Ravnica is a plane whose main planet is covered by a large city, eponymously known as Ravnica.
Ravnica is a global urban landscape; an ecumenopolis composed of a patchwork of grand halls, decrepit slums, and ancient ruins, with successive layers of stone.
It is one of the most densely populated planes in the Multiverse.
The magic of law and the metaphysics of hierarchy are deeply embedded in the very structure of the plane, allowing cooperative leaders to achieve feats of greatness.
Among the countless civic centers of the world, one dominates all the others: the city of Ravnica, a metropolis so vast that its name has long since become synonymous with the entire plane.
Centuries of Ravnican economic activity—largely fueled by the Izzet's foundries and the forges of other guilds—have saturated Ravnica's atmosphere with all sorts of industrial pollution.
Nearly ten thousand years before the events of Ravnica, the plane of Ravnica was the stage for unspeakable violence and brutality, with various factions constantly waging endless wars.
Realizing that this endless war would eventually destroy everything, a council among the ten factions was held, where the leader Azor I suggested establishing a living and breathing enchantment that would end the violence and ensure the survival of the factions.
While some of the order-phobic factions had initial disagreements, the other nine leaders eventually agreed that such a pact was the best chance for survival.
Each of the ten factions signed the Guildpact, and over time, these factions became the ten guilds of Ravnica.
From the signing of the Guildpact, the city and plane of Ravnica, governed by the Ravnican guilds, were ruled by the Guildpact.
This lasted for more than ten millennia.
The power of the Guild Pact was subtle; it prevented any guild from meddling in the affairs of another guild or disrupting the balance of power among the ten guilds by manipulating circumstances and coincidences to nullify the actions of the disruptive guild.
While the Guild Pact was reputed to have brought relative peace and prosperity to the realm, sporadic clashes between guilds persisted.
Despite these occasional conflicts, the anniversary of the signing of the Guild Pact was celebrated each year with a one-day festival, where everyone laid down their arms and rejoiced.
This celebration was called the Guild Pact Festival.
Not all citizens of Ravnica are members of a guild; about half of the population is not part of one.
However, the guilds are a necessary part of daily life, and their presence is felt everywhere in Ravnica.
The Azorius Senate (white/blue) is the police force, the legislative and judicial body of Ravnica's bureaucracy.
The Boros Legion (red/white) is a permanent army that protects the Guildpact and contains the Wojek League, the official peacekeepers of the city of Ravnica.
The Cult of Rakdos (black/red), considered a necessary evil by some, is made up of thrill-seekers who provide the heavy labor, restoration, and entertainment of the plane.
The Golgari Swarm (black/green) manages food production and the disposal of organic waste.
The Gruul clans (red/green) have lost their former glory as guardians of the wild expanses of Ravnica and are now just a loose affiliation of berserker clans seeking to annihilate the civilization of the plane.
The Izzet League (blue/red) is responsible for civil engineering works and new magical developments in the world city.
The Orzhov Syndicate (White/Black) was originally the most widespread religion in Ravnica. Today, it regulates trade and banking operations, among other activities such as law.
The Selesnya Conclave (green/white) promotes what is now the strongest nature-based religion in Ravnica, and its LEDev guards patrol rural areas while being environmental defenders and charitable workers.
The Simic combine harvester (green/blue) provides medical assistance and conducts biological research.
House Dimir (blue/black) was recently considered extinct and provides illegal but necessary services, while openly serving as couriers, investigators, reporters, and archivists.
The Dimir House is a guild of secrecy, manipulation, and treacherous agreements. This obscure organization operates behind the scenes to manipulate Ravnica for its own ends.
Once a conspiracy known only to the upper echelons of Ravnica, it was brought to light. The guild offers knowledge brokerage services in all its forms, from the basics of journalism, public archives, and education; to blackmail, espionage, and counter-espionage; with at its peak smuggling, burglaries, assassinations, and other illegal services, with contacts becoming increasingly obscure.
House Dimir was founded by the ancient vampire Szadek.
This vampire was one of the ten paruns who signed the Guildpact and remained at the head of the guild for the next 10,000 years.
One of the crucial clauses of the Guildpact stipulated that none of the signatories (including Szadek) could reveal the existence of the Dimir to the people of Ravnica, thus preserving the guild's anonymity while forcing it to remain hidden.
