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Slaad

2021-06-16T22:56:18Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Slaad Types */

[[File:Slaad 4.jpg|300px|thumb|right|A red, green, blue and gray Slaad.]]

The '''Slaadi''' are a race of toad-like extraplanar beings from the world of [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Natives of [[Limbo]], they are the counterparts to the [[Modron]]s in that they serve as the living exemplars of [[alignment|Chaotic Neutral]]. They originated in 1st edition as submissions of D&D fan and science fiction author Charles Stross perhaps by way of '' [[White Dwarf]]'' (although, contrary to common thought, ''not'' to its [[Fiend Factory]]); thence they hopped over to the eenfamous [[Fiend Folio]].

In practice, they got portrayed as [[Chaotic Stupid|"Whee! Lolrandumb! I's funny!"]]. Blame [[Planescape]]'s ''Faces of Evil'' for Xanxost.

==Slaad Types==
Slaadi are mostly remembered for coming in multiple different colors and their horrific breeding cycle. See, the basic Slaad come in Blue and Red colors. Blue Slaadi have a corruptive bite/claw attack (depending on the edition) that physically and mentally mutates a victim into a Red Slaad. And Red Slaadi can implant eggs with their claw attacks that hatch into chest-bursting tadpoles that subsequently turn into Blue Slaadi.

If the victim of either a blue slaad or a red slaad is high enough level (AD&D), an arcane spellcaster (3e), or able to cast any sort of third-level spell (5e), then the result is instead a Green Slaad, a more powerful strain with innate spellcasting abilities. These are cherished and prized by the lower Reds and Blues, who seek to nurture them; as a result, green slaadi are notably arrogant and braggadocios. They have the ability to assume a humanoid form - in AD&D, this is the form of their original host, but in 3e this became a simple Change Shape ability, which is passed on to the higher forms.

If Green Slaadi live for at least a century, they have the chance to mature into the more powerful Gray Slaadi, who are the next tier on the progression ladder. These are much better mages, and have a particular skill in crafting and using magical items.

Death Slaadi are the next highest up on the list. In AD&D, nobody knows where Death Slaadi come from; in 3rd edition, it was stated that gray slaadi who have survived for at least a century in that form sometimes undergo a ritual that transforms them into death slaadi; the ritual seems to involve infecting themselves with the essence of Evil, which is why Death Slaadi are 'sometimes' Chaotic Evil and other slaadi are Chaotic Neutral. 5e says that the ritual requires consuming the corpse of a slain death slaad, which means the number of these monsters is likely fixed. These are portrayed as the brutal overlords of the race, albeit inferior in power to the mighty Slaad Lords.

There might, in the existence of Death Slaadi, be a proto Mencius Moldbug commentary on the 'Great Wheel': that chaotic good is a sham and that chaos is, at its core, evil - or at least [[Far Realm]]. Some at TSR recognised that That Way Comes [[Skub]]. So the first Monstrous Compendium appendix for Planescape (2e, barely) retcons that Death Slaadi are all chaotic-neutral like the rest of 'em. The 3e Monster Manual kicks that right in the pants, to restore the near-evil. The Epic book doubled down with the Black Slaad, also sometimes evil. Simply adding a chaotic good counterpart to the death slaadi is an idea that nobody seems to have thought of yet.

The exact list of types has (appropriately) fluctuated over editions, but the general list is '''Red''', '''Blue''', '''Green''', '''Gray''' and '''Death''', as this was the original slaad list in [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]].

In 3rd edition, the '''Mud Slaad''', '''Black Slaad''' and '''White Slaad''' were added as direct parts of the family tree. Mud Slaads, which appeared in the 3e [[Fiend Folio]], are the least member of the member of the slaad race, inferior even to Red and blue Slaadi, and are portrayed as cowardly, cringing, insecure creatures with a sonic damage-inflicting shriek attack, that reproduce by mutating other creatures into more mud slaad. Black and White Slaadi are the ultimate non-Slaad-Lord forms of the Slaad Race, and appeared in 3e's Epic Level Handbook. Death Slaadi who survive for at least a century mature into White Slaadi (which would mean that the number of black slaadi, rather than being fixed, should be in perpetual ''decline''), who in turn become Black Slaadi if they survive another century. Aside from different levels of epic power (HP, defenses, etc), both Whites and Blacks have the exact same abilities, including the ability to infect victims with raw chaos-stuff that can rapidly break the victim down into more chaos-stuff.

[[Dragon Magazine]] #306 introduced the '''[[Gormeel]]''', which are a mutant slaad offshoot characterized by their ''Lawful'' alignment, [[Just As Planned|because embracing order is the last thing you'd expect chaos to do, so of course it does that just to fuck with you.]]

In 4th edition, most of the color-based slaad returned, along with several alternative versions and new slaadi:
* Red Slaads are divided into Blood Slaads (pretty much their old selves) and Juggernauts (15ft tall musclebound bruisers).
* Blue Slaads are divided into Talon Slaads (armed with chaos phage implanting wristblades) and Digesters (oversized brutes who seek to literally eat away at reality),
* Green Slaads are divided into Curse Slaads and Madjacks, characterized mostly by their different sets of magical abilities.
* Gray Slaads are divided into Rift Slaads (who can manipulate the planar fabric) and Havocs (more powerful versions).
* Black Slaads are divided into Void Slaads (who have all sorts of life-draining tricks) and Entropics (who can shapeshift into life-draining miniature black holes).
* White Slaads (also called Chronos Slaads) have the power to pull replicas of themselves from the time stream.
* Flux Slaads are the smallest and weakest of their ilk, often fleeing the [[Elemental Chaos]] to set themselves up as rulers of [[bullywug]] tribes.
* Slaad Spawners are mutant slaads of any of the aforementioned breeds who can produce baby slaads (not slaad larvae, miniature adult slaads) from noxious boils on their backs.
* Golden Slaads have been transformed by exposure to a surge of raw chaos, and randomly shift into and out of the form of a golden [[slime]].
* Putrid Slaads are slaad [[zombie]]s.

===Rulers===
Slaadi are ruled by the Slaad Lords, who represent unique aspects of Chaos.
* [[Ssendam, Lord of the Insane]], appears as either a giant golden slaad or an immense translucent-gold [[slime]] that resembles an amoeba with a human brain for a nucleus. It has been described as being either male or female in different sources, and with the alternate forms of a naked man wielding a black sword that stuns what it touches, a golden slaad, or a gorgeous gold-skinned [[elf]]-maid with 0 [[Wisdom]].
* [[Ygorl, Lord of Entropy]], manifests as either a giant black slaad or a shadowy, sickle-wielding, bat-winged humanoid skeleton. Also played by the epic Michael Clarke Duncan in the game "Demon Stone." Some sources say he actually experiences time backwards.
* Tales of the Outer Plane added the forgotten Slaad Lord [[Wartle]], whilst [[Dragon Magazine]] #221 added [[Chourst, Lord of Randomness]] (who is basically the most ADHD Slaad imaginable), and [[Renbuu, Lord of Colors]] (who loves to experiment with changing colors on everything), who later became official in the [[Planescape]] expansion Planes of Chaos.
* Dungeon #101 added [[Bazim-Gorag the Firebringer]], who became official in the "Champions of Ruin" [[splatbook]] for the [[Forgotten Realms]]. He has two heads, a fiery aura, and a glaive wreathed in black flame.
* Secrets of the Plane Below mentions [[Norsar the Many]], a white slaad lord with the ability to pull hundreds of different temporal duplicates of himself from the timestream.

==Alternate Versions==
They got a lot of attention in the [[World Axis]], but were really revamped; amongst other things, they changed from being chaotically random to wanting to dissolve all of reality into an endless chaos, changing them to the 4e definition of Chaotic Evil (since 4e [[skub]]tastically decided to reduce [[Alignment]] to a spectrum of Lawful Good - Good - Unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil). This was explained in "Secrets of the Plane Below" that slaad believe there was once an infinite multiverse of many parallel realities (think Marvel or DC), but somehow they all got smooshed together into the present cosmology. This really pisses them off, and/or has driven them mad, because they supposedly can still see into the former parallel realities and now they want to rip reality apart in order to free them.

4e slaads even got their own [[Demon Prince]]; Urae-Naas, a "female" slaad so bloated with eggs she can't walk anymore and has to drag herself along on her long arms and enormous tongue, who rules over the Phage Breeding Grounds; a bounded 10-mile demiplane made from the ever-rotting guts of her dead boyfriend, the [[Archomental|Primordial]] Ramenos, which serves as the 53rd layer of the [[Abyss]]. The plane's most distinguishing feature is the legions of humanoid slaves trapped within the rotting walls of the entrail-caverns, screaming vainly for release before she drags her bulk their way and decides to implant them with her brain-eating progeny.

That's not to say they were entirely stripped of their randomness; they got a really fun "Slaad Reaction Table" in the Secrets of the Plane Below splatbook, where trying to talk to a slaad could result in it suddenly becoming convinced the party doesn't exist, bursting into croaking laughter, attacking them in a mad frenzy, or its head exploding violently before the rest of it nonchalantly wanders off.

[[Pathfinder]] replaced them with the more snake-like [[Proteans]] of the Maelstrom, creation, and destruction in one, and who created much of the rest of the multiverse in their experiments with chaos. Whether or not this was a bad is a question long debated by philosophers (except the Abyss, most people are pretty sure on that one and it's generally considered the Protean's oldest mistake), but Proteans are open to debate on the matter. They're also open to dissolving you into raw chaos with warp waves, some of their castes are as violent as any Slaad, but on the whole, they tend to be more philosophical and varied than their froggy cousins.

==See Also==
For more info, check out these links:
* http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-slaad.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaad

==Gallery==
<gallery>
Red slaad 1e.png|1e Red
Blue Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Blue
Green Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Green
Gray Slaad 1e.png|1e Gray
Death slaad 1e.png|1e Death
Red Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Red
Blue Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Blue
Green Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Green
Gray Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Gray
Death Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Death
Slaad 3e.jpg
Green Slaad 2e.gif
Slaad MM 2e.png
Blue Death Slaad 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad EC.png
Slaad Planescape.jpg
Slaad plane below.jpg
Slaad spawner.jpg
Slaad limbo.jpg
Bazimgorag.jpg
Mud Slaad.jpg|Mud Slaad
White Slaad.jpg|White Slaad
Black Slaad.jpg|Black Slaad
Golden Slaad.jpg|Golden Slaad
Gormeel.jpg|Gormeel
Slaad Gith 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad combat.jpg
Chourst.jpg|Chourst
Renbuu.jpg|Renbuu
Renbuu Planescape.jpg|Renbuu in Planescape
Ygorl 1e.jpg|1e Ygorl
Ygorl 2e.jpg|2e Ygorl
Ygorl 4e.jpg|4e Ygorl
Ssendam 1e.jpg|Ssendam
Wartle.jpg|Wartle, the most un-badass of the Slaad Lords
</gallery>

{{D&D-Outsiders}}

Slaad

2021-06-16T22:53:18Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Slaad Types */

[[File:Slaad 4.jpg|300px|thumb|right|A red, green, blue and gray Slaad.]]

The '''Slaadi''' are a race of toad-like extraplanar beings from the world of [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Natives of [[Limbo]], they are the counterparts to the [[Modron]]s in that they serve as the living exemplars of [[alignment|Chaotic Neutral]]. They originated in 1st edition as submissions of D&D fan and science fiction author Charles Stross perhaps by way of '' [[White Dwarf]]'' (although, contrary to common thought, ''not'' to its [[Fiend Factory]]); thence they hopped over to the eenfamous [[Fiend Folio]].

In practice, they got portrayed as [[Chaotic Stupid|"Whee! Lolrandumb! I's funny!"]]. Blame [[Planescape]]'s ''Faces of Evil'' for Xanxost.

==Slaad Types==
Slaadi are mostly remembered for coming in multiple different colors and their horrific breeding cycle. See, the basic Slaad come in Blue and Red colors. Blue Slaadi have a corruptive bite/claw attack (depending on the edition) that physically and mentally mutates a victim into a Red Slaad. And Red Slaadi can implant eggs with their claw attacks that hatch into chest-bursting tadpoles that subsequently turn into Blue Slaadi.

If the victim of either a blue slaad or a red slaad is high enough level (AD&D), an arcane spellcaster (3e), or able to cast any sort of third-level spell (5e), then the result is instead a Green Slaad, a more powerful strain with innate spellcasting abilities. These are cherished and prized by the lower Reds and Blues, who seek to nurture them; as a result, green slaadi are notably arrogant and braggadocios. They have the ability to assume a humanoid form - in AD&D, this is the form of their original host, but in 3e this became a simple Change Shape ability, which is passed on to the higher forms.

If Green Slaadi live for at least a century, they have the chance to mature into the more powerful Gray Slaadi, who are the next tier on the progression ladder. These are much better mages, and have a particular skill in crafting and using magical items.

Death Slaadi are the next highest up on the list. In AD&D, nobody knows where Death Slaadi come from; in 3rd edition, it was stated that gray slaadi who have survived for at least a century in that form sometimes undergo a ritual that transforms them into death slaadi; the ritual seems to involve infecting themselves with the essence of Evil, which is why Death Slaadi are 'sometimes' Chaotic Evil and other slaadi are Chaotic Neutral. 5e says that the ritual requires consuming the corpse of a slain death slaad, which means the number of these monsters is likely fixed. These are portrayed as the brutal overlords of the race, albeit inferior in power to the mighty Slaad Lords.

There might, in the existence of Death Slaadi, be a proto Mencius Moldbug commentary on the 'Great Wheel': that chaotic good is a sham and that chaos is, at its core, evil - or at least [[Far Realm]]. Some at TSR recognised that That Way Comes [[Skub]]. So the first Monstrous Compendium appendix for Planescape (2e, barely) retcons that Death Slaadi are all chaotic-neutral like the rest of 'em. The 3e Monster Manual kicks that right in the pants, to restore the near-evil. The Epic book doubled down with the Black Slaad, also sometimes evil. Simply adding a chaotic good counterpart to the death slaadi is an idea that nobody seems to have thought of yet.

The exact list of types has (appropriately) fluctuated over editions, but the general list is '''Red''', '''Blue''', '''Green''', '''Gray''' and '''Death''', as this was the original slaad list in [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]].

In 3rd edition, the '''Mud Slaad''', '''Black Slaad''' and '''White Slaad''' were added as direct parts of the family tree. Mud Slaads, which appeared in the 3e [[Fiend Folio]], are the least member of the member of the slaad race, inferior even to Red and blue Slaadi, and are portrayed as cowardly, cringing, insecure creatures with a sonic damage-inflicting shriek attack, that reproduce by mutating other creatures into more mud slaad. Black and White Slaadi are the ultimate non-Slaad-Lord forms of the Slaad Race, and appeared in 3e's Epic Level Handbook. Death Slaadi who survive for at least a century mature into White Slaadi (which would mean that the number of black slaadi, rather than being fixed, should be in perpetual ''decline''), who in turn become Black Slaadi if they survive another century. Aside from different levels of epic power (HP, defenses, etc), both Whites and Blacks have the exact same abilities, including the ability to infect victims with raw chaos-stuff that can rapidly break the victim down into more chaos-stuff.

[[Dragon Magazine]] #306 introduced the '''[[Gormeel]]''', which are a mutant slaad offshoot characterized by their ''Lawful'' alignment.

In 4th edition, most of the color-based slaad returned, along with several alternative versions and new slaadi:
* Red Slaads are divided into Blood Slaads (pretty much their old selves) and Juggernauts (15ft tall musclebound bruisers).
* Blue Slaads are divided into Talon Slaads (armed with chaos phage implanting wristblades) and Digesters (oversized brutes who seek to literally eat away at reality),
* Green Slaads are divided into Curse Slaads and Madjacks, characterized mostly by their different sets of magical abilities.
* Gray Slaads are divided into Rift Slaads (who can manipulate the planar fabric) and Havocs (more powerful versions).
* Black Slaads are divided into Void Slaads (who have all sorts of life-draining tricks) and Entropics (who can shapeshift into life-draining miniature black holes).
* White Slaads (also called Chronos Slaads) have the power to pull replicas of themselves from the time stream.
* Flux Slaads are the smallest and weakest of their ilk, often fleeing the [[Elemental Chaos]] to set themselves up as rulers of [[bullywug]] tribes.
* Slaad Spawners are mutant slaads of any of the aforementioned breeds who can produce baby slaads (not slaad larvae, miniature adult slaads) from noxious boils on their backs.
* Golden Slaads have been transformed by exposure to a surge of raw chaos, and randomly shift into and out of the form of a golden [[slime]].
* Putrid Slaads are slaad [[zombie]]s.

===Rulers===
Slaadi are ruled by the Slaad Lords, who represent unique aspects of Chaos.
* [[Ssendam, Lord of the Insane]], appears as either a giant golden slaad or an immense translucent-gold [[slime]] that resembles an amoeba with a human brain for a nucleus. It has been described as being either male or female in different sources, and with the alternate forms of a naked man wielding a black sword that stuns what it touches, a golden slaad, or a gorgeous gold-skinned [[elf]]-maid with 0 [[Wisdom]].
* [[Ygorl, Lord of Entropy]], manifests as either a giant black slaad or a shadowy, sickle-wielding, bat-winged humanoid skeleton. Also played by the epic Michael Clarke Duncan in the game "Demon Stone." Some sources say he actually experiences time backwards.
* Tales of the Outer Plane added the forgotten Slaad Lord [[Wartle]], whilst [[Dragon Magazine]] #221 added [[Chourst, Lord of Randomness]] (who is basically the most ADHD Slaad imaginable), and [[Renbuu, Lord of Colors]] (who loves to experiment with changing colors on everything), who later became official in the [[Planescape]] expansion Planes of Chaos.
* Dungeon #101 added [[Bazim-Gorag the Firebringer]], who became official in the "Champions of Ruin" [[splatbook]] for the [[Forgotten Realms]]. He has two heads, a fiery aura, and a glaive wreathed in black flame.
* Secrets of the Plane Below mentions [[Norsar the Many]], a white slaad lord with the ability to pull hundreds of different temporal duplicates of himself from the timestream.

==Alternate Versions==
They got a lot of attention in the [[World Axis]], but were really revamped; amongst other things, they changed from being chaotically random to wanting to dissolve all of reality into an endless chaos, changing them to the 4e definition of Chaotic Evil (since 4e [[skub]]tastically decided to reduce [[Alignment]] to a spectrum of Lawful Good - Good - Unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil). This was explained in "Secrets of the Plane Below" that slaad believe there was once an infinite multiverse of many parallel realities (think Marvel or DC), but somehow they all got smooshed together into the present cosmology. This really pisses them off, and/or has driven them mad, because they supposedly can still see into the former parallel realities and now they want to rip reality apart in order to free them.

4e slaads even got their own [[Demon Prince]]; Urae-Naas, a "female" slaad so bloated with eggs she can't walk anymore and has to drag herself along on her long arms and enormous tongue, who rules over the Phage Breeding Grounds; a bounded 10-mile demiplane made from the ever-rotting guts of her dead boyfriend, the [[Archomental|Primordial]] Ramenos, which serves as the 53rd layer of the [[Abyss]]. The plane's most distinguishing feature is the legions of humanoid slaves trapped within the rotting walls of the entrail-caverns, screaming vainly for release before she drags her bulk their way and decides to implant them with her brain-eating progeny.

That's not to say they were entirely stripped of their randomness; they got a really fun "Slaad Reaction Table" in the Secrets of the Plane Below splatbook, where trying to talk to a slaad could result in it suddenly becoming convinced the party doesn't exist, bursting into croaking laughter, attacking them in a mad frenzy, or its head exploding violently before the rest of it nonchalantly wanders off.

[[Pathfinder]] replaced them with the more snake-like [[Proteans]] of the Maelstrom, creation, and destruction in one, and who created much of the rest of the multiverse in their experiments with chaos. Whether or not this was a bad is a question long debated by philosophers (except the Abyss, most people are pretty sure on that one and it's generally considered the Protean's oldest mistake), but Proteans are open to debate on the matter. They're also open to dissolving you into raw chaos with warp waves, some of their castes are as violent as any Slaad, but on the whole, they tend to be more philosophical and varied than their froggy cousins.

==See Also==
For more info, check out these links:
* http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-slaad.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaad

==Gallery==
<gallery>
Red slaad 1e.png|1e Red
Blue Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Blue
Green Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Green
Gray Slaad 1e.png|1e Gray
Death slaad 1e.png|1e Death
Red Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Red
Blue Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Blue
Green Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Green
Gray Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Gray
Death Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Death
Slaad 3e.jpg
Green Slaad 2e.gif
Slaad MM 2e.png
Blue Death Slaad 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad EC.png
Slaad Planescape.jpg
Slaad plane below.jpg
Slaad spawner.jpg
Slaad limbo.jpg
Bazimgorag.jpg
Mud Slaad.jpg|Mud Slaad
White Slaad.jpg|White Slaad
Black Slaad.jpg|Black Slaad
Golden Slaad.jpg|Golden Slaad
Gormeel.jpg|Gormeel
Slaad Gith 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad combat.jpg
Chourst.jpg|Chourst
Renbuu.jpg|Renbuu
Renbuu Planescape.jpg|Renbuu in Planescape
Ygorl 1e.jpg|1e Ygorl
Ygorl 2e.jpg|2e Ygorl
Ygorl 4e.jpg|4e Ygorl
Ssendam 1e.jpg|Ssendam
Wartle.jpg|Wartle, the most un-badass of the Slaad Lords
</gallery>

{{D&D-Outsiders}}

Slaad

2021-06-16T22:51:26Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Slaad Types */

[[File:Slaad 4.jpg|300px|thumb|right|A red, green, blue and gray Slaad.]]

The '''Slaadi''' are a race of toad-like extraplanar beings from the world of [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Natives of [[Limbo]], they are the counterparts to the [[Modron]]s in that they serve as the living exemplars of [[alignment|Chaotic Neutral]]. They originated in 1st edition as submissions of D&D fan and science fiction author Charles Stross perhaps by way of '' [[White Dwarf]]'' (although, contrary to common thought, ''not'' to its [[Fiend Factory]]); thence they hopped over to the eenfamous [[Fiend Folio]].

In practice, they got portrayed as [[Chaotic Stupid|"Whee! Lolrandumb! I's funny!"]]. Blame [[Planescape]]'s ''Faces of Evil'' for Xanxost.

==Slaad Types==
Slaadi are mostly remembered for coming in multiple different colors and their horrific breeding cycle. See, the basic Slaad come in Blue and Red colors. Blue Slaadi have a corruptive bite/claw attack (depending on the edition) that physically and mentally mutates a victim into a Red Slaad. And Red Slaadi can implant eggs with their claw attacks that hatch into chest-bursting tadpoles that subsequently turn into Blue Slaadi.

If the victim of either a blue slaad or a red slaad is high enough level (AD&D), an arcane spellcaster (3e), or able to cast any sort of third-level spell (5e), then the result is instead a Green Slaad, a more powerful strain with innate spellcasting abilities. These are cherished and prized by the lower Reds and Blues, who seek to nurture them; as a result, green slaadi are notably arrogant and braggadocios. They have the ability to assume a humanoid form - in AD&D, this is the form of their original host, but in 3e this became a simple Change Shape ability, which is passed on to the higher forms.

If Green Slaadi live for at least a century, they have the chance to mature into the more powerful Gray Slaadi, who are the next tier on the progression ladder. These are much better mages, and have a particular skill in crafting and using magical items.

Death Slaadi are the next highest up on the list. In AD&D, nobody knows where Death Slaadi come from; in 3rd edition, it was stated that gray slaadi who have survived for at least a century in that form sometimes undergo a ritual that transforms them into death slaadi; the ritual seems to involve infecting themselves with the essence of Evil, which is why Death Slaadi are 'sometimes' Chaotic Evil and other slaadi are Chaotic Neutral. 5e says that the ritual requires consuming the corpse of a slain death slaad, which means the number of these monsters is likely fixed. These are portrayed as the brutal overlords of the race, albeit inferior in power to the mighty Slaad Lords.

