Ravnica

The Endless City of Guilds

Ravnica is a worldwide cityscape governed primarily by ten different sociopolitical guilds that are forcibly kept from usurping one another by the enigmatic and powerful Guildpact, a magical document signed at Ravnica's founding by the Paruns of each guild.

This ecumenopolis is a patchwork of grand halls, decrepit slums, and ancient ruins, soaring skyscrapers, meandering sewers, sprawling mausoleums, abandoned neighborhoods, and packed warehouses with layer upon layer of stonework built on top of one another for thousands of years. There is only one place in the entire city where any of Ravnica's original surface remains visible, and it is the top of a mountain.

The sprawl is so large that single neighborhoods are as immense as real world cities, warehouse districts are in multilevel super-complexes that take hours to traverse, and just one factory can be the size of a football stadium and skyscraper combined. All while the population density stays around the level of Tokyo in habitable parts of the city. Because of this, most citizens live right next to where they work, never leaving the familiar parts of the city that they can access without spending money (usually on foot or via crowded public transport) unless they've saved up enough to take a vacation or buy a mount.

Centuries of progress, construction, and industry have saturated Ravnica’s atmosphere with all manner of industrial pollution, leaving the skies mostly overcast on a regular basis. One of the ten guilds, the Izzet League has recently developed atmospheric cleaning machines but they are not yet widely available.

While its entire surface is now a city, Ravnica still has oceans. A few of them are man-made via canals on the surface, but the natural oceans still exist, sealed underneath miles of concrete. If you're lucky enough to see past the smoggy clouds and lights of the big city at night, you'll glimpse Ravnica's two moons and the glorious array of stars and constellations that surround them.

Law magic and the metaphysics and culture of hierarchy are deeply woven into the very fabric of the plane, enabling cooperating leaders to achieve feats of greatness through the fate bending power of the Guildpact. Ideals such as justice, progress, and law are worshiped instead of named gods. The ten guilds are such diverse microcosms of culture because each of them revere different ideals, some overlap and some clash.

Ghosts manifest regularly and are even put to use by some guilds as warriors, ambassadors, or couriers. The act of putting a spirit into a body so it can provide more physical labor (necromancy) is also an accepted practice most places. The supernatural and the natural mirror each other in Ravnica; instead of moving on to an afterlife, the lingering spirits of the dead go to a place of purgatory deep within the ethereal realm known as Agyrem, otherwise known as the Ghost Quarter, until they waste away into nothingness.

Prior to the events of the Decamillenial, the Guildpact had held the political structure of Ravnica together for 10,000 years. After that fateful celebration, it was damaged and its power began to fade. A temporary and nonmagical Guildpact was drafted to keep the peace, but tensions between the now unbridled guilds are growing day by day.