Starting Out:
Starting Level:
Players will start at level 4 – You all will have had some experience adventuring and have completed a handful of successful missions/tasks/dungeon crawls/whatever-fits-your-character’s-back-story. You’re not all complete noobs, but you also aren’t terribly seasoned… Maybe comparable to an adventuring community college graduate.
Ability Scores:
We’ll be using a standard Point Buy as outlined on p. 13 of the Player’s Handbook.
Races and Classes:
Anything in officially printed source books is fair game. This game will take place on the plane of Ravnica, but the overall Magic: The Gathering universe seems pretty accepting of new and strange folks. When you live in a city where Fblthp is eternally wandering the streets, Loxodon missionaries are walking their temple/golem through town, your plumber is a slimy Ooze creature, and street vendors are trying to sell you the latest Simic frog-snail snack stick, you’re not going to be shocked to see a Dragonborn walking down the street. This is also a universe where traveling across planes of existence is a fairly common-place event, so even if you end up being a bit unusual for the area, no one is going to pick up the pitchforks and torches just because you’re a bird person or you have mystic tattoos all over your body. I’m open to Unearthed Arcana being a possibility, but please talk to me about it before committing as some of the content in those supplements isn’t tested and could potentially cause power balance issues. I’m also open to homebrew ideas, but I do reserve the right to nerf anything too OP. You’ve got a lot of options here, and if you pick Variant Human, I will silently roll my eyes and grudgingly accept your bland, boring, vanilla decision.
Unearthed Arcana and Homebrew content is potentially available. I would like to look over the content before approving it, just to make sure it isn’t wildly unbalanced – even if it does end up looking a bit OP, we can work on adjusting it to align with group power levels if it’s really what you’ve got your heart set on.
Death:
Permadeath isn’t really a thing around here. There are a multitude of ways to bring someone back from the dead in both D&D and M:tG, so don’t sweat too much about losing your character. Your character will never die and be lost forever because some snotty little goblin got really luck on his rolls. Now, that being said, if your character dies and you WANT to reroll, by all means do so. Also, if a situation arises where your character’s death would contribute in a meaningful way to the story, we could certainly work that in, but that will be something I will absolutely discuss with you directly beforehand and the fate of the character will still be 100% in your hands. It’s your character, you’ve invested the time, and I want to make sure you have a high level of control over the character’s ultimate fate.
Backgrounds:
Rolling for background stuff is fine if that’s what you want to do, but have no hesitation on re-rolling or fudging stuff to better fit your vision of the character or make it all up on your own. If the randomization helps get ideas flowing and build up some more robust characters, awesome, however I want to emphasize that these are your characters and I want their backstory to be what you want it to be. So, if you want to roll on tables, awesome. If you want to ignore the tables completely and just write up your own stuff, awesome. If you want to use a bit of both, awesome. I think the only time I might have issue with backstory elements is if you try to shoehorn more fame/experience into your character than should be there at lvl4 – At lvl4, you’re not (yet) the legendary hero of Innistrad who has slain countless armies of the undead and is known across the land as a guardian of the people. You might be walking on that path, but you’re far from the finish line.
Guilds:
Please do consider how your character has interacted with the Guilds of Ravnica. The Guilds are a big part of life in Ravnica and even if you don’t have any direct association with a particular guild, you’ve still had some level of interaction.
We will not be using the Renown system in the Ravnica source book. Instead, I’ll be advancing you along Guild tracks by milestone (if pursuing Guild rank is in your character’s interests). If your character isn’t interested in Guild politics, that’s fine it won’t directly play into the story (at least not to start).
There are rewards available for interacting with Guilds. Sometimes it will be a buddy in the Azorious scribe house that can deliver you privileged informaion, sometimes it will be a cool item like the Mizzium Apparatus. I’d recommend looking over what’s listed in the book in case there are any rewards you would like to pursue down the road. If you find something that tickles your fancy let me know and I’ll incorporate it into the campaign.
One Feat for One Flaw:
I’m going to take a page out of Savage World’s book and allow players to take a Feat at character creation if they develop a solid character flaw for themselves. Think of this as getting an Edge for taking a Major Hindrance. All normal restrictions and requirements for Feats apply. And please do make an attempt to make your character flaw something that will actually come into play every once in a while. Having a weird scar on your back that is covered by clothes 99% of the time is not an interesting character quirk. Having a paralyzing phobia of spiders or a periodic hand tremor that can interfere with the somatic component of your spells or an unhealthy compulsion to lick non-food items, now those are the kind of things that make for awesomely unpredictable story moments.
Starting Gear:
For starting gear, go ahead and take your normal lvl1 starter gear, but you all have been doing pretty Ok for yourselves as lowbie adventurers and have gained an additional 100gp to spend on gear as you see fit. This is money that you’ve been earning over the past few months/years, so you will have had time to track down pretty much anything you’re after, even if it is kind of unusual for the area. If there is a particular piece of equipment that you feel is important to your character’s central theme that is out of this price range, let me know and we can talk about it.
If any of you decide to spend a portion of your extra gold on a mount, horses are fine and readily available, but this is Ravnica, so other critters are just as likely to have been trained as a mount. Just as an example, here’s a thread of people discussing Magic cards that feature mounts: https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/529354-how-many-different-kinds-of-mounts-have-been-used. So, you CAN have a horse, but you could also potentially have an Elk, an Elephant, a riding kitty, or even several varieties of dinosaur. Anything roughly comparable to a horse stat- and ability-wise will cost 1:1 the same as a horse. Anything that has some beefier stats or interesting abilities like attacks or flying will cost more. If you want a big ol’ lazy hog that doesn’t go very fast and runs away from danger at the first sign of trouble, that will cost a bit less. Also, I don’t expect your mounts to feature heavily in combat or other mechanics-laden gameplay, so unless someone ends up making a cavalry fighter style character I’m not going to sweat the details too much, it’ll probably end up being more of a flavor thing.
Also, if there’s an item that fits your back story really well and will help sell your character’s personality or RP traits, we can discuss your character having it, even if it doesn’t exactly fit into the budget. For example, if you are a Bard who thrives on living in the spot light and you always make your entrances as dramatic as you can, you could probably convince me that your character REALLY NEEDS a Cloak of Billowing and I’m not going to make you spend all your gold on that.
House Rules:
Critical Success/Failure
20 is a critical success and will do something awesome in addition to the normal success effect. 1 is a critical failure and something unpleasant is probably about to happen.
One Feat for One Flaw
See the heading of the same name under Character Creation.
Wild Magic
In this game, Wild Magic is going to have a little more oomph than in vanilla D&D. Kim and I have developed a Wild Magic system that is a bit more fun and I want to use that for anyone who might interact with Wild Magic. If you’re thinking of playing a character that focuses on using Wild Magic, let me know and I’ll update this section with real info.
Ryan Steiner 