There might, in the existence of Death Slaadi, be a proto Mencius Moldbug commentary on the 'Great Wheel': that chaotic good is a sham and that chaos is, at its core, evil - or at least [[Far Realm]]. Some at TSR recognised that That Way Comes [[Skub]]. So the first Monstrous Compendium appendix for Planescape (2e, barely) retcons that Death Slaadi are all chaotic-neutral like the rest of 'em. The 3e Monster Manual kicks that right in the pants, to restore the near-evil. The Epic book doubled down with the Black Slaad, also sometimes evil. Simply adding a chaotic good counterpart to the death slaadi is an idea that nobody seems to have thought of yet.

The exact list of types has (appropriately) fluctuated over editions, but the general list is '''Red''', '''Blue''', '''Green''', '''Gray''' and '''Death''', as this was the original slaad list in [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]].

In 3rd edition, the '''Mud Slaad''', '''Black Slaad''' and '''White Slaad''' were added as direct parts of the family tree. Mud Slaads, which appeared in the 3e [[Fiend Folio]], are the least member of the member of the slaad race, inferior even to Red and blue Slaadi, and are portrayed as cowardly, cringing, insecure creatures with a sonic damage-inflicting shriek attack, they reproduce by mutating other creatures into more mud slaad. Black and White Slaadi are the ultimate non-Slaad-Lord forms of the Slaad Race, and appeared in 3e's Epic Level Handbook. Death Slaadi who survive for at least a century mature into White Slaadi (which would mean that the number of black slaadi, rather than being fixed, should be in perpetual ''decline''), who in turn become Black Slaadi if they survive another century. Aside from different levels of epic power (HP, defenses, etc), both Whites and Blacks have the exact same abilities, including the ability to infect victims with raw chaos-stuff that can rapidly break the victim down into more chaos-stuff.

[[Dragon Magazine]] #306 introduced the '''[[Gormeel]]''', which are a mutant slaad offshoot characterized by their ''Lawful'' alignment.

In 4th edition, most of the color-based slaad returned, along with several alternative versions and new slaadi:
* Red Slaads are divided into Blood Slaads (pretty much their old selves) and Juggernauts (15ft tall musclebound bruisers).
* Blue Slaads are divided into Talon Slaads (armed with chaos phage implanting wristblades) and Digesters (oversized brutes who seek to literally eat away at reality),
* Green Slaads are divided into Curse Slaads and Madjacks, characterized mostly by their different sets of magical abilities.
* Gray Slaads are divided into Rift Slaads (who can manipulate the planar fabric) and Havocs (more powerful versions).
* Black Slaads are divided into Void Slaads (who have all sorts of life-draining tricks) and Entropics (who can shapeshift into life-draining miniature black holes).
* White Slaads (also called Chronos Slaads) have the power to pull replicas of themselves from the time stream.
* Flux Slaads are the smallest and weakest of their ilk, often fleeing the [[Elemental Chaos]] to set themselves up as rulers of [[bullywug]] tribes.
* Slaad Spawners are mutant slaads of any of the aforementioned breeds who can produce baby slaads (not slaad larvae, miniature adult slaads) from noxious boils on their backs.
* Golden Slaads have been transformed by exposure to a surge of raw chaos, and randomly shift into and out of the form of a golden [[slime]].
* Putrid Slaads are slaad [[zombie]]s.

===Rulers===
Slaadi are ruled by the Slaad Lords, who represent unique aspects of Chaos.
* [[Ssendam, Lord of the Insane]], appears as either a giant golden slaad or an immense translucent-gold [[slime]] that resembles an amoeba with a human brain for a nucleus. It has been described as being either male or female in different sources, and with the alternate forms of a naked man wielding a black sword that stuns what it touches, a golden slaad, or a gorgeous gold-skinned [[elf]]-maid with 0 [[Wisdom]].
* [[Ygorl, Lord of Entropy]], manifests as either a giant black slaad or a shadowy, sickle-wielding, bat-winged humanoid skeleton. Also played by the epic Michael Clarke Duncan in the game "Demon Stone." Some sources say he actually experiences time backwards.
* Tales of the Outer Plane added the forgotten Slaad Lord [[Wartle]], whilst [[Dragon Magazine]] #221 added [[Chourst, Lord of Randomness]] (who is basically the most ADHD Slaad imaginable), and [[Renbuu, Lord of Colors]] (who loves to experiment with changing colors on everything), who later became official in the [[Planescape]] expansion Planes of Chaos.
* Dungeon #101 added [[Bazim-Gorag the Firebringer]], who became official in the "Champions of Ruin" [[splatbook]] for the [[Forgotten Realms]]. He has two heads, a fiery aura, and a glaive wreathed in black flame.
* Secrets of the Plane Below mentions [[Norsar the Many]], a white slaad lord with the ability to pull hundreds of different temporal duplicates of himself from the timestream.

==Alternate Versions==
They got a lot of attention in the [[World Axis]], but were really revamped; amongst other things, they changed from being chaotically random to wanting to dissolve all of reality into an endless chaos, changing them to the 4e definition of Chaotic Evil (since 4e [[skub]]tastically decided to reduce [[Alignment]] to a spectrum of Lawful Good - Good - Unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil). This was explained in "Secrets of the Plane Below" that slaad believe there was once an infinite multiverse of many parallel realities (think Marvel or DC), but somehow they all got smooshed together into the present cosmology. This really pisses them off, and/or has driven them mad, because they supposedly can still see into the former parallel realities and now they want to rip reality apart in order to free them.

4e slaads even got their own [[Demon Prince]]; Urae-Naas, a "female" slaad so bloated with eggs she can't walk anymore and has to drag herself along on her long arms and enormous tongue, who rules over the Phage Breeding Grounds; a bounded 10-mile demiplane made from the ever-rotting guts of her dead boyfriend, the [[Archomental|Primordial]] Ramenos, which serves as the 53rd layer of the [[Abyss]]. The plane's most distinguishing feature is the legions of humanoid slaves trapped within the rotting walls of the entrail-caverns, screaming vainly for release before she drags her bulk their way and decides to implant them with her brain-eating progeny.

That's not to say they were entirely stripped of their randomness; they got a really fun "Slaad Reaction Table" in the Secrets of the Plane Below splatbook, where trying to talk to a slaad could result in it suddenly becoming convinced the party doesn't exist, bursting into croaking laughter, attacking them in a mad frenzy, or its head exploding violently before the rest of it nonchalantly wanders off.

[[Pathfinder]] replaced them with the more snake-like [[Proteans]] of the Maelstrom, creation, and destruction in one, and who created much of the rest of the multiverse in their experiments with chaos. Whether or not this was a bad is a question long debated by philosophers (except the Abyss, most people are pretty sure on that one and it's generally considered the Protean's oldest mistake), but Proteans are open to debate on the matter. They're also open to dissolving you into raw chaos with warp waves, some of their castes are as violent as any Slaad, but on the whole, they tend to be more philosophical and varied than their froggy cousins.

==See Also==
For more info, check out these links:
* http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-slaad.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaad

==Gallery==
<gallery>
Red slaad 1e.png|1e Red
Blue Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Blue
Green Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Green
Gray Slaad 1e.png|1e Gray
Death slaad 1e.png|1e Death
Red Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Red
Blue Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Blue
Green Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Green
Gray Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Gray
Death Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Death
Slaad 3e.jpg
Green Slaad 2e.gif
Slaad MM 2e.png
Blue Death Slaad 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad EC.png
Slaad Planescape.jpg
Slaad plane below.jpg
Slaad spawner.jpg
Slaad limbo.jpg
Bazimgorag.jpg
Mud Slaad.jpg|Mud Slaad
White Slaad.jpg|White Slaad
Black Slaad.jpg|Black Slaad
Golden Slaad.jpg|Golden Slaad
Gormeel.jpg|Gormeel
Slaad Gith 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad combat.jpg
Chourst.jpg|Chourst
Renbuu.jpg|Renbuu
Renbuu Planescape.jpg|Renbuu in Planescape
Ygorl 1e.jpg|1e Ygorl
Ygorl 2e.jpg|2e Ygorl
Ygorl 4e.jpg|4e Ygorl
Ssendam 1e.jpg|Ssendam
Wartle.jpg|Wartle, the most un-badass of the Slaad Lords
</gallery>

{{D&D-Outsiders}}

Slaad

2021-06-16T22:43:56Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Slaad Types */

[[File:Slaad 4.jpg|300px|thumb|right|A red, green, blue and gray Slaad.]]

The '''Slaadi''' are a race of toad-like extraplanar beings from the world of [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Natives of [[Limbo]], they are the counterparts to the [[Modron]]s in that they serve as the living exemplars of [[alignment|Chaotic Neutral]]. They originated in 1st edition as submissions of D&D fan and science fiction author Charles Stross perhaps by way of '' [[White Dwarf]]'' (although, contrary to common thought, ''not'' to its [[Fiend Factory]]); thence they hopped over to the eenfamous [[Fiend Folio]].

In practice, they got portrayed as [[Chaotic Stupid|"Whee! Lolrandumb! I's funny!"]]. Blame [[Planescape]]'s ''Faces of Evil'' for Xanxost.

==Slaad Types==
Slaadi are mostly remembered for coming in multiple different colors and their horrific breeding cycle. See, the basic Slaad come in Blue and Red colors. Blue Slaadi have a corruptive bite/claw attack (depending on the edition) that physically and mentally mutates a victim into a Red Slaad. And Red Slaadi can implant eggs with their claw attacks that hatch into chest-bursting tadpoles that subsequently turn into Blue Slaadi.

If the victim of either a blue slaad or a red slaad is high enough level (AD&D), an arcane spellcaster (3e), or able to cast any sort of third-level spell (5e), then the result is instead a Green Slaad, a more powerful strain with innate spellcasting abilities. These are cherished and prized by the lower Reds and Blues, who seek to nurture them; as a result, green slaadi are notably arrogant and braggadocios. They have the ability to assume a humanoid form - in AD&D, this is the form of their original host, but in 3e this became a simple Change Shape ability, which is passed on to the higher forms.

If Green Slaadi live for at least a century, they have the chance to mature into the more powerful Gray Slaadi, who are the next tier on the progression ladder. These are much better mages, and have a particular skill in crafting and using magical items.

Death Slaadi are the next highest up on the list. In AD&D, nobody knows where Death Slaadi come from; in 3rd edition, it was stated that gray slaadi who have survived for at least a century in that form sometimes undergo a ritual that transforms them into death slaadi; the ritual seems to involve infecting themselves with the essence of Evil, which is why Death Slaadi are 'sometimes' Chaotic Evil and other slaadi are Chaotic Neutral. 5e says that the ritual requires consuming the corpse of a slain death slaad, which means the number of these monsters is fixed. These are portrayed as the brutal overlords of the race, albeit inferior in power to the mighty Slaad Lords.

There might, in the existence of Death Slaadi, be a proto Mencius Moldbug commentary on the 'Great Wheel': that chaotic good is a sham and that chaos is, at its core, evil - or at least [[Far Realm]]. Some at TSR recognised that That Way Comes [[Skub]]. So the first Monstrous Compendium appendix for Planescape (2e, barely) retcons that Death Slaadi are all chaotic-neutral like the rest of 'em. The 3e Monster Manual kicks that right in the pants, to restore the near-evil. The Epic book doubled down with the Black Slaad, also sometimes evil. Simply adding a chaotic good counterpart to the death slaadi is an idea that nobody seems to have thought of yet.

The exact list of types has (appropriately) fluctuated over editions, but the general list is '''Red''', '''Blue''', '''Green''', '''Gray''' and '''Death''', as this was the original slaad list in [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]].

In 3rd edition, the '''Mud Slaad''', '''Black Slaad''' and '''White Slaad''' were added as direct parts of the family tree. Mud Slaads, which appeared in the 3e [[Fiend Folio]], are the least member of the member of the slaad race, inferior even to Red and blue Slaadi, and are portrayed as cowardly, cringing, insecure creatures with a sonic damage-inflicting shriek attack, they reproduce by mutating other creatures into more mud slaad. Black and White Slaadi are the ultimate non-Slaad-Lord forms of the Slaad Race, and appeared in 3e's Epic Level Handbook. Death Slaadi who survive for at least a century mature into White Slaadi (which would mean that the number of black slaadi, rather than being fixed, should be in perpetual ''decline''), who in turn become Black Slaadi if they survive another century. Aside from different levels of epic power (HP, defenses, etc), both Whites and Blacks have the exact same abilities, including the ability to infect victims with raw chaos-stuff that can rapidly break the victim down into more chaos-stuff.

[[Dragon Magazine]] #306 introduced the '''[[Gormeel]]''', which are a mutant slaad offshoot characterized by their ''Lawful'' alignment.

In 4th edition, most of the color-based slaad returned, along with several alternative versions and new slaadi:
* Red Slaads are divided into Blood Slaads (pretty much their old selves) and Juggernauts (15ft tall musclebound bruisers).
* Blue Slaads are divided into Talon Slaads (armed with chaos phage implanting wristblades) and Digesters (oversized brutes who seek to literally eat away at reality),
* Green Slaads are divided into Curse Slaads and Madjacks, characterized mostly by their different sets of magical abilities.
* Gray Slaads are divided into Rift Slaads (who can manipulate the planar fabric) and Havocs (more powerful versions).
* Black Slaads are divided into Void Slaads (who have all sorts of life-draining tricks) and Entropics (who can shapeshift into life-draining miniature black holes).
* White Slaads (also called Chronos Slaads) have the power to pull replicas of themselves from the time stream.
* Flux Slaads are the smallest and weakest of their ilk, often fleeing the [[Elemental Chaos]] to set themselves up as rulers of [[bullywug]] tribes.
* Slaad Spawners are mutant slaads of any of the aforementioned breeds who can produce baby slaads (not slaad larvae, miniature adult slaads) from noxious boils on their backs.
* Golden Slaads have been transformed by exposure to a surge of raw chaos, and randomly shift into and out of the form of a golden [[slime]].
* Putrid Slaads are slaad [[zombie]]s.

===Rulers===
Slaadi are ruled by the Slaad Lords, who represent unique aspects of Chaos.
* [[Ssendam, Lord of the Insane]], appears as either a giant golden slaad or an immense translucent-gold [[slime]] that resembles an amoeba with a human brain for a nucleus. It has been described as being either male or female in different sources, and with the alternate forms of a naked man wielding a black sword that stuns what it touches, a golden slaad, or a gorgeous gold-skinned [[elf]]-maid with 0 [[Wisdom]].
* [[Ygorl, Lord of Entropy]], manifests as either a giant black slaad or a shadowy, sickle-wielding, bat-winged humanoid skeleton. Also played by the epic Michael Clarke Duncan in the game "Demon Stone." Some sources say he actually experiences time backwards.
* Tales of the Outer Plane added the forgotten Slaad Lord [[Wartle]], whilst [[Dragon Magazine]] #221 added [[Chourst, Lord of Randomness]] (who is basically the most ADHD Slaad imaginable), and [[Renbuu, Lord of Colors]] (who loves to experiment with changing colors on everything), who later became official in the [[Planescape]] expansion Planes of Chaos.
* Dungeon #101 added [[Bazim-Gorag the Firebringer]], who became official in the "Champions of Ruin" [[splatbook]] for the [[Forgotten Realms]]. He has two heads, a fiery aura, and a glaive wreathed in black flame.
* Secrets of the Plane Below mentions [[Norsar the Many]], a white slaad lord with the ability to pull hundreds of different temporal duplicates of himself from the timestream.

==Alternate Versions==
They got a lot of attention in the [[World Axis]], but were really revamped; amongst other things, they changed from being chaotically random to wanting to dissolve all of reality into an endless chaos, changing them to the 4e definition of Chaotic Evil (since 4e [[skub]]tastically decided to reduce [[Alignment]] to a spectrum of Lawful Good - Good - Unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil). This was explained in "Secrets of the Plane Below" that slaad believe there was once an infinite multiverse of many parallel realities (think Marvel or DC), but somehow they all got smooshed together into the present cosmology. This really pisses them off, and/or has driven them mad, because they supposedly can still see into the former parallel realities and now they want to rip reality apart in order to free them.

4e slaads even got their own [[Demon Prince]]; Urae-Naas, a "female" slaad so bloated with eggs she can't walk anymore and has to drag herself along on her long arms and enormous tongue, who rules over the Phage Breeding Grounds; a bounded 10-mile demiplane made from the ever-rotting guts of her dead boyfriend, the [[Archomental|Primordial]] Ramenos, which serves as the 53rd layer of the [[Abyss]]. The plane's most distinguishing feature is the legions of humanoid slaves trapped within the rotting walls of the entrail-caverns, screaming vainly for release before she drags her bulk their way and decides to implant them with her brain-eating progeny.

That's not to say they were entirely stripped of their randomness; they got a really fun "Slaad Reaction Table" in the Secrets of the Plane Below splatbook, where trying to talk to a slaad could result in it suddenly becoming convinced the party doesn't exist, bursting into croaking laughter, attacking them in a mad frenzy, or its head exploding violently before the rest of it nonchalantly wanders off.

[[Pathfinder]] replaced them with the more snake-like [[Proteans]] of the Maelstrom, creation, and destruction in one, and who created much of the rest of the multiverse in their experiments with chaos. Whether or not this was a bad is a question long debated by philosophers (except the Abyss, most people are pretty sure on that one and it's generally considered the Protean's oldest mistake), but Proteans are open to debate on the matter. They're also open to dissolving you into raw chaos with warp waves, some of their castes are as violent as any Slaad, but on the whole, they tend to be more philosophical and varied than their froggy cousins.

==See Also==
For more info, check out these links:
* http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-slaad.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaad

==Gallery==
<gallery>
Red slaad 1e.png|1e Red
Blue Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Blue
Green Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Green
Gray Slaad 1e.png|1e Gray
Death slaad 1e.png|1e Death
Red Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Red
Blue Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Blue
Green Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Green
Gray Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Gray
Death Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Death
Slaad 3e.jpg
Green Slaad 2e.gif
Slaad MM 2e.png
Blue Death Slaad 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad EC.png
Slaad Planescape.jpg
Slaad plane below.jpg
Slaad spawner.jpg
Slaad limbo.jpg
Bazimgorag.jpg
Mud Slaad.jpg|Mud Slaad
White Slaad.jpg|White Slaad
Black Slaad.jpg|Black Slaad
Golden Slaad.jpg|Golden Slaad
Gormeel.jpg|Gormeel
Slaad Gith 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad combat.jpg
Chourst.jpg|Chourst
Renbuu.jpg|Renbuu
Renbuu Planescape.jpg|Renbuu in Planescape
Ygorl 1e.jpg|1e Ygorl
Ygorl 2e.jpg|2e Ygorl
Ygorl 4e.jpg|4e Ygorl
Ssendam 1e.jpg|Ssendam
Wartle.jpg|Wartle, the most un-badass of the Slaad Lords
</gallery>

{{D&D-Outsiders}}

Slaad

2021-06-16T22:43:17Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Slaad Types */

[[File:Slaad 4.jpg|300px|thumb|right|A red, green, blue and gray Slaad.]]

The '''Slaadi''' are a race of toad-like extraplanar beings from the world of [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Natives of [[Limbo]], they are the counterparts to the [[Modron]]s in that they serve as the living exemplars of [[alignment|Chaotic Neutral]]. They originated in 1st edition as submissions of D&D fan and science fiction author Charles Stross perhaps by way of '' [[White Dwarf]]'' (although, contrary to common thought, ''not'' to its [[Fiend Factory]]); thence they hopped over to the eenfamous [[Fiend Folio]].

In practice, they got portrayed as [[Chaotic Stupid|"Whee! Lolrandumb! I's funny!"]]. Blame [[Planescape]]'s ''Faces of Evil'' for Xanxost.

==Slaad Types==
Slaadi are mostly remembered for coming in multiple different colors and their horrific breeding cycle. See, the basic Slaad come in Blue and Red colors. Blue Slaadi have a corruptive bite/claw attack (depending on the edition) that physically and mentally mutates a victim into a Red Slaad. And Red Slaadi can implant eggs with their claw attacks that hatch into chest-bursting tadpoles that subsequently turn into Blue Slaadi.

If the victim of either a blue slaad or a red slaad is high enough level (AD&D), an arcane spellcaster (3e), or able to cast any sort of third-level spell (5e), then the result is instead a Green Slaad, a more powerful strain with innate spellcasting abilities. These are cherished and prized by the lower Reds and Blues, who seek to nurture them; as a result, green slaadi are notably arrogant and braggadocios. They have the ability to assume a humanoid form - in AD&D, this is the form of their original host, but in 3e this became a simple Change Shape ability, which is passed on to the higher forms.

If Green Slaadi live for at least a century, they have the chance to mature into the more powerful Gray Slaadi, who are the next tier on the progression ladder. These are much better mages, and have a particular in crafting and using magical items.

Death Slaadi are the next highest up on the list. In AD&D, nobody knows where Death Slaadi come from; in 3rd edition, it was stated that gray slaadi who have survived for at least a century in that form sometimes undergo a ritual that transforms them into death slaadi; the ritual seems to involve infecting themselves with the essence of Evil, which is why Death Slaadi are 'sometimes' Chaotic Evil and other slaadi are Chaotic Neutral. 5e says that the ritual requires consuming the corpse of a slain death slaad, which means the number of these monsters is fixed. These are portrayed as the brutal overlords of the race, albeit inferior in power to the mighty Slaad Lords.

There might, in the existence of Death Slaadi, be a proto Mencius Moldbug commentary on the 'Great Wheel': that chaotic good is a sham and that chaos is, at its core, evil - or at least [[Far Realm]]. Some at TSR recognised that That Way Comes [[Skub]]. So the first Monstrous Compendium appendix for Planescape (2e, barely) retcons that Death Slaadi are all chaotic-neutral like the rest of 'em. The 3e Monster Manual kicks that right in the pants, to restore the near-evil. The Epic book doubled down with the Black Slaad, also sometimes evil. Simply adding a chaotic good counterpart to the death slaadi is an idea that nobody seems to have thought of yet.

The exact list of types has (appropriately) fluctuated over editions, but the general list is '''Red''', '''Blue''', '''Green''', '''Gray''' and '''Death''', as this was the original slaad list in [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]].

In 3rd edition, the '''Mud Slaad''', '''Black Slaad''' and '''White Slaad''' were added as direct parts of the family tree. Mud Slaads, which appeared in the 3e [[Fiend Folio]], are the least member of the member of the slaad race, inferior even to Red and blue Slaadi, and are portrayed as cowardly, cringing, insecure creatures with a sonic damage-inflicting shriek attack, they reproduce by mutating other creatures into more mud slaad. Black and White Slaadi are the ultimate non-Slaad-Lord forms of the Slaad Race, and appeared in 3e's Epic Level Handbook. Death Slaadi who survive for at least a century mature into White Slaadi (which would mean that the number of black slaadi, rather than being fixed, should be in perpetual ''decline''), who in turn become Black Slaadi if they survive another century. Aside from different levels of epic power (HP, defenses, etc), both Whites and Blacks have the exact same abilities, including the ability to infect victims with raw chaos-stuff that can rapidly break the victim down into more chaos-stuff.

[[Dragon Magazine]] #306 introduced the '''[[Gormeel]]''', which are a mutant slaad offshoot characterized by their ''Lawful'' alignment.

In 4th edition, most of the color-based slaad returned, along with several alternative versions and new slaadi:
* Red Slaads are divided into Blood Slaads (pretty much their old selves) and Juggernauts (15ft tall musclebound bruisers).
* Blue Slaads are divided into Talon Slaads (armed with chaos phage implanting wristblades) and Digesters (oversized brutes who seek to literally eat away at reality),
* Green Slaads are divided into Curse Slaads and Madjacks, characterized mostly by their different sets of magical abilities.
* Gray Slaads are divided into Rift Slaads (who can manipulate the planar fabric) and Havocs (more powerful versions).
* Black Slaads are divided into Void Slaads (who have all sorts of life-draining tricks) and Entropics (who can shapeshift into life-draining miniature black holes).
* White Slaads (also called Chronos Slaads) have the power to pull replicas of themselves from the time stream.
* Flux Slaads are the smallest and weakest of their ilk, often fleeing the [[Elemental Chaos]] to set themselves up as rulers of [[bullywug]] tribes.
* Slaad Spawners are mutant slaads of any of the aforementioned breeds who can produce baby slaads (not slaad larvae, miniature adult slaads) from noxious boils on their backs.
* Golden Slaads have been transformed by exposure to a surge of raw chaos, and randomly shift into and out of the form of a golden [[slime]].
* Putrid Slaads are slaad [[zombie]]s.

