Ravnica Table of Contents & More

Thank you.

 

[Jester David]

Thinking on this for a couple days, it occurred to me that this book is apparently 180-odd pages of lore and stuff prior to a giant section of monsters.
Which is pretty comparable to the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron. If you added a comparable number of monsters to that book, you'd end up with a book almost the exact same size. They're very comparable in the amount of pages. Which makes it interesting to compare what they assign pages to.

So... comparing pages.
Intro. The base information of the setting.
GGtR has 5-pages of introduction.
WGtE has 16-pages of introduction
Winner: Eberron.

Characters. Character options and advice on making characters.
GGtR has 18-pages. Six new races and two subclasses while detailing two other PHB races.
WGtE has 30-pages that add four races but details the role of every PHB race.
Winner: Hard to say... Eberron goes into much more detail, but GGtG has more content. Leaning to Eberron for explaining how gnomes fit vs just assuming people won't play variant races.

Factions. Guilds and Dragonmark Houses.
GGtR has 70-pages on the guilds with 10 new associated backgrounds, new spells, and magic items.
WGtE has 24-pages with a background.
Winner: GGtR clearly takes home the prize for detail here, with each faction receiving six pages of content versus the page each Dragonmark gets.

Magic Items. Treasures of wonder.
GGtG has 10-pages.
WGtE also has 10-pages.
Winner: Tie

City. Description of the default location.
GGtR has 24-pages on the Tenth District, with each precinct receiving 3-pages.
WGtE has 40-pages on Sharn, City of Towers.
Winner: Eberron spends less time on each district of the city, but gives so much more attention to the city, and how players relate to it.

Other. The rest of the pages.
GGtR has 50-pages devoted to "creating adventures". Including 3 more pages for each Guild, detailing their adventures I guess.
WGtE has some glossaries, some further reading, a map, and some extra art. Oh, and 38-pages devoted to the continent of Khorvaire, everyday life, and the magical economy.
Winner. Probably Eberron...


Looking at the comparison and what time was spent in what areas, you can probably get a good idea of what the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica looks like if you take the Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron and strip out the entire "Welcome to Khorvaire" chapter and move those pages to the Dragonmark houses, plus half the introduction. And then taking a quarter of the Sharn chapter and using that for Guild related adventure hooks.

It'd certainly be valid to have an Eberron book focused so much on the Dragonmark Houses and assuming that all adventures are being done by members of the Houses or their agents. After all, there was enough content for an entire 160-page book on the Dragonmarked Houses. But... that seems small to me. That seems to be telling me what kind of campaign to run rather than presenting the world and letting me decide where I want to run the campaign and what about the setting interests me.

That's where I'm at now. Got the book pre-ordered on Amazon so I can do a review. Maybe it will convince me otherwise. I've been wrong about how much I will like/hate WotC products in the past...

 

[gyor]

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

The Guilds shape that entire world and most things in it. These are more then just Guilds, they are world spanning organizations that run the government, many institutions, how huge areas the territory, they all have their school, soldiers, monsters and so on.

 

[gyor]

Thinking on this for a couple days, it occurred to me that this book is apparently 180-odd pages of lore and stuff prior to a giant section of monsters.
Which is pretty comparable to the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron. If you added a comparable number of monsters to that book, you'd end up with a book almost the exact same size. They're very comparable in the amount of pages. Which makes it interesting to compare what they assign pages to.

So... comparing pages.
Intro. The base information of the setting.
GGtR has 5-pages of introduction.
WGtE has 16-pages of introduction
Winner: Eberron.

Characters. Character options and advice on making characters.
GGtR has 18-pages. Six new races and two subclasses while detailing two other PHB races.
WGtE has 30-pages that add four races but details the role of every PHB race.
Winner: Hard to say... Eberron goes into much more detail, but GGtG has more content. Leaning to Eberron for explaining how gnomes fit vs just assuming people won't play variant races.

Factions. Guilds and Dragonmark Houses.
GGtR has 70-pages on the guilds with 10 new associated backgrounds, new spells, and magic items.
WGtE has 24-pages with a background.
Winner: GGtR clearly takes home the prize for detail here, with each faction receiving six pages of content versus the page each Dragonmark gets.

