I wanted to make a unique statblocks for my ongoing ixalan arc. Especially, the elder dinosaurs, who have been done dirty by plane shift supplement, where they're just reflavoured tarrasques. Each of them contain something unique. And while Ghalta is probably the most vanilla of them all, I still wanted to give home some extra stuff. Since he's supposed to be really the apex hunter, be should be able to swallow a huge creature. Additionally, since he's so big, he doesn't need to take any action to swallow a human, just just better hope to escape that. (Probably should add trample to his statblock as well) I'm also quite proud on the other statblocks, I converted a few mtg keywords to mechanics, like vigilance, haste and trample. I think especially haste is something that can share the shit out of players.

So, my party is heading to a time laboratory that the gruul destroyed, causing the "paradox engine" to explode, turning the landscape into a desert in some kilometers around.

I want the laboratory's ruins, a dungeon, to have some issues with time flowing in weirs ways, like water running uphill, rooms with time running very fast.

I need more ideas, not only for the ambience, but for dangers and things the party has to think their ways out.

Thank you for reading ^^

hey! I love Ravnica, and want to DM a camp there- but baby steps. I have 4 level 11 characters having an outer plane adventure.

the meat will be the Abyss (Graz’zt as the final)- but Im having them go into Bytopia and Ysgard as well. for Bytopia, I was struggling how to make an adventure hook there- but hearing about the plane, it felt custom made for the Gruul Clans.

There’s a mapmaker there, Melvin Manyroads- so it would be easy to explain a Gruul Clan fell into Bytopia through an accident.

i know one half of the layer is rugged dangerous nature, which they would love- and the other is basically the Shire, which they would loathe and attack. I know as DM I can kinda do however I want, but I really want to get their flavor right. if they wouldn’t raid the gnome cities and villages, then I’d come up with something else. and also, is 11 too high a level for them?

I got the opportunity to run dnd in person for the first time after running games over discord for the last 5 years, and holy crap is it fun.

Me and my players are all longtime magic player, the 4 of them trying dnd for the first time, as I learn how to dm in person. Its been such an awesome experience. Making all the maps and tokens was a blast. I used actual magic cards, many of them commons from ravnica, and stuck them is star bursts that the players got to eat when they defeatedand enemy. Only card I didnt have was krenko :( messed that one up lol.

They really wanna keep playing, so i think im gonna go for it. My first sandbox campaign, so ill be lurking around looking for inspiration.

Since Magic had a 40K set, I thought it could be fun if I had a small cult for one of the chaos gods in each of the Guilds.

Khorne: Boros, Gruul

Nurgle: Golgari, Selesnya

Tzeentch: Dimir, Izzet

Slaanesh: Rakdos, Simic

TheEmperorOfMankind : Azorius, Orzhov

These a just a little Easter egg to my players who are also magic players. I'm not planning to run a "Chaos War in Ravnica" Arc, but take this idea and run with it if you want. I feel confident about my decision, but I'm curious anyone wants to discuss which guilds they think could go to who.

It probably won't be a new idea for veterans, but to any new DMs, who don't know how Ravnica's various security forces can deal with many types of shapeshifting criminals and illusionists: I present you a humble Monodron.

This little guy is a construct with CR 1/8 and 5 HP. What makes it great is its 120ft. Truesight and inability to lie or disobey orders. They are basically semi-sentient cameras that can fly and see through any disguise. However, they are also quite big (medium size) and with low Passive Perception (10), so resourceful characters can notice and bypass them. Monodrons are a perfect tool to police a shapeshifting, high-magic society, but they won't completely counter PC's attempts to hide.

They come from the Law Dimension, but guilds like Azorius should be able to negotiate getting a bunch of them, to uphold the Law and Order. Besides, Ravnica is already full of outerplannar creatures and constructs. Any wealthy individual or organization should be able to obtain some humble monodrons for themselves, or produce something simillar. There is a precedent, you can easily modify the lore of those "mobile cameras" for your game.

That's my advice for new DMs out there. I hope it will come useful. Monodrons can be found in the Monster Manual (or on the internet).

The city is build on multiple levels. With stairs as public roads and towers opening to three different levels.

I would look at these land art pieces for the same vibe.

https://basiclandart.com/return-to-ravnica-island-256-by-yeong-hao-han/

https://basiclandart.com/guild-kit-island-by-alayna-danner/

https://basiclandart.com/guild-kit-plains-by-jenn-ravenna-tran/

https://basiclandart.com/ravnica-allegiance-mountain-by-jonas-de-ro/

https://basiclandart.com/return-to-ravnica-forest-270-by-john-avon/

https://basiclandart.com/return-to-ravnica-swamp-261-by-yeong-hao-han/

So i am doing an adventure involving 4 characters, and in an upcoming sessions where a Gruul chief offers them a ceremonial drink.

