Love the mention of Fringe :)

I love the setting and wanted to run a campaign in it since the first MTG Ravnica set. A few years ago I took a stab at it... And I didn't know what to do with it! The campaign ended due to writes block. (A big part of it is my fault, I struggle with doing a cold start and coming up with a plot that also involves the PCs.) Some things I realized about Ravnica is that the world is shallow. And that makes sense, it was designed for a card game! Most of what has been written about it exist to justify the mechanics. The world is not designed with RPGs in mind. Having areas of the city being called Nth District and Precinct NUMBER is indicative of this. There was very little known about where things were located before we got the 5E book, the book mostly restated what we knew and all it added to the setting was giving us our first ever map. Ravnica is a static and tenuously peaceful state of affairs, with a few recent crises that have already been resolved. Compare with Forgotten Realms or Golarion that have several impending threats looming from the word go, or major conflicts where PCs can take a side, and locations and relations to sell the illusion that the world is real and has more going on than the word count allowed for, they are worlds that are designed to hook a GM and a party to tell their own stories. Ravnica's big upside as a setting is the artwork and ideas from all the cards, that hint to something bigger if you can connect the dots, but there is nothing there. The world is also very limiting. A layered world-encompassing city is cool in concept, and it works great in a setting like Star Wars where you are not stuck with only one world. There are very few things you can do with a stupidly large city that you could not do with a more reasonably sized city, but the cost of having a city that covers everything is that you dont have the things that are paved over, you can't have anything that is "outside the city" if there is no "outside", city ruins in the Rubblebelt is the closest thing to a wilderness and it is still city ruins. It's a great flavor! But it is also the only flavor. With everywhere being densely populated, it also leaves few blind spots where an evil could be brewing unnoticed for long. Even having PCs be part of different guilds is limiting, because the venn-diagram of acceptable solutions to problems narrow. The main reason to use Ravnica as a setting is to lean into the reference for fans of the setting, if you are not doing that, then you might as well use another world with a huge city in it, and poach ideas from Ravnica instead to make things easier and more flexible for yourself as a GM. If you use Ravnica then you will need to decide whether the PCs can change the world, and the implied question then is whether the PCs can kill an established character or whether they can derail canon history (if you are playing in the setting's past). Some players (like one of mine) may want the campaign to be compatible with canon and will dislike including named character from the setting, despite referencing them being the point. If I were to revisit Ravnica again for an RPG, and without changing anything about the setting, I think I would lean into the guilds as an analogue for megacorporations, and use the setting as a fantasy reskin of a cyberpunk campaign. I think the world could be a good fit since cyberpunk is mostly city-locked already, and Ravnica already has anachronistic modernities to it like electricity, machines and newspapers. Just have the players be guildless or all of the same guild, then all the remaining guilds can be overwhelming antagonists to hide and steal from.

Dr Frankenstein was the creator of the monster, but was in the end more monstrous haha. I love me some ravnica, but it starts to really be a stretch when you have disparate guilds. I have a harder time explaining why an azor elocutor would be "adventuring" with a grul clan berserker than I do with weird multiclassing. If you can get everyone on board for a single, or a few "allied" guilds I think it would run well. Short of world ending events (and even then in the case of Rakdos) it just doesnt make sense for some factions to cooperate .

Omfg another talking zombie! C'mon you are unbearably slow in double speed!