Izzet League
In the Izzet League, the meaning of a lifetime guarantee can be.... variable....The Izzet are obsessive experimenters, combining a keen creative intellect with a short attention span. The original mandate of the Izzet guild was to provide solutions for public works projects (sewers, boilers, and roadways), but their increasingly far-fetched experiments satisfy only their insatiable curiosity. Sometimes their experiments yield useful technological advancements; other times they produce unintended mana geysers, spatial rifts, arcane portals, or huge explosions — all of which can be useful in their own way. The league’s most grandiose experiments typically concern public works projects and elemental experimentation. These efforts use a methodology that relies on unexpected outcomes: all results are informative, even if they completely defy expectations. For example, an experiment that begins as the creation of a “hypermana focusing lens” might be renamed a “scram-range teleportal” once the researchers discover more properties of what they have fashioned. Then, after a few goblin volunteers vanish inside it, the apparatus gains the designation of “universal refuse disintegrator” — until the goblin volunteers are discovered alive, having been teleported far from the workshop. This sort of adjustment is par for the course in Izzet experiments; the “fiddle and find out” method is favoured over any process of systematic scientific research. The Izzet League is one of the few guilds whose founder, the dragon Niv-Mizzet , remains its guildmaster, just as the guild continues to fulfil its original mission (even as its experiments go far beyond the guild’s original mandate).
Inside the League
Niv-Mizzet , the original and current guildmaster of the Izzet League, is a fifteen-thousand-year-old, vain, temperamental, super-intelligent dragon. As he directs experiments throughout the guild, he values results over success, accepting and even anticipating that Izzet experiments will end in gloriously unpredictable ways. However, the dragon rarely concerns himself with the day-to-day running of the guild, preferring to craft long-range plans and let underlings implement the details. Overseeing the daily operations of the guild is the purview of the Izmundi, a board of directors that assembles teams from among the rank and file of the Izzet League to carry out research according to Niv-Mizzet ’s directions. The Izmagnus is a smaller board with five to seven members (some members’ identities remain secret) who serve as Niv-Mizzet t’s closest advisors.
The Izzet League is organized into units designated as laboratories that specialize in certain fields of research. Though they all operate under the general guidance of the Izmundi, each laboratory is typically left alone to conduct its research. New fields of study emerge all the time, but the more established laboratories — each populated by hundreds of mages and their attendants — include the following: The Laboratory of Pyrology has a prominent facility in the guildhall, Nivix. Its emphasis is on heat, fire, and explosion. The Laboratory of Storms and Electricity focuses on controlling the weather as well as containing and conducting electrical energy. Its headquarters is in a spire atop Nivix, known as the Lightning Rod. Research into smelting and forging, most often using the magical metal known as mizzium, is conducted at the Laboratory of Metallurgy, which has a small outpost in the Tenth District’s Smelting Quarter. The magical science of transmuting one substance to another is the study of the Laboratory of Alchemy. The Laboratory of Orientation, concerned with teleportation and spatial recombination, has multiple workshops that seem to appear and disappear at random. The Laboratory of Mimeography studies means of duplication. The Laboratory of Continuism emphasizes the study of temporal manipulation. Research into counter-magic and redirection takes place in the Laboratory of Arcane Geometry, which has a small presence in Prism University in the Tenth District. The Laboratory of Gravitational Inversion conducts research on means of flight and maintains a workshop near Augustin Station in the Tenth District. The Laboratory of Plasma-Dermatology places emphasis on the combining of opposing elements, with the purpose of creating creatures called weirds. Izzet laboratories function in a constant state of high energy that propels researchers from one experiment to the next. Some grand-scale experiments draw on the resources of an entire laboratory, while others are a lone visionary’s labour of love.
"The other guilds will learn the hard way not to interfere with our investigations."
Goals of the Izzet
The Izzet League thirsts for knowledge, cherishes intellect, and speculates about the secrets of the multiverse. It brings to its scientific pursuits a flaming passion that turns its search for knowledge into an insatiable hunger, makes its cold intellect brilliantly fruitful, and widens its speculation into a search for connections between wildly disparate objects or concepts. It is manic in its expressions of creative energy, shifting from careful analysis to intuitive leap seemingly for no reason, always thinking outside the proverbial box. As the Izzet see it, unpredictable action, far from being antithetical to methodical research, has experimental value. In the words of one researcher, “The only action worth taking is one with an unknown outcome.”
As Ravnica descends into increasing turmoil, the Izzet have further intensified their frenetic research, though now their efforts are mainly directed toward one outcome: the development of super-weapons. The suspicion that festers in the mind of the Izzet guildmaster, the ancient dragon Niv-Mizzet, urges him to push his guild’s research toward increasingly dangerous and volatile experimentation. For the rest of the guild members, the search for bigger and better weapons is mainly an opportunity to engage in all sorts of wild research while abandoning all outward pretense of safety or reason. Much of the guild’s laboratory space has been converted into testing grounds that are capable of withstanding great discharges of magical energy.
Type
Guild, Craftsmen
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