===Rulers===
Slaadi are ruled by the Slaad Lords, who represent unique aspects of Chaos.
* [[Ssendam, Lord of the Insane]], appears as either a giant golden slaad or an immense translucent-gold [[slime]] that resembles an amoeba with a human brain for a nucleus. It has been described as being either male or female in different sources, and with the alternate forms of a naked man wielding a black sword that stuns what it touches, a golden slaad, or a gorgeous gold-skinned [[elf]]-maid with 0 [[Wisdom]].
* [[Ygorl, Lord of Entropy]], manifests as either a giant black slaad or a shadowy, sickle-wielding, bat-winged humanoid skeleton. Also played by the epic Michael Clarke Duncan in the game "Demon Stone." Some sources say he actually experiences time backwards.
* Tales of the Outer Plane added the forgotten Slaad Lord [[Wartle]], whilst [[Dragon Magazine]] #221 added [[Chourst, Lord of Randomness]] (who is basically the most ADHD Slaad imaginable), and [[Renbuu, Lord of Colors]] (who loves to experiment with changing colors on everything), who later became official in the [[Planescape]] expansion Planes of Chaos.
* Dungeon #101 added [[Bazim-Gorag the Firebringer]], who became official in the "Champions of Ruin" [[splatbook]] for the [[Forgotten Realms]]. He has two heads, a fiery aura, and a glaive wreathed in black flame.
* Secrets of the Plane Below mentions [[Norsar the Many]], a white slaad lord with the ability to pull hundreds of different temporal duplicates of himself from the timestream.

==Alternate Versions==
They got a lot of attention in the [[World Axis]], but were really revamped; amongst other things, they changed from being chaotically random to wanting to dissolve all of reality into an endless chaos, changing them to the 4e definition of Chaotic Evil (since 4e [[skub]]tastically decided to reduce [[Alignment]] to a spectrum of Lawful Good - Good - Unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil). This was explained in "Secrets of the Plane Below" that slaad believe there was once an infinite multiverse of many parallel realities (think Marvel or DC), but somehow they all got smooshed together into the present cosmology. This really pisses them off, and/or has driven them mad, because they supposedly can still see into the former parallel realities and now they want to rip reality apart in order to free them.

4e slaads even got their own [[Demon Prince]]; Urae-Naas, a "female" slaad so bloated with eggs she can't walk anymore and has to drag herself along on her long arms and enormous tongue, who rules over the Phage Breeding Grounds; a bounded 10-mile demiplane made from the ever-rotting guts of her dead boyfriend, the [[Archomental|Primordial]] Ramenos, which serves as the 53rd layer of the [[Abyss]]. The plane's most distinguishing feature is the legions of humanoid slaves trapped within the rotting walls of the entrail-caverns, screaming vainly for release before she drags her bulk their way and decides to implant them with her brain-eating progeny.

That's not to say they were entirely stripped of their randomness; they got a really fun "Slaad Reaction Table" in the Secrets of the Plane Below splatbook, where trying to talk to a slaad could result in it suddenly becoming convinced the party doesn't exist, bursting into croaking laughter, attacking them in a mad frenzy, or its head exploding violently before the rest of it nonchalantly wanders off.

[[Pathfinder]] replaced them with the more snake-like [[Proteans]] of the Maelstrom, creation, and destruction in one, and who created much of the rest of the multiverse in their experiments with chaos. Whether or not this was a bad is a question long debated by philosophers (except the Abyss, most people are pretty sure on that one and it's generally considered the Protean's oldest mistake), but Proteans are open to debate on the matter. They're also open to dissolving you into raw chaos with warp waves, some of their castes are as violent as any Slaad, but on the whole, they tend to be more philosophical and varied than their froggy cousins.

==See Also==
For more info, check out these links:
* http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-slaad.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaad

==Gallery==
<gallery>
Red slaad 1e.png|1e Red
Blue Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Blue
Green Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Green
Gray Slaad 1e.png|1e Gray
Death slaad 1e.png|1e Death
Red Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Red
Blue Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Blue
Green Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Green
Gray Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Gray
Death Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Death
Slaad 3e.jpg
Green Slaad 2e.gif
Slaad MM 2e.png
Blue Death Slaad 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad EC.png
Slaad Planescape.jpg
Slaad plane below.jpg
Slaad spawner.jpg
Slaad limbo.jpg
Bazimgorag.jpg
Mud Slaad.jpg|Mud Slaad
White Slaad.jpg|White Slaad
Black Slaad.jpg|Black Slaad
Golden Slaad.jpg|Golden Slaad
Gormeel.jpg|Gormeel
Slaad Gith 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad combat.jpg
Chourst.jpg|Chourst
Renbuu.jpg|Renbuu
Renbuu Planescape.jpg|Renbuu in Planescape
Ygorl 1e.jpg|1e Ygorl
Ygorl 2e.jpg|2e Ygorl
Ygorl 4e.jpg|4e Ygorl
Ssendam 1e.jpg|Ssendam
Wartle.jpg|Wartle, the most un-badass of the Slaad Lords
</gallery>

{{D&D-Outsiders}}

Slaad

2021-06-16T22:41:17Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Slaad Types */

[[File:Slaad 4.jpg|300px|thumb|right|A red, green, blue and gray Slaad.]]

The '''Slaadi''' are a race of toad-like extraplanar beings from the world of [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Natives of [[Limbo]], they are the counterparts to the [[Modron]]s in that they serve as the living exemplars of [[alignment|Chaotic Neutral]]. They originated in 1st edition as submissions of D&D fan and science fiction author Charles Stross perhaps by way of '' [[White Dwarf]]'' (although, contrary to common thought, ''not'' to its [[Fiend Factory]]); thence they hopped over to the eenfamous [[Fiend Folio]].

In practice, they got portrayed as [[Chaotic Stupid|"Whee! Lolrandumb! I's funny!"]]. Blame [[Planescape]]'s ''Faces of Evil'' for Xanxost.

==Slaad Types==
Slaadi are mostly remembered for coming in multiple different colors and their horrific breeding cycle. See, the basic Slaad come in Blue and Red colors. Blue Slaadi have a corruptive bite/claw attack that physically and mentally mutates a victim into a Red Slaad. And Red Slaadi can implant eggs with their claw attacks that hatch into chest-bursting tadpoles that subsequently turn into Blue Slaadi.

If the victim of either a blue slaad or a red slaad is high enough level (AD&D), an arcane spellcaster (3e), or able to cast any sort of third-level spell (5e), then the result is instead a Green Slaad, a more powerful strain with innate spellcasting abilities. These are cherished and prized by the lower Reds and Blues, who seek to nurture them; as a result, green slaadi are notably arrogant and braggadocios. They have the ability to assume a humanoid form - in AD&D, this is the form of their original host, but in 3e this became a simple Change Shape ability, which is passed on to the higher forms.

If Green Slaadi live for at least a century, they have the chance to mature into the more powerful Gray Slaadi, who are the next tier on the progression ladder. These are much better mages, and have a particular in crafting and using magical items.

Death Slaadi are the next highest up on the list. In AD&D, nobody knows where Death Slaadi come from; in 3rd edition, it was stated that gray slaadi who have survived for at least a century in that form sometimes undergo a ritual that transforms them into death slaadi; the ritual seems to involve infecting themselves with the essence of Evil, which is why Death Slaadi are 'sometimes' Chaotic Evil and other slaadi are Chaotic Neutral. 5e says that the ritual requires consuming the corpse of a slain death slaad, which means the number of these monsters is fixed. These are portrayed as the brutal overlords of the race, albeit inferior in power to the mighty Slaad Lords.

There might, in the existence of Death Slaadi, be a proto Mencius Moldbug commentary on the 'Great Wheel': that chaotic good is a sham and that chaos is, at its core, evil - or at least [[Far Realm]]. Some at TSR recognised that That Way Comes [[Skub]]. So the first Monstrous Compendium appendix for Planescape (2e, barely) retcons that Death Slaadi are all chaotic-neutral like the rest of 'em. The 3e Monster Manual kicks that right in the pants, to restore the near-evil. The Epic book doubled down with the Black Slaad, also sometimes evil. Simply adding a chaotic good counterpart to the death slaadi is an idea that nobody seems to have thought of yet.

The exact list of types has (appropriately) fluctuated over editions, but the general list is '''Red''', '''Blue''', '''Green''', '''Gray''' and '''Death''', as this was the original slaad list in [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]].

In 3rd edition, the '''Mud Slaad''', '''Black Slaad''' and '''White Slaad''' were added as direct parts of the family tree. Mud Slaads, which appeared in the 3e [[Fiend Folio]], are the least member of the member of the slaad race, inferior even to Red and blue Slaadi, and are portrayed as cowardly, cringing, insecure creatures with a sonic damage-inflicting shriek attack, they reproduce by mutating other creatures into more mud slaad. Black and White Slaadi are the ultimate non-Slaad-Lord forms of the Slaad Race, and appeared in 3e's Epic Level Handbook. Death Slaadi who survive for at least a century mature into White Slaadi (which would mean that the number of black slaadi, rather than being fixed, should be in perpetual ''decline''), who in turn become Black Slaadi if they survive another century. Aside from different levels of epic power (HP, defenses, etc), both Whites and Blacks have the exact same abilities, including the ability to infect victims with raw chaos-stuff that can rapidly break the victim down into more chaos-stuff.

[[Dragon Magazine]] #306 introduced the '''[[Gormeel]]''', which are a mutant slaad offshoot characterized by their ''Lawful'' alignment.

In 4th edition, most of the color-based slaad returned, along with several alternative versions and new slaadi:
* Red Slaads are divided into Blood Slaads (pretty much their old selves) and Juggernauts (15ft tall musclebound bruisers).
* Blue Slaads are divided into Talon Slaads (armed with chaos phage implanting wristblades) and Digesters (oversized brutes who seek to literally eat away at reality),
* Green Slaads are divided into Curse Slaads and Madjacks, characterized mostly by their different sets of magical abilities.
* Gray Slaads are divided into Rift Slaads (who can manipulate the planar fabric) and Havocs (more powerful versions).
* Black Slaads are divided into Void Slaads (who have all sorts of life-draining tricks) and Entropics (who can shapeshift into life-draining miniature black holes).
* White Slaads (also called Chronos Slaads) have the power to pull replicas of themselves from the time stream.
* Flux Slaads are the smallest and weakest of their ilk, often fleeing the [[Elemental Chaos]] to set themselves up as rulers of [[bullywug]] tribes.
* Slaad Spawners are mutant slaads of any of the aforementioned breeds who can produce baby slaads (not slaad larvae, miniature adult slaads) from noxious boils on their backs.
* Golden Slaads have been transformed by exposure to a surge of raw chaos, and randomly shift into and out of the form of a golden [[slime]].
* Putrid Slaads are slaad [[zombie]]s.

===Rulers===
Slaadi are ruled by the Slaad Lords, who represent unique aspects of Chaos.
* [[Ssendam, Lord of the Insane]], appears as either a giant golden slaad or an immense translucent-gold [[slime]] that resembles an amoeba with a human brain for a nucleus. It has been described as being either male or female in different sources, and with the alternate forms of a naked man wielding a black sword that stuns what it touches, a golden slaad, or a gorgeous gold-skinned [[elf]]-maid with 0 [[Wisdom]].
* [[Ygorl, Lord of Entropy]], manifests as either a giant black slaad or a shadowy, sickle-wielding, bat-winged humanoid skeleton. Also played by the epic Michael Clarke Duncan in the game "Demon Stone." Some sources say he actually experiences time backwards.
* Tales of the Outer Plane added the forgotten Slaad Lord [[Wartle]], whilst [[Dragon Magazine]] #221 added [[Chourst, Lord of Randomness]] (who is basically the most ADHD Slaad imaginable), and [[Renbuu, Lord of Colors]] (who loves to experiment with changing colors on everything), who later became official in the [[Planescape]] expansion Planes of Chaos.
* Dungeon #101 added [[Bazim-Gorag the Firebringer]], who became official in the "Champions of Ruin" [[splatbook]] for the [[Forgotten Realms]]. He has two heads, a fiery aura, and a glaive wreathed in black flame.
* Secrets of the Plane Below mentions [[Norsar the Many]], a white slaad lord with the ability to pull hundreds of different temporal duplicates of himself from the timestream.

==Alternate Versions==
They got a lot of attention in the [[World Axis]], but were really revamped; amongst other things, they changed from being chaotically random to wanting to dissolve all of reality into an endless chaos, changing them to the 4e definition of Chaotic Evil (since 4e [[skub]]tastically decided to reduce [[Alignment]] to a spectrum of Lawful Good - Good - Unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil). This was explained in "Secrets of the Plane Below" that slaad believe there was once an infinite multiverse of many parallel realities (think Marvel or DC), but somehow they all got smooshed together into the present cosmology. This really pisses them off, and/or has driven them mad, because they supposedly can still see into the former parallel realities and now they want to rip reality apart in order to free them.

4e slaads even got their own [[Demon Prince]]; Urae-Naas, a "female" slaad so bloated with eggs she can't walk anymore and has to drag herself along on her long arms and enormous tongue, who rules over the Phage Breeding Grounds; a bounded 10-mile demiplane made from the ever-rotting guts of her dead boyfriend, the [[Archomental|Primordial]] Ramenos, which serves as the 53rd layer of the [[Abyss]]. The plane's most distinguishing feature is the legions of humanoid slaves trapped within the rotting walls of the entrail-caverns, screaming vainly for release before she drags her bulk their way and decides to implant them with her brain-eating progeny.

That's not to say they were entirely stripped of their randomness; they got a really fun "Slaad Reaction Table" in the Secrets of the Plane Below splatbook, where trying to talk to a slaad could result in it suddenly becoming convinced the party doesn't exist, bursting into croaking laughter, attacking them in a mad frenzy, or its head exploding violently before the rest of it nonchalantly wanders off.

[[Pathfinder]] replaced them with the more snake-like [[Proteans]] of the Maelstrom, creation, and destruction in one, and who created much of the rest of the multiverse in their experiments with chaos. Whether or not this was a bad is a question long debated by philosophers (except the Abyss, most people are pretty sure on that one and it's generally considered the Protean's oldest mistake), but Proteans are open to debate on the matter. They're also open to dissolving you into raw chaos with warp waves, some of their castes are as violent as any Slaad, but on the whole, they tend to be more philosophical and varied than their froggy cousins.

==See Also==
For more info, check out these links:
* http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-slaad.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaad

==Gallery==
<gallery>
Red slaad 1e.png|1e Red
Blue Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Blue
Green Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Green
Gray Slaad 1e.png|1e Gray
Death slaad 1e.png|1e Death
Red Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Red
Blue Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Blue
Green Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Green
Gray Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Gray
Death Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Death
Slaad 3e.jpg
Green Slaad 2e.gif
Slaad MM 2e.png
Blue Death Slaad 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad EC.png
Slaad Planescape.jpg
Slaad plane below.jpg
Slaad spawner.jpg
Slaad limbo.jpg
Bazimgorag.jpg
Mud Slaad.jpg|Mud Slaad
White Slaad.jpg|White Slaad
Black Slaad.jpg|Black Slaad
Golden Slaad.jpg|Golden Slaad
Gormeel.jpg|Gormeel
Slaad Gith 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad combat.jpg
Chourst.jpg|Chourst
Renbuu.jpg|Renbuu
Renbuu Planescape.jpg|Renbuu in Planescape
Ygorl 1e.jpg|1e Ygorl
Ygorl 2e.jpg|2e Ygorl
Ygorl 4e.jpg|4e Ygorl
Ssendam 1e.jpg|Ssendam
Wartle.jpg|Wartle, the most un-badass of the Slaad Lords
</gallery>

{{D&D-Outsiders}}

Slaad

2021-06-16T22:39:46Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3:

[[File:Slaad 4.jpg|300px|thumb|right|A red, green, blue and gray Slaad.]]

The '''Slaadi''' are a race of toad-like extraplanar beings from the world of [[Dungeons & Dragons]]. Natives of [[Limbo]], they are the counterparts to the [[Modron]]s in that they serve as the living exemplars of [[alignment|Chaotic Neutral]]. They originated in 1st edition as submissions of D&D fan and science fiction author Charles Stross perhaps by way of '' [[White Dwarf]]'' (although, contrary to common thought, ''not'' to its [[Fiend Factory]]); thence they hopped over to the eenfamous [[Fiend Folio]].

In practice, they got portrayed as [[Chaotic Stupid|"Whee! Lolrandumb! I's funny!"]]. Blame [[Planescape]]'s ''Faces of Evil'' for Xanxost.

==Slaad Types==
Slaadi are mostly remembered for coming in multiple different colors and their horrific breeding cycle. See, the basic Slaad come in Blue and Red colors. Blue Slaadi have a corruptive bite that physically and mentally mutates a victim into a Red Slaad. And Red Slaadi can implant eggs with their claw attacks that hatch into brain-eating tadpoles that subsequently turn into Blue Slaadi.

If the victim of either a blue slaad or a red slaad is high enough level (AD&D), an arcane spellcaster (3e), or able to cast any sort of third-level spell (5e), then the result is instead a Green Slaad, a more powerful strain with innate spellcasting abilities. These are cherished and prized by the lower Reds and Blues, who seek to nurture them; as a result, green slaadi are notably arrogant and braggadocios. They have the ability to assume a humanoid form - in AD&D, this is the form of their original host, but in 3e this became a simple Change Shape ability, which is passed on to the higher forms.

If Green Slaadi live for at least a century, they have the chance to mature into the more powerful Gray Slaadi, who are the next tier on the progression ladder. These are much better mages, and have a particular in crafting and using magical items.

Death Slaadi are the next highest up on the list. In AD&D, nobody knows where Death Slaadi come from; in 3rd edition, it was stated that gray slaadi who have survived for at least a century in that form sometimes undergo a ritual that transforms them into death slaadi; the ritual seems to involve infecting themselves with the essence of Evil, which is why Death Slaadi are 'sometimes' Chaotic Evil and other slaadi are Chaotic Neutral. 5e says that the ritual requires consuming the corpse of a slain death slaad, which means the number of these monsters is fixed. These are portrayed as the brutal overlords of the race, albeit inferior in power to the mighty Slaad Lords.

There might, in the existence of Death Slaadi, be a proto Mencius Moldbug commentary on the 'Great Wheel': that chaotic good is a sham and that chaos is, at its core, evil - or at least [[Far Realm]]. Some at TSR recognised that That Way Comes [[Skub]]. So the first Monstrous Compendium appendix for Planescape (2e, barely) retcons that Death Slaadi are all chaotic-neutral like the rest of 'em. The 3e Monster Manual kicks that right in the pants, to restore the near-evil. The Epic book doubled down with the Black Slaad, also sometimes evil. Simply adding a chaotic good counterpart to the death slaadi is an idea that nobody seems to have thought of yet.

The exact list of types has (appropriately) fluctuated over editions, but the general list is '''Red''', '''Blue''', '''Green''', '''Gray''' and '''Death''', as this was the original slaad list in [[Advanced Dungeons & Dragons]].

In 3rd edition, the '''Mud Slaad''', '''Black Slaad''' and '''White Slaad''' were added as direct parts of the family tree. Mud Slaads, which appeared in the 3e [[Fiend Folio]], are the least member of the member of the slaad race, inferior even to Red and blue Slaadi, and are portrayed as cowardly, cringing, insecure creatures with a sonic damage-inflicting shriek attack, they reproduce by mutating other creatures into more mud slaad. Black and White Slaadi are the ultimate non-Slaad-Lord forms of the Slaad Race, and appeared in 3e's Epic Level Handbook. Death Slaadi who survive for at least a century mature into White Slaadi (which would mean that the number of black slaadi, rather than being fixed, should be in perpetual ''decline''), who in turn become Black Slaadi if they survive another century. Aside from different levels of epic power (HP, defenses, etc), both Whites and Blacks have the exact same abilities, including the ability to infect victims with raw chaos-stuff that can rapidly break the victim down into more chaos-stuff.

[[Dragon Magazine]] #306 introduced the '''[[Gormeel]]''', which are a mutant slaad offshoot characterized by their ''Lawful'' alignment.

In 4th edition, most of the color-based slaad returned, along with several alternative versions and new slaadi:
* Red Slaads are divided into Blood Slaads (pretty much their old selves) and Juggernauts (15ft tall musclebound bruisers).
* Blue Slaads are divided into Talon Slaads (armed with chaos phage implanting wristblades) and Digesters (oversized brutes who seek to literally eat away at reality),
* Green Slaads are divided into Curse Slaads and Madjacks, characterized mostly by their different sets of magical abilities.
* Gray Slaads are divided into Rift Slaads (who can manipulate the planar fabric) and Havocs (more powerful versions).
* Black Slaads are divided into Void Slaads (who have all sorts of life-draining tricks) and Entropics (who can shapeshift into life-draining miniature black holes).
* White Slaads (also called Chronos Slaads) have the power to pull replicas of themselves from the time stream.
* Flux Slaads are the smallest and weakest of their ilk, often fleeing the [[Elemental Chaos]] to set themselves up as rulers of [[bullywug]] tribes.
* Slaad Spawners are mutant slaads of any of the aforementioned breeds who can produce baby slaads (not slaad larvae, miniature adult slaads) from noxious boils on their backs.
* Golden Slaads have been transformed by exposure to a surge of raw chaos, and randomly shift into and out of the form of a golden [[slime]].
* Putrid Slaads are slaad [[zombie]]s.

===Rulers===
Slaadi are ruled by the Slaad Lords, who represent unique aspects of Chaos.
* [[Ssendam, Lord of the Insane]], appears as either a giant golden slaad or an immense translucent-gold [[slime]] that resembles an amoeba with a human brain for a nucleus. It has been described as being either male or female in different sources, and with the alternate forms of a naked man wielding a black sword that stuns what it touches, a golden slaad, or a gorgeous gold-skinned [[elf]]-maid with 0 [[Wisdom]].
* [[Ygorl, Lord of Entropy]], manifests as either a giant black slaad or a shadowy, sickle-wielding, bat-winged humanoid skeleton. Also played by the epic Michael Clarke Duncan in the game "Demon Stone." Some sources say he actually experiences time backwards.
* Tales of the Outer Plane added the forgotten Slaad Lord [[Wartle]], whilst [[Dragon Magazine]] #221 added [[Chourst, Lord of Randomness]] (who is basically the most ADHD Slaad imaginable), and [[Renbuu, Lord of Colors]] (who loves to experiment with changing colors on everything), who later became official in the [[Planescape]] expansion Planes of Chaos.
* Dungeon #101 added [[Bazim-Gorag the Firebringer]], who became official in the "Champions of Ruin" [[splatbook]] for the [[Forgotten Realms]]. He has two heads, a fiery aura, and a glaive wreathed in black flame.
* Secrets of the Plane Below mentions [[Norsar the Many]], a white slaad lord with the ability to pull hundreds of different temporal duplicates of himself from the timestream.

==Alternate Versions==
They got a lot of attention in the [[World Axis]], but were really revamped; amongst other things, they changed from being chaotically random to wanting to dissolve all of reality into an endless chaos, changing them to the 4e definition of Chaotic Evil (since 4e [[skub]]tastically decided to reduce [[Alignment]] to a spectrum of Lawful Good - Good - Unaligned - Evil - Chaotic Evil). This was explained in "Secrets of the Plane Below" that slaad believe there was once an infinite multiverse of many parallel realities (think Marvel or DC), but somehow they all got smooshed together into the present cosmology. This really pisses them off, and/or has driven them mad, because they supposedly can still see into the former parallel realities and now they want to rip reality apart in order to free them.