Magic Items. Treasures of wonder.
GGtG has 10-pages.
WGtE also has 10-pages.
Winner: Tie

City. Description of the default location.
GGtR has 24-pages on the Tenth District, with each precinct receiving 3-pages.
WGtE has 40-pages on Sharn, City of Towers.
Winner: Eberron spends less time on each district of the city, but gives so much more attention to the city, and how players relate to it.

Other. The rest of the pages.
GGtR has 50-pages devoted to "creating adventures". Including 3 more pages for each Guild, detailing their adventures I guess.
WGtE has some glossaries, some further reading, a map, and some extra art. Oh, and 38-pages devoted to the continent of Khorvaire, everyday life, and the magical economy.
Winner. Probably Eberron...


Looking at the comparison and what time was spent in what areas, you can probably get a good idea of what the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica looks like if you take the Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron and strip out the entire "Welcome to Khorvaire" chapter and move those pages to the Dragonmark houses, plus half the introduction. And then taking a quarter of the Sharn chapter and using that for Guild related adventure hooks.

It'd certainly be valid to have an Eberron book focused so much on the Dragonmark Houses and assuming that all adventures are being done by members of the Houses or their agents. After all, there was enough content for an entire 160-page book on the Dragonmarked Houses. But... that seems small to me. That seems to be telling me what kind of campaign to run rather than presenting the world and letting me decide where I want to run the campaign and what about the setting interests me.

That's where I'm at now. Got the book pre-ordered on Amazon so I can do a review. Maybe it will convince me otherwise. I've been wrong about how much I will like/hate WotC products in the past...

Ravnica's city section is 100% of the book, the whole plane is the city, the 10th district section is just a focused look at one area.

And one has to take into account Eberrons subraces, Shifters have 4, Warforged have 3, each of the Dragonborn houses have one. Plus Dragonmark feats.

And even more importantly the Wayfarer's Guide is getting the Artificer, with 2 to 4 subclasses.

So ultimately WGE has way more character options or at least it appears so from the GGR ToC.

As for the rest so much of Ravnica is tied up in the guilds, creatures, and NPCs that coming the two books is hard until GGR is out as WGE gets the artificer.

 

[Parmandur]

Thinking on this for a couple days, it occurred to me that this book is apparently 180-odd pages of lore and stuff prior to a giant section of monsters.
Which is pretty comparable to the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron. If you added a comparable number of monsters to that book, you'd end up with a book almost the exact same size. They're very comparable in the amount of pages. Which makes it interesting to compare what they assign pages to.

So... comparing pages.
Intro. The base information of the setting.
GGtR has 5-pages of introduction.
WGtE has 16-pages of introduction
Winner: Eberron.

Characters. Character options and advice on making characters.
GGtR has 18-pages. Six new races and two subclasses while detailing two other PHB races.
WGtE has 30-pages that add four races but details the role of every PHB race.
Winner: Hard to say... Eberron goes into much more detail, but GGtG has more content. Leaning to Eberron for explaining how gnomes fit vs just assuming people won't play variant races.

Factions. Guilds and Dragonmark Houses.
GGtR has 70-pages on the guilds with 10 new associated backgrounds, new spells, and magic items.
WGtE has 24-pages with a background.
Winner: GGtR clearly takes home the prize for detail here, with each faction receiving six pages of content versus the page each Dragonmark gets.

Magic Items. Treasures of wonder.
GGtG has 10-pages.
WGtE also has 10-pages.
Winner: Tie

City. Description of the default location.
GGtR has 24-pages on the Tenth District, with each precinct receiving 3-pages.
WGtE has 40-pages on Sharn, City of Towers.
Winner: Eberron spends less time on each district of the city, but gives so much more attention to the city, and how players relate to it.

Other. The rest of the pages.
GGtR has 50-pages devoted to "creating adventures". Including 3 more pages for each Guild, detailing their adventures I guess.
WGtE has some glossaries, some further reading, a map, and some extra art. Oh, and 38-pages devoted to the continent of Khorvaire, everyday life, and the magical economy.
Winner. Probably Eberron...


Looking at the comparison and what time was spent in what areas, you can probably get a good idea of what the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica looks like if you take the Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron and strip out the entire "Welcome to Khorvaire" chapter and move those pages to the Dragonmark houses, plus half the introduction. And then taking a quarter of the Sharn chapter and using that for Guild related adventure hooks.