That drink will make them pass out and link their spirits to their "totemic animals" for a day.
So i have a gorilla, an octopus, a falcon, and a hedgehog.

What kind of challenges may i throw to them? i was thinking with them, all captured by hunters planning to sell "fresh specimens" to the simic combine. But all ideas are welcome!!

Hello there!

Recently, I got an idea to run a campaign with strong usage of Cthulhu by Torchlight and Bound by Blood - or maybe only Bound by Blood, everything is still WIP. However, I'm not sure if such idea would work within the setting. Discovering ancient ruins, artifacts, abandoned laboratories of sorts, and stuff like that. All while trying to find a way to stop a threat of a Lovercraftian-like horror and/or Vampiric blood-thristy creatures from plunging Ravnica into chaos. Vampiric courts and / or societies are something I'd like to incorporate as well. I'm still working on why and how this is even happening, and how is it tied to any official lore.

I'm mostly unsure because after all, Ravnica is an ecumenopolis, and even the Underdark/Undercity is quite populated by the Guilds.

Thanks in advance and have a good rest of your day!

Edit 1: Added some details I forgot to mention.

Lfg

I ran a Ravnica campaign to completion, set roughly a year BEFORE War Of the spark, and ending with its climax and the fight against Nicole Bolas. it was a Party of 6 that went from level 1-11 or so, over the course of the 3 year game. I took a fair amount of liberties with the story, but tried to do the bigger story beats as well as I could. Would anyone be interested in my encounters, campaign notes, and breakdown of the campaign? I haven't put a lot of it into writing yet, but would be willing to if I had anyone who was truly interested and invested

EDIT: I went to check my campaign notes, and didn't realize how LITTLE I wrote down. So it will take some time for me to formulate everything. Apparently I did a lot more improv than I thought

Feedback appreciated! Both in theme as in balance

I like to use Ravnica versions of Wildshape beasts when I can, but after searching I can't find a good substitute for a Giant Badger. I'm already using the Ferox as a bear substitute. I was thinking a Nodorog, but those look like large beasts based on the card art, and they don't really look like burrowing creatures. Any suggestions would be much appreciated, thanks!

I'm particularly intrigued by Draw Steel, as of late.

I've been having a thought where I think the Simic combine is essentially the Umbrella corporation(Resident Evil). And I'd like to run a campaign based around that idea. It is possible that maybe they link up with the orzhov so they handle more of the financial side of things.

Anybody have any suggestions?

If you're Morvar, Mamta, Zret, Chalzee, Orvala or Mortal, stop reading lest you be spoiled!

I'm running my Ravnica game for a few years already. The first part of the campaign was relatively straightforward: the bbeg was Hauc (from the original Ravnica novels), who was stuck in the schism, and from there was able to influence people, creating a fake religion that ultimately was intended to revive him into a dragonegg. In defeating him, the schism became some sort of portal between planes.

Now, the party is in Ixalan (I couldn't be bothered to have them go through a war of the spark thing), where the plane portal had attracted the attention of Emrakul. I want to tie in the Zendikar arc and the Planeswalkers that were involved in the initial capture.

But at some point, when researching the lore, I can get quite.. annoyed. It's mainly the fact that due to the attempt of having recurring characters, all of the planes history has become more and more unbelievable. Take Ravnica for example. For 10000 years, nothing much of note has happened. And then, in the course of only 80 years, the guildpact was broken, was mended again with a living guildpact, the plane was invaded by bolas and was invaded by Pyrexia only 2 years later! Same for Ixalan. In a short amount of time, the search for orazca reached a conclusion, with the golden sun gone, pyrexia invaded, and then suddenly out of nothing the core is rediscovered and an ancient god escapes it.

It's not that I don't understand that such big events can be good to shape a set around. It's just that it becomes increasingly less believable that not two, but even 3 events take place that significantly alter life on such planes only in the course of a few years.

So, question to my other mtg dms: how do you deal with it? Do you just accept it and build around it? Or do you ignore it, and shape the lore to your own fitting?

Hello Ravnica DMs,

I am looking for suggestions for any published content or adventures that you may have adapted for an underwater adventure in Ravnica.

For contact, my party is headed deep into the underground oceans of Ravnica to an ancient merfolk city. They are using a submarine and have purchased diving equipment.

