Castes of Suvnica: Planeswalker guide to Guilds of Suvnica

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Plot concept for the block

• Suvnica's caste system is artificial, implanted on a world known to its inhabitants as Telengor.
• It is part of a project run (tentatively) by the Infinite Consortium before it was brought down.
• The Rimid are psychic vampires, but weren't always this way.
• The Rimid's role, unknown to most other races, is to hunt and kill any planeswalker that sparks or infiltrates on.
• Ob Nixilis has made destroying Suvnica's civilizations his latest pet project.
• He's collaborated with Suvnica's native demons behind the scenes to essentially take over the Zhavi and the Gilrog, using his influence to tear Suvnican society apart.
• After Chandra arrives, she witnesses the attempted murder of a native planeswalker and saves them.
• An external eyes helps revealing that there's something really messed up with Suvnica, and she leaves to get the Gatewatch involved.
• Investigation, done in part with key information from a Telengon planeswalker, reveal to the populace that Nixilis and his demonic allies intended to use Suvnica's very way of life to destroy it.
• It is also revealed that the Rempart itself and the alterations it imprinted upon Telengor's leylines are the cause of the constant monstrous attacks upon the city-state by the surrounding nature.
• Internal tensions come to a bubble in the form of several castes joining the already revolting Tezzi and Sorba.
• The Rempart is destroyed in the early stages of the revolt.
• Eventually the entire caste system collapses, leaving a far more balanced society slowly moving beyond its xenophobic reflexes to take contact with Telengon's native civilizations and magic.

Block Planeswalker (tentative)

• SUV: Chandra, Unnamed WG planeswalker
• THR: Either Jace or Gideon, WU Telangon Aven planeswalker
• [unnamed third set]: Ob Nixilis, possibly adding a second color such a s red or G

Detailed description to be rewritten

Ravnica is hardly the sole plane to have developed a guild system. It is in fact a rather widespread system of social organization in the Multiverse, but it does not, however, usually arise on its own. In many instances, these systems are in fact offshoots, engineered creation of the Infinite Consortium at the behest of Nicol Bolas himself. Why Bolas wishes this type of society to be found across the multiverse is unknown, and since none of them is less than a thousand years old, hardly anyone remains that could answer this question besides the elder dragon himself.

Suvnica (known to the Consortium as world U in lineage S, the 19th lineage of the grand experiment) is in fact the youngest of these. To its original inhabitants, this was a massive colonization project of an uninhabited plane. They were recruited, some covertly, many unknowingly, across the multiverse to form the initial population on a welcoming new world. The guild system was instigated from the very outset of colonization as a way to immediately create much needed social structure in the budding civilization no less than two different guilds (The Zhavi and the Rimid) were tasked with the initial implementation (and later the enforcement) of the incredible, all-encompassing spell known to the Suvnicans merely as the Compact.

Soon a sprawling capital had appeared, pulled out of the ground by collectively driven spells even more massive than the compact itself, and it wasn't very long before a few satellite establishment had been created along the coast that Suvnica had been built on, and deeper in the Hermland, as the uncolonized land was known. With no recollections ever (thanks to the Rimid's dedicated work) of a time when the guild system did not exist, the future looked bright for Suvnica. Sadly, this was not to be, for Suvnicans would soon find and entire plane turning against them and no possibilities to leave, or even memories of such possibilities.

The first sign that anything was amiss, although no one could have predicted it at the time, occurred two hundred years after Suvnica was founded, fifty years after the completion of the city's third rampart. It is now known as the March of the Artin. Unknown to the Consortium, even more so to the colonists, there did exist a sentient race on the plane. The Artins, who call themselves the Arktons ("The first ones"), are a race of sentient bears whose evolution was greatly accelerated, it appears, by the appearance of Suvnica. This was the conclusion reached by both Tezzi and Suiroza scholars, since Suvnica's foundation was the only event seemingly correlated with the Artins' foundational myths.

According to the Artin, the Hermland was rapidly becoming more and more hostile to life, and they sought refