The Izzet League

Overview

The Izzet League are charged with attending to Ravnican civic works, including water supply systems, sewers, heating systems, boilers, and roadways. In addition to carrying out these functions, the Izzet members — obsessive, keen, and creative intellectuals, who often have short attention spans — are known to perform magical experiments with reckless abandon and sometimes with spectacular but severe results. Unlike the other guilds, the Izzet do not openly strive for hegemony of the city and the plane. Instead, integral to the Izzet League, a guild of masters of both theoretical and applied science and spellcraft, is the passionate seeking of, and thirst for, knowledge. Combined with their drive for discovery and child-like curiosity, the brilliant but capricious and whimsical Izzet Magewrights jump to and from ideas as they see fit, discarding old ideas for new ones that attract their attention. In this regard, they can be likened to ambivalent or benevolent mad and absent-minded scientists/professors. The Izzet League is one of the few guilds whose Parun, the dracogenius Niv-Mizzet, remains its guildmaster, just as the guild continues to fulfill its original mission (even as its experiments go far beyond the guild's original mandate). Similarly to The Rakdos Cult, most of the Izzet League seems to be drawn to its eccentric and charismatic guildmaster and seem to revere his great feats. Because of this, the League has gained recognition as a cult of personality.

Purpose

The Izzet are obsessive experimenters, combining a keen creative intellect with a short attention span. The original mandate of the Izzet League 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 "hyper-mana focusing lens" might be renamed as a "scram-range teleportal" once the researchers discover more properties of what they have fashioned. Then, after a few goblin volunteers vanish inside of it, the apparatus gains the designation of "universal refuse disintegrator" - until the goblins are eventually 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 favored over any process of systematic scientific research. The goals of the Izzet are both easy and impossible to grasp. They constantly thirst for knowledge, cherish intellect, and speculate 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 widely 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."

Goals

The Izzet have further intensified their frenetic research in recent years, though now their efforts are mainly directed toward one outcome: the development of massive infrastructure projects and weaponry. The suspicion that festers in the mind of the draconic guildmaster urges him to push his guilds 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. Though many speculate that Niv-Mizzet is just a conceited old lizard with no real concern for the populace of Ravnica, any self respecting Izzet member ranked high enough to know, would tell you that his true purpose is beyond our understanding.

Organization Structure

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 and vision. The Izmagnus is a smaller board within the Izmundi with only five to seven members (some members keep their identities a secret) who serve as the dracogenius's closest advisors. One known member of the Izmagnus is a Goblin by the name of Mizzix. Starting at the bottom as an attendant, Mizzix quickly earned herself a place at her own magical forge with a squadron of attendants. Through a combination of natural talent, calculated political moves, and fortunate accidents, Mizzix has gradually risen from attendant, to research lead, to a spot on the Izmundi and eventually the Izmagnus. 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:

Laboratory of Pyrology With an emphasis on fire, heat, and explosions, this lab features a prominent facility in the Guildhall Nivix and is one of the larger laboratories of the entire League. Most of the well known pieces of Izzet weaponry come from this famous lab.

Laboratory of Storms and Electricity Focusing primarily on controlling the weather as well as containing and conducting electrical energy, it's headquarters is in a spire atop Nivix in a special facility often referred to as the Lightning Rod.

Laboratory of Metallurgy Research into smelting and forging, most often using the magical metal known as Mizzium, happens in this lab. They work in congruence with other labs to make the pieces for their devices. In the 10th District, they operate out of a small outpost in the Smelting Quarter.

Laboratory of Alchemy The magical science of transmuting one substance into another is studied fervently in this lab. Although they are a smaller laboratory in comparison to the others, these researchers are in charge of making sure the entire League never runs out of needed materials.

Laboratory of Orientation This lab is concerned with teleportation and spatial recombination. They are a relatively new lab, recently celebrating their hundred year anniversary, and their discoveries aren't usually well known among the general populace. The few outposts this lab does have seem to disappear and reappear from time to time.

Laboratory of Mimeography This is the newest of all the main Izzet laboratories, only having a few decades under their belt. The study of Mimicry and Duplication are slow and complex, so the teams in this lab rarely have new results to share, but few can deny how fascinating the field is regardless.

Laboratory of Continuism With an emphasis on temporal manipulation, this lab works tirelessly to unravel the mysteries of time and space. Admittedly, although this is one of the earliest labs ever founded, they have yet to make any large scale advances.

Laboratory of Arcane Geometry This well known lab conducts research into counter magics and the redirection of energy. Being one of the more accessible laboratories within the League, they actually have a small presence in the completely guild-neutral Prism University.

Laboratory of Gravitational Inversion This is a lab that conducts research on means of flight and maintains a workshop near Augustin Station in the 10th District. Their research usually manifests in the form of personal gear or small vehicles that grant their user the ability to slalom through the spires of Ravnica far above its streets.

Laboratory of Plasma-Dermatology This strange lab places an emphasis on the combining of opposing elements, with the purpose of creating Weirds, paradoxical elemental creatures that contain the essence of two volatile and usually opposing forces within themselves.

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 researches of an entire lab, while others are a lone visionary's labor of love. When commissioned by the Izmagnus or the Firemind himself, special research teams consisting of members from many different Izzet laboratories are formed, usually to take on specialty project of great importance.