So my friend wants to DM a campaign set in Ravnica and he said he'd let me play as a Tortle if I could write a good explanation as to why he and other Tortles are now in Ravnica. He and I brainstormed and the best ones we came up with was that the Golgari found the Tortles who were trapped away in a lost part of the Undercity for a few millenia, but I feel it's a bit uninspired. Could I get some tips for writing races into worlds that weren't there before?
So my friend wants to DM a campaign set in Ravnica and he said he'd let me play as a Tortle if I could write a good explanation as to why he and other Tortles are now in Ravnica. He and I brainstormed and the best ones we came up with was that the Golgari found the Tortles who were trapped away in a lost part of the Undercity for a few millenia, but I feel it's a bit uninspired. Could I get some tips for writing races into worlds that weren't there before?
well from my recent worldbuilding experiences(look in my sig for those experiences) i can tell you that experiements or just straight secret races often do well
for ravinca you have the unique answer of the fact this a world with a regular level of planar traffic
So my friend wants to DM a campaign set in Ravnica and he said he'd let me play as a Tortle if I could write a good explanation as to why he and other Tortles are now in Ravnica. He and I brainstormed and the best ones we came up with was that the Golgari found the Tortles who were trapped away in a lost part of the Undercity for a few millenia, but I feel it's a bit uninspired. Could I get some tips for writing races into worlds that weren't there before?
If you go back and read the original novels set in Ravnica, like the ones published in like 2000, there wasn't really that much codification of the species that lived there. There were bird-headed people, cyclopses, animal- people, etc, there wasn't really the sense that there were only like 6 types of people, but rather they just leaned into the 'crazy diverse thriving bazaar city' vibe where you could expect to find an angel walking a beat or a giant selling street meat. I think it's one of those settings where anything can fit, while the species that appear in the Guide are more just like some of the most common. And hell, I don't think there's *any* mention of Vedalkans in the original novels, and simic hybrids were added in later too, so I don't think it should require any worldbuilding gymnastics to say Tortles exist.
Side note; viashino *do* canonically appear in Ravnica but are not however actually in the Guide, because the race would've been too similar to lizardfolk and for some reason wotc didn't want to reprint them, but they said that you could just reskin lizardfolk as viashino, so that to my mind could definitely set a precedent for stuff existing in Ravnica despite not appearing in the Guide.
You could be a one off, or you could have been found as a young tortle and raised in a different society, your whole purpose could be hunting the world to try and find your kin, discover where you came from.
That will then give you and your DM a bit more to play with, maybe you came from a different material plane, maybe a powerful Fey or Trickster god was playing a joke and decided to take a tortle baby and send it through the cosmos to another world. maybe your species existed on a tiny island and explorers came and slowly removed the young as trophies scattering you across the lands.
Extradimensional rifts, warpstorms, teleporting islands (got stranded as the home island teleported away again), natural/experimental mutation (TMNT), exiled/rescued by a god, hidden culture, stasis/hibernation, ancient curse...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
So my friend wants to DM a campaign set in Ravnica and he said he'd let me play as a Tortle if I could write a good explanation as to why he and other Tortles are now in Ravnica. He and I brainstormed and the best ones we came up with was that the Golgari found the Tortles who were trapped away in a lost part of the Undercity for a few millenia, but I feel it's a bit uninspired. Could I get some tips for writing races into worlds that weren't there before?
well from my recent worldbuilding experiences(look in my sig for those experiences) i can tell you that experiements or just straight secret races often do well
for ravinca you have the unique answer of the fact this a world with a regular level of planar traffic
Check out my homebrew subclasses spells magic items feats monsters races
i am a sauce priest
help create a world here
Simic creation.
I have a weird sense of humor.
I also make maps.(That's a link)
If you go back and read the original novels set in Ravnica, like the ones published in like 2000, there wasn't really that much codification of the species that lived there. There were bird-headed people, cyclopses, animal- people, etc, there wasn't really the sense that there were only like 6 types of people, but rather they just leaned into the 'crazy diverse thriving bazaar city' vibe where you could expect to find an angel walking a beat or a giant selling street meat. I think it's one of those settings where anything can fit, while the species that appear in the Guide are more just like some of the most common. And hell, I don't think there's *any* mention of Vedalkans in the original novels, and simic hybrids were added in later too, so I don't think it should require any worldbuilding gymnastics to say Tortles exist.
Side note; viashino *do* canonically appear in Ravnica but are not however actually in the Guide, because the race would've been too similar to lizardfolk and for some reason wotc didn't want to reprint them, but they said that you could just reskin lizardfolk as viashino, so that to my mind could definitely set a precedent for stuff existing in Ravnica despite not appearing in the Guide.
You could be a one off, or you could have been found as a young tortle and raised in a different society, your whole purpose could be hunting the world to try and find your kin, discover where you came from.
That will then give you and your DM a bit more to play with, maybe you came from a different material plane, maybe a powerful Fey or Trickster god was playing a joke and decided to take a tortle baby and send it through the cosmos to another world. maybe your species existed on a tiny island and explorers came and slowly removed the young as trophies scattering you across the lands.
Extradimensional rifts, warpstorms, teleporting islands (got stranded as the home island teleported away again), natural/experimental mutation (TMNT), exiled/rescued by a god, hidden culture, stasis/hibernation, ancient curse...