Ravnica Table of Contents & More

Thank you.

 

[Kramodlog]

Obviously we don't know a lot with the book not out, plus I didn't play the card game enough to know any flavor text (all my knowledge coming from the design pages and the book).

But I think the crux of the arguments come down to some people doubting how much a person's kingdom job and neighbors influence their lives, and possibly an overestimation of how much material a setting can realistically have in it first foray into print.

Of course Ravnica will have much less than Faerun, Athas, Sigil or Eberron. It has a couple hundred pages to put forth the important concepts and enough game material to get going. I counted well over a thousand pages of Dark Sun material. Heck, I had that much Al-Qadim. by last week. Forgotten Realms has more novels than I can count about one person.

Ravnica will probably have plenty of stuff to get someone who likes that setting and the themes going but will obviously have a very open landscape to be filled in by players and DMs since they only have the one sourcebook and a handful of small novels.

I'm okay with that, in part because I get the idea of Ravnica (and love me some Simic, I wanted to be a genetic engineer when I was younger), and in part because I always felt a little uncomfortable getting into a Forgotten Realms game because I thought I needed to read 20 years of material to know what is going on and what is being referenced.

I've seen what a setting can realistically have at its first forey. It can be a huge amounts like Forgotten Realms' Old Grey Box or Eberron's original campaign setting or Ravenloft's campaign box. Ravnica's containt ain't there. Not by a long shot.

 

[Derren]

So, the best comparisons I can think if are, firstly, Shadowrun, and secondly, Star Trek Adventures.

Ravnica is basically low-tech (no computers), high-magic Shadowrun. It's a Rennisance-Punk setting with all-powerful Megacorps that are in control of everything.

And any Shadowrun setting book would be very bare bones and poorly received if all it did was describing the 10 Megacorps and maybe a district of Seattle.

 

[gyor]

So, double checking the Monster Manual and Volo's Guide, between them have ~20 NPC stat blocks. MToF doesn't have NPC blocks, though it has some racial character types (Drow, Dueregar, Gith).

Guildmaster's Guide has ~30 pages of NPC blocks. At least one from each Guild will be the named Guildmaster, but that leaves a lot of eminently lootable stat blocks just for NPCs.

Even with say each guildmaster getting a single page, that leaves 20 pages for NPC templates. Going by the MM you can fit 2 to three templates per page. That is say 40 to 60 NPC templates still.

 

[gyor]

I've seen what a setting can realistically have at its first forey. It can be a huge amounts like Forgotten Realms' Old Grey Box or Eberron's original campaign setting or Ravenloft's campaign box. Ravnica's containt ain't there. Not by a long shot.

We haven't actually read the book, only the ToC.

 

[gyor]

And any Shadowrun setting book would be very bare bones and poorly received if all it did was describing the 10 Megacorps and maybe a district of Seattle.

The 10th of Ravnica is likely bigger then Settle.

 

[Parmandur]

And any Shadowrun setting book would be very bare bones and poorly received if all it did was describing the 10 Megacorps and maybe a district of Seattle.

One major advantage that Ravnica has over Shadowrun in that regard is that the DM can just make places up. And this book is filled with procedural generation tables to help do just that, along with a deep dive into the area explored in the fiction of the setting.

 

[Parmandur]

The 10th of Ravnica is likely bigger then Settle.

I think there is some hang-up over words like "District" or "Guild." The Ravnican Guilds are as similar to the Guilds of, say, Waterdeed as a 19gh century Get eral Store in a small town is to Amazon. And the Tenth District is itself a megacity, not a neighborhood.

 

[Kramodlog]

We haven't actually read the book, only the ToC.

And we see guilds take much of the space. Not the world. The products I mentioned had more variety of content in them.

 

[Kramodlog]

One major advantage that Ravnica has over Shadowrun in that regard is that the DM can just make places up. And this book is filled with procedural generation tables to help do just that, along with a deep dive into the area explored in the fiction of the setting.

Why buy a book if you have to invent your setting anyway? Might as well use homebrew settings for cheaper.

 

[Parmandur]

Why buy a book if you have to invent your setting anyway? Might as well use homebrew settings for cheaper.

For the Guilds, and the material around them. If I run it, I'd probably use the Tenth District anyways: 20 pages is more than adequate for a campaign, especially with loads of tables to help make stuff up.

But I'm in this for the playable Medium Centaurs and Loxodon.