4e slaads even got their own [[Demon Prince]]; Urae-Naas, a "female" slaad so bloated with eggs she can't walk anymore and has to drag herself along on her long arms and enormous tongue, who rules over the Phage Breeding Grounds; a bounded 10-mile demiplane made from the ever-rotting guts of her dead boyfriend, the [[Archomental|Primordial]] Ramenos, which serves as the 53rd layer of the [[Abyss]]. The plane's most distinguishing feature is the legions of humanoid slaves trapped within the rotting walls of the entrail-caverns, screaming vainly for release before she drags her bulk their way and decides to implant them with her brain-eating progeny.

That's not to say they were entirely stripped of their randomness; they got a really fun "Slaad Reaction Table" in the Secrets of the Plane Below splatbook, where trying to talk to a slaad could result in it suddenly becoming convinced the party doesn't exist, bursting into croaking laughter, attacking them in a mad frenzy, or its head exploding violently before the rest of it nonchalantly wanders off.

[[Pathfinder]] replaced them with the more snake-like [[Proteans]] of the Maelstrom, creation, and destruction in one, and who created much of the rest of the multiverse in their experiments with chaos. Whether or not this was a bad is a question long debated by philosophers (except the Abyss, most people are pretty sure on that one and it's generally considered the Protean's oldest mistake), but Proteans are open to debate on the matter. They're also open to dissolving you into raw chaos with warp waves, some of their castes are as violent as any Slaad, but on the whole, they tend to be more philosophical and varied than their froggy cousins.

==See Also==
For more info, check out these links:
* http://thecampaign20xx.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/dungeons-dragons-guide-to-slaad.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slaad

==Gallery==
<gallery>
Red slaad 1e.png|1e Red
Blue Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Blue
Green Slaad 1e.jpg|1e Green
Gray Slaad 1e.png|1e Gray
Death slaad 1e.png|1e Death
Red Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Red
Blue Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Blue
Green Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Green
Gray Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Gray
Death Slaad 5e.jpg|5e Death
Slaad 3e.jpg
Green Slaad 2e.gif
Slaad MM 2e.png
Blue Death Slaad 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad EC.png
Slaad Planescape.jpg
Slaad plane below.jpg
Slaad spawner.jpg
Slaad limbo.jpg
Bazimgorag.jpg
Mud Slaad.jpg|Mud Slaad
White Slaad.jpg|White Slaad
Black Slaad.jpg|Black Slaad
Golden Slaad.jpg|Golden Slaad
Gormeel.jpg|Gormeel
Slaad Gith 3e.jpg
Blue Slaad combat.jpg
Chourst.jpg|Chourst
Renbuu.jpg|Renbuu
Renbuu Planescape.jpg|Renbuu in Planescape
Ygorl 1e.jpg|1e Ygorl
Ygorl 2e.jpg|2e Ygorl
Ygorl 4e.jpg|4e Ygorl
Ssendam 1e.jpg|Ssendam
Wartle.jpg|Wartle, the most un-badass of the Slaad Lords
</gallery>

{{D&D-Outsiders}}

Vicious Mockery

2021-06-16T04:49:06Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* 5E */

{{dnd-stub}}
{{topquote|You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range. If the target can hear you (though it need not understand you), it must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or take 1d4 psychic damage and have disadvantage on the next Attack roll it makes before the end of its next turn.|The spell's description in the 5E PHB}}

'''Vicious Mockery''' is a [[Bard]] Cantrip from [[Dungeons & Dragons|Dungeons & Dragons]] that's tied with the class itself just because of how priceless it is. It's widely loved for its incredibly memeable fluff, so much so that nobody seems to realize that the crunch offers questionable value at times.

==[[Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition|4E]]==
Of course it's here as an at-will power. It's a pretty basic ranged attack, dependent on an implement and obviously reliant on Charisma to hit against an enemy's Will. Its damage is also respectable at a fixed 1d6+Cha damage and makes the target take -2 to attack rolls until the end of your next turn.

==[[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition|5E]]==
It's awesome because it gives you an excuse to make a character who's just a nonstop fountain of schlocky one-liners, and the ability to kill the BBEG by insulting their mother. Even better, the clause about the target not needing to understand your language means that, if a bard is nearby, people in this world can suddenly have an emotional breakdown without even understanding why. Lastly the cantrip also gives the target disadvantage on its next attack roll.

You could also slightly reflavor it into your character telling a joke that's so bad it literally causes some of the victim's brain cells to Ragequit.

However, it's only 1d4 of damage, the lowest die of damage you can use in 5e. For comparison, ''Toll the Dead'' from Xanathar's uses a d8, but upgrades to a freaking ''d12'' if the target is missing even ''a single'' hit point. And to add insult to injury, the ''Frostbite'' Cantrip, also from Xanathar's, functions nearly identically to ''Vicious Mockery'', save that it uses a d6 instead of a d4. The advantages ''Vicious Mockery'' has over ''Frostbite'' is that the former doesn't have a somatic component and uses a damage type that isn't commonly resisted, but such things are rarely a consideration in normal gameplay anyway. The lack of a somatic component means that in theory the bard could hold weapons at the same time they cast, helping some bard Gish Builds, but most GM's don't pay hard core attention to spell components anyway so it's not a real distinction.

A somewhat more serious advantage is the saving throw being wis rather then con, so that if your fighting something with a lot of hit points but is stupid the Mockery would do better, in fact Vicious mockery is one of only two cantrips that call on a save from a mental stat, the other being the above-mentioned Toll the Dead. This gives mockery a niche against people too dumb to understand your insulting them, but are tanky or dodgy enough that other cantrips could bounce off them and do no damage. Now is that a broad enough category to make Mockery worth it? While it will vary fromgame to game of course, many low level undead, trolls, handful of giants and some beasts fit into that category. Against higher level 'bosses', espically those with magical abilities, it will struggle but they tend to have high enough stats that any cantrip, which does no damage on a passed save, will struggle.

Overall Vicious Mockery has a niche, and an arguably fairly common use scenario, however it is also inarguably used more often than one likely should simply for the memes. Take it, use it, have fun with it, but remember where its strengths lie and play into them. Insult the dumb muscle and use other stuff on the bosses.

==Gallery==
[[File:Morte.jpg|frameless|Using said ability since 1999. Years before it was printed.]]

Vicious Mockery

2021-06-16T04:46:39Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* 5E */

{{dnd-stub}}
{{topquote|You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range. If the target can hear you (though it need not understand you), it must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or take 1d4 psychic damage and have disadvantage on the next Attack roll it makes before the end of its next turn.|The spell's description in the 5E PHB}}

'''Vicious Mockery''' is a [[Bard]] Cantrip from [[Dungeons & Dragons|Dungeons & Dragons]] that's tied with the class itself just because of how priceless it is. It's widely loved for its incredibly memeable fluff, so much so that nobody seems to realize that the crunch offers questionable value at times.

==[[Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition|4E]]==
Of course it's here as an at-will power. It's a pretty basic ranged attack, dependent on an implement and obviously reliant on Charisma to hit against an enemy's Will. Its damage is also respectable at a fixed 1d6+Cha damage and makes the target take -2 to attack rolls until the end of your next turn.

==[[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition|5E]]==
It's awesome because it gives you an excuse to make a character who's just a nonstop fountain of schlocky one-liners, and the ability to kill the BBEG by insulting their mother. Even better, the clause about the target not needing to understand your language means that, if a bard is nearby, people in this world can suddenly have an emotional breakdown without even understanding why. Lastly the cantrip also gives the target disadvantage on its next attack roll.

You could also slightly reflavor it into your character telling a joke that's so bad it literally causes some of the victim's brain cells to Ragequit.

However, it's only 1d4 of damage, the lowest die of damage you can use in 5e. For comparison, ''Toll the Dead'' from Xanathar's uses a d8, but upgrades to a freaking ''d12'' if the target is missing even ''a single'' hit point. And to add insult to injury, the ''Frostbite'' Cantrip, also from Xanathar's, functions nearly identically to ''Vicious Mockery'', save that it uses a d6 instead of a d4. The advantages ''Vicious Mockery'' has over ''Frostbite'' is that the former doesn't have a somatic component and uses a damage type that isn't commonly resisted, but such things are rarely a consideration in normal gameplay anyway. The lack of a somatic component means that in theory the bard could hold weapons at the same time they cast, helping some bard Gish Builds, but most GM's don't pay hard core attention to spell components anyway so it's not a real distinction.

A somewhat more serious advantage is the saving throw being wis rather then con, so that if your fighting something with a lot of hit points but is stupid the Mockery would do better, in fact Vicious mockery is one of only two cantrips that call on a save from a mental stat, the other being the above-mentioned Toll the Dead. This gives mockery a niche against people too dumb to understand your insulting them, but are tanky or dodgy enough that other cantrips could bounce off them and do no damage. Now is that a broad enough category to make Mockery worth it? While it will vary fromgame to game of course, many low level undead, trolls, handful of giants and some beasts fit into that category. Against higher level 'bosses', espically those with magical abilities, it will struggle but they tend to have high enough stats that any cantrip, which does no damage on a passed save, will struggle.

Overall Vicious Mockery has a niche, and an arguably fairly common use scenario, however it is also inarguable used more often then likely should simply for the meme's. Take it, use it, have fun with it, but remember where it's strength's lie and play into them. Insult the dumb muscle and use other stuff on the bosses.

==Gallery==
[[File:Morte.jpg|frameless|Using said ability since 1999. Years before it was printed.]]

Selesnya Conclave

2021-06-16T04:03:51Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

[[File:Selesnya Logo.png|center]]

The Selesnya Conclave is a green/white guild from the plane and city of Ravnica. Introduced in Ravnica: City of Guilds, the guild is also featured in Return to Ravnica and Guilds of Ravnica. They represent an orderly version of nature quite removed from the shamanistic savagery of the Gruul Clans and are the true religious faction in Ravnica, including the dark side that it entails...

==History==
The Conclave was founded by Mat'Selesnya, a female humanoid elemental formed via [[Phoenix Lord|the fusion of several dryads]]. The Selesnya Conclave is a decentralized collective variably described as a "selfless, nurturing, spiritual group" or a "brainwashing nature cult", and involves itself in the establishment and maintenance of peace, life, and unity in Ravnica.

Despite their superficial appearance of being a "good" and "peace-loving", in truth the guild has a nasty history, as hypocritical and as sinister as the other Ravnican guilds. The Conclave employed "Quietmen" and other members to silence the civilians of Ravnica, and once attempted a plane-wide brainwashing scheme. The defenders of the Selesnya are the Ledev guardians. In addition to these guards, the Quietmen used to guard Vitu-Ghazi, but Szadek, Lord of Secrets gained control of them and used them to wreak havoc. Since the end of the original Ravnica block they have been much in the distant background of many of the plane's subsequent events.

The Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica book for 5th Edition D&D makes it clear that the average faction agent or Guild grunt doesn't know shit about the Guild's darker history, and mostly avoids any of the more ethically untenable mind control stuff. Of course, the entire senior faction hierarchy are now Lawful Good, too, so maybe they just wanted one unambiguously not-evil faction outside the Boros for the book. It also provided stats for the collective of dryads that run the show, and they're piddling compared to, say, Rakdos or Aurelia.

==Guild Members==
===Guild Leaders===
====The Chorus of the Conclave====
The first Selesnya guildmaster, debuting in the original Ravnica block. The Chorus is essentially ''the'' hivemind of the Conclave and thus is not centred on one leader, but instead on an entire cacophony of dryad voices. [https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=247374 Their card] in Ravnica block was intended to play into their Convoke mechanic, but the steep mana cost (4WWGG!) prevented it from being played much.
====Trostani====
A trio of dryads each representing the ideals of order, life and harmony who took over the responsibilities of the Conclave as Mat'Selesnya's voice. They fell into disunity following Nicol Bolas' invasion of the plane but got better eventually. Their original incarnation in ''Return to Ravnica'' was neglected at first but now sees some use in EDH, but their later version is almost complete trash.

===Guild Champions===
====Emmara Tandris====
A powerful elven healer who has a long history with Magic's blue mascot, Jace Beleren. She was the voice of dissent that tried to persuade Jace from joining the Infinite Consortium, but Jace being Jace he ignored her and went on his merry way to becoming the blue planeswalker poster boy. Meanwhile Emmara continued her work with the Selesnya, eventually becoming Trostani's trusted agent in the race for the Implicit Maze. Her original card was at best a placeholder for a better GW legendary to take her place at the head of an EDH deck, but her War of the Spark version is an interesting change in scope and makes for a decent tempo pick.
====Tosimir Wolfblood====
One of the Conclave's greatest ledevs (evangelist knights) who rides a giant white wolf named Voja. He returned in War of the Spark to fight alongside the Conclave's forces. Has arguably one of the best token creature companions in the game, and his card abilities buff it immensely.

==Mechanics==
=== Convoke ===
A sort of self ramp ability, spells with convoke let you tap creatures to cover their mana cost. Colored mana can only be paid using creatures of that color of course. Returned in ''War of the Spark'' as the Selesnya core mechanic.

=== Populate ===
When a populate effect is activated, you can make a token that is a copy of another creature token you control.

==Villians or not?==
Compared to the other guilds of Ravnica, they are no more or less villianous compared to the other guilds even when taking into account brainwashing schemes (the other guilds, Dimir and Orzhov particularly, would not hesitate to do such a thing), as the creation of the guild system itself could be seen as an unjust act or mistake that inevitably results in tyranny.
What sets the Selesnya apart from the other guilds is that they do not actively disdain or ignore the citizens of Ravnica, but instead care about keeping them safe and able to live in a peaceful community. The other guilds certainly do not have this as their goal.
::The Azorious only care about maintaining the status quo, which is them being THE Authority, and writing laws that restrict and strangulate change.
::The Boros are essentially the military arm of the Azorious and the guildpact, too hidebound to see the injustices of overreaching law in spite of their passion for justice.
::The Rakdos only care about their hedonism, murdering people for laughs, and their demon worship.
::The Dimir care only for being on top from the shadows, masterminding and manipulating conspiracies, and blackmailing or murdering any dissenters.
::The Simic care only for playing God with science and biology. Consequences (and lives ruined through "improvement") be damned, as only they know better than anyone else (they especially know better than the last guy who tried before them).
::The Izzet are a cult of personality for an eccentric dragon scientist who cares little for collateral damage.
::The Gruul are angry, hurt, and truthfully wronged outcasts and anarchists that do not care about who they hurt in their rage against the system.
::The Golgari are often-malevolent necromancers and criminals who live apart from the rest of Ravnica in what is essentially their own dog-eat-dog society with a disturbing emphasis on "recycling".
::The Orzhov are an odiously corrupt farce of a religion, being essentially a scientologist-like cult crossbred with a ruthless mafia that will hound you to the afterlife itself with payday-loan shark debts.
In comparison to these often malevolent secret/not-so-secret societies, the Selesnya are practically saints. In essence, the Selesnya function as a mutual defense pact against all these crazy people serving actual demons, Illuminati-vampires, mafia-boss ghosts, dragons, mad scientists, necromancers, and petty tyrannical bureaucrats. Not to mention that the Selesnya Conclave is the only non-malevolent source of spirituality that we know about on Ravnica. In the end, is it really so bad to be in a spiritual and naturalistic community that truly takes care of all of its own? Because that is the question that the guildless citizens of Ravnica have to ask themselves, is it worth being on their own, free and yet at the mercy of the other guilds, having only the indelicate and blind protection of the law to safeguard them and being unable to deliver retribution? The Selesnya Conclave offers safety and community against the lawful lawlessness of the other guilds, being one of the few guilds not made up of crazy people, criminals, wicked sadists, or amoral wannabe-Übermensches certainly helps too.

==Gallery==

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Selesnya Conclave appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Selesnya Initiate" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Selesnya Conclave are most likely to be [[Human]]s, [[Centaur]]s, [[Elf|Wood Elves]], [[Half-Elf|Half-Elves]] and [[Loxodon]]s. The most iconic classes associated with this guild are the [[Bard]] (Glamour, Lore), [[Cleric]] (Life, Nature), Druid (Dreams, Land (Forest/Grassland), Shepherd), [[Fighter]] ([[Arcane Archer]], Battle Master, Champion), [[Monk]] (Open Hand), [[Paladin]] (Redemption, Ancients), [[Ranger]] (Beast Master - prefer Wolves, Hunter), and [[Warlock]] ([[Archfey]]).

===Selesnya Initiate Background===
Taking the Selesnya Initiate background grants you the bonus skill proficiencies of Nature and Persuasion, as well as a Tool Proficiency consisting of either one type of artisan's tools or one musical instrument. You gain the bonus language of either Elvish, Loxodon or Sylvan, and start the game with a Selesnya insignia, a healer's kit, a set of common clothes and a robe to wear over them, and 5 GP work of Azorius 1-zino coins.

The background's feature is '''Conclave Shelter''': your guild members will always grant you a place to hide or rest, unless you've proven to be an active danger to them, and this means that whilst they'll defy the other Guilds to shelter you, they won't risk their lives in the effort. It also means you can get free healing and care at any Selesnya enclave, although if you need spells cast, you have to pony up the material components required.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the Selesnya Initiate, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip druidcraft, friends
::1st aid, animal friendship, charm person
::2nd animal messenger, calm emotions, warding bond
::3rd plant growth, speak with plants
::4th aura of life, conjure minor elementals
::5th awaken, commune with nature

Members of the Selesnya Conclave refer to their magic as "doruvati," a Sylvan word meaning "gift." When you use these gifts of Mat'Selesnya, graceful swirls of green and silver light dance in the air around you, and phantasmal green leaves might waft through the air. A sensation of gentle warmth and the smell of spring flowers or autumn leaves might accompany your spells.

===Selesnya Conclave Renown===
Because the Conclave doesn't officialy believe in the idea of a rigid hierarchy, Renown works more as a way of proving yourself worth of belonging to the more specialized roles by which members can serve the Conclave in particular ways. As such, a character can basically belong to as many roles as they want, and even if they don't step into specialized roles, will still earn the right to requisition a Selesnya Charm before undertaking official missions once they reach Renown 10.

''Special Role: Evangel (Renown 3)''
::Evangels are, as the name implies, the missionaries of the Selesnya creed, speaking out to try and win converts amongst the Guildless and even the members of other Guilds. This gives you a bonus non-Conclave contact, and also means you have much more independence than the typical Selesnya follower.

''Special Role: Votary (Renown 3, Proficiency with martial Weapons)''
::Serving as the soldiers and guards of the Selesnya Conclave, most Votaries are assigned to guard duty in the vernadi gardens, but are occasionally deployed elsewhere in times when the Conclave needs to flex its muscles. Votaries are taught secret incantations that let them tap into the ambient magic that flows through a vernadi's gardens; in such areas, a Votari can call upon the aid of 1d6 awakened shrubs or 1 awakened tree during battle, although such floral guardians cannot leave their place of origin and remain mobile.

''Special Role: Sagittar (Renow 3, Proficiency with Longbow)''
::Saggitars are Votaries trained in the use of sharp-shooting above all else, and serve as the primary defenders of key Conclave locations. As such, a Saggitar never needs to pay for arrows; the Conclave provides all the ammunition that they need.

''Special Role: Equenaut (Renown 10, Proficiency in Animal Handling)''
::Much like the Skyknights of the [[Boros Legion]], the Equenauts are elite cavalry who ride flying steeds to control the sky in military engagements - although, officially, Equenauts are more concerned with scouting to find places to establish new vernadi. An Equenaut rides a [[pegasus]] mount, and has much more freedom about where and when to fly it than a Skyknight, but will be punished for letting their steed come to harm, especially through deliberate malice or neglect.

''Special Role: Hierarch (Renown 10, Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature)''
::The most skilled and experienced members of the Selesnya Conclave's internal clergy naturally take a leadership role, both in the rites to invoke Mat'Selesnya's blessing and in the day-to-day running of a vernadi. As a Hierarch, you can call upon the aid of 1d4 acolytes, even leading them to missions, and are expected to offer advice and opinions to your voda. You're also granted superior food and lodging, the free equivalent of a Comfortable lifestyle.

''Special Role: Ledev Guardian (Renown 25, 10th level)''
::The elite champions of the Selesnya Conclave, though the Ledev contain many centaurs, their primary constitutens are humanoids riding dire wolf steeds - as such, a player who joins this illustrious order is given their own bonded dire wolf steed.

''Special Role: Dignitary (Renown 50)''
::Acting as emissaries to the other guilds of [[Ravnica]], Dignitaries are the highest authority in the Conclave apart from Trostani and the voda themselves. Reaching this elite position grants a player access to the comforts of a Wealthy lifestyle And the ability to call upon Selesnya initiates (acolytes, scouts, or soldiers); 10d10 for a Trostani-given mission, and 8d10 for a mission of their own devising.

{{Ravnica Guilds}}

Boros Legion

2021-06-16T04:03:30Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

[[File:Boros Logo.png|300px|thumb|right|The insignia of the Boros Legion.]]

What happens when you take [[Paladin|a Paladin's]] righteous zeal, [[Salamanders|a Salamanders']] love for burning shit, and men and [[-4 Str|women]] who are [[RAGE|ALWAYS ANGRY]], [[Angry Marines|ALL THE TIME]], put them in a [[Rip and tear|giant mosh-pit blender and put it on puree]]? Well, most likely you'll get a bloody, gory mess, but the metaphorical answer would be the '''Boros Legion''', a bunch of fuckawesome [[Paladin|Paladins]], [[Cleric|Clerics]] and [[3.5e|non-sucky]] [[Fighter|Fighters]] who are led by [[Sanguinius|a radiant, effeminate archangel]], who's going to make you [[Judge Dredd|obey the law...]] [[Awesome|or else]]. The Boros Legion's job is to basically serve as [[Ravnica|Ravnica's]] military/police. They like enforcing laws. And if the [[Azorius]] doesn't give them enough laws to enforce, the Boros make up laws on their own, just so they have something to enforce.

Basically, they're what the [[Harmonium]] '''wishes''' they were in terms of both coolness and ability to actually get shit done.

==History==
The Boros Legion was founded by ass-kicking [[Archangel|Seraphim]] [[-4 Str|Sis]] Razia, who was a parun, or the original founders of the guilds that dot the city of Ravnica today. Y'see, Razia was a firm believer in [[Gay|peace, harmony and coexistence]]... but unlike ''some'' [[Selesnya Conclave|prissy little tree-hugging faggots]], she was more than happy [[/tg/ gets shit done|to kick some asses into line to get the job done]]. She was more than happy to ''literally'' [[Awesome|wage war on the crime of Ravnica]] if it meant ensuring everyone's safety and individual justices, so she created a bunch of fellow archangels like her and built up the plane's best - and, virtually, only - [[Imperial Guard|professional army]].

[[Skub|Now say what you will]] about the guild's more controversial aspects... y'know, the zealotry, the violence, the [[Exterminatus|mass executions]] and all that shit. While the Anon writing this little tid-bit ''may'' be a bit biased towards the Boros Legion, if it wasn't for them, order would have broken down in Ravnica a ''long'' time ago, especially given all the [[Chaos|extra-dimensional bullshit]] invading Ravnica from time to time. Even if they're a bunch of hard-ass motherfuckers, they're the only ones outside of [[Selesnya Conclave|the Conclave]] and ''[[Skub|maybe]]'' [[Azorius|the Senate]] to have good intentions in mind, only unlike the former group, they aren't gonna be a bunch of [[Communism|collectivist douchebags]] to get the job done. No, once you're in the Legion, you're in it for life; and while they can be quite extreme in their goals, they're the reason why Ravnica still exists to this day.

