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ZENDIKAR -- Where Magic: The Gathering and D&D Collide!

I've never played Magic: the Gathering, so while I"m reporting on this, bear in mind I personally can't fully contextualise it. However, it appears that a M:tG world called Zendikar is now available as a D&D 5th Edition setting via a free 38-page PDF available from WotC's website. It contains three sections -- The World of Zendikar, Races of Zendikar, and A Zendikar Bestiary. There's an added note that the material is not fully playtested or legal in D&D Organised Play events. "Plane Shift: Zendikar was made using the fifth edition of the D&D rules. D&D is a flexible rules system designed to model any kind of fantasy world. The D&D magic system doesn't involve five colors of mana or a ramping-up to your most powerful spells, but the goal isn't to mirror the experience of playing Magic in your role-playing game. The point is to experience the worlds of Magic in a new way, through the lens of the D&D rules. All you really need is races for the characters, monsters for them to face, and some ideas to build a campaign."

I've never played Magic: the Gathering, so while I"m reporting on this, bear in mind I personally can't fully contextualise it. However, it appears that a M:tG world called Zendikar is now available as a D&D 5th Edition setting via a free 38-page PDF available from WotC's website. It contains three sections -- The World of Zendikar, Races of Zendikar, and A Zendikar Bestiary. There's an added note that the material is not fully playtested or legal in D&D Organised Play events. "Plane Shift: Zendikar was made using the fifth edition of the D&D rules. D&D is a flexible rules system designed to model any kind of fantasy world. The D&D magic system doesn't involve five colors of mana or a ramping-up to your most powerful spells, but the goal isn't to mirror the experience of playing Magic in your role-playing game. The point is to experience the worlds of Magic in a new way, through the lens of the D&D rules. All you really need is races for the characters, monsters for them to face, and some ideas to build a campaign."

Races include Humans, Kor, Merfolk, Vampires, Goblins, and Elves. Monsters include angels, archons, griffins, felidars, sphinxes, drakes, krakens, surrakar, demons, dragons, giants, ogres, minotaurs, hydras, hellions, trolls, and more. Click on the image below to download the 38-page PDF.


Screen Shot 2016-04-27 at 16.50.32.png

Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering are two different games, but that doesn't mean their Multiverses can't meet.

From the beginning, Magic's plane of Zendikar was conceived as an "adventure world" where parties of explorers delve into ancient ruins in search of wonders and treasures, fighting the monsters they encounter on the way. Many of the plane's creative roots lie in D&D, so it should be no surprise that The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Zendikar feels a lot like a D&D campaign setting book. It's littered with adventure hooks and story seeds, and lacks only the specific rules references you'd need to adapt Zendikar's races, monsters, and adventures to a tabletop D&D campaign. And it's all surrounded by amazing fantasy art that holds boundless inspiration in itself.

You can think of Plane Shift: Zendikar as a sort of supplement to The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Zendikar, designed to help you take the world details and story seeds contained in that book and turn them into an exciting D&D campaign. The easiest way to approach a D&D campaign set on Zendikar is to use the rules that D&D provides mostly as written: a druid on Zendikar might call on green mana and cast spells like giant growth, but she's still just a druid in the D&D rules (perhaps casting giant insect).

Plane Shift: Zendikar was made using the fifth edition of the D&D rules. D&D is a flexible rules system designed to model any kind of fantasy world. The D&D magic system doesn't involve five colors of mana or a ramping-up to your most powerful spells, but the goal isn't to mirror the experience of playing Magic in your role-playing game. The point is to experience the worlds of Magic in a new way, through the lens of the D&D rules. All you really need is races for the characters, monsters for them to face, and some ideas to build a campaign.

Finally, The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Zendikar will help you create a D&D campaign in Zendikar, but you don't actually need the book to make use of the material in Plane Shift: Zendikar—you can also refer to the abundance of lore about Zendikar found on MagicTheGathering.com and the Zendikar plane profile.
 

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ZzarkLinux

First Post
This would make for an awesome 300 page campaign setting book. I'd buy it in a flash.

Maybe they can do the same for Innistrad and Ravenloft.

They seem to be focusing on adventure-path-tidbits for settings. But if they get enough settings, I wonder if they can release a big-book-of-settings with samples from each.

Maybe like:
D&D Wonderous Settings: 2016 Edition.
News, Clues, and Artwork from your favorite fantasy worlds.
200 pages, $100, and 25 pages each devoted to Krynn, Ravenloft, Realms, Eberron, Zendikar, Mirrodin, and Rokugan. I would buy that book in a heartbeat, even with the price increase and inclusion of settings I've never read.
 

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Mecheon

Sacabambaspis
Wow. I'm legitimately surprised they did this. They've crossed the streams.

If they go completely nuts with this and give us Ravnica... That might fill the Sigil shaped hole in my heart
 

In this thread: loads of people complaining about free stuff, because it isn't the right free stuff.

This is pretty cool. I agree with other posters who speculate that it is a labour of love: this doesn't have the look of an initial attempt at setting books, but instead something that was done by a guy who knew the fluff of one game and the mechanics of the other.

Overall it looks like a fun thing to play around with, and I'm definitely interested in grabbing the Art Book that this accompanies and using the setting for short games. The Eldrazi stuff practically writes its own stories (group of adventurers hired to go and find vital artefacts from pre-Eldrazi age, run into servants both of Eldrazi and of rival Planeswalker who wants to steal them for himself...) and the benefit of running off of the back of the card game is having access to a wildly huge amount of art to shape the scene. I would even be happy to just drop this setting into a Planescape campaign, as it has a fun theme that doesn't necessarily need to be done in isolation.
 

MidwayHaven

First Post
Remember when the first Zendikar packs had those ultra-super-rares (Black Lotus et al) hiding in assorted booster boxes? Maybe the D&D Zendikar experience would allow PCs to discover the Teeth of Dahlver-Nar hiding in the Bojuka Bogs or something. :)

Other than that, Zendikar is a perfect fit for D&D. They even had "level-up" creature cards in Rise of the Eldrazi!
 


robus

Lowcountry Low Roller
Supporter
Is Zendikar an acceptable setting for DMs Guild? I would love to see a better Monster Manual than the half-arsed effort in the PDF for example...
 

jgsugden

Legend
Vampires make pretty good Vrylorka from Heroes of Shadow for those few of us that added them to our gaming worlds.

This may have been born of a labor of love, but it is much more than that now... it is testing waters... And this many new and efficient race choices will get to a lot of game tables. Kor monks, Ula Merfolk Enchanters, Vampire Warlocks and Sorcerers, and a variety of these alternate elf builds (wisdom +2 instead of dexterity +2 means Clerics and druids have a new home) will see play in games that allow them.
 
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robus

Lowcountry Low Roller
Supporter
I know nothing about M:tG (too old when it became a thing) - but after looking at (after this announcement) it does seem completely mad that WotC isn't leveraging those assets as campaign settings for Dnd? Why come up with a bunch of parallel settings? (Yes there are some classics that people want - but if WotC is wanting to leverage their assets this seems a perfect way to reinforce there product offerings: 1 setting - 2 ways to play!) And thus people who like one might be tempted to try the other.

Not saying anything new - but after browsing the M:tG settings, what the heck WotC? This seems like a no-brainer?!
 

Stacie GmrGrl

Adventurer
Some of the M:tG settings are way cooler than majority of the official D&D worlds, and especially cooler than Forgotten Realms. Not to say the FR are bad or not fun, because they are, but they really haven't changed much since their inception, and it's become a rather stagnant game setting over the years.

I would love to see more of these other worlds get D&D'd. :)
 

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