Ravnica Reinvented

20240-7-13

Ready for round 3? We’ve got to pick a setting to analyze, and we want to keep our third choice simple, so that we can look for patterns we found in our first analysis. For those reasons, we are working with Ravnica. We have a lot of resources available to us including the art from Magic the Gathering, and the setting book Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica (GGtR). I’m going to assume you don’t have that book, but I do, so I can pull out some content to talk about as well, since we are looking at this from another direction entirely. Another thing we need to discuss is the fact that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has released multiple story updates for the setting, so it isn’t uniform. Luckily, we also have some tools to help. When WotC made GGtR they picked a timeline to focus on, which happens to be a steady state equilibrium setting. From the artwork, we can tell we are looking at a fantasy steampunk setting. That already tells us a lot, and fits with the questions we asked last time, but with different answers.

True to form, we are going to discuss our color wheel again. And as hinted at last time, you can do some really odd things. In Ravnica, the city is ruled by 10 guilds, each as a combination of two distinct colors. The math works out, trust me. 5 of these guilds have allied colors, and 5 have opposed colors. Just look at the back of a MTG card if you need some help with that. So if this was a normal color wheel, we could say that instead of our standard 5 colors, we now have 10 colors that are a little closer to the center, and each other. That sure is a twist, but it could make this analysis much harder. We can still keep our focus on the colors, but there is more insight to gain if you study the guild color combinations separately.

Starting with Green again, due to the setting, we are in a huge plane- wide city. So nature is limited. Each green guild also does experimentation on nature, trying to push it to its various limits. Experimentation is a blue trait, so we can simply say that green is shifted towards blue, much like Innistrad colors were shifted black.

Next with white, we see white as a major metropolitan color. These guilds work at scale, with individuals falling through the cracks. There is also a heavy focus on using magic, including items. A small leaning towards both blue and black. Blue, oh what a special color in Ravnica. The blue guilds are secretive even when they really shouldn’t be. And I think the city would be really cool with just the blue guilds. They hit the blue traits well, but really hit hard with magitech, experimentation, and a specific disregard of life. Possibly a small leaning towards black, but also pushing blue further than standard fantasy.

Black was our focus in Innistrad, so looking at differences is important. Here, black is selfish, but much less violent and murderous. Black even provides utility through the bank, recycling, information, and entertainment systems. Just looking at that list, we can tell that there is a city leaning, but I’m willing to call this a blue leaning as well.

Lastly, red provides some difficulty. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand any of these guilds. Like fundamentally I can’t get myself into their mindset. Each seems like they could be a subset of another guild. I’m going to abstain from judging here, and just say I don’t know. Overall we can say the setting shifts towards blue, including blue going more blue. There might be a small shift towards black, which mostly comes from a bit of pessimism inherent to the art setting, and the fact that everything focuses on violence because it’s based on a battle card game.

We could be done here, we have the answers to the questions we asked last time. But since that was short, we can also go a little deeper. After all, we have an entire source book to compare to our analysis, and guide us into deeper thoughts. First, the book is directed towards DMs looking to build adventures, not DMs looking to build a setting. It often encourages the DM to focus on a specific guild, such as giving random tables per guild for guild related adventures or adventures that could take place at a key guild location. Neat.

Coming up with locations that focus on our color focuses could be a good idea. In Ravnica we have locations listed such as cathedrals, fortresses, research labs, etc. Looking back at Innistrad, we can see if they had key locations for their colors. White often focused on the churches, blue also had labs. Black had graveyards, red was village streets and bars, and green was in a wolf pack. And these choices are nearly effortless once we know our setting base and our color choices. These options are so obvious that we probably could save them for later, but also getting them out early could help avoid decision paralysis when we need a setting later.

GGtR also has tables for generating a villain of any guild into a villain. This ranges from a member betraying the guild’s core principles, reinterpreting those principles, or doing the quiet part with the silent support of the guild. Regardless, it’s nice to point out that anyone can go too far. It includes a beautiful map of the city, detailing various sections, streets, and landmarks. It tells us about what happens there and which guilds are most prominent. But what most DMs might not notice is that there isn’t a table pointing back to those areas. When the adventure references a location, it is almost always a generic street, a generic building, etc. That whole map is wasted if you rely on the random tables. If that isn’t a huge oversight, then we can guess that we really don’t need all of that to make a good adventure. So we will skip thinking about it, and not try to add those parts to our framework.

Is there more we could add? Everything lines up with our colors, the world is in such a steady state that there isn’t competition for religion or culture outside of these guilds. We don’t have division within the guilds to any significant level outside of the recognized hierarchy. I’d like to build on our tools, so lets next work on a setting with history.