I'm sitting here listening to mid-career Tom Waits songs on a fall-cool, dirty-sheet-skied Toronto, Ontario day, regretting never publishing an anthology of Ravnica fanfic. Somehow the Magic Expanded Multiverse, the extensive fanfiction collective I helped found and lead for many years, never got around to giving the city plane the anthology treatment Alara and Innistrad got.

That's a shame, because it's in the anthology treatment, I think, that Ravnica really comes alive. The whole genesis of the M:EM's conceit - a fully canon-compatible expansion of Magic's base setting and stories - emerged in part because of people in the old Wizards official forums spontaneously writing short stories set on Ravnica and Alara, and the Ravnica stories in particular accumulating characters that cropped up in multiple people's stories.

This basic principle of characters bouncing off each other at the hands of different authors seemed to follow naturally from Ravnica's urban setting where anything could happen and different groups were thrown higglety-pigglety together. Ravnica takes the conceit of the "fantasy tavern" or "free city", where all sorts of heroes and villains might bump into each other unexpectedly, and expands it to the size of a world. The Magic: Expanded Multiverse simply codified the basic enthusiasm its setting provokes. For the surprisingly little fic in the archives set on Ravnica, Ravnica (or possibly Alara with its five colliding worlds) has always felt somehow symbolic to me of the project as a whole.

It's a shame, too, and strange, that canon also hasn't given Ravnica the anthology treatment. The original Ravnica trilogy, starting with the novel entitled Ravnica City of Guilds, not to be confused with the new novel brilliantly entitled Ravnica, had a bit of an anthology feel to it, with guild-aligned characters rotating in and out to match the uneven presentation of the ten infamous Guilds within the original block's three sets, but it was ultimately three novels written by two people tied together strongly by the character of Agrus Kos. The Secretist, while split into three parts, was ultimately just a novel split into three parts, accompanied by a few short stories of variable quality and continuity. There's been nothing like the print anthology for Shadowmoor, or the surprisingly large number of short stories about various legends from Kamigawa.

This time it seems like they're opting to split the story somewhat between online Magic Story entries, and the shocking return of the novel line in the form of a hardcover book. Which will arrive on shelves concluding a decade long story arc released across a bewildering variety of media. For $27. Hm. How... bracingly optimistic!

However, it doesn't look like the format that I found so successful during the middle period of the gatewatch story, where multiple authors constructed a more distributed set of short stories with a variety of characters weaving in and out of the metanarrative, is going to be coming back for Return To Return To Ravnica.

This runs the risk of reducing one of the qualities that makes Ravnica such a great place for tellig stories: the possibility of presenting a ludicrous range of possible philosophies, perspectives, positions, occupations, and intrigues. And that's all within any SINGLE Guild! The Guilds are at their most interesting when they contain multitudes and contradictions, and the same is true of the ill-treated Gateless as well, who aren't even united necessarily by the same attitude toward the guilds. There are probably plenty of Gateless, for example, that get along with the Guilds better than Vraska, soon to be head of the Golgari, does. There are plenty of others with grievances presumably ranging from the petty to the extremely well founded (though I bet it leans more to the latter given how comically villainous the Guilds can get).

I've already talked at length about my adoration of the everyday-unfamiliar in fantasy, and Ravnica has always delivered, on the card level at least. The delightfully goofy Affectionate Indrik stands out from the new set, pushing the usual fearsome flavor of "fight" aside to make way for something more slapstick and down to earth, while still notably alien. At its best moments, much of Ravnica is like this, conveying a sense of a strange and deliberately a bit over the top urban landscape that nevertheless is full of people just trying to make a damn living. If sometimes Izzet flavor text might be a bit too heavy on the ~wacky antics~ for my taste, or the appearance of stadium-sized wurms seems a little implausible, there's other cards that balance things out with interesting little worldbuilding tidbits. What is Murmuring Mystic actually murmuring about, and to what purpose? What's the life of a Child of the Night like, dodging the different guilds? Ravnica tantalizes with hints and suggestions of possible narratives about such lowly figures.

Oh, and this time around we're seeing more overt complexity within the guilds. At their worst the guilds can be caricatures of themselves, and we're definitely seeing a little of that this time around (have I complained already about the ~wacky Izzet flavor text~?), but we're also seeing, due to the specific narrative device of Bolas's outside pressure on each guild, more divisions of style and attitude emerge. Conspicuously, this set brings back one of the cooler elements of one of Magic's greatest sets: Fallen Empires' multiple art and flavor texts for individual cards. The common Guild Gates have quotes from different figures within each guild, expressing sometimes major differences in opinion over how the Guilds should be run. Elsewhere we see these divides play out on single cards, as with the new Split cards.

The result, hopefully, will be a greater sense of the Guilds as complex entities. As much as I'm on the side of anyone seeking to overthrow the system (because the Guild system is really awful), from a narrative standpoint I recognize that just having the guilds be populated entirely by flat ideologues and cackling monsters can't make for particularly compelling narrative, not when there's so dang much you can do with various low ranked guild members trying to make their morally ambiguous way through Ravnica's bizarre socioeconomic system.

I am hedging things a bit here, though, because WotC doesn't have a great history of handling this complexity. The Guilds are extremely flexible entities, and that's good for storytelling because it means any individual characters within the guilds might behave in a variety of ways without being shallow black and white heroes and villains. Fantasy Noir is all about those grays.

My problem with this is that it takes the flexibility of Ravnica's setting and uses it to artfully dodge things like thematic followthrough, consistency, consequences... things that are pretty essential for stories on the whole. If a storyline about the Gateless is to mean something, its major elements - like the attitude of characters like Aurelia toward the revolutionaries, or the actual resolution of the conflict - can't just be casually swept aside. Hell, I'm still mad that what we saw in Agents of Artifice - a Ravnica where the major Guilds had collapsed and countless smaller organizations sprung up in their place - was reversed without explanation. I get it, the Guilds are a hugely popular marketing thing, but just because I get it doesn't mean I have to like it. And even from a marketing standpoint, the haziness of the Guilds can lead to trouble, as with the recent furor over a Rakdos-branded shirt with "SAFEWORD" printed on it, or the flavor text of Lava Coil which might be taken to make light of police brutality. With the Guilds vibrating between villainous and fandom-friendly states, expectations and interpretations also get muddled and complicated.

I'm looking out my window at the city shrouded in autumn fog, now, far later at night than I should be up writing. Toronto seems to dissolve into vague shapes that could be one thing and could be another. This is what Ravnica feels like to me. It's a dream of a setting and all the potential stories that could be told there, but there's also a frustrating, marketing-driven nebulousness to its contours and conditions and consequences. The Guilds seem poised to be anything and everything a player might want them to be in order to buy the merch. Ravnica could be more, though - all that fog might condense and even has, on occasion, condensed into a picture of a world, if one that's always flowing and moving. For now, I'm still looking out into the mist of this new season on one of my favorite planes and imagining more than seeing what might be out there.