It'd certainly be valid to have an Eberron book focused so much on the Dragonmark Houses and assuming that all adventures are being done by members of the Houses or their agents. After all, there was enough content for an entire 160-page book on the Dragonmarked Houses. But... that seems small to me. That seems to be telling me what kind of campaign to run rather than presenting the world and letting me decide where I want to run the campaign and what about the setting interests me.

That's where I'm at now. Got the book pre-ordered on Amazon so I can do a review. Maybe it will convince me otherwise. I've been wrong about how much I will like/hate WotC products in the past...

A lot of good, trenchant analysis here. I think between the two books, we can begin to triangulate how WotC plans to do setting books moving forwards. WotC folks have talked about taking the crunch from the WGtE, and putting it in a new hardcover book focusing in on the Five Nation's instead of Sharn. Throw on a beastiary, and I can see a hardcover Eberron book next year that essentially hybridizes these two books in style.

A few notes: in GGtR, "Krenko's Way" on 160 and following (looks to be ~12 pages) is an intro adventure module per Ari Levitch. The rest if the material in that chapter looks to be modeled after, and designed to be used with, chapter 3 in the DMG. I would say that ~36 pages of material flies with your "City" heading as it gives with some of the Sharn material in WGtE.

 

[Derren]

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.

As he can in Shadowrun. There are enough empty spaces in the established SR cities to make things up, not to mention many cities which are not detailed at all. Same goes for corporations etc.
And still, Shadowrun is so much more than just the Big 10. And especially newcomers are much better served with descriptions of how people work and live and how cities etc. look like than just with an description of the Megas.
How does it help a new player to envision the Shadowrun world when he has a list of all Wuxing subsidiaries?

Not that Ravnica will even get into this level of detail. Of the 6 pages of content each guild gets 2-3 will likely be rules. Add an art piece and the actual information you get for the guild will be rather small.
So I really wonder if the content of this book will enable you in any way to paint a detailed and immersive picture of Ravnica.

 

[Remathilis]

Thinking on this for a couple days, it occurred to me that this book is apparently 180-odd pages of lore and stuff prior to a giant section of monsters.
Which is pretty comparable to the Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron. If you added a comparable number of monsters to that book, you'd end up with a book almost the exact same size. They're very comparable in the amount of pages. Which makes it interesting to compare what they assign pages to.

So... comparing pages.
Intro. The base information of the setting.
GGtR has 5-pages of introduction.
WGtE has 16-pages of introduction
Winner: Eberron.

Characters. Character options and advice on making characters.
GGtR has 18-pages. Six new races and two subclasses while detailing two other PHB races.
WGtE has 30-pages that add four races but details the role of every PHB race.
Winner: Hard to say... Eberron goes into much more detail, but GGtG has more content. Leaning to Eberron for explaining how gnomes fit vs just assuming people won't play variant races.

Factions. Guilds and Dragonmark Houses.
GGtR has 70-pages on the guilds with 10 new associated backgrounds, new spells, and magic items.
WGtE has 24-pages with a background.
Winner: GGtR clearly takes home the prize for detail here, with each faction receiving six pages of content versus the page each Dragonmark gets.

Magic Items. Treasures of wonder.
GGtG has 10-pages.
WGtE also has 10-pages.
Winner: Tie

City. Description of the default location.
GGtR has 24-pages on the Tenth District, with each precinct receiving 3-pages.
WGtE has 40-pages on Sharn, City of Towers.
Winner: Eberron spends less time on each district of the city, but gives so much more attention to the city, and how players relate to it.

Other. The rest of the pages.
GGtR has 50-pages devoted to "creating adventures". Including 3 more pages for each Guild, detailing their adventures I guess.
WGtE has some glossaries, some further reading, a map, and some extra art. Oh, and 38-pages devoted to the continent of Khorvaire, everyday life, and the magical economy.
Winner. Probably Eberron...


Looking at the comparison and what time was spent in what areas, you can probably get a good idea of what the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica looks like if you take the Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron and strip out the entire "Welcome to Khorvaire" chapter and move those pages to the Dragonmark houses, plus half the introduction. And then taking a quarter of the Sharn chapter and using that for Guild related adventure hooks.

It'd certainly be valid to have an Eberron book focused so much on the Dragonmark Houses and assuming that all adventures are being done by members of the Houses or their agents. After all, there was enough content for an entire 160-page book on the Dragonmarked Houses. But... that seems small to me. That seems to be telling me what kind of campaign to run rather than presenting the world and letting me decide where I want to run the campaign and what about the setting interests me.