==Structure==
Alright, so. There's basically three different power bands within the legion, the '''Angels''', the '''Guildmages''', and the '''Legion of Wojek/Boros Army'''. The simple version is that the angels are in charge of the whole shindig, the Legion of Wojek serves as the police force, the Boros Army as it's military, while the Guildmages act as sort of the commander's "link" between [[Emperor|the divine]] and the [[Human|petty mortals]]. To paraphrase, this is the power rundown:

Angels were above and outside of the regular hierarchy. They provided inspiration and direction and only occasionally do they swing their fiery swords in battle. Any angel of any status outranked a mortal Boros member.

* '''Power Band 1: Razia''' — The Parun of the Boros Legion. A demigod in all-but-name, she's revered by all of the Legion.
* '''Power Band 2: The Angelic Warleaders''' — Basically the top brass as far as angels go; they make all of the military decisions for the lower echelons.
* '''Power Band 3: Firemane Angels''' — The angels that actually [[/tg/ gets shit done|do shit]] on the battlefield. Not involved in strategy or politics.
* '''Power Band 4: Battleforce Angels''' — The rank and file of the angel echelon.[6] They are strong and loyal and many.
* '''Power Band 5: The Boros Guildmages''' — The highest power band among Boros mortals, the Guildmage was the only rank that could initiate contact with the angels. They're basically the angel's subordinates who served as generals for the rest of the Legion.

Below the rank of Guildmages, you have the League of Wojek and the Boros Army. The League of Wojek are basically the [[Inquisition|police force]] of Ravnica, making sure to root out any crime and more-or-less serving as the standing garrison in the city. The Boros Army are called in in case some [[Rakdos|really fucked]] [[Heresy|up shit]] is going on, to pretty much put the executioner's axe on the assholes breaking the law.

* '''Power Band 6: The Commander-Generals''' — The guys in charge of the Legion's military, carrying out the angel's orders. There's two of these guys in general: one for the Wojek League, the other for the Boros Army.
* '''Power Band 7: Section Commanders''' — Ten of these Wojek commanders are each in charge of one of the districts of Ravnica City. They ''used'' to be able to deploy the [[Mecha|Sentinel Titans]].
* '''Power Band 8: Shift Captains and Skyknight Captains''' — The Wojek Shift Captains are the highest rank that currently patrols the streets. The Skyknight Captains command the Skyknights ''and'' the rest of the Boros soldiers. They fly the skies on colossal [[Roc|rocs]], which give them a great vantage point from which to command a battle. On the ground as often as they’re in the air so as to communicate with the ground troops.
* '''Power Band 9: Wojek Embermages''' — The combat mages of the League of Wojek. Specializes in burning shit up. Duh.
* '''Power Band 10: Lieutenants / Skyknight and Skyjeks''' — Lieutenants are the most clever and experienced of the street patrol Wojek, and answer directly to the Shift Captain. Ace fighters in the air, the Skyknight Legionnaires and the Skyjeks and their rocs hold the respect and awe both of the Boros rank and file and of the Ravnica citizenry.
* '''Power Band 11: Wojek Sergeants and Sunhome Enforcers''' — These bad boys are standard street patrollers while Sunhome Enforcers are soldiers who have proven themselves worthy of guarding the Sunhome fortress.
* '''Power Band 12: Wojek Apothecaries and Flame-Kin''' — The healers of the League of Wojek, the Wojek Apothecaries are necessary in the many scrapes that occur on the streets. The flame-kin are bipedal elementals that have been touched by the angels of the Boros. They are passionate zealots loyal to the cause of the Legion.
* '''Power Band 13: Constables and Commandos''' — Wojek constables take care of the menial tasks that need taking care of. Boros Commandos are good soldiers perfect for what is commonly called ‘Hammer Duty’. Many of the Commandos are Ordruun, a race of [[Minotaur|minotaurs]]. Ordruun Commandos even outnumber human Commandos. Swiftblades are the first soldiers into combat. They're the elite marines of Boros specializing in assault and occupation.
* '''Power Band 14: Thundersong Trumpeters''' — Though they don't patrol the streets like the ‘jeks and don't occupy the trenches like the rest of the army, Trumpeters outrank all low level soldiers. They strike fear into the heart of the enemy with their song.
* '''"The Grunts"''' — The common rank-and-file police and soldiers that make up the majority of the manpower.

==Guild Members==

===Guild Master===
The Guildmaster of the Boros has been the same for the entire existence of the Guild. Razia, the Heart of the Legion, Archangel and Parun of the Boros. Razia has been the heart and soul of the Boros guild since the signing of the [[Guildpact]]. She was more like a demigod to the army than a military leader, inspiring greatness and giving hope, meaning, and destiny to her Boros followers. Just to keep the black-hearted honest, she did, on occasion, rip the battlefield with holy fire. Her sword burned with such brightness that foes averted their eyes and arrows diverted their paths. And then she got assassinated by [[House Dimir|the Dimir's guildleader]], the vampire Szadek. The angel Feather was put in as her replacement, being arguably Razia's legitimate heir.

Aurelia the Warleader decided to take over and wreck anyone who didn't agree using her twin swords and PMS RAGE that would have made the [[Angry Marines]] proud, before she excuted Feather in a duel. Feather escaped because Krenko the goblin mob boss had a job to steal one of Feather's feathers, all acording to Lazav's plan.

In her second action as the Guild Master she made a deal for joint research with [[Izzet League|NIV-fucking-Mizzet]] where they made a collective hive mind called the Warmind Initiavtive. Based off Niv-Mizzet's Firemind, it allows the Boros to share their collective rage, making them ALWAYS ANGRY ALL THE TIME.

===Guild Champions===
Agrus Kos is one of the manliest men in the series. He punched the [[vampire]] who killed his Guild Master into submission, destroying the entire government in the process and then dying, only to come back from the dead just to wreck more shit. Awesome. He then destroyed the government again, saved the world 3 times over in the process. Currently in a constant battle with Szadek in the afterlife, but when he comes back he'll probably beat [[Jace Beleren]] out office and show him how it's done.

Tajic, a generic Boros soldier who has an odd blade is good friends with Teysa. She invites him over for tea now and then, plotting world domination.

===Others===
==Mechanics==
=== Radiance ===

Radiance is all about sharing the love - in this case, the burning love that the Boros preach at the point of flaming swords. A spell with keyword ''Radiance'' will extend its effects to every other creature that shares a color with the original target. Feel the love, baby!

=== Battalion ===
The Boros is all about fighting with friends, so if you bring your best friends with you to punch somebody, you guys get stronger. Results vary depending on who you bring. A creature with keyword ''Battalion'' will activate its effect if it and at least two other creatures are attacking. Technically this mechanic debuted in Innistrad under that plane's very own [https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=482724 CREED], but the Boros made the mechanic official.

===Mentor===
Like Battalion, but with a uniform effect. When a creature with Mentor attacks, it may put a +1/+1 counter on another attacking creature with a lower power than the mentor creature.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
</gallery>

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Boros Legion appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Boros Legionnaire" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Boros Legion are most likely to be [[Human]]s, [[Goblin]]s or [[Minotaur]]s. The most iconic classes associated with this guild are the [[Barbarian]] (Zealot), [[Cleric]] (Forge, Life, Light and War [[Cleric Domain]]s), [[Fighter]] (Battle Master, [[Cavalier]], Champion, [[Gish|Eldritch Knight]]), [[Monk]] (Sun Soul), [[Paladin]] (Oath of Devotion), [[Ranger]] (Hunter), [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|Sorcerer]] ([[Favored Soul|Divine Soul]]), [[Warlock]] (Celestial Pact) and [[Wizard]] ([[Evoker]], [[Warmage]])

===Boros Legionnaire Background===
Skill Proficiencies: Athletics, Intimidation
Tool Proficiencies: Cartographer's tools or navigator's tools
Languages: Choose one of Celestial, Draconic, Goblin, or Minotaur
Equipment: A Boros insignia, a feather from an angel's wing, a tattered piece of a Boros banner (a souvenir from a famous battle), a set of common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 2 gp (Boros-minted 1-zino coins)

Feature: Legion Station
::You have an established place in the hierarchy of the Boros Legion. You can requisition simple equipment for temporary use, and you can gain access to any Boros garrison in Ravnica, where you can rest in safety and receive the attention of medics. You are also paid a salary of 1 gp (a Boros-minted 1-zino coin) per week, which (combined with free lodging in your garrison) enables you to maintain a poor lifestyle between adventures.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the Boros Legionnaire, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip fire bolt, sacred flame
::1st guiding bolt, heroism
::2nd aid, scorching ray
::3rd beacon of hope, blinding smite
::4th death ward, wall of fire
::5th flame strike

Your magic often features dramatic bursts of flame or radiance. When you cast beneficial spells on your allies, they appear momentarily surrounded with halos of bright fire.

===Boros Legion Renown===
As with the [[Azorius Senate]], Renown does not automatically bestow rank; you need to win the approval of superior officers first. That said, the Boros Legion has a more diverse array of ranks than their counterparts, representing different specializations.

Rank 1: Sergeant (Renown 3)
::You are now the first step in the chain of the hierarchy above the common soldiers. You are given a salary that grants you the ability to maintain a modest lifestyle, and also have private quarters in the garrison. Furthermore, when undertaking a mission for the Boros Legion that requires military strength, you are automatically assigned a squad of 1d4 soldiers to back you up - '''don't''' treat these like expendable henchmen, or you '''will''' suffer the consequences as the Wojeks come crashing down on you.

Special Role: Skyknight (Renown 5, 5th level)
::By applying to join the Skyknights, you have entered the prestigious aerial mounted cavalry of the Boros Legion, and will be assigned regular patrols from the back of a trained Ravnican giant eagle. That said, this eagle (called a Skyjek Roc) is an official military unit, so using it for personal matters is a significant violation of regulations. It's possible to belong to the Skyknights and the Wojeks simultaneously, giving you the unique title of "Skyjek".

Special Role: Wojek (Renown 5, 5th Level)
::By applying to join the Wojeks, you enter what is one of the most feared branches of the Boros Legion; combining elements of military police and military intelligence, you have an unusual degree of independence from the regulations in order to carry out your primary roles. What are they? "Investigating" the activities of other guilds to spy on their schemes and prepare for potential threats, and to root out spies, information leaks and corruption in the ranks of the Boros Legion. Yeah, you're the IA - and keep in mind that ''nobody'' likes the IA people. The Legion has rules, but tempers also run pretty hot here. It's possible to belong to the Skyknights and the Wojeks simultaneously, giving you the unique title of "Skyjek".

Rank 2: Brigadier (Rank 1, Renown 10)
::At this rank, you gain responsibilities for missions and strategies that you can't execute entirely on your own; captains address plans to you, and you break those plans down into manageable chunks for you and the sergeants answering to you. You command six squads, consisting of 4 soldiers and 1 sergeant - at least one of these squads will be made of up skyknights if you belong to the skyknights yourelf. You can assign these squads to tasks of your choosing in areas of the city where you have authority, lead them into battle, or bring one full squad with you on guild missions for extra muscle. When assigned an official mission, you always get given a Boros Charm for a little extra magical protection. Also, your personal quarters in the garrison get nicer, although your salary remains unchanged.

Special Role: Sunhome Guard (Renown 10, 7th level)
::The Sunhome Guard are the elite troops who focus on protecting the Boros Guildhalls. As such, your missions upon entering this unique branch of the Legion will be predominantly slanted towards defense, from rooting out a [[House Dimir]] agent to fending off a full-fledged [[Gruul Clans]] attack, Assault on Precinct 13 style.

Rank 3: Captain (Rank 2, Renown 25)
::Upon reaching this rank, you are now one step closer towards the highest peaks of the Boros hierarchy, You command a small garrison, consisting of four brigades, with each brigade comprised of a brigadier plus their 30 troops (six squads of five, made up of four soldiers and one sergeant). You regularly communicate with the warleader angels, the emissaries of the Guildmaster, and answer to your designated commander. You have a personal retinue of 2d4 soldiers and your salary increases to grant you a comfortable lifestyle.

Rank 4: Commander (Rank 3, Renown 50)
::This is the pinnacle of the Boros hierarchy, at least as realistically as you are likely to see. You command one of the major garrisons of the Boros Legion in Ravnica, such as rising to command the Sunhome Guard if you were previously a member of that branch. You report directly to the Guildmaster, and are placed in charge of a major guild initiative.

{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}

Gruul Clans

2021-06-16T04:02:43Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

[[File:Gruul Logo.png|center]]

A guild of anarchists who demonstrate their love of nature with [[Rage|RAAAAAAAGE]] and [[RIP AND TEAR]].
{{mtg-stub}}
==History==
The green and red guild was originally created to protect the remaining patches of nature in [[Ravnica]]. But this is not easy when your whole plane is a constantly growing urban landscape, with building leaving less and less space for trees and stuff. On top of that, the other green aligned guilds declared that protecting nature was their gig, making the Gruul Clans lose their relevance.

The Clans decided FUCK IT, and started tearing down building so nature can regrow... Or because they feel like smashing stuff.

==Structure==
As their name indicate, the Gruul aggregate themselves in a collection of clans without any semblance of organization, and allied only by their common love of breaking shit.
==Guild Members==
===Guild Master===
Borborygmos: The Gruul are too wild and [[rage|angry]] for a formal leadership structure. Instead, they are represented by the cyclops Borborygmos, on account of the fact that he is the wildest and angriest there is.

===Guild Champions===

====Ruric Thar====
Ruric and Thar are the two halves of an Ogre who leads the Ghor-Clan, as opposed to the Burning-Tree Clan. They're the second strongest in the clan next to the current guildleader. Jace hired them to destroy his laboratory. Being against such huge [[Magnus the Red|nerdiness]] they destroyed it while Jace erased his memory. But then they got mentally connected to Jace a little bit and knew they had to run the Implicit Maze, so they did.
In card form they [[Angron|must attack each round]], and whenever someone casts a non-creature spell they deal 6 damage to that player. Probably while screaming [[Leman Russ|"NNEEEERRRRDDDD!!!!"]]

===Others===
==Mechanics==
===Bloodthirst===
Creatures with this mechanic will get boosts if they are played in a turn where an opponent has been damaged

===Bloodrush===
Allows to boost an attacking creature by discarding another one.

===Riot===
Allows a creature to pick up either a +1/+1 counter or haste as it is entering the battlefield.

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Gruul Clans appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Gruul Anarch" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Gruul Clans are most likely to be [[Human]]s, [[Centaur]]s, [[Goblin]]s and [[Minotaur]]s. The most iconic classes associated with this guild are [[Barbarian]] (Ancestral Guardian, Berserker, Storm Herald, Totem Warrior), [[Cleric]] (Tempest), [[Druid]] (Moon), [[Fighter]] (Champion), [[Ranger]] (Beastmaster - Fierce Beasts, Hunter), and [[Rogue]] ([[Scout (D&D)|Scout]]).

===Gruul Anarch Background===
Gaining proficiency with Animal Handling, Athletics and the Herbalism kit, the Anarch can also speak Draconic, Giant, Goblin or Sylvan, and starts play with a Gruul insignia, a hunting trap, a herbalism kit, a boar skull, a beast-hide cloak, a set of traveler's clothes, and 10GP worth of Azorius 1-zino coins.

Its background feature is '''Rubblebelt Refuge''', which means that in rubblebelts, the anarch can always find safe places to hide or rest, as well as enough fresh food and water to feed up to 6 people (including themselves) per day.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the X, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip fire bolt, produce flame
::1st compelled duel, speak with animals, thunderwave
::2nd beast sense, shatter
::3rd conjure animals, conjure barrage
::4th dominate beast, stoneskin
::5th destructive wave

Fueled by the fire of rage burning in your heart, your magic is almost always accompanied by fiery effects, such as flames smoldering behind your eyes or dancing over your hands.

===Gruul Clans Renown===
Needless to say, a bunch of anarchistic neo-primitives don't exactly have a complicated hierarchy.

''Proven (Renown 3)''
::At this level, you're a recognized warrior in your own clan. You don't command enough respect to lead, but your prowess is acknowledged enough that your chieftain will often pick you out specifically for missions, and may send a warband of 1d4 anarchs to back you up in combat.

''Beast-Friend (Renown 10)''
::At this level, your soul has grown strong enough and wild enough to enable for some level of communication and control with the beasts of the rubblebelt. Whilst they won't fight for you unless you have some specific ability to control beasts, you can still summon a batterboar, ceratok or raktusk to serve you as a mount in the rubblebelts. Also, when you are sent on a raid or other mission, your clan's [[druid]] will give you a Gruul Charm.

''Celebrated (Renown 25)''
::Your clan knows and admires you, and even other clans nearby are starting to take notice of you. Such is the respect you command that not only will your clan druid cast spells for you on request, but you have picked up a personal entourage of 2d4 anarchs and 3 [[berserker]]s or 3 [[ogre]]s, who eagerly follow you into battle. Your chief will start getting edgy around you at this point, because you've now become a potential threat to their leadership.

''Chieftain (Renown 50)''
::Your name commands admiration, respect and fear. You can now challenge your former chieftain to a trial by combat to take their place, or ask the warriors loyal to you to follow you into the rubblebelts and found a new clan.

{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}
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==Gallery==
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Golgari Swarm

2021-06-16T04:02:03Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

{{mtg-stub}}
[[File:Golgari Logo.png|center]]
There are two Guilds on [[Ravnica]] that comprise the lower classes of society: the [[Gruul Clans]], who are basically the multiverse's largest Anarchist Bike Gang, and the Golgari Swarm, which are what would happen if you kicked all of the [[Underdark]] races in [[Dungeons & Dragons]] out onto the street, then forced them to work either as fast food workers or garbage men until they got pissed off enough to unionize. That's right: there's Soy-lent Green in Ravnica, and it's more than just people.

==History==
The Golgari Swarm was originally created to deal with dead bodies (possibly by making them zombies), and feeding the homeless (possibly to zombies), and their core belief is that [[Nurgle|death and decay are important parts of the cycle of life]]; in a nutshell, they believe that nature is comprised of a great cycle of birth, death, decay and rebirth, and that the key to power is tapping into all of the aspects of this cycle. They are aligned with the Green and Black colors of Mana, which represents that viewpoint well, and wield a weird combination of necromancy and druidic magic, with a big emphasis on inducing decay, controlling & manipulating fungal growth, raising the dead, commanding vermin, and afflicting others with parasitic vermin & fungus. A Golgari defense formation usually consists of waves of predatory mushrooms, slime-like masses of carnivorous lichen or mold, zombies (often infested with bugs or fungus for extra nastiness) and giant bugs, backed by the outcast humanoids who make up the actual rot-farmers, fungus-druids and necromancers. Like the Rakdos, Dimir and Simic, the Golgari occupy the underground of Ravnica, tending to claim the damper regions where they can cultivate their precious fungus and vermin for food.

The original Golgari who signed the Guildpact was Svothgir, who was killed by the Sisters of Stone Death, three Gorgons, and then replaced by the [[Elf]]-[[Lich]] Savra. Who was also killed. Then came back as a lich. And then killed again. And replaced by Jarad. Who was also killed. And then came back as a [[Lich]].

In fact in the entire history of the Golgari and Ravnica they are the guild whose leaders have been killed the most. Seriously, they can't hold on to a decent leader. The only reason Jarad has seemingly remained in power is because nobody else in Ravnica cares.

Most of the Golgari is composed of humans, zombies, elves, plant-zombies (which are apparently zombies animated by fungus, similar to the D&D [[Dusanu]]), [[Medusa|gorgons]], [[myconid|mushroom]] [[vegepygmy|people]], giant beetles, kraul (bug-people), and [[troll]]s (like the living under bridges and regenerating kind, not the internet kind.) Ancient lore suggests the presence of other monstrous humanoids, like [[harpy|harpies]], but there are no cards supporting this.

Recent history has been pretty sad for the Golgari. Despite getting the first green-black planeswalker in the form of [[Vraska]], they contributed next to nothing to the recent story.

==Structure==
The Golgari Swarm currently functions in a similar way to an [[Tyranids|organism]] with each member being connected by a hive-mind. Jarad basically controls the entire swarm from Karazda, the newest and slimiest Golgari Guildhall. (The old one is a giant cathedral that contains Svothgir's severed head and moves around and is considered the exact center of Golgari territory.) There is a hierarchy but no one exactly knows how it works except the Golgari, who aren't telling, being busy nomming brains and feeding homeless.

==Guild Members==
===Guild Master===

==== Svothgir ====
The original Parun of the Guild. Given that the Golgari like elves a lot, he was probably some combination of Elf and Zombie. He was beaten by The Sisters of Stone Death and then made a deal with Savra to help deal with them. They of course killed two and outed the third. But then Savra got greedy and was way more powerful, and then promptly played Fulgrim to his Ferrus Manus. His severed head wound up placed in an Orzhov Cathedral, and being not quite dead, proceeded to grow fungus tentacles and take over the place. The cathedral is now named after him and moves. So he might have gotten the better end of the deal.

==== Sisters of Stone Death ====
Three Gorgon Sisters who took over after whupping Svothgir's ass. They broke every bone in his body and took over after serving him as lieutenants and gave themselves PROMOTIONS. But this did kill two of the original five, and they couldn't turn him to stone since he was still pretty strong. Ludmilla was the last one alive as of the end of the Ravnica block, but hasn't been seen since.

==== Savra ====
Savra was the high-priestess of the Dark Elves in the Golgari. Svothgir came to her for help after his defeat, and she of course helped him, giving him a new body. And then killed him after they beat the Sisters. She took over the Guild and promptly gave it up to her true master, the vampire Szadek who led the Dimir Guild. She also gained part of the control of the Selesnya Guild and the Boros Legion, giving Szadek control of all four guilds. Szadek then snapped her neck, she got possessed by Svothgir's spitit, and then got crushed and destroyed (possibly raped,) in a fight between a Simic Experiment Kraken-Fungus-thing, and Rakdos. Yes, that Rakdos. She is very, very dead.

==== Jarad vod Savo ====
Savra's brother and a former bounty hunter. But when Savra and Szadek began being giant buttholes he opposed his twin. When she eventually got crushed (possibly lit on fire, torn limb from limb, eaten, and whatever else we don't wanna know that Rakdos did,) Jarad took control of the swarm. Later was kiled in a Rakdos blood ritual involving a child of his, but being a Golgari and an elf of course he knew necromancy (which must be step one for being in the Golgari swarm to start, unless you're a giant beetle,) he possessed his own corpse and didn't let death slow him down, LIKE A BOSS.
In card form he gets stronger for every creature card in the graveyard, and can also pay mana and *BLAM* one of his own dudes to make your opponent lose life. Finally by sacrificing land he can return to your hand from the graveyard, because you can't keep a good Elf(possibly zombie, possibly plant-zombie,) down.

===Guild Champions===

==== Varolz, The Scar Striped ====
Being a giant swarm of zombies (possibly plant-zombies) there aren't a whole lot of indviduals in the Golgari Swarm (and considering the number of dead Guild Masters it might pay to blend in.) But the implicit maze was discovered and there was no way the Golgari were passing that prize up, so in went Varolz.

Varolz is a 12-15 foot tall troll (making him possibly tied for largest guild runner with Ruric Thar, but Ruric Thar is more interested in crumping fools with his axe then measuring stuff, LIKE A REAL <s>MAN</s> OGRE!) Varolz has a parasitical fungus that heals his wounds, making him a tough cookie in a race of tough cookies (theoretically.) Oh, he didn't do shit. He did reach the end and was fighting the other maze runners, but other than that he just ran through like everybody and killed everybody in his way. (Hmm, maybe him and Ruric Thar would get along.)

In card form he is notable for some next-level cheese. He can scavenge any creature in his graveyard for their CMC. Combine with some one-drop creatures that have a power of 12-or-13, and you pay one black mana to put 13 +1/+1 COUNTERS ON ANY CREATURE! Even that unblock-able infect creature? Even that unblock-able infect creature. Defense-wise he's a joke though, every other troll in the game can crump his head easily, since he needs to sacrifice a creature to regenerate and only has a 2/2 body to back it up.

===Others===

==Mechanics==
=== Dredge ===
[[Dredge]] is one of the most powerful key word mechanics in M:tG. A small entry here is not able to do justice to the influence it had, and continues to have, on the metagame and ban lists of multiple formats.

