OVERVIEW
House Dimir is Ravnica's dark secret: behind a facade of respectable businesses, primarily messengers, journalists, and archivists, lurks an association of spies, assassins, and intelligence agents whose existence is barely suspected by the city at large. Secrecy is both the House's best weapon and its best defense, and much of the guild's work is hidden even from other members. Dimir agents leave no trace of their covert crimes, even wiping or warping their own memory to remove any evidence of their completed assignments.
On the surface the Dimir operate in th epublic eye as couriers, librarians, news organizations, and information brokers. Many suspect that the Dimir are also host to a vast network of assassins, although these claims have never been able to be proven.
All that is currently known of the Dimir has come from your contact
Specs who indicated the Dimir's main purpose is to ensure the Guildpact remains intact and that no one guild gains too much influence over another, at any cost, and by any means.
House Dimir has a clandestine aspect hidden from all but its most important members. The Guildmaster and inner circle of contacts guide and manipulate the covert operations of the guild. Members of House Dimir ultimately receive their orders from this source without having any idea of who issued the order or why. Messages to agents are funneled through magical drop points, telepathic relays, or via thought strands. House magic is designed to implement or remove memories of certain interactions, sometimes manifesting them as ethereal ribbons of readable code to avoid their mission being detected by the Senate's Precognitive Mages or any other mind scouring magic.
For most of Ravnica's history, the guild officially didn't exist. The Ravnican people generally believed that there were only nine guilds and that if there ever was a tenth, it had dissolved thousands of years ago. The name Dimir was not known by most people and those that did know it believed it to be a myth, children's story or a paranoid conspiracy theory. This misinformation was actively propagated by the Dimir themselves as a method for avoiding suspicion. The spell that concealed their identity was finally broken when Agrus Kos arrested Szadek, which exposed him and House Dimir to the public, forcing them to manifest a public face in recent days.
PURPOSE
House Dimir is a guild of secrecy, manipulation and underhanded deals, a shadowy organization operating behind the scenes to twist Ravnica to its own ends. The guild provides espionage, smuggling, burglary, counter-intelligence, assassination and other illegal services for the Ravnican populace, although its patrons are unaware that they are in fact employing the guild, instead thinking they are employing guildless mercenaries or another guild such as the Rakdos. The guild is so secretive that even its own agents often do not know who they truly work for.
Not much is known about the long term goals of this secretive guild; however, what is known is their original purpose. By attempting to subvert and break it in the most intricate ways, they point out its weaknesses and make it even stronger. Additionally, they act as a stabilizing agent amongst the guilds. As they attempt to sabotage guild progress and gain a further advantage above the other factions, they are acting as a balance that prevents any one guild from getting too far ahead of the others too easily. These motives can lead them to assassinate, mislead, influence, or sabotage one guild or assist another; it all depends on what the situation calls for.
CORE VALUES
To House Dimir, knowledge is power. The guild hungers to learn everything it doesn't already know, especially the weaknesses of its adversaries, and to exploit those weaknesses for its own gain. Conversely, the House holds its own secrets tightly, because it doesn't want its enemies to turn the tables. The Dimir lurk in the shadows, methodically gathering the knowledge they need to twist Ravnica to their advantage. This immense desire for the knowledge of others has created a paranoid sense of suspicion for everyone and everything in the city. Although their motivations for joining the House can vary, all agents possess an inherent distrust for societal structure and wish to see it subverted.
GOALS
House Dimir is all about secrets and misinformation, even where its own members are concerned. Any given Dimir agent knows of no more than a handful of alleyway contacts and dossier drop spots and all memories of the sensitive information they witness on the job is passed onto their superiors. One agent knows another only by a code name, or receives communications only at a particular meeting spot at a specific place and time. Every self-proclaimed expert with an opinion on the matter has a theory about the guild's intentions, and all those guesses about Dimir's motivations and pursuits contradict each other, frustrating any attempt to get to the truth of things. The public face of Dimir remains inscrutable, which some interpret as the best evidence that the guild's true plans mean something dire for the Ravnican populace.
House Dimir's progress toward its goals depends on a web woven from meticulously gathered intelligence. Like how a struggling insect sends vibrations through the web to alert the spider, so too does unpredictable behavior from other guilds triggers an investigative response from the Dimir. To preserve manpower and maintain the flow of information through the web, the House focuses their agents on the less predictable guilds. The Senate, Conclave, and surprisingly enough, the Swarm behave predictably on the whole, although the last two can be hard to track accurately due to their sheer size. When the Syndicate hosts a sudden eviction, the Legion makes a rash decision, or the Combine has a sudden scientific breakthrough, it can disrupt the web, warranting more surveillance for these guilds than some of the others. Of all the other guilds, the League, the Cult, and the Clans concern the Dimir the most; their erratic methods of decision making, combined with their unflinching approach to danger can force any plan to contain them to change very quickly.
ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE
House Dimir was founded by the ancient vampire Szadek. The vampire was one of the ten paruns that signed the Guildpact and remained in charge of the guild for the subsequent 10,000 years. One of the crucial clauses of the Guildpact was that none of the signatories (including Szadek) could reveal the existence of the Dimir to Ravnica's people, protecting the guild's anonymity while forcing it to remain hidden. This created a flaw in the Guildpact's structure that would eventually allow it to be broken.
The guild operates on a strictly need-to-know basis on three levels: the overt face of the guild that the general public is allowed to see, the covert inner guild that Ravnicans suspect exists, but rarely see, and a deeper, clandestine level that is hidden even from its own members.
At the top of its hierarchy is the Guildmaster. Only they are fully aware of all of the guild's activities. Beneath him are the Necrosages, who oversee the guild's activities from their guildhall. They manipulate the flow of information, keeping the guild informed on all things whilst keeping the rest of the plane ignorant.
Few individuals are ever allowed to meet the guild's leaders, as instead a network of middlemen are employed to pass on messages to cells of field operatives. Agents at the very bottom of the guild only meet a mysterious individual in a back alley that gives them some basic information on their target and nothing else. The public face of the guild is represented by couriers, librarians, investigators, media reporters and archivists; however, even this public face is obscured by myriad aliases, fronts, and secretly backed businesses. The local paper in a small neighborhood is likely to be a guildless association run by locals who care about their community; but the Dimir can use this as a conduit for their information gathering or smear campaigns without the honest proprietor even knowing they are being influenced by the shadowy organization.
The Dimir's guildmages use their magic to influence the minds of others. They can send messages to operatives over distances or strike people with amnesia, magically alter memories or even perform lobotomies on victims to cover their tracks. The Dimir also practice necromancy, creating undead minions such as skeletons and wights to carry out missions. Such minions are employed as they are single-minded, easy to create and dispose of, cannot be interrogated in the event of capture and are easily blamed on the Golgari instead. Spirits are also used by the Dimir to pass on messages, carry out surveillance invisibly or even to possess important figures such as judges and senators. Nobody is beyond the reach of House Dimir.
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