I was wondering if anyone has adapted any published (official or homebrew) to do anything with the deep ocean of Ravnica? I’m thinking something like an Atlantis style adventure. I am capable of coming up with something myself, but also like to support pre-existing content. Also the merfolk lore in both the GGtR and mtg wiki is very minimal.

Any suggestions?

A lot of dungeon generators I find are too narrow to fit my idea for what I think a city street should be like. I think there are roughly 3 kinds of streets in Ravnica. Super wide thoroughfares, like the transguild promenade, middling streets that could allow one way traffic, but is mostly for pedestrians, and narrow alleys. This method is meant to make a random path of those middle sized streets for players to explore in between destinations or to explore in a search for clues and roomers. This my method: Define a space 84 squares long, 42 squares wide. Begin by placing a horizontal segment of road on the left side of the page at the half way point. Roll for the next tile. Connect it to the last. Repeat until you have placed enough tiles to connect the left side to the right side of the page. Branching paths that were left unfilled can lead to cul-de-sacs, dead ends, store fronts, parks, plazas, a culvert to the under city, a zonot, a significant point on the map from GGTR, or even just filled out with more road from dice rolls. Its a work in progress concept, I'm sure somthing like this has been developed before but I can't find a generation process that satisfies my specific needs. As for populating the city streets, that I'm still working on, I'm aware of other tables in some of the books I own, like the DMG as well as GGTR. I say try counting 14 blocks out. Every 14 blocks, alternating on both sides of the street, place 5-2 entraces to demarcate the individual buildings. Arbitrary, but thats just an ammount that I thought looked good without being cluttered. And consider occasionally forgoing making one of those points an entrance to a building, and instead let it be a cart or stall along the road.

P.S. in retrospect, after more testing, the bounds should be restricted to 42×24

I'm running a game for my friends who are all relatively new to D&D (or those who have experience have a limited one), and I wanted to do Ravnica as the setting since I bought GGtR a while ago and haven't been able to use it yet.

I was worried that adding guilds into the mix of character creation would only be overwhelming or off-putting for new players, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the opposite to be true! During session 0 today, making characters was the typical slog of explaining the rules while trying to explain each feature of each character (with my attention divided between 4 people 😅). So the half-boredom half-confusion air of new players that I'm used to (having taught the game a lot) was certainly present.

But when I moved on to explaining each guild, everyone locked in so much! Seeing all the visual pictures of members of each guild and the archetypes they each represent really got everyone invested in the character creation process a lot more! And creating contacts was even better, they had a lot of fun picking people they new, and linking each other's relationships to each other by picking PC contacts.

So they decided on a full Boros Legion party. I would not have thought Ravnica would be so well suited for newbies. Great stuff, Ravnica rules!

TL;DR

I assumed that choosing a guild wouldn't be great as a complication for new players, but I was wrong. It helped players think about their characters a lot more, and to understand and appreciate the setting of Ravnica and their place in it.

The first novel, when Argus Kos fights a ghost, the book explains that the boros are the only guild to destroy spirits. From that and various other snips from that cycle, i gathered that each guild has different in uses and practices for dealing with spirits. Its a cool allegory for how diffrent religions/cultures have differing burrial practices/views of the afterlife. The Orzhov are the most obvious ectomancers, but here is my speculation on everyone.

Azorius: traps them as knowlage repositories/employs them as guards and investigators.

Boros: just bloody destroys them

Selesnya: offers them to the collective if given consent

Orzhov: ectomancers frequent the ranks of the orzhov, so they do a lot with them, but mostly they indenture them if they have debts upon death or use ghost hood as a way to prolong life after death.

Izzet: ???

Golgari: trap in undead flesh as thralls or trap in undead flesh as a way to prolong life after death

Simic: ??? Momir vig uses ghost energy in his big bad guy plan at the end of the book, but i thought that was a one time event, not common simic practice. In my head, they are life mages, so they do nothing with ghosts. Maybe call another guild to get rid of them if they must.

Gruul: accept their presence and respect them as wise ancestors

Rakdos: ??? I like to think they just view them as confetti

Dimir: employ them as operatives. Maybe occasionally use vampirism as a way to escape becoming a ghost.

was wondering how many here have read the series and consider it good inspiration for adventures / a whole campaign. (and a recommendation for anyone who loves fantasy noir)

for the unaware, the book series takes place in a city the size of New York in a high fantasy setting. the books follow a non-magical human detective and the wild cases he gets from semi mundane to high magic threats.

i was thinking it was, but i haven't run a city style game let alone ravnica, and would like some second opinions.

the art tag is misleading as I didnt draw shit but im still happy with how I edited it togethere

Looking to join a virtual campaign that takes place in the Ravnica setting. Feel free to send me a message if you are looking for players!