Simply put, a card with Dredge allows you to return it to your hand from the graveyard as an alternative to drawing a new card card whenever you are able to draw a card. In exchange you take X cards from the top of your library and put them in the graveyard. This is broken because in a deck built around abusing Dredge you have lots of cards that can be pulled from the graveyard to your hand, so in effect Dredge is "Put this card in your hand and then make so many cards available for you to then put into your hand later", this breaks the game because it basically ignores a bunch of rules that other decks have to follow. It also has a few other bullshit strengths such as being immune to most disruption effects (opponent makes you discard a card, bring it back and then add a bunch of cards into that pool of potential dredge cards in your graveyard). Not to mention that when built right the graveyard is basically an extension of the player's hand which leads to circumventing the hand limit without having to bother with an artifact, enchantment or creature that can get removed and force you to dump the hand. Coupled with Black's frequent return from the graveyard creatures and cards, triggers based on cards going into or out of the graveyard, sacrifice triggers etc, it can be very, very frustrating playing a Dredge deck that flatout plays an entirely different game of Magic.

Countering Dredge isn't hard so much as having super-specific cards on hand that can stop it. But these cards do fuck all against everything else except a few related archetypes like Reanimator and decks that rely on recursion meaning that you will almost never have the right cards main-decked for game 1 unless Dredge (or other graveyard) decks are on the upswing in popularity in the meta. Game 2 is about how well the Dredge player can recover from being castrated by cards like Leyline of the Void, or (more likely) their ability to sufficiently gain the upper hand before castration and be able to win the game (or better yet, for them, beat you before you castrate them).

=== Scavenge ===
Scavenging a creature in the graveyard means exiling it and putting +1/+1 equal to its power on one of your field creatures, for a cost (which is independent of the casting cost, unless it's scavenge is being granted by [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=368977 Varolz, the Scar-Striped]). Coupled with a quick and huge ramp (a given with green), a large amount of scavengable creatures, sacking and triggers-on-sacking (a given with black) this can result in a huge stampede of creatures with ridiculous power/toughness. Keyword-givers round out the field populator.

Scavenge may seem as [[cheesy]] as dredge, but defenses exist in the form of counters (preventing keywords being given) deathtouch creatures (ubiquitous) and penalizing and boardwipe spells, effectively rendering the enemy's wall of meat and muscle a moot point.

===Undergrowth===
Undergrowth is less so much an ability, and more a signpost that says, "The following effect cares about how many creatures are in your graveyard". Usually this means something like giving a creature +X/+X where X is the number of creatures in your graveyard.

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Golgari Swarm appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Golgari Agent" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Golgari Swarm are most likely to be [[Human]]s or [[Drow|Devkarin Elves]] - because of COURSE WotC wouldn't be so cool as to let you play something monstrous like a kraul, troll or gorgon. The most iconic classes associated with this guild are the [[Druid]] (Circle of Spores or of the Land - Forest/[[Swamp]]/[[Underdark]]), [[Fighter]] (Champion), [[Ranger]] (Beast Master with insect/reptile companion or Gloom Stalker), [[Rogue]] ([[Assassin]] or [[Thief]]) and [[Wizard]] ([[Necromancer]]). Theoretically, the [[Warlock]] with the Undying patron makes perfect sense here too, given the Swarm's association with powerful [[lich]]es in leadership and tutelary roles, but all SCAG subclasses are not mentioned here at all.

===Golgari Agent Background===
Your skill proficiencies are Nature and Survival, you gain Tool Proficiency (Poisoner's Kit), learn Elvish, Giant or Kraul as a bonus langauge, start with the following gear: a Golgari insignia, a poisoner's kit, a pet beetle or spider, a set of common clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp worth of mixed coins, and have the Undercity Paths feature:

You know hidden, underground pathways that you can use to bypass crowds, obstacles, and observation as you move through the city. When you aren't in combat, you and companions you lead can travel between any two locations in the city twice as fast as your speed would normally allow. The paths of the undercity are haunted by dangers that rarely brave the light of the surface world, so your journey isn't guaranteed to be safe.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the Golgari Swarm, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip dancing lights, spare the dying
::1st entangle, ray of sickness
::2nd protection from poison, ray of enfeeblement, spider climb
::3rd animate dead, plant growth
::4th giant insect, grasping vine
::5th cloudkill, insect plague

Golgari magic is often accompanied by a sickly green glow and a rotting stench.

===Golgari Swarm Renown===
Officially, the Golgari don't have a proper hierarchy as such; they're more meritocratic than that. In practice, everybody knows that the people who stand out will get more attention from the people who have power - the higher your Renown, the greater the guildmaster's knowledge of you, his confidence in your abilities, and his interest in your activities.

''Agent (Renown 3)''
::You're starting to get noticed at this level. Your name isn't known, but the fact you can be trusted is; as such, leaders will pass on specific tasks for you, and offer you reasonable support.

''Monstrous Favors (Renown 10)''
::At this level, your reputation is such that even the more monstrous denizens of the Undercity are starting to learn about you - the [[troll]]s, the kraul, the [[Medusa|Ravnican gorgons]], whatever else your DM believes is lurking down there in the dark. When undertaking an official mission for the Swarm, such a monster will be willing to hear you out if you ask for some reasonable assistance, though they will expect a favor in return. Additionally, such is your renown as an agent that you will always be entrusted with a Golgari Charm when you begin a mission for the Swarm.

''Special Roler: Ochran (Renown 10)''
::Having earned a sufficient level of trust, you can petition a Golgari leader to accept you into the ranks of the Ochran, the closest thing the Golgari have to a dedicated military branch. Duties as an Ochran include playing bodyguard to people important to the guild and being sent on missions of assassination, theft, and sabotage.

''Advisor (Renown 25)''
::At this point, you've become a leader in pretty much everything that matters. Lower members of the Guild will often look to you for advice and treat you with respect, although you have no official power yet. The High Chancellors know you by name, and will regularly seek you out for missions or even to ask your opinions - and you can bet that whatever you say will pass to the Guildmaster's ears.

''High Chancellor (Renown 50)''
::Now you're an official leader in the Swarm, the highest rank you can get until the Guildmaster dies (or you bump them off). This gives you direct access to the Guildmaster, in which role you serve as an adviser and convey their instructions to the "body" of the Swarm.

''Special Role: Matka (Renown 50, Devrakin Elf, Spellcasting ability)''
::The second-most powerful member of the Swarm is the Matka, the Devkarin high priest; whilst "officially" equal to the other High Chancellors, the racial loyalty that the Devkarin feel to the Matka means that even High Chancellors who are Devkarin will often submit to the Matka's will. Of course, there can only be '''one''' Matka, and assassination '''is''' a legitimate means of advancing through the Swarm's ranks, meaning that the current incumbent will not be planning on stepping down without a fight...

{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}
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==Gallery==
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Orzhov Syndicate

2021-06-16T04:01:31Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

[[File:Orzhov Logo.png|center]]
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Imagine if the Catholic Church was a scam being run by the mafia. Who were also [[necromancer]]s. That's the '''Orzhov Syndicate''' in a nutshell. Despite being the most "religious" of the Guilds, they are arguably the least spiritual Guild on Ravnica, as their religious aspects usually take a backseat to their debt collection racket. If you find yourself needing some cash, these are the guys you go to, but they will almost always try and screw you over because you didn't read the fine print. Not even death is enough to free you of your debt, as they are happy to conjure your ghost to work until your debt is fulfilled.

==History==
The Orzhov dates all the way back to the signing of the Guildpact, back when they may have actually been a true religious organization. Though they are not the oldest or the only religion on Ravnica, they were the ones to get legitimized. Over time, the religion stuff took a backseat, as they began to worship power and money more and more, to the point that they are known as the church without any gods. Despite this, many are attracted to the promises of longevity and profits, which is why they continue to this day, despite being seen as a corrupt guild.
==Structure==
At the highest rung of the Syndicate was the Obzedat, who ruled over their empire of debt with a cold, ghostly grasp. Unfortunately for them, [[Kaya]] came in and ended their rule during the third Ravnica block, where she became the head honcho, releasing all of the ghosts that had outstanding debts. This caused no end of instability immediately afterward, and the guild found itself increasingly under the influence of [[Nicol Bolas]]. After the events of War of the Spark, Tomik gained leadership over the Syndicate. Under the highest rung were the olicharchs, families with old money running through their blood. This was followed by the pontiffs, followed by the ministrants, the knights, and the syndics. At the very bottom rung are the borrowers, poor saps whose debts are still outstanding. Of note is that the higher you are in the guild, the more you use magic to extend your livelihood, eventually turning to a ghostly form. This usually has the side effect of making your offspring more susceptible to birth defects.

==Guild Members==
The Karlov family shows up in the fluff plenty of times when you read about the Orzhov, and for good reason. The Karlovs are some of the most respected families in the Syndicate, having rubbed shoulders with pretty much every other family. Their founder, Grandfather Karlov, was even part of the Obzedat! As the most respected family of the Syndicate, they have plenty of ambition to enact upon, with Teysa Karlov, the current matriarch of the family, spending much of her time trying to stage coups so she ends up as the leader of the Orzhov.
===Guild Masters===
For the longest time, the Obzedat were the defacto leaders of the Orzhov, and all of their orders were as good as law. After their demise, Kaya unwittingly assumed the role of Guild Master, due to a loophole in the Guildpact that caused every debt the Orzhov had outstanding to fall upon her. She tried her best to do the right thing for the guild, which ends up making things a bit worse, and she eventually has to call upon Tomik to help fix things. Tomik eventually becomes the official ruler of the Syndicate when Kaya is put under penance by the now Guildpact empowered Niv-Mizzet. Teysa does eventually get her wish, and pulls the strings in the background for Tomik alongside a council of three called the Triumverate.

====Obzedat====
The Orzhov Syndicate was ruled by a council of powerful ghosts. Each were the rulers of their house in the Orzhov, and they're basically the richest of the rich. One of them was probably the parun of the Guild and passed away, but the Orzhov don't let stuff like Death get in the way of PROFITS. Some do have human descendants or agents. But they would sell their grandchildren for the right price.
Both of the the card forms involve your opponent losing life and you gaining life. The new version is pretty ridiculous since they can disappear on your opponent's turn and then come back and steal life from them, and give it to you.

===Guild Champions===
Teysa Karlov was chosen as their guild champion during the running of the Implicit Maze, and eventually became the official speaker for the Obezdat. Karlov being Karlov, it wasn't enough and what would follow would be several attempts to undermine and take over the Obzedat.
===Others===
Thrulls are living creatures made from dead, decomposing flesh and raised by Orzhov necromancers. They serve as the muscle of the guild, doing simple tasks like guard work and transport. All of them wear fancy masks to hide their more... undesirable faces.

==Mechanics==
===Haunt===
When a card with haunt is put into a graveyard in a certain way (from play in the case of the permanents, during resolution after casting in the case of instants and sorceries), instead you exile it and have it "haunt" another creature, much like an aura. When that haunted creature dies, it triggers another effect.

=== Extort ===
The Extort mechanic is the Orzhov's ability from the Return to Ravnica block. Essentially when you cast a spell when you have a permanent on your board with the Extort ability you can pay one black or one white mana to have each opponent lose one life which you then gain. You can't Extort a spell with the same permanent multiple times but if you have multiple permanents with the Extort ability out when you go to cast a spell you can Extort once for each of them.
===Afterlife===
Representing how the Orzhov don't recognize death as the end of one's obligations. Creatures with afterlife N leave behind N 1/1 flying spirit tokens, which are presumably the hapless creature along with any other ghosts in their service.

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Orzhov Syndicate appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Orzhov Representative" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Orzhov Syndicate are most likely to be [[Human]]s. The most iconic classes associated with this guild are the [[Cleric]] (Order), [[Fighter]] (Battlemaster and Champion), [[Paladin]] (Oath of Conquest), [[Rogue]] ([[Assassin]], [[Thief]]), and [[Wizard]] ([[Abjurer]], [[Diviner]], [[Enchanter]], [[Necromancer]])

===Orzhov Representative Background===
Skill Proficiencies: Intimidation, Religion

Languages: Two of your choice

Equipment: An Orzhov insignia, a foot-long chain made of ten gold coins, vestments, a set of fine clothes, and a belt pouch containing 1 pp (an Orzhov-minted 10-zino coin)

Feature: Leverage
::You can exert leverage over one or more individuals below you in the guild's hierarchy and demand their help as needs warrant. For example, you can have a message carried across a neighborhood, procure a short carriage ride without paying, or have others clean up a bloody mess you left in an alley. The DM decides if your demands are reasonable and if there are subordinates available to fulfill them. As your status in the guild improves, you gain influence over more people, including ones in greater positions of power.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the Orzhov, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip friends, guidance
::1st command, illusory script
::2nd enthrall, ray of enfeeblement, zone of truth
::3rd bestow curse, speak with dead, spirit guardians
::4th blight, death ward, Leomund's secret chest
::5th geas

Your magic tends to manifest as swirling shadows, brilliant light, or sometimes the momentary appearance of shadowy spirit forms. Your spells might draw the blood of your enemies, or even directly touch their souls.

===Orzhov Syndicate Renown===
To rise in the ranks of the Orzhov Syndicate requires devotion, dedication and deviousness. Whilst your precise responsibilities depend on whether you are a Priest (cleric), Advokist (wizard) or Enforcer (fighter or rogue), everybody starts at the bottom; working your way up requires knowing when to take orders and when to take blackmail notes. Leverage is the currency that the internal Syndicate runs on.

Rank 1: Syndic (Renown 3)
::You are a low-ranking functionary; borrowers will defer to you and perform small favors that require no significant risk, effort or cost, whilst the bulk of your work entails performing similar tasks for your superiors.

Rank 2: Knight (Rank 1 and Renown 10)
::At this rank, you earn a unique title, gain authority over syndics, and are trusted to transport large sums of money. You earn a salary that provides you with a comfortable lifestyle between adventures, and when sent on a mission that poses a potential threat, you receive an Orzhov Charm. You have the authority to demand service from borrowers, even indentured spirits, but doing this counts as credit against their debt, so be careful about doing this. Your superiors will take note of largesse and chastise you accordingly.

Rank 3: Ministrant (Rank 2 and Renown 25)
::This is the highest position that you can normally attain without being born into the Syndicate itself. Your salary increases to gran a wealthy lifestyle, and you are given a personal servitor thrull (which will be replaced in 1d4 weeks if you get it killed, so long as your superiors judge you aren't abusing it), as well as a staff of 2d4 knights and 4d8 syndics. This personal staff will obey you, but you will be punished for using them to carry out work other than that which you have been assigned by your pontiff.

Rank 4: Pontiff (Rank 3 and Renown 50)
::The highest possible rank in the Syndicate, you have become one of the executive managers who enact the will of the Ghost Council. You have authority over a staff of 2d6 ministrants, each with their own staff of 2d4 knights and 4d8 syndics. You now command a personal staff of 2d4 servitor thrulls and winged thrulls, can maintain an aristocratic lifestyle on your salary, and are even privileged to occasionally speak to members of the Obzedat.

{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}

==Gallery==
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Azorius Senate

2021-06-16T03:59:46Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

[[File:Azorius Logo.png|center]]
[[File:Bureaucracy.jpeg|frame|One of the first Azorius cards]]
Your request to read this document in full and view any images herein has been reviewed by the Prav Committee For Document Viewing And Reading and has been APPROVED. In accordance with all applicable communication laws and protocols, we would like to thank you for your patience.

==History==
{{mtg-stub}}

==Structure==
* Guild Master Isperia has 3 arbiters who advise her.

* A senate that passes laws that are largely ignored until they roll in the troops AND BEAT SOME LAW AND ORDER INTO ANYONE WHO DISAGREES.

* "Absolutely hierarchical. Most Azorius functionaries report to one superior and have two guild members that report to them, creating a pyramidal command structure."

http://mtg.wikia.com/wiki/Azorius_Senate

==Guild Members==
===Guild Masters===
====Grand Arbiter Augustin IV====
He was Guild Master during Dissension. After he died by a spike containing the soul of his arch nemesis shoved through him literally ripping his soul to pieces then having an airship crash into his guildhall and explode (the Azorius senate passed so many flight restrictions after that). He was subsequently replaced by his champion Isperia the Inscrutable who then renamed herself...

====Isperia, Supreme Judge====
Isperia, a female sphinx and now Supreme Judge who moved the Azorius senate and sentenced Jace to be ruler of Ravnica as community service (BEST SENTENCE EVAR) during the Implicit Maze incident (hilarious results at court). Had a run in with [[Vraska]] that ended in her death. She was superseded by...

====Dovin Baan====
A [[Vedalken]] from the plane of [[Kaladesh]] who came in shortly after Isperia got stoned and took over, just like that. He implemented a couple of tricks from his home plane, like Thopters, to help keep a watchful eye on the city. Oh, and he's working with [[Nicol Bolas]]. Just great. Got beat up by [[Chandra]] and then peaced out once the Immortal Sun was destroyed, which means the Azorius has gone through two guildmasters in the span of one block! Hopefully whoever takes over after the War is a bit more survivable.

====Azor====
Azor is the parun (founder) of the Azorius. He's a sphinx and is on the plane of [[Ixalan]] for reasons involving [[Ugin]], and is also a colossal douche. Fun fact: a last minute change to his card was to his mana cost so it is in line with how Guild Masters were costed prior to Guilds of Ravnica (double one color, double another color, and possibly more generic mana added on top).

===Guild Champions===
Isperia used to be champion, although now that she's the master she has appointed Lavinia of the tenth to be her champion who basically is Ravinca's [[Rule 63|gender swapped]] [[Judge Dredd]].

===Others===

==Mechanics==
=== Forecast===
Surprisingly this is not much of a control mechanic. This is because development told design that WU control [[fail|was a bit stronger than they liked]] and didn't want it getting new toys. Forecast traces it's heritage to the Un-card [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Infernal%20Spawn%20of%20Evil Infernal Spawn of Evil]. [http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/219]

===Detain===
Blue and White are two of the colors most inclined to be in a control deck (and are also two of the most control freak color philosophy wise). Detain feels kind of control-ish (although it is actually made to not slow down the game too much). Detained permanents are unable to attack or block and can't use their activated abilities. A detainment lasts until the detainer's next turn. Detain was initially based off tapping a creature, but they decided to make it more like the card [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Arrest Arrest]. The duration of 'till your next turn' was chosen because it was short enough to remember but long enough to matter. WotC reserves the ability to detain any non land permanent on UW gold cards. Mono-color cards are allowed to detain creatures.

=== Addendum===
Representing the bureaucratic preference to do things slowly and with deliberate timing, addendum marks a bonus that a spell gets when cast during the owner's main phase.

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Azorius Senate appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Azorius Functionary" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Azorius Senate are most likely to be [[Human]]s or [[Vedalken]]. The most iconic classes associated with this guild are the [[Bard]] (College of Lore), [[Cleric]] (Knowledge and Order [[Cleric Domain]]s), [[Fighter]] (Battle Master, Champion, [[Cavalier]], Champion, [[Gish|Eldritch Knight]]), [[Paladin]] (Oath of Vengeance), [[Rogue]] (Inquisitive), and [[Wizard]] ([[Abjurer]], [[Diviner]], [[Enchanter]]). Theoretically, the Oath of the Crown Paladin would work too, but no subclasses from the SCAG are mentioned in the GGR.

===Azorius Functionary Background===
Skill Proficiencies: Insight, Intimidation

Languages: Two of your choice

Equipment: An Azorius insignia, a scroll containing the text of a law important to you, a bottle of blue ink, a pen, a set of fine clothes, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp (Azorius-minted 1-zino coins)

Feature: Legal Authority
::You have the authority to enforce the laws of Ravnica, and that status inspires a certain amount of respect and even fear in the populace. People mind their manners in your presence and avoid drawing your attention; they assume you have the right to be wherever you are. Showing your Azorius insignia gets you an audience with anyone you want to talk to (though it might cause more problems than it solves when you're dealing with incorrigible lawbreakers). If you abuse this privilege, though, you can get in serious trouble with your superiors and even be stripped of your position.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the X, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip friends, message
::1st command, ensnaring strike
::2nd arcane lock, calm emotions, hold person
::3rd clairvoyance, counterspell
::4th compulsion, divination
::5th dominate person

Your magic often takes the form of blue or golden runes floating and glowing in the air in circular patterns or of shimmering azure barriers of magical energy. If you cast ensnaring strike, for example, the vines created by the spell might appear as rune-inscribed glowing bands that wrap around the target and hold it in place.

===Azorius Senate Renown===
Naturally, Renown in the Azorius Senate is based on the firm laws of hierarchy; no matter how famous you get, your promotions won't come if your superior officers disapprove of you.

Rank 1: Official (Renown 3)
::You gain a title based on your class: Justicar for Lawmage (Abjurer, Enchanter, Order Cleric) or Precognitive Mage (Diviner, Knowledge Cleric), Officer for Arrester (Fighter, Paladin), Scribe for Elocuter (Bard) or Bureaucrat (anything else). At this rank, you can order Azorius recruits to perform mundane, non-threatening tasks and errands for you, and earn a salary that supports you at a modest lifestyle.

Rank 2: Authority (Rank 1 and Renown 10)
::Your title changes again; Justicars become Deputies, Officers become Imperators, and Scribes become Emissaries. When undertaking a mission on the guild's behalf, you are granted an Azorius Charm and can requisition the aid of a low-level Azorius enforcement squad (1d4 arresters and 1 lawmage) for the mission. Your salary increases to supporting you at a comfortable lifestyle.

Rank 3: Minister, Judge or Senator (Rank 2 and Renown 25)
::Your title changes again depending on which of the three columns of the Senate you have decided to attain rank in; Minister for Law Enforcement, Judge for the Judiciary, and Senator for the Legislative Body. You can request the aid of a large Azorius enforcement squad (3d4 arresters and 1-2 lawmages), and your salary increases to the wealthy lifestyle.

Rank 4: Arbiter (Rank 3 and Renown 50)
::This is the highest possible rank for you to achieve, second only to the Guildmaster. There are only three Arbiters, each of which has absolute authority over their senatorial column, so you won't be promoted to this rank whilst the current incumbent is still alive. Don't get any funny ideas, though; this isn't the [[Golgari Swarm]] - dead man's boots does NOT apply here.

{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}
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==Gallery==
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Izzet League

2021-06-16T03:58:46Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

[[File:Izzet Logo.png|300px|thumb|right|The crest of the Izzet League. Its guild leader, Niv-Mizzet is very vain and will often change it according to his whims.]]
The '''Izzet League''' is one of the ten Guilds of [[Ravnica]]. They are responsible for maintaining the civic works of the city: water supplies, sewers, heating, roads and so on. Which is probably not a good idea considering the guild's fickle attention span. Seriously, would you want a guild that needs [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=253601 a giant presumably dangerous spider making buildings its habitat in order for the building to be stable] in charge of maintenance? When they're not busy doing this, the magewrights perform magical experiments, often with spectacular (for good or ill) results. This does not really matter to the Izzet, because [https://i1.theportalwiki.net/img/a/a5/Cave_Johnson_fifties_fifth_test_complete09.wav SCIENCE isn't about "WHY?"! It's about "WHY NOT?"!]. Their child-like drive and curiosity, combined with their capriciousness and great intellect, makes them unpredictable at best: [[Genius: The Transgression|they can jump from amicable professor to mad scientist in the blink of an eye]].

