Watch These 4 Trailers for Ravnica

Watch all of them to really get a feel for the setting, then buy the enovels for the setting on Amazon.

I reading the first one and so far it entertaining.

 

[Jhaelen]

Hmm. I guess this is my least favorite M:tG setting. A world-spanning city? That kind of nonsense is best reserved for Star Wars.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Wizards certainly seem to be on a urban kick ATM. I wonder if that is on purpose? Whilst developing city stuff, how about we do this, sort of thing. Seems that these new FR adventures are set in a city - I wonder if there will be notes for adapting to Ravnica or Sharn. If not, I am sure they will emerge. (Ans yes, I understand Eberron is more than a city, but the DMsGuild thing looks to be focussing on Sharn, so that is essentially 4 Wizards books based upon urban adventure).

I doubt that's coincidental. Dragon Heist states that it will have lots of urban setting rules and fluff, so that sort information should be able to be translated to Sharn and Ravnica with presumably little difficulty. I wouldn't be surprised if we see this sort of theming in the future - I can easily imagine a "dragon" theme year, where we get a Volo's-style monster book on dragons and their kin, a Dragonlance PDF with the possibility of upgrading like we just got with Eberron, an official or semi-official Eberron release on Argonnessen, and a new dragon-themed adventure path set in the Forgotten Realms that can be adapted to various settings (Yes, we got Rise of Tiamat, but as we all know, that was an early production and has its flaws, so a new dragon adventure would be nice!).

And I'm certain that the adventure parts of Dragon Heist and Dungeon of the Mad Mage will have at the very least sidebars, if not more, on how to adapt them to other D&D settings, especially for Sharn and Greyhawk City, as both are the big "adventurer" cities in the setting with large dungeon or dungeon-like complexes either under the city (Sharn) or nearby (Greyhawk) that could easily adapt parts (or all) of what we're getting for Undermountain. (I'm not familiar with Ravnica or other settings for me to judge if there are good candidates for translation there, other than Dragonlance which doesn't have a reasonable metropolis/dungeon combo that I can think of).

 

[gyor]

I doubt that's coincidental. Dragon Heist states that it will have lots of urban setting rules and fluff, so that sort information should be able to be translated to Sharn and Ravnica with presumably little difficulty. I wouldn't be surprised if we see this sort of theming in the future - I can easily imagine a "dragon" theme year, where we get a Volo's-style monster book on dragons and their kin, a Dragonlance PDF with the possibility of upgrading like we just got with Eberron, an official or semi-official Eberron release on Argonnessen, and a new dragon-themed adventure path set in the Forgotten Realms that can be adapted to various settings (Yes, we got Rise of Tiamat, but as we all know, that was an early production and has its flaws, so a new dragon adventure would be nice!).

And I'm certain that the adventure parts of Dragon Heist and Dungeon of the Mad Mage will have at the very least sidebars, if not more, on how to adapt them to other D&D settings, especially for Sharn and Greyhawk City, as both are the big "adventurer" cities in the setting with large dungeon or dungeon-like complexes either under the city (Sharn) or nearby (Greyhawk) that could easily adapt parts (or all) of what we're getting for Undermountain. (I'm not familiar with Ravnica or other settings for me to judge if there are good candidates for translation there, other than Dragonlance which doesn't have a reasonable metropolis/dungeon combo that I can think of).

Ravnica is also said to have urban rules as well.

 

[Oofta]

Two things came to my mind, I like to hear your thoughts on this:

Ravnica - guilds Planescape - factions

Can this material be used to substitute a new planescape adventure? The idea sprang into my mind when someone wrote angels and demons are common sight in Ravnica?

Also world spanning city:

I have only seen one city where this makes sense in any meaningful way: Sigil. It makes sense because it is limited in size somehow, supplies come in from different planes so no problem here.

Ravnica otoh that seems a bit unbelievable, make cities as large like Sao paolo combined with some other metropolis maybe increase that by factor 5 that might work. Imagine a city with say 50-100 million inhabitants, you could make that work in a setting with logical consistency, no matter what magic / roof gardenfood or whatever shenanigan to feed the populace.

BUT: Even this 100 million people city will not take up much space on the map. Check out some megacities with google maps, they take less area than you might think. A metropolis and its surrounding space with suburbs IRL is normally an area which fits in a circle of 30-50 km diameter max.
Take that by five and it will be a circle 100 km diameter approx. This is 7850 squarekilometres . Earth surface is 510 000 000 squarekilometres!

That is 64000 of your megacities! with 100 km diameter and 100 million people each! That means 64 000 *100 000 000 people total which is approx. 1000 x the existing IRL earth population and earth is considered overpopulated with its IRL population.

Even if there are big areas of water involved the and the factors in my computation are reduced by a factor of ten or 50 this still does not make for a good explanation how this should work.

The numbers were bugging me so I did some calculations. While I'm not sure what the population density of the city in Ravnica so let's take Denver as a guideline. Not particularly dense in terms of population density, it has 1,500 people per square kilometer. Assuming a planet with roughly the land mass of earth with it's 200 million square kilometers, that gives us a population of 300 billion.