This created a flaw in the structure of the Guildpact that would ultimately allow for its breaking.
For a long time, the guild officially did not exist. The Ravnican people generally believed that there were only nine guilds and that, if there was a tenth, it had been dissolved thousands of years ago.
Dimir's name was unknown to most people, and those who knew of it mistook it for a myth, a children's tale or a paranoid conspiracy theory.
This misinformation was actively propagated by the Dimirs themselves to escape suspicion.
The spell of the Guild Pact was finally broken when Agrus Kos, an officer of the League of Wojek, arrested Szadek, exposing him and the House of Dimir. After the first Pact of Guilds, the Dimir had a public presence, represented by couriers, librarians, private detectives, journalists and archivists.
The guild operates on a strict need-to-know basis, on three levels: the visible face of the guild, which the general public is allowed to see; the secret guild, which Ravnicans suspect exists, but rarely see; and a deeper, clandestine level, hidden even from its members.
At the top of the hierarchy is the leader. He alone is fully aware of all the guild's activities.
Below him are the necroses, who oversee the guild's activities from Duskmantle.
They manipulate the flow of information, keeping the guild informed of everything, while keeping the rest of the plan in the dark.
Few are allowed to meet the guild leaders; a network of intermediaries is used to transmit messages to the cells of field agents.
Agents at the very bottom of the guild only meet a mysterious individual in an alley who provides them with some basic information about their target, and nothing else.
Memory magic allows the Dimir to use any individual as a first contact without his or her knowledge.
Dimir Guild mages use their magic to influence the minds of others, and are usually the first line of defense against savvy enemies.
They can send remote messages to agents, strike people with amnesia, magically alter memories, or even perform lobotomies on their victims to cover their tracks.
When they arrive on the scene, Dimir Guild mages weaken their victims with a mind-dissolving black cloud, enabling them to gather information, both profane and occult, used to eliminate potential threats.
The Dimir also practice necromancy, creating undead servants such as skeletons and spectres to carry out their missions.
These servants are employed because they are determined, easy to create and eliminate, uninterruptible in the event of capture, and easily imputed to the Golgari. Spirits are also used by the Dimir to transmit messages, carry out invisible surveillance, or even possess important figures such as judges and senators.
No one is beyond the reach of House Dimir.
Near an industrial canal, four silhouettes are reflected on the water.
Circu was a loyal servant of Szadek. As a lobotomist, those who knew or saw "too much" were treated with his scalpel.
He was able to extract incriminating information from the minds of his enemies, ripping out the brain tissue that allowed them to remember lost knowledge.
His skill ensured that Dimir's secrets remained unknown.
If someone managed to conjure up a selective memory, Circu and Szadek concocted a simple spell ("Glimpse the Unthinkable") that purged the knowledge with a broad, crude stroke and allowed its victim to see "the truth".
Mirko Vosk is a high-ranking member of House Dimir and a vampire detective on Ravnica .
Vosk is responsible for both recovering memories and implanting identities and other information into the minds of others.
His talents as a magician should have secured him a place in Ravnica's criminal world, but neither freelance mercenary work nor hobbies capture his interest as much as Dimir's manipulations and subterfuges.
Etrata is a vampire assassin from Ravnica and a former champion of House Dimir .
She is currently employed as a detective with the Ravnican Magic Investigation Agency.
Etrata is a dark-skinned woman with impressive vampiric fangs.
She is cold, elegant, terribly competent and deeply nihilistic. Ravnica is a complete stranger to her, let alone her guild.
Her sole aim is to be the best spy she can be. A professional assassin with a record of dozens of victims, she never kills for free and remembers every one of her victims.
A member of the Dimir, she infiltrated other Ravnican guilds with disconcerting ease and killed when necessary.
LAZAV, the current guild master of House Dimir on Ravnica.
Apart from his qualities as a mental mage and shapeshifter, details about Lazav are scarce. He (or she, or they) claims to obey a higher power.
Lazav has a regal appearance and wears a floating leather cape, fashioned from the hide of a beast that has been extinct for centuries.
He can distort reality and seems to attract all the magic around him.
Lazav: "My subordinates, if I've gathered you here it's because you're the best in your field, and for you to dominate a crucial piece of information, someone is plotting against us."
Circus: "Is that all?"
Mirko Vosk: "It's the very essence of our guild, and it would be strange if no one tried to sabotage us."
