The keen eyed among may have noticed that Wizards of the Coast own both Dungeons and Dragons and Magic The Gathering, and in fact have done so for years. The burning question therefore is, why haven’t they created a Magic The Gathering setting for D&D? After all, Magic is all about wizards who wander from world to world getting into fights. There is plenty of material out there.
The Guildmaster’s Guide To Ravnica is hopefully the first of many sourcebooks to fill this gap and it’s pretty fabulous. Ravnica is certainly an interesting place to start. The setting is sort of a fantasy take on the cyberpunk genre. Ravinica is a huge, world sized metropolis, with towers that go as high as the clouds. It’s a fantasy world, so the building and principles look medieval and its guilds instead of corporations, but the idea is the same. The poor people live on the bottom of the city with the pollution and strange monsters, whilst the rich are in their towers.
The Guilds form a big part of the setting; everyone is anyone is part of a guild, and they are ten of them in total, from law enforcing Azorius to the demon worshipping Cult of Rakdos. As this is all based on the popular card game, you can see some very simple themes running through the various Guilds and figure out what kind of play-style each Guild would represent in Magic. That said, The Guildmaster’s Guide To Ravnica is highly focused on turning all of that into a D&D campaign. Guilds also govern what race and character type you’re likely to be. Though that said, if you want to be a magic-item making tinkerer who happens to be a Loxodon (elephant person), then of course that’s a thing you can do.
The book is extremely comprehensive and well thought out; a lot as gone into meshing the entire thing into a single and coherent campaign setting, and it’s got all you need to run a game. Personally I like to lift ideas from multiple sources and as such this book is a bit of a treasure.
The sheer volume of interesting ideas present is well worth the time, and the setting is flexible enough to allow both political and adventure based games at the same time. One of the nice things about this setting is that each faction on its own is set to destroy the world if left to their own devices. In most cases this would be a bit of an accident, but without the other guilds competing against them, then things would go wrong quickly. This means there is an inherent conflict to the setting and that makes it a doddle to set up adventures in this world.
My only concern is that it’s so good that we’ll get more Magic inspired books. On the one hand, that’s a great thing. But on the other I’m still waiting for 5th Edition take on the old school Planescape setting and it’d looking like I’m going to have to cram all this Magic inspired stuff into that setting instead.