Even if we cut that number in half, how does a planet support 150 billion people? Or 100 billion? Where does the oxygen come from, much less the water or food? What do you do with all the waste? Where do building materials come from? I get that there are "rooftop gardens" and "food factories" but seriously. Our planet won't be able to support 10 billion, certainly not for 10,000 years (why is it that civilizations in extreme fantasy have always lasted for 10,000 years?)

Sorry about the rant. It's just that things like this may make sense for a board/card game, but I come from a "simulate a fantasy world" perspective. I can give a lot of things a pass because "magic" but at a certain point things just fall apart.

 

[Coroc]

[MENTION=6801845]Oofta[/MENTION]
exactly, the thing is it is not about handwaving stuff because of muh magic. It is not about let's say a factor of two or three off to be reasonable not even a factor of ten. It is a factor of 100-1000 off and that buggers me as well. Ok many things are physically impossible in D&D (e.g. giant creatures), and tbh players when adventuring in a city scenario rarely consider about how the population get's their food, but it is so many other things which get off track. You need administration, you need craftsmen, you need armorers and weaponsmiths to provide your military.

There's the next thing: assuming a populace of 100 billion. If 5-10 billion of these go mad and revolt then it is the end of the world, because it is so many people they could do irreparable damage in short time due to the pure mass of people even if they are overcome in the end. And they would not even have to be armed properly, sticks and stones or some household tools would be enough.

And so on,.. I wish some one with a little more knowledge about the setting would do some explaining how It is meant, eventually 95 % of the cityplanet are empty / occupied by some monsters?

 

[MidwayHaven]

I think we're forgetting the fact that Magic's planes are rather small compared to what D&D's conventional description of what a planet is. Though we have no idea how large exactly Ravnica is, it can be assumed that it's much smaller than a standard Earth-sized planet. If I'm not mistaken, the second Ravnica novel discusses the Utvara reclamation zone (which I think was on the opposite side of the plane from the Old City), and it only took maybe less than a week of travel there using rail magitech.

Brady Dommermuth, former head of Creative Design at Magic, has been quoted as saying that Ravnica's entire population is in the millions; that could still give us anything between 2 million and 999 million. For an ecumenopolis, that I think could be relatively small.

 

[Aaron L]

Ok, so I know nothing about MtG or Ravnica, and when I saw the cover for the Ravnica book I thought it was a cyberpunk fantasy setting. If that isn't accurate, then the cover is very misleading and I will be extremely disappointed.

 

[QuietBrowser]

Ok, so I know nothing about MtG or Ravnica, and when I saw the cover for the Ravnica book I thought it was a cyberpunk fantasy setting. If that isn't accurate, then the cover is very misleading and I will be extremely disappointed.

It's not "cyberpunk", but it IS very highly advanced magitek - it's a dungeonpunk setting, like Eberron, but even more "out there" in terms of "technology".

One of the 10 Guilds of Ravnica is the Izzet League. They're a Blue/Red Mana aligned guild, so they're basically an entire sub-culture of mad scientists. They serve as Ravnica's engineers and they conduct all kinds of experiments for the hell of it, including building devices that manipulate raw energy, running magic directly through peoples' brains, and creating all manner of flying, rolling and digging machines. I can't be more specific than that because that's really the extent of my knowledge - they do "magitek", to the extent one of their associated creatures are fused elementals called "Weirds", but I couldn't name their specific machinery.

Another Guild is the Simic Combine; Blue/Green aligned, they believe the purpose of nature is to play with and experiment with it. They're mad biologists who view fleshcrafting as an almost holy act; they graft specialist organs to themselves like gills or extra arms, mutate themselves with DNA infusions, splice animals together, and generally use magic to tinker with biology for the sake of building "better" beasts, like giant spiders that manipulate water instead of spinning silk, protoplasmic horrors, and organic zeppelins.

 

[Aaron L]

Ok, that sounds pretty cool then. Even if I don't like the setting it sounds like it should have plenty of cool/weird magitech rule stuff I can swipe.

 

[gyor]

It's not "cyberpunk", but it IS very highly advanced magitek - it's a dungeonpunk setting, like Eberron, but even more "out there" in terms of "technology".

One of the 10 Guilds of Ravnica is the Izzet League. They're a Blue/Red Mana aligned guild, so they're basically an entire sub-culture of mad scientists. They serve as Ravnica's engineers and they conduct all kinds of experiments for the hell of it, including building devices that manipulate raw energy, running magic directly through peoples' brains, and creating all manner of flying, rolling and digging machines. I can't be more specific than that because that's really the extent of my knowledge - they do "magitek", to the extent one of their associated creatures are fused elementals called "Weirds", but I couldn't name their specific machinery.

Another Guild is the Simic Combine; Blue/Green aligned, they believe the purpose of nature is to play with and experiment with it. They're mad biologists who view fleshcrafting as an almost holy act; they graft specialist organs to themselves like gills or extra arms, mutate themselves with DNA infusions, splice animals together, and generally use magic to tinker with biology for the sake of building "better" beasts, like giant spiders that manipulate water instead of spinning silk, protoplasmic horrors, and organic zeppelins.

Simic is basically a twisted version of transhumanist, they want people to get evovle biologically. I think Izzet League and Simic Combine make for interesting allies and enemies.