Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica

• 1. Introduction

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  Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica surfaced on Amazon in July 2018 without any announcement. The cover art and full listing were simply there, visible to anyone who searched. What they revealed was that Wizards of the Coast planned something unprecedented. It would be the first full hardcover Dungeons & Dragons guide built around a world from Magic: The Gathering. That world, Ravnica, had first appeared in 2005 in the card set Ravnica: City of Guilds. It had been designed for a card game, not for the kind of collaborative storytelling that D&D demands.

  Whether a world built for card games could support the needs of tabletop storytelling was the central question facing a 256-page book. The designer charged with answering it was James Wyatt. He had spent more than a decade working on Dungeons & Dragons before switching to the Magic team in 2014.

• 2. The Endless City

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  Ten guilds divide Ravnica between them, each representing a distinct ideology and each in perpetual competition with the others. The world they inhabit bears no resemblance to a conventional fantasy map. There is no ocean, no farmland, no wilderness: just city, in every direction, covering the entire planet.

  The Tenth District is where most guild activity is concentrated, and it is where the book situates most of its adventuring possibilities. The setting carries a high-magic atmosphere throughout. Its cultural flavor draws from Slavic traditions, giving Ravnica a visual character unlike most D&D worlds.

  A companion card set, Guilds of Ravnica, launched on the 5th of October 2018, just weeks before the D&D sourcebook. That release carried the collectible card game into its twenty-sixth year. The D&D book would follow forty-six days later.

• 3. From Free PDF to Hardcover

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  In 2016, James Wyatt began releasing a series of free PDF documents called Plane Shift. Each article adapted a different Magic: The Gathering plane for use in D&D's 5th edition.

  Wyatt's project was tied to the Art of Magic: The Gathering book series, which he also wrote. Those coffee table books reprinted illustrations from the cards with descriptions of each plane's lore. The Plane Shift articles gave players the game rules they needed to actually run campaigns in those worlds.

  Six articles appeared between 2016 and 2018: Amonkhet, Dominaria, Innistrad, Ixalan, Kaladesh, and Zendikar. An Ixalan-set adventure was also part of the series. None of the Plane Shift material qualified as official content for organized play. In 2017, designer Mike Mearls explained why. "It's basically a thing James does for fun," Mearls wrote. The team had no wish to burden it "with needing all the work required to make it official."

  The positive reception to those free articles eventually led Wizards of the Coast to commission a proper book. Ravnica was selected as the setting, and Wyatt was named lead designer. He described the finished work plainly: "this book is, essentially, Plane Shift: Ravnica." Elaine Chase, then vice president for global brand strategy and marketing at Magic: The Gathering, spoke about the crossover in a press release. "It's super cool for fans of D&D and Magic to be playing together in the same multiverse," she said. Nathan Stewart, director of Dungeons & Dragons, called Ravnica "full of adventure possibilities."

  Magali Villeneuve created the cover art, and the book went on sale on the 20th of November 2018.

• 4. Inside the Book

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  Roughly ninety pages of the sourcebook covered the ten guilds and the Tenth District in detail. Nearly forty pages were dedicated to building adventures, with hooks that drew each of the guilds into the action. Another seventy pages contained stat blocks for the creatures and non-player characters that inhabit the setting.

  Five new playable races gave players a way to inhabit the world directly. Centaurs, minotaurs, loxodon, Vedalken, and Simic hybrids each represented a different kind of being within Ravnica's society. Two new subclass options added further mechanical range: the Order Domain Cleric and the Circle of Spores Druid. Ravnica-specific magic items and treasure rounded out the offerings.

  Richard Jansen-Parkes, writing for the UK print magazine Tabletop Gaming, would scrutinize exactly that mechanical package in his review.

• 5. Welcomed and Questioned

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  Publishers Weekly placed Guildmasters' Guide to Ravnica at number seventeen in its Hardcover Nonfiction bestseller list for the week ending the 3rd of December 2018. The publication called it a "Black Friday winner."

  Jansen-Parkes praised the mechanical depth and called the setting's art beautiful throughout. He noted, though, that the book felt "a little shallow when you come to plot an actual adventure there." His conclusion was measured: it was "a fascinating world to dabble in and borrow from, but falls just short of being a viable plug-and-play setting."

  Gavin Sheehan, writing for Bleeding Cool, called the book "a fine addition to 5E" while noting it would not suit every table. He advised that players with no background in Magic: The Gathering should prepare for "a steeper climb up the hill." Matthew Beilman, writing for CBR, reached a warmer verdict. He argued that the guilds guaranteed "there is never a shortage of intrigue or varying ways to run a campaign."

  In January 2020, Christian Hoffer reported for ComicBook.com that some fans felt collaborative IP projects had displaced classic campaign settings. They pointed to worlds like Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Dark Sun, all referenced in D&D's core rulebooks. Hoffer reported that the D&D team published about three books a year. Collaborative books had been added to the schedule on top of those three annual publications, not in place of them.

  WizKids released fifty-five themed miniatures as part of their Icons of the Realm blind box line. That accessory set earned a nomination for Best Game Accessory at the 2019 Origins Award.