==History==
When the Guildpact was ratified the Izzet were given their task of maintaining the civic works. Unlike the other guilds the Izzet have not tried to expand their territory or increase their power: aside from improvements to their fields of expertise their power has stayed more or less the same over the course of millennia. This is in part due to the Izzet not sticking to one idea for too long and in one part due to the fact that the Guildmaster, Niv-Mizzet, finds the thought of running Ravnica too boring. This is much to the relief of the other Guilds, mainly because if Niv-Mizzet wanted to conquer the plane for himself there would be a good chance of him actually succeeding.
[[File:Prime Izmagus.jpg|400px|thumb|left|Your average Izzet Member. [[Mark Rosewater]] once mentioned that Doc Brown of Back to the Future is a good (though less insane) example of the Izzet mindset: SCIENCE because he can. A decade later the artist Izzy took this to its logical conclusion with the new art for [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=265380 Inspiration].]]
==Structure==
The Izzet League has a rather straightforward hierarchy. At the top sits the Guildmaster, the [[dragon]] Niv-Mizzet. His position is a safe one, and all who threaten, annoy or bore him are incinerated by his breath. Below him sit those with access to the Firemind: a link with Niv-Mizzet's consciousness which allows those with the dragon's approval to link with him. This grants those who enter the Firemind access to the Guildmaster's brilliance, greatly enhancing their intellect and allowing them to overcome obstacles encountered during their research. Below this are all the regular members who gather in informal meetings, groups and symposia to study and experiment. The final group consists mainly of [[goblin]]s who act as servants, test subjects and testers of the Izzet's various spells and devices. High mortality rates are expected, and the Izzet learn what does not work from these tests. But those who are clever and lucky enough can climb the ranks and even gain access to the Firemind, as long as they please Niv-Mizzet.

==Guild Members==
The vast majority of ranking members amongst the Izzet are [[human]]s, while the test subjects are mainly goblins. Less common members include fairies, [[ogre]]s and human/djinni hybrids.

The guild also employs elementals and creatures called Weirds: elementals consisting of opposing elements. Niv-Mizzet made these to stop the squabbling of various Elementalists, a generous gesture compared to the alternative (setting them on fire).

Finally the Izzet also have drakes that they use as familiars. They also have access to dragons, who might be clones of Niv-Mizzet but intentionally made less intelligent and powerful.

===Guild Master===
[[File:Niv-Mizzet Firemind.jpg|200px|right]][[File:Niv-Mizzet Dracogenius.jpg|200px|right]]
The dragon Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind has ruled over the Izzet since the inception of the guild at the founding of the Guildpact, where he served as one of the ten Paruns who ratified the document. He is extremely intelligent, charismatic, powerful, caprcious, demanding and very, very vain. In this sense he embodies the values of the Izzet (which he named after himself, of course) perfectly: his intelligence and thirst for knowledge combined with his destructive power makes him all the Izzet are in one very large and scaled body. The dragon's relationship with [[Planeswalker]]s is unknown: he unwittingly has [[Ral Zarek|one in his employ]], but he could not Planeswalk himself despite his vast intelligence and it is unknown if he even knew about the other planes at all.

He is also one of the oldest creatures on Ravnica, being at least 15,000 years old. As the millennia went on he appeared less and less in public, eventually retreating into privacy about 7500 years after the founding of the Pact. Just after the Decamillennial, the ten thousandth anniversary of the Guildpact he appeared again to fight against the Nephillim, the [[Cthulhu|Old Gods]] of Ravnica. They injured him and the Firemind retreated towards the north pole, claiming "he was bored of the fight". After this he was never seen again, and many thought he had vanished for good.

Niv-Mizzet had not vanished for good, however, and after the reinstatement of a new but non-magically empowered Guildpact he signed it on behalf of the Izzet. After his return he began to fervently research the Implicit Maze, and ordered Ral Zarek to investigate the leylines and streets of Ravnica. After his investigations were done Niv-Mizzet announced his findings to the rest of the city and started the run for the Implicit Maze.

Niv-Mizzet appears on four cards. His first two iterations, a 4/4 and a 5/5 with flying, both cost 2UURR. Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind deals 1 damage to a creature or player whenever you draw a card, and you can draw for 1 when you tap him. Niv-Mizzet, Dracogenius has you draw a card whenever it deals damage to a player and can ping a creature or player for 1 when you pay UR. His third iteration as Niv-Mizzet, Parun ups the colored man commitment to UUURRR for another 5/5 flyer who draws you a card whenever any player casts an instant or sorcery and pings any target for one when you draw. This means that Niv-Mizzet combos with himself, which makes perfect sense given Niv-Mizzet's vanity: ping a player for 1 with the Dracogenius, draw a card, then ping for another 1 with the Firemind.

His latest incarnation from War of the Spark is a marked departure from all of the other Niv-Mizzet cards. With a casting cost of [[WUBRG]], this version of him represents him embracing the powers of the Guildpact after dying (but getting better) and ascending into a greater being to fight [[Nicol Bolas|Nicky B]]. He's a 6/6 Dragon Avatar with flying. When he enters the battlefield, you get to sift through the top ten cards of your deck, and put any cards with a unique color pair into your hand.

===Guild Champions===
[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=97208 Tibor and Lumia] are a husband and wife team of wizards: the wise and noble Tibor can grant Flying to a creature whenever you cast a Blue spell while the hot-headed Lumia pings all non-flying creatures for 1 whenever you cast a Red spell. They didn't do anything in the story of Ravnica.

[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=369062 Melek, Izzet Paragon] was going to be the Maze Runner for the Izzet but Ral Zarek killed him out of of jealousy and took his place. He lets you play with the top card on your deck revealed, and if it's an instant or a sorcery you can cast it with the added bonus of [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=191322 Twincasting] it.

===Others===
The afore-mentioned [[Ral Zarek]] is one of the highest ranking members of the Izzet and reports directly to Niv-Mizzet.

Crix is a female goblin engineer once in the service of the demented magelord Zomaj Hauc. He enhanced her with superior intelligence, speed and flight (by ways of [[awesome|pyromana powered jets in her metal shin bones]]). She was instrumental in the plan of the magelord to hatch three dragon eggs he found earlier and wanted to use the hatchlings to gain control over the city and defeat Niv-Mizzet. Crix' enhancements proved to be the magelord's downfall when she aligned herself with a [[party|group dedicated to defeating him]], which netted her a promotion to Master Engineer and access to the Firemind.

==Mechanics==
As the color of instants and sorceries Izzet League decks employ plenty of sorceries and instants. They are great at removal, either though sheer damage or other tricks. Izzet decks are typically good at whittling down their opponent: pinging a bit alongside damage that is not easily blocked allows for an inevitable victory.

Izzet decks have two weaknesses though: they tend to have a high mana cost while lacking the ability to accelerate their mana. They also don't have particularly good creatures: they are mostly there to improve your spellcasting and perform tricks with their abilities rather than dealing raw damage.

Although thus far the Izzet league has mechanically been associated with instants and sorceries, [[MaRo]] has been trying to find a way to make them be an artifacts matter faction, so don't be to surprised if the next time we see them, they focus on artifacts and not instants and sorceries.

===Replicate===
Replicate is an additional mana cost you can pay any number of times when casting a spell. This copies the effects of the spell and allow it to be given new targets in addition to the first, widening the effect of the spell.

===Overload===
Overload is a mana cost you can pay instead of the one listed in the top-right. This changes what the spell targets: all instances of the word "target" are replaced with the word "each", effectively targeting every 'legal target' a spell can have (while, for better or worse, by-passing things like heroic, shroud, and hexproof). Some overload cards are similar to non-overload spells. The main difference is that the non-overload spells don't usually specify a player, which in some ways gives the non-overload spells more flexibility. For example, compare [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=370818 Disperse] with [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=270798 Cyclonic Rift]. You want to save your creature by sending it to your hand and later use it's ETB ability for extra value? Well, Cyclonic Rift can't do that. On the other hand Cyclonic Rift acts either as a Disperse on one of your opponent's permanents, ''or'' by paying the overload cost sends pretty much his ''entire'' board position back to his hand, causing a huge tempo swing, and flat out eliminating any tokens he had.

===Jump-Start===
A similar mechanic to Flashback. A card with Jump-Start can be cast from the graveyard as long as you discard a card in addition to paying the normal mana cost.

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Izzet League appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Izzet Engineer" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Izzet League are most likely to be [[Human]]s, [[Goblin]]s and [[Vedalken]]. The most iconic classes associated with this guild are [[Fighter]] ([[Gish|Eldritch Knight]]), [[Sorcerer (Dungeons & Dragons)|Sorcerer]] (Draconic Bloodline, Storm Sorcery, [[Wild Mage|Wild Magic]]) and [[Wizard]] ([[Conjurer]], [[Evoker]], [[Transmuter]]).

===Izzet Engineer Background===
You have proficiency in the Arcana and Investigation skills, as well as one type of Artisan's tools. You can speak Draconic, Goblin or Vedalken. You begin play with an Izzet insignia, a set of artisan's tools, a hammer, a block and tackle, a set of common clothes, and 5GP worth of Azorius 1-zino coins.

Your background feature is '''Urban Infrastructure''':
The popular conception of the Izzet League is based on mad inventions, dangerous experiments, and explosive blasts. Much of that perception is accurate, but the league is also involved with mundane tasks of construction and architecture—primarily in crafting the infrastructure that allows Ravnicans to enjoy running water, levitating platforms, and other magical and technological wonders.

You have a basic knowledge of the structure of buildings, including the stuff behind the walls. You can also find blueprints of a specific building in order to learn the details of its construction. Such blueprints might provide knowledge of entry points, structural weaknesses, or secret spaces. Your access to such information isn't unlimited. If obtaining or using the information gets you in trouble with the law, the guild can't shield you from the repercussions.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the Izzet Engineer, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip produce flame, shocking grasp
::1st chaos bolt, create or destroy water, unseen servant
::2nd heat metal, rope trick
::3rd call lightning, elemental weapon, glyph of warding
::4th conjure minor elementals, divination, Otiluke's resilient sphere
::5th animate objects, conjure elemental

Your spells tend to be loud, flashy, or explosive, even when the effect is unremarkable. For example, when you open the portal of a rope trick spell, the portal might be outlined by harmless, showy sparkles.

If you use an arcane focus, it probably takes the form of an intricate device that could include metal gauntlets, glass canisters, copper tubing, and leather straps attaching it to your body. The mizzium apparatus described in chapter 5 is a magical version of this gear.

The chaos bolt spell is a favorite of Izzet spellcasters because of its unpredictable nature.

===Izzet League Renown===
Like their fellows in the [[Simic Combine]], there's a stark difference in the roles open to members of the Izzet League depending on whether or not they can cast spells. Unlike the Combine, though, higher ranks don't require magical abilities to access.

''Rank 1: Reasearcher (Renown 3, Spellcasting or Pact Magic)''
::You've proven yourself smart enough (or at least lucky enough) to be entrusted with access to the League's experimental [[magitek]] engineering facilities with acceptable risk of killing yourself. You can access a lab's resources for your experiments, request the aid of 1d4 lowly attendants (commoners) for use in your experiments or missions, and can build a Mizzium Apparatus with access to an Izzet workshop, 10 days of downtime, and, for replacements, a 50GP fine.

''Special Role: Scorchbringer (Renown 3)''
::The Izzet League may have a reputation as a bunch of crazy [[arcanist]]s, but they'll happily accept anyone willing to hurl fire at things with minimal provocation. As a Scorchbringer, you belong to the League's basic military division, and are given a free pyroconverger (a [[magitek]] [[flamer]] of somewhat dubious stability) as your assigned weapon. If it blows up, you can get a replacement for 50GP.

''Rank 2: Supervisor (Renown 10)''
::Regardless of your particular skill set, you display enough sanity and level-headedness that the higher-ups decide you can be entrustede to try and point the usual cast of screwballs in the right direction. You answer to a director, and translate their commands into concrete tasks for researchers and scorchbringers to undertake. This gives you a salary (Modest lifestyle) and access to an Izzetr Charm when on official Leaguebusiness.

''Special Role: Independent Researcher (Rank 1, Renown 10, Spellcasting or Pact Magic)''
::Rather than become a supervisor, you've chosen to strike out and pursue your own personal research. As you've managed to last this long without killing yourself, you're considered trustworthy enough to do so. You now have access to a team of 2d6 competent attendants (commoners with Proficiency: Arcana) and can craft an Izzet Charm for your own uses with 5 days of downtime in the lab. You can only have 1 such charm at a time, though.

''Rank 3: Director (Renown 25)''
::Your uncanny ability to evade death at the hands of your compatriots (and your own experiments) has impressed the higher ranks of the Izzet League, and granted you the right to join the ranks of the Izmundi, the guys who manage the various laboratories of the League, either by taking the place of a dead director of founding your own lab. Whilst you still may be called upon to pursue research and experiments at Niv-Mizzet's directives, otherwise you can pretty much operate your lab as you see fit. You also earn a salary that supports a Comfortable level lifestyle, which is handy.

''Rank 4: Advisor (Rank 3 and Renown 50)''
::You've got it made in the shade, now; Niv-Mizzet himself has taken notice of you and promoted you to the Izmagnus, the guys who advise the League's Parun (in so far as he takes advice) and run the guild for him. You now can live a Wealthy level lifestyle, thanks to your fine salary.

===Niv-Mizzet===
Niv-Mizzet himself also got statted out for the Guildmaster's Guide (before he became Living Guildpact, that is). As it is, he's a CR 26 Gargantuan Dragon, ability scores ranging from 14 dexterity to 30 intelligence and the spellcasting ability of a level 20 Wizard, plus a helping of other abilities. Also, his Fire Breath is stronger than that of an Ancient Red Dragon.
{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}

Simic Combine

2021-06-16T03:58:15Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Dungeons & Dragons */

{{stub}}
[[File:Simic Logo.png|center]]

The Simic Combine is one of the ten Guilds of [[Ravnica]] in [[Magic: The Gathering]]. Based around the combination of Blue Mana and Green Mana, their philosophy is essentially one of "Mad Biology"; they believe that nature exists to be studied, experimented upon, enhanced and improved. They are Ravnica's masters of [[fleshcrafting]], shaping and engineering all kinds of mutants, monsters and the magical equivalent of genetically-engineered life-forms - ostensibly to create creatures that will better serve the city and be better adapted to Ravnica's urban ecologies, but in practice often just for the fun of it.

They also readily experiment on themselves, splicing and grafting and mutating themselves for fun and profit. This leads to all kinds of weird mutant creatures being part of the upper echelons - according to the cards, new recruits to the Combine actually have "test subject" as one of their primary duties, so they better hope they manage to survive the bio-warping long enough to make a name for themselves in the guild, as opposed to, y'know, breaking down into a [[slime|mindless puddle of ravenous protoplasm]] or something.

== Mechanics ==
=== Graft ===
Representing the original guild leader's dubious understanding of patient consent. Creatures with graft come into battle with +1/+1 counters, then when a new creature enters the battlefield, you can move a +1/+1 counter off the creature with graft onto the new one.

=== Evolve ===
Representing a more rigorous system of iterative improvements used by the time of Return to Ravnica. A creature with Evolve gains a single +1/+1 counter when it's controller plays a creature with higher power or toughness

=== Adapt ===
A creature with Adapt gains a certain amount of +1/+1 counters when you pay the cost listed on the card, as long as it doesn't have any counters on it already.

==Dungeons & Dragons==
Like all of the ten guilds, the Simic Combine appeared in the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a [[splatbook]] for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]]. Here, it was handled as a combination of Background and Faction, with the player choosing the "Simic Scientist" background to certify they have membership, and being able to earn Renown. This is a new system to 5e, and basically is a kind of abstractified experience; you start off as a general worker (Renown 1), and as you complete missions for the Guild or do things that get you noticed, your Renown increases, giving you increased abilities. Of course, if you publicly screw things up for your guild, your esteem will drop and you can lose Renown.

Characters from the Simic Combine are most likely to be [[Human]]s, [[Elf|High Elves]], [[Vedalken]]s or Simic Hybrids (obviously). The most iconic classes associated with this guild are [[Druid]] (Circle of Land - Coast/Forest), [[Fighter]] (Champion), [[Monk]] (Way of the 4 Elements - Air/Water), and [[Wizard]] ([[Conjurer]] or [[Transmuter]]). In-universe, Wizards and Druids are known as Scientists, as these are the people performing the [[magitek]] biology research and experimentation; Fighters are known as Guardians or Soldiers, respected for their role in protecting the Combine against krasis-gone-wrong and external threats, and Monks are called "Deepsages", serving as warrior-philosophers.

===Simic Scientist Background===
You gain Skill Proficiencies in Arcana and Medicine, can speak two languages of your choice, and carry the following equipment: A Simic insignia, a set of commoner's clothes, a book of research notes, an ink pen, a bottle of squid ink, a flask of oil (made from blubber), a vial of acid (derived from digestive juices), a vial of fish scales, a vial of seaweed, a vial of jellyfish stingers, a glass bottle of unidentified slime, and a belt pouch containing 10 gp (Azorius 1-zino coins)

Clades and Projects
As a Simic researcher, you are part of a clade—a diverse group of individuals combining disparate talents in pursuit of a common goal—or a researcher on a specialized, short-term project focused on addressing an immediate need. You can roll a d6 or choose from the options in the Research Options table to determine your area of research.

Research Options
::d6 Clade/Project
::1 Hull Clade, focused on protection and durability
::2 Fin Clade, focused on movement
::3 Gyre Clade, focused on cyclical patterns and metamagic
::4 Guardian Project, focused on creating guard monsters and super soldiers
::5 Crypsis Project, focused on intelligence and counterintelligence
::6 Independent research in a new area

Feature: Researcher
When you attempt to learn or recall a magical or scientific fact, if you don't know that information, you know where and from whom you can obtain it. Usually, this information comes from a Simic laboratory, or sometimes from an Izzet facility, a library, a university, or an independent scholar or other learned person or creature. Knowing where the information can be found doesn't automatically enable you to learn it; you might need to offer bribes, favors, or other incentives to induce people to reveal their secrets.

To further represent the Guild's training and philosophical impact, spellcasters (that is, anyone with the Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature) gain bonus spells to their spell list based on the guild. For the Simic Combine, that's the following:
::Spell Level Spells
::Cantrip acid splash, druidcraft
::1st detect poison and disease, expeditious retreat, jump
::2nd alter self, enhance ability, enlarge/reduce
::3rd gaseous form, water breathing, wind wall
::4th freedom of movement, polymorph
::5th creation

When your magic causes physical alterations in yourself or others, the result often displays the characteristics of fish, amphibians, or other water-dwelling creatures. Blue-green eddies of magical energy sometimes accompany your spellcasting, forming spirals that reflect the mathematical perfection of nature.

===Simic Combine Renown===
Because the Combine is a Guild with an emphasis on applied magic, Scientists get most of the attention and most easily can earn Renown. Guardians and Deepsages get much lesser bonuses; they can seek to become Luminaries or, ultimately, Speakers.

''Rank 1: Technician''
::Prerequisite: Renown 3 or higher in the Simic Combine, Spellcasting or Pact Magic class feature
At this rank, you're a fully accredited Simic Scientist, but you're still at the bottom of the peaking order; you perform research and run experiments for other, more highly ranked Scientists. Still, it's not all bad; by accessing a Simic Facility, you can get a pet, familiar, mount, or animal companion upgraded - this takes 1d6 days, but permanently imbues it with a Minor Adaption from the Krasis table (presumably being treated as a Category 1 Krasis):
::d8 Minor Adaptations
::1 Amorphous Structure. The krasis can move through a space as narrow as 1 inch wide without squeezing.
::2 Aquatic. The krasis gains a swimming speed equal to its walking speed.
::3 Climbing Speed. The krasis gains a climbing speed equal to its walking speed.
::4 Cryptic Skin. The krasis can change color to match its surroundings. It has advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks made to hide.
::5 Heightened Awareness. The krasis can't be surprised, as a result of having sensitive barbels like a catfish, stereoscopic vision like a chameleon, a tongue like a snake, eye stalks like a lobster, or an array of several eyes.
::6 Ink Cloud (Recharges after a Short or Long Rest). While underwater, the krasis can use a bonus action to expel a cloud of ink and then move up to its speed. The ink cloud is stationary and fills a 20-foot-radius sphere centered on a point in the krasis's space before it moves. The sphere is heavily obscured until the ink disperses after 1 minute. A strong current also disperses the ink cloud.
::7 Leaping Legs. With or without a running start, the krasis's long jump is 20 feet (category 1), 30 feet (category 2), or 40 feet (category 3). Its high jump is 10 feet (category 1), 20 feet (category 2), or 30 feet (category 3).
::8 Stabilizing Legs. The krasis has several crablike legs. As a result, it has advantage on Strength and Dexterity saving throws made against effects that would knock it prone.

''Rank 2: Researcher''
::Prerequisite: Rank 1 and renown 10 or higher in the Simic Combine
::Now you're high enough in the ranks to start running your own independent experiments, tinkering with nature to pursue your own research. You're still a subordinate, however, and are assigned to work in a Clade or Project, which will direct you towards a particular line of research based on its focus - see the Simic Scientist background for known Clades and Projects. Or maybe you belong to a smaller Clade/Project pursuing an entirely different line of research. The point is that your Clade Leader will provide you with the aid of a Simic Charm and/or a Category 1 Krasis of your specifications should you request the assistance for an official Clade project.

''Rank 3: Project Leader''
::Prerequisite: Rank 2 and renown 25 or higher in the Simic Combine
::Now you're such a big shot that you're running your own research team, which means you can pursue your own experiments with the aid of 3d12 researchers and technicians, who will undertake projects for you up to and including producing a Category 2 Krasis of your own design. Of course, you're still expected to be contributing to the good of the Combine as a whole, you can expect your zonot's Speaker to pop in pretty often to make sure you're not doing anything that will look bad on the Simic Combine.

''Rank 4: Clade Leader''
::Prerequisite: Rank 2 and renown 50 or higher in the Simic Combine
::Congratulations! You've reached the top of the pile in the Scientist's hierarchy; you're still only a Beta in the Combine's overarching hierarchy, but you represent one of the most famous and respected Scientists around. As the title says, you've now got the authority to potentially take charge of your own Clade, but since new Clades are only founded rarely, you're not likely to get that position unless one of the older Clade Leaders retires (or "retires"). Still, you're now a head researcher, commanding multiple projects that may often span multiple zonots - this gives you access to a team of 5d12 researchers for your own personal projects, as well as the ability to requisition help from the Combine in the form of soldiers, krasis and tamed beasts. That said, your authority doesn't extend to the Speaker's Chamber; you can request a Speaker to bring matters of importance to you before the council, but you can't directly petition the leaders yourself.

''Special Rank: Luminary''
::Prerequisite: Renown 10 or higher in the Simic Combine
::As a Guardian, you've attained a roughly Sergeant-like rank in what passes for the military branch of the Simic Combine, whilst as a Deepsage, your reputation has grown as a wise leader and a source of enlightenment. Regardless, like a Researcher, you can petition a ranking member of the guild to provide you with assistance when you set off to perform a mission for the Combine, in the form of either a Simic Charm and/or a team of Simic Hybrids; one Brute or Flyer, up to two Poisoners or Shockers, and up to 4 Spies.

''Special Rank: Speaker''
::Prerequisite: Renown 50 or higher in the Simic Combine
::Congratulations! You've made it as far as it's possible to get in the Simic Combine; as a Speaker, you are now the elected representative for one of the nine zonots of the Simic Combine. The selection of a new Speaker (in the event of an existing Speaker's retiring, dying, or otherwise leaving the position) takes place through a combination of popular election and the input of the other eight Speakers, with the current Prime Speaker having the final word. If you emerge as the victor after this rigorous process, you assume the leadership of your zonot and are empowered to bring its concerns before the Speakers' Chamber. You are a political leader rather than a scientific one, so you have authority over other members of the combine only if they live and work in your zonot. If a clade has a laboratory in your zonot, you have the right (and responsibility) to supervise its activities to ensure compliance with laws and regulations, but not to interfere in its research beyond that point. And if the clade leader lives in a different zonot, you have no authority whatsoever over that person.