That's where I'm at now. Got the book pre-ordered on Amazon so I can do a review. Maybe it will convince me otherwise. I've been wrong about how much I will like/hate WotC products in the past...

It would be interesting how this stacked up to the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide...

 

[Parmandur]

It would be interesting how this stacked up to the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide...

SCAG has ~15 pages of general "welcome to the Forgotten Realms, here are the basics."

~43 pages for PC options: Races (including a handful of new subraces and variants), Subclasses (11 all told), and how to use them in other settings

~9 pages for Backgrounds.

~54 pages of straight Gazeeter material for the Sword Coast region, which is about the size of the portions of the US and Canada west of the Rocky Mountains combined.

There are ~19 pages of material on the gods and religion in the Forgotten Realms, in the first chapter after other general stuff about Faerun.

Not organized exactly that way, but that's about how it stacks up. It's shorter than the WGtE all around, and waaaay shorter than GGtR. A beastiary would have helped it, actually, though I've gotten good use out of the book.

 

[Parmandur]

As he can in Shadowrun. There are enough empty spaces in the established SR cities to make things up, not to mention many cities which are not detailed at all. Same goes for corporations etc.
And still, Shadowrun is so much more than just the Big 10. And especially newcomers are much better served with descriptions of how people work and live and how cities etc. look like than just with an description of the Megas.
How does it help a new player to envision the Shadowrun world when he has a list of all Wuxing subsidiaries?

Not that Ravnica will even get into this level of detail. Of the 6 pages of content each guild gets 2-3 will likely be rules. Add an art piece and the actual information you get for the guild will be rather small.
So I really wonder if the content of this book will enable you in any way to paint a detailed and immersive picture of Ravnica.

Backgrounds are not rule intensive, crunch wise you can pack them in. There will be a lot of tables in here, but those go to help build the setting in play.

The parallel is not exact: the Guilds are emore important to the world than the Megacoros are, being ancient institutions fused into the fabric of the planet by magical power. There is a little bit in the book on the Guildless it looks like, which is about right for this setting.

 

[Jester David]

A lot of good, trenchant analysis here. I think between the two books, we can begin to triangulate how WotC plans to do setting books moving forwards. EotC folks have talked about taking the crunch from the WGtE, and putting it in a new hardcover book focusing in on the Five Nation's instead of Sharn. Throw on a beastiary, and I can see a hardcover Eberron book next year that essentially hybridizes these two books in style.

Mearls has repeatedly said that IF they do another Eberron book, it will synergise with the one on the Guild and likely not reprint much.

Big “if” as well. If they were planning on doing one, they wouldn’t have done the PDF product and risk reducing the audience. I think we’re getting Ravnica explicitly because they don’t want to release updated setting to stores.
I doubt we’ll see a non-PoD Eberron book this edition. WGtE is it.

 

[Parmandur]

Mearls has repeatedly said that IF they do another Eberron book, it will synergise with the one on the Guild and likely not reprint much.

Big “if” as well. If they were planning on doing one, they wouldn’t have done the PDF product and risk reducing the audience. I think we’re getting Ravnica explicitly because they don’t want to release updated setting to stores.
I doubt we’ll see a non-PoD Eberron book this edition. WGtE is it.

That's not exactly what has been suggested. What Mearls has said:

"This is 100% official content for Eberron. Since it is an ebook, that also means we can update content with comments based on UA playtests of the races and the artificer. If we do an Eberron print product, we will design it to complement as much as possible what the PDF presents.

"Some things, like the artificer, races, and basic world info, will be picked up for a print book, but we want fans to be happy owning both.

"We'll likely make them two, separate things. Just speaking theoretically - the print book might focus on the Five Nations and adventures there, while this covers Sharn in more detail."

https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/1021496102800056321?lang=en

So, as we see, they are openly talking about doing a hardback Eberron book, that would repeat race and Class info, and such things as Dragonmarks, but not the Sharn and other campaign material. Enough to feel like a different book, that somebody might want both. The key here, that is missing from WGtE, is monsters. Eberron has a significant amount of unique monsters, that would happily fill up a valuable book alongside additional Gazeeter material, ala GGtR. I think the reception of Ravnica will determine if they pursue this path, but given the energy they have put into playtesting every single bit of crunch in the WGtE (to the exclusion of any alternatives for future products), it seems to be their operating plan.