build up a system from there?

To the best of my knowledge, based on Mark Rosewater's podcast, the design process for Ravnica went roughly:
"We want to make a set themed around 2 color combos. How can we have 10 different factions and tie them all together in a coherent setting?"
"How about a city with a bunch of guilds in it?"

The in lore stuff is a post hoc justification for the game being the way it is, and as Randuir said, it basically boils down to "A wizard sphinx did it."

As far as in-universe how colors and people get associated... that's very much kind of handwaved in MtG lore. It's really only good for card mechanics. Most stories you read from MtG lore won't involve colors of mana much at all and won't mention the type of land mana comes from other than a brief "And then they tapped into a leyline and cast...". Unless you're into the card game then I'd suggest just thinking about the guilds as organizations with their own particular styles, both in terms of philosophy and powers, and not worry about the colors at all.

[Sception]

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. I hadn't really considered what they contribute to society, definitely a flaw with the tone of GGtR, this does leave me with a follow up question: Why do the guilds contribute to society in such an extremist manner?

This actually related to your color questions, something else that ggtr didnt put a lot of emphasis on, because they didn't want to rework the entire 5e magic system to reflect it.

Keep in mind that some of this is old lore to me and I may be remembering bits wrong, so keep a few grains of salt around, but...

In mtg the colors are both flavors of magic and personality archetype, like wizard school, alignment, and classical elemental affinity all in one. Users of a particular type of magic aren't always friendly with each other, but they generally have similar mind sets and world views, as well as similar power sets. The five colors are organized in a star pattern, with two 'ally' colors closest to that color's characterization adjacent to it and the two most far removed on the opposite points.

Magic the gathering card expansions come in 'blocks', sets of multiple expansions based on a particular mechanical and narrative theme. Ravnica's mechanical theme was 'two color pairs', so there was a bunch of multicolored cards, each pair had a particular mechanical gimmick that reflected both colors so even single colored cards in the guild could have that theme going, etc.

The narrative theme they came up with to justify the color pairs bit was the planet-wide city of ravnica, with ten different two color guilds that would each contribute to the city's life in some manner consistent with their colors.

Eg, golgari are made up of the (normally opposed) colors black and green, life and death. But both colors are also associated with concepts of growth, so together that became recycling, composting, putrefaction, fungal growth blooming from corpse fields, life-from-death. In a city that covers most of an entire world, where there isn't enough empty land to dump waste in landfills or set aside huge areas of land for fields and pastures, it's obvious how important the golgari services would be.

Now, not all of the guilds came together quite that well from a narrative front. The idea to center everything on two color pairs came first, the characterization of the guilds came second, and some feel a bit more forced or contrived than that.

But even that forced aspect can be read as having some on character justification. Iirc, Ravnica was a constructed world, it and its guilds, and the magical 'guuldpact' that defines them, all a deliberate experiment in producing a self sustaining civilization, peacefully integrating all five colors, in part by breaking each color up and binding each piece to the four remaining coulors.

If a particular color pair wasnt especially suited to building a functioning civilization, eg green-red or red-black, then it would just have to be a little forced to make it work, leaving those guilds to be more about providing contained outlets for destructive impulses rather than actual constructive contributions.

Without the 'color theory' aspect, guilds like the Rakdos are hard to understand. The key to rationalizing them in universe is accepting that, in the original setting, the combination of energies those guilds represent would exist in the world anyway, and the guildpact that holds ravnica's civilization together couldn't exist without the proper elemental balance.

As for the extreme aspect of the guilds, they are again defined by pairs of powerful arcane, elemental, and alignmental forces, in some cases *opposed* forces, bound together by a god-tier spell/artifact that compels them to apply those forces to particular societal occupations. That's going to lead to some amount of erratic behavior & subversive compliance.

[Vessyra]

Well start with a character build them and think about there Personality then look at the guilds then.


So what kind of character do you want to play?

I agree with building the character, then looking at the guilds. Our Ravenica campaign was originally planned to be a standard-world D&D setting, but when we changed to Ravenica, my drow backstory just changed the names of some things and joined the guild that fit her personality. And now, despite not knowing a thing about Ravenica when I created her, she's my most well-developed and complex character.

In summary: Throne12 is smart, create the character as you would any PC, then mod the backstory for Ravenica and join the guild that fits your personality.

[Prince Vine]

Thanks, that's what I was looking for. I hadn't really considered what they contribute to society, definitely a flaw with the tone of GGtR, this does leave me with a follow up question: Why do the guilds contribute to society in such an extremist manner?

Several people pointed out that most guild members aren't extremists so maybe the reputation is only from a small minority. It is also possible that most the guild leaders being immortal beings have very different senses of ethics.

In the lore the guilds are the evolution of various ancient factions and armies from a massive war that had the potential to flat-out destroy the world. Eventually the original Azor came up with a magically binding contract that functioned as a peace treaty, philosophical dissertation and constitution. The various groups can be extreme because either 1. Allowing extreme behavior was the only way to get them to agree, 2. The hassle of ruling a guild is designed to bog them down and keep their potential destructive power in check (looking at you Rakdos), or 3. As mentioned a thousand years or more is a long time to hone interests and plans and off the top of my head Simic, Dmir, Orzhov, Selesnya, Golgari, Boros, Izzet, Rakdos were initially led by a being functionally immortal (with some just not letting death stop them).

[lightningcat]

The original Ravnica trilogy was about a Boros beatcop. His partner was an angel that had gotten into a serious disagreement with the Guild leader and was knocked down to beat cop until she learned her lesson. After he dies, the main character goes on to be a beat cop for the Orzov.
Not read any of the later series, but they are short books and usually well written. They also give lot of little details about the world.

[dave2008]

I don't like any of the guilds, this is not to say that they are bad by any means but rather none of them appeal to the type of characters I tend to make.

What kind of character do you tend to make? I am assuming from your post that you don't really want to go outside your comfort zone. So, it will be possible to give you better advice if you let us know what type of character you like to play. I don't know Ravnica well, but I bet with some more information we can help you out.