===Simic Hybrid Race===
Uniquely amongst the guilds, the Simic Combine has its own associated race, representing their propensity for self-augmentation and mutation. They're called "Simic Hybrids" because MtG's actual name for them, the Krasis, has been repurposed to exclusively serve for the monsters bio-engineered by the Combine - and rather than make things TOO complicated by turning them into a template, WoTC just made them an individual race, since it's the bio-adaptations that define a humanoid Krasis more than anything else. They have the following stats:

::Ability Scores: Con +2; Choose any +1
::Size: Medium
::Speed: 30ft.
::Age. Hybrids begin their lives as adult humans, elves, or vedalken. They age at a slightly accelerated rate, so their maximum life spans are probably reduced somewhat. The Guardian Project has not been operating long enough to observe the full effect of this phenomenon.
::Alignment. Most hybrids share the generally neutral outlook of the Simic Combine. They are more interested in scientific research and the standing of their guild than in moral or ethical questions. Those who leave the Combine, however, often do so because their philosophical outlook and alignment are more in line with a different guild's.
::Size. Your size is Medium, within the normal range of your humanoid base race.
::Darkvision. You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You can't discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.
::Languages. You can speak, read, and write Common and your choice of Elvish or Vedalken.
::Animal Enhancement. Your body has been altered to incorporate certain animal characteristics. You choose one animal enhancement now and a second enhancement at 5th level. At 1st level, choose one of the following options:
* Manta Glide You have ray-like fins that you can use as wings to slow your fall or allow you to glide. When you fall and aren't incapacitated, you can subtract up to 100 feet from the fall when calculating falling damage, and you can move up to 2 feet horizontally for every 1 foot you descend.
* Nimble Climber You have a climbing speed equal to your walking speed.
* Underwater Adaptation You can breathe air and water, and you have a swimming speed equal to your walking speed.
:: At 5th level, your body evolves further, developing new characteristics. Choose one of the options you didn't take at 1st level, or one of the following options:
* Grappling Appendage You have two special appendages growing alongside your arms. Choose whether they're both claws or tentacles. As an action, you can use one of them to try to grapple a creature. Each one is also a natural weapon, which you can use to make an unarmed strike. If you hit with it, the target takes bludgeoning damage equal to 1d6 + your Strength modifier, instead of the bludgeoning damage normal for an unarmed strike. Immediately after hitting, you can try to grapple the target as a bonus action. These appendages can't precisely manipulate anything and can't wield weapons, magic items, or other specialized equipment.
* Carapace Your skin in places is covered by a thick shell. You gain a +1 bonus to AC when you're not wearing heavy armor.
* Acid Spit As an action, you can spray acid from glands in your mouth, targeting one creature or object you can see within 30 feet of you. The target takes 2d10 acid damage unless it succeeds on a Dexterity saving throw against a DC equal to 8 + your Constitution modifier + your proficiency bonus. This damage increases by 1d10 when you reach 11th level (3d10) and 17th level (4d10). You can use this trait a number of times equal to your Consitution modifier (minimum of once), and you regain all expended uses of it when you finish a long rest.

{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}

Ral Zarek

2021-06-16T03:53:24Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3:

Ral Zarek is a blue and red planeswalker from the city plane of [[Ravnica]] and is devoted to the [[Izzet League]]. Despite this, he doesn't like the Guildmaster of the Izzet, Niv-Mizzet. As in the typical "love the work environment, hate the boss" kind of deal. He's a storm mage, something he caught a bunch of shit over when he was a kid, but now uses to zap assholes with lightning if he wants. His district of Ravnica has the highest amount of thunderstorms by far ''just because he lives there.'' During the Dragon's Maze Ral murdered the Izzet champion, who had been specifically designed to run the maze, and took his place. During the maze he stopped only to fight [[Jace Beleren|Jace]] over a perceived slight who then used illusions to get away because Jace is kind of a bitch.

Later on he realizes that Niv-Mizzet is trying to set up an experiment to determine the source of some weird environmental magic stuff, which Ral knows is related to Planeswalking (but Niv-Mizzet doesn't). He puts two and two together and figures out that Jace is a fellow 'walker, so the former foes collaborate to sabotage the experiment so Niv-Mizzet doesn't learn about planeswalkers and try to vivisect them. They end up bonding a bit over their love for Ravnica, even if they aren't exactly besties yet.

As of the end of ''Hour of Devastation'', we find out he's working for [[Nicol Bolas|Bolas]]. Just ''great''. As of ''Guilds of Ravnica'', Ral has taken over as leader of the Izzet League following the disappearance of Niv-Mizzet. Where did Niv go? No one really knows.

As of War of the Spark, we find out that Ral didn't like being Bolas's plaything, and struck out to be as much of a pain in the ass for him as possible. In doing so, he fried a bunch of Eternals and tried to give Niv-Mizzet the powers of the Guildpact to fight Bolas. This doesn't quite work out because [[Dovin Baan]] sabotages the machine Ral was going to use, but Dovin ends up dying later. Niv-Mizzet eventually gets his powerup anyways.
== Cards ==
[[File:94.jpg]]

For a Blue, a Red & 2 colorless you get Ral's first card, Ral Zerak with a loyalty of 4, his +1 is tap a permanent and untap another permanent, which isn't so bad. His -2 is deal 3 damage to target creature or player you'll probably only use this you really wanna kill a 3 toughness creature or your opponent is at 3 life. Finally his ultimate is -7 and let's you flip 5 coins each coin that comes up heads gives you another turn, so you'll either fail miserably, Win the game or somewhere in between. This ability becomes trolltastic with a Krark's Thumb (2 colorless mana artifact that lets you reroll any coin flip and pick which one you want) in play. Ten flips to get that extra turn goodness instead of five in a Izzet deck that inevitably has numerous library search options to find said cheap ass artifact and enough blue trickery to keep Ral alive long enough to build loyalty? That'll do Planeswalker. That'll do.

His second card, Ral, Izzet Viceroy, is a much more consistent version that requires less moving parts. A 3 generic, 1 red, 1 blue walker, his +1 lets you look at the top two cards of your deck, pick one to put into your hand, and the other in the graveyard. This lets you tear through your deck extremely quickly, which can be both a good thing or a bad thing. His -3 zaps a creature for damage depending on how many instants and sorceries you have in your graveyard and in exile. His ultimate at -8 gives you an emblem that zaps anything you want for 4 AND draws you two cards any time you play an instant or sorcery. Slower, but undeniably effective!

His third card, following his anger fit at Bolas, returns to the same casting cost as his first incarnation. A Rare walker, Ral, Storm Conduit is a very good companion for storm decks, which is weird considering how much MaRo hates storm... While he's on the field, anytime you cast or copy an instant or sorcery card, you can plink your opponent or one of their walkers for 1. He can +2 to Scry 2 to set up future draws. His -2 lets you copy the next instant or sorcery.

{{Template:Planeswalkers}}

Ravnica

2021-06-16T03:47:08Z

2603:8001:3500:CB:3515:1B70:20D1:AAD3: /* Guilds */

{{Topquote|A perpetual haze of dreary rain hangs over the spires of Ravnica. Bundled against the weather, the cosmopolitan citizens in all their fantastic diversity go about their daily business in bustling markets and shadowy back alleys. Through it all, ten guilds--crime syndicates, scientific institutions, church hierarchies, military forces, judicial courts, buzzing swarms, and rampaging gangs--vie for power, wealth, and influence. These guilds are the foundation of power on Ravnica. They have existed for millennia, and each one has its own identity and civic function, its own diverse collection of races and creatures, and its own distinct subculture. Their history is a web of wars, intrigue, and political machinations as they have vied for control of the plane.|WotC's description of Ravnica in its D&D 5e splatbook.}}

'''Ravnica''' is a [[plane]] in the universe of [[Magic: The Gathering]]. It's essentially a giant city (in fact, its tagline is "City of Guilds"), continuously expanding outward and upward. When someone says a deck is a [part of guild name] deck, that might only mean the deck's colors is the same colors as that guild, e.g. any black-green deck can be called a golgari deck.

== Colors ==
First, we need to explain the color mechanic, which is a bit like Magic's version of the D&D alignment system, except it operates nothing like that.

* '''White''' represents goodness, altruism, and other [[This Guy]] stuff. However if unchecked White can quickly become Authoritarian and inflexible.

* '''Green''' represents nature, harmony, and druidic treehugger stuff. Keep in mind that Nature also consists of a whole lot of deadly creatures that find you tasty.

* '''Blue''' represents scholarly knowledge-seeking and other nerdy things. Users of Blue Mana tend to indulge in [[Just As Planned]] type behavior. This makes it one of the most frustrating decks to play against.

* '''Red''' represents chaos, disorder, and LOLrandom. Also freedom, emotion, and passion.

* '''Black''' represents evil, dickery, and other [[That Guy]] stuff. It also represents throwing off societies expectations, and self determination.

One's "alignment" is formed from combining two different colors, there being a corresponding guild for each possible combination. speaking of which...

== Guilds ==
Ravnica is run by ten guilds, each of which embodies two of Magic's colors:

; The [[Azorius Senate]]: White and Blue. Boros may be THE LAW, but the Azorius Senate is the legislature and court system. They are known for being extraordinarily stuffy, unproductive, and bureaucratic, having so many laws that it's virtually impossible not to break one. Members include sphinxes, archons (armored entities riding flying felids), Vedalkens (blue humanoids a bit obssessed with perfection) and humans.
; The [[Boros Legion]]: Red and White. THEY ARE [[Judge Dredd|THE LAW]]! Law itself is more of Azorius domain however, the Boros are more concerned with what they believe to be justice. They are the military of Ravnica, and are unparalleled in tactics, if lacking in vision. Essentially self-righteous knight templars that will punch you first and then tell you your rights if you commit any crime. Members include angels, humans, giants and to a lesser extent goblins, viashinos (a race of lizardfolks) and minotaurs.
; [[House Dimir]]: Blue and Black. The guild of spies and assassins, although officially they work as the reporters and messengers of the city, which helps them spy even more (one of their stated functions is to undermine the [[Guildpact]] to tease out errors, which some militant organizations might define as instigators/insurgents), so secretive that its very existence was considered a myth until a big storyline reveal. Since the fall of the [[Guildpact]], and during the rise of its replacement, they have schemed against the greater good and nearly destroyed much of Ravnica in Dragon Maze. All this subterfuge applied to the goal of being the last guild standing unopposed. Members include vampires, humans, shapeshifters, specters and fairies.
; The [[Izzet League]]: Blue and Red. Mad scientists, [[wizard]]s, artificers and inventors, ruled by the [[dragon]] [[Niv-Mizzet]]. They're a little fuzzy on the idea of "safety", while also being tasked with maintaining and improving the city's infrastructure. When asked how much power is required, Izzet mages always answer "More". This leads to [[Dwarf Fortress]] style FUN. Members include goblins, humans, fairies, minotaurs, cyclops and viashinos.
; The [[Golgari Swarm]]: Black and Green. Bugs, critters, moss, and undead. Functions as the waste management/food production guild by growing edible stuff using the city's trash. Was given one of the most broken keyword mechanics in any cardgame, then a dud one. They are mostly sewer-dwelling, and frequently pessimistic. Members include elves (the somewhat dark type), gorgons, Krauls (a race of intelligent insects), trolls and humans.
; The [[Gruul Clans]]: Red and Green. Formerly in charge of keeping Ravnica connected to nature, the Gruul are not so much a unified faction as a bunch of clans of [[Chaotic Neutral]] anarchists. They were formally barbaric park rangers. Really. After getting their duties usurped by the other guilds and essentially exiled to the fringes of the city, the Gruul are now mostly in favor of tearing down structures and the city in general, returning to the wild nature that they revere. Some of them believe in the return of a [https://scryfall.com/card/war/133/ilharg-the-raze-boar giant stompy boar god] that will mark the end of all civilisation. Members of the Gruul includes pretty much whoever doesn't feel at home in a more civilised group, which means pretty much any race can end up with them: humans, centaurs, ogres, cyclops, viashinos, trolls, goblins and all the wild beasts you could expect them to befriend until they feel hungry.
; The [[Orzhov Syndicate]]: White and Black. They act like a church, but they're really all about the money and function as a debt-collecting, guilt-inducing mafia. Their power is both in holiness, and shadow, and extends beyond death. Beware a contract with them. In short, think Supernatural version of the Mafia, who revel in making offers you can't refuse. Members include spirits, humans, angels (the kind that look like if death decided to try sexy) and a bunch of homonculus made from the flesh of the people whose spirits they "collected".
; The [[Cult of Rakdos]]: Black and Red. They're a [[Chaotic Evil]] [[Slaanesh| pleasure cult]]/carnival/assassins guild that other guilds keep around for cleaning up loose ends, and because they would be just that painful to remove, not that some aren't trying. The Rakdos value showmanship, acknowledge that life is short, and specialize in shortening it more for a bloody show. Members include humans (with a high pain tolerance), goblins, ogres and a bunch of devils and demons that wouldn't look too out of place in a more grimdark setting.
; The [[Selesnya Conclave]]: Green and White. A nature cult that allegedly brainwashes people who join it. Note: not a cult like that of Rakdos, more in the hippie sense. Selesnyans value unity in all things, though not much diversity. They, not the church Orzhova, are the most spiritual on Ravnica. It should be noted that even taking into account the alleged brainwashing, they are the only guild which is not staffed by crazy people, criminals, sadists, madmen, and [[Lawful Stupid|lawfags]]. Members include dryads, elves, loxodons, centaurs and of course humans.
; The [[Simic Combine]]: Green and Blue. Genetic engineers who now dabble in holistic methods. Like Selesnya and (formerly) the Gruul, the Combine maintains what remains of nature on Ravnica, but instead of letting nature take its course, they adapt it to fit with industry and civilization (generally that means creating a bunch of mutant hybrid animals named Krasis, or grafting their members with appendages such as pincers, tentacles or shells). Members include elves, humans, merfolks.

== Guildmasters ==
Each guild of Ravnica has a leader, some of whom are the original founders, or Paruns, of the guild.

; The [[Azorius Senate]]: Founded by Azor, about whom little is known to the fan community, but has been confirmed to not be from Ravnica originally. Formerly led by the sphinx Isperia, who then got turned to stone by Vraska. Dovin Baan took control of the Azorius following Isperia's death, but was killed in the after-effects of the War of the Spark, and Lavinia is now their guildmaster.
; The [[Orzhov Syndicate]]: The Orzhov were led by a council of ghosts known as the Obzedat. Who this comprises is mostly unknown, and current members may include some of the original signers of the guildpact. The Obdezat were killed by [[Kaya]], and Tomik is their current Guildmaster.
; [[House Dimir]]: Founded by Szadek, a vampire. Currently led by Lazav, a shapeshifter.
; The [[Izzet League]]: Founded and for the longest time, continuously led by the great dragon [[Niv-Mizzet]], for whom it is named. In recent developments, Niv had disappeared, having actually been killed by [[Nicol Bolas]] and was later ressurected and ascended to the new Living Guildpact. following the War of the Spark [[Ral Zarek]] has been given the job of Guildmaster.
; The [[Cult of Rakdos]]: Founded and continuously led by the cruel and chaotic demon Rakdos, who gave it its title.
; The [[Golgari Swarm]]: Founded by Svogthir, a human Lich, and currently led by Jarad, an elf lich. This guild has an abnormally high turnover rate for its leadership positions, for which being technically dead does not disqualify you. Notably, Jarad became a Lich because [[Awesome|when he died in the first Ravnica's story, his spirit quickly returned to the scene and possessed his own corpse.]] Jarad can't seem to catch a break, and got petrified by [[Vraska]] who has taken over as leader.
; The [[Gruul Clans]]: Founded, per se, by the cyclops Cisarzim. Currently unofficially led by the cyclops Borborygmos, although his "reign" was split by a short time in which [[Domri Rade]] was in charge.
; The [[Boros Legion]]: Founded by the angel Razia, Currently let to war by the more direct angel Aurelia.
; The [[Selesnya Conclave]]: Founded by Mat'Selesnya, currently led by Trostani, each multiple dryads made one.
; The [[Simic Combine]]: Founded by an unknown person with the name "Simic", was led by the merfolk Zegana, but the current Prime Speaker is the elf Vannifar.

{{Template:Ravnica Guilds}}

== Native Races ==
As a [[dungeonpunk]] fantasy Ecumenopolis (that's the fancy word for "city planet," like Coruscant from Star Wars), Ravnica is home to a vast array of races, who have been forced to learn to get along as the city streets swallowed up the wild places and the dungeons. There's never been a proper "official list" given out by WotC, but looking at the cards and the setting fiction presents the following native races:

[[Human]]s: Because every setting has to have humans, right?

[[Elves]]: Divided into three different tribes, each associated with a specific guild. The Silhana are the traditional "wood elves"; nature worshippers who embrace Green Mana, who have become synonymous with the [[Selesnya Conclave]]. The Devkarin are Ravnica's [[Drow|"dark elves"]], being a reclusive tribe of elven [[necromancer]]s who embrace Black Mana, and thus have intertwined themselves with the [[Golgari Swarm]]. The final tribe has lost its original name, but its embrace of Blue Mana makes them Ravnica's "high elves" and has seen them fall in with the [[Simic Combine]].

[[Vedalken]]: Hyper-logical, intelligent, magically adept humanoids, the towering Vedalken are the iconic Blue Mana humanoids of Ravnica, and are found in the [[Azorius Senate]] and [[Simic Combine]] predominantly, although some mavericks gravitate towards the [[Izzet League]] instead.

[[Centaur]]s are mostly associated with the [[Gruul Clans]] and the [[Selesnya Conclave]].

[[Minotaur]]s are predominantly found amongst the [[Gruul Clans]], but they are also known to join the [[Cult of Rakdos]] and the [[Boros Legion]].

[[Goblin]]s have adapted well to Ravnica, mostly by staying in the shadows or falling in with those organizations that value their Red Mana natures (to whit: impulsive, mischievous, emotional, and fond of breaking things, blowing things up, and setting things on fire). They are found amongst all four of the Red Mana guilds; the [[Gruul Clans]], the [[Cult of Rakdos]], the [[Izzet League]], and even the [[Boros Legion]].

[[Loxodon]]s are towering, gentle-natured [[beastfolk|humanoid elephants]], whose strong sense of community leads them to the ranks of three of the White Mana guilds; the [[Selesnya Conclave]], the [[Azorius Senate]] and the [[Orzhov Syndicate]].

[[Viashino]] are raptor-like [[lizardfolk]] characterized by their whip-like tails, which are tipped in razor-sharp bone blades they use as formidable natural weapons. Red Mana aligned, they naturally gravitate towards a violent lifestyle, courtesy of strong predatory instincts; they gravitate towards the [[Gruul Clans]], but are found in all of the Red Mana guilds.

[[Angel]]s are embodiments of White Mana associated with the [[Azorius Senate]], the [[Boros Legion]], and the [[Orzhov Syndicate]].

[[Demon]]s are embodiments of Black Mana exclusively associated with the [[Cult of Rakdos]], though the occasional (possibly illusory) weirdo has been spied skulking around [[House Dimir]].

[[Giant]]s are predominantly found amongst the [[Gruul Clan]]s. [[Ettin|Two-headed giants]] are known to inhabit Ravnica, as do [[Cyclops]]es - in fact, Cyclopses have been known to work for the [[Izzet League]], equipped with giant-sized [[Power Armor]] to make them more useful to the guild. [[Troll]]s, by comparison, are exclusively found amongst the [[Golgari Swarm]]. [[Ogre]]s have been known to join the [[Cult of Rakdos]].

[[Medusa]]s, called [[Gorgon]]s here, are inhabitants of the Undercity and aligned with the [[Golgari Swarm]].

[[Elemental]]s consist of two distinct varieties. The [[Selesnya Conclave]] houses "pure" elementals of earth, wood and water, whilst the [[Izzet League]] creates artificial elementals called "Weirds" by hybridizing different kinds of elemental energy.

[[Sphinx]]es are associated with the [[Azorius Senate]].

[[Undead]] of the sapient kind are associated with different Black Mana guilds; [[ghost]]s with the [[Orzhov Syndicate]], [[vampire]]s with [[House Dimir]], and [[revenant]]s and/or [[lich]]es with the [[Golgari Swarm]].

[[Merfolk]] were revealed to have existed in the covered-over seas of Ravnica in 2013, and were responsible for shaking up the [[Simic Combine]] to try and bring it back from its modern "evolution-worshipping mad biologist" characterization to its historical "holistic bio-transhumanist" characterization. Cynics have suggested that they were an attempt to compensate for the distinctly lackluster reception to [[Vedalken]], who have never really managed to be too popular as the "Blue Mana Race".

[[Fey]] are predominantly associated with the [[Selesnya Conclave]], which is particularly home to [[Dryad]]s, but a number of [[fairy]]-type fey are known to belong to the [[Izzet League]].

[[Kraul]]s are a race of giant, sapient, vaguely humanoid beetles who are aligned to the [[Golgari Swarm]].

[[Doppelganger]]s are reputedly part of [[House Dimir]].

In addition to all of the above, the [[Simic Combine]] is known to create its own unique races by splicing together [[Broken One|humanoids with animals or other humanoids]], or mixing animals together and evolving them to develop human-level intelligence. Given that apprenticeship in the Combine consists of "let your superiors experiment on you and hope you come out of it with a useful graft or mutation instead of dying horribly", many Simic researchers look like [[beastfolk]] or [[mutant]]s.

[[Djinn]] pop up from time to time, occasionally affiliated with the [[Izzet League]], but just as often as free agents.

== Tabletop ==
Ravnica was first featured in the card game with the ''Ravnica'' block in 2005 and 2006, which was in turn composed of the "City of Guilds", "Guildpact", and "Dissension" sets. The block was accompanied by the "Ravnica Cycle" trilogy of books, one for each set. It has since become one of WotC's favorite settings, and has been revisited more times than any setting other than [[Dominaria]] - indeed, it seems to have usurped Dominaria's former place as the "core setting" for Magic: The Gathering. October 2012 saw the "Return to Ravnica" block's release, which spanned into "Gatecrash" (February 2013) and "Dragon's Maze" (in 2013).

Ravnica has also become officialy associated with [[Dungeons & Dragons]] as well. After WotC broke the unwritten rule of "no D&D/MtG crossovers" for [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]], they were delighted by the relatively warm reception to their [[Plane Shift]] articles. This culminated in the release in late November 2018 of the official [[splatbook]] "Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica", which adapts the city-plane as an adventuring setting for D&D 5e.

This decision was... controversial, in no small part because of outrage from [[Planescape]] fans (who had been expecting an official 5e release after two editions of being shunned) and, to a lesser extent, from [[Eberron]] fans (who were angry that, by comparison, their setting just got a glorified [[Unearthed Arcana]] that they had to pay for).

After many leaks, debates and teasers, the GGR debuted with the following content:
* A detailed look at the world of Ravnica, in particular fleshing out the 10th District, a region on the city-world that had never been detailed before.
* New backgrounds for each of the 10 Guilds, all of which converted the "Guildmage" lore by adding bonus spells to the spell-list of any caster with that background.
* Integration of the Renown mechanic, to support working for your Guild.
* Guidelines on how to actually run campaigns when your players all want to belong to different Guilds.
* Two new subclasses; the [[Cleric Domain]] of Order, and the Circle of Spores [[Druid]].
* Five new races; [[Centaur]], [[Goblin]], [[Minotaur]], [[Simic Combine]] Hybrid and [[Vedalken]]
* Two new spells; Chaos Bolt and Encode Thoughts.
* 17 new magic items based on Ravnica lore.
* Nearly 80 new monsters.

There were, of course, complaints. For example, the racial array was considered distinctly lackluster, considering all of the possibilities that it offered - previous [[Plane Shift]]s had given rules for [[merfolk]] and [[vampire]] PCs, which would have fitted in just fine, many fans were hoping for a [[medusa]] race, and [[viashino]] had been part of a race playtesting [[Unearthed Arcana]] only to be dropped from the actual book. Another complaint is the lack of referencing any material that wasn't in the PHB or Xanathar's Guide to Everything, when, for example, the Undying [[Warlock]] would have been a perfect fit for the [[Golgari Swarm]].

But, for what it's worth, it is a solid book, and certainly better than the [[Forgotten Realms|Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide]], WotC's only other dedicated setting book for 5e <s>to this date</s> until Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and Mythic Odysseys of Theros.

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