Lazav: "No, you don't understand, it's not just against our house, it's against our whole world."
Etrata: "What do you mean by that?"
Lazav: "The world holds many mysteries and one of them is the structure of our worlds."
Etrata: "our?
Lazav: "Yes. In fact, there are several worlds quite different from ours, separated by a space called the Blind Eternities, and in one of these worlds, a divine creature has obtained the ability to travel through the Blind Eternities to conquer and dominate new territories.
We are next. "
Etrata: "Despite our spy network, we haven't obtained any information about what you're saying. "
Lazav: "You haven't, but he has. "
???:" hello".
The three turned abruptly, surprised not to have detected the stranger behind them earlier.
Lazav: "This is Rob Lucci, he's been my disciple ever since, but he's achieved some great feats. "
Rob Lucci is a very tall, slim but muscular man with pronounced eyebrows.
He wore a white suit with a white top hat and a mask.
Lucci:" mademoiselle"
he said, handing Etrata some papers.
She prayed to them and flipped through the pages with an expression on her face growing darker and darker.
Mirko Vosk: "I can't believe it."
Lazav: "and yet all the evidence is there".
Mirko Vosk: "We're experts in espionage and information gathering, how could we have missed this?"
Rob Lucci: "This being is even better at this game, he's had thousands of years to perfect his manipulation techniques.
But thanks to my ability I was able to obtain information about his subordinate who will help him dominate Ravnica, and that person is Ral Zarek, Niv-Mizzet's second-in-command of the Izzet League.
He has managed to hide this fact from Niv-Mizzet, an impressive task in itself. Indeed, Ral never considered the former dragon a role model or mentor, but at best a nuisance, at worst a likely adversary.
Despite this, Ral has always served the Cerebropyre with loyalty.
Ral grew up in a small district of Ravnican where everyone called him a "rain mage".
He quickly learned to keep a low profile, eventually arriving alone in the Tenth District.
There, he picked up the local accent and studied the history of all the guilds. When he discovered the Izzet, Ral learned all he could about them.
He studied storm magic based on the Niv-Mizzet equations and worked his way up through the guild.
The happiest day of his life came when he joined the League of Izzet as a guild mage.
Ral's mother was a poor factory worker, until she was maimed in an accident when Ral was eleven.
She lived with her injuries for another two years, never really healing. Ral spent this time doing everything he could to help her.
After her death, it took only a few months for the thirteen-year-old to abandon his drunken lout of a father and strike out on his own.
Four years later, he found a job as a rain mage and began a relationship with a young poet named Elias.
After an unhappy encounter with some young noblemen, he met a man who offered him a job.
The man introduced himself as Nicol Bolas .
In the three years following his arrival at Bolas, Elias's career took off in a way neither of them could have imagined.
Despite their lavish lifestyle, they grew apart due to Ral's secret missions for Bolas.
During one of his executor missions, Ral was stabbed by a young boy.
Returning home wounded, he found Elias in the arms of another man.
The shock awakened the Planeswalker spark in him and he disappeared from Ravnica.
Ral arrived on an unidentified world. Unaware of where he was or how he got there, he found an apprenticeship with an old tinker who worked with electricity.
He also found a new lover in the tall, broad-shouldered Harith.
After learning all he could from Ghazz, Ral and Harith robbed him.
Ral later betrayed Harith too, and took off with all the loot.
Ten years later, he had created a small imperium for himself and the first version of his accumulator.
But when Bolas returned to collect his debt, Ral abandoned his enterprise in the plan and transplanted himself to Ravnica."
Mirko Vosk: "What kind of skills did you use to reach such a high-ranking person and extract his secrets? "
Rob Lucci: "I prefer to keep this information to myself, sir. "
Mirko Vosk:" mhh"
Rob Lucci: "Professor, I'm leaving now."
Lazav: "Well, you can go, Rob Lucci."
Lucci turned, waving his long white coat in the darkness.
Lazav: "It's unforgivable that we should be caught up in someone else's plans, and I declare Nicol Bolas and his subordinate Ral Zarek to be an existential danger to House Dimir,
I want you to observe this man until he interacts with this Bolas to locate and eliminate them. "
Mirko Vosk: "Hey, that's an interesting plot. "
Circus:" mhh"
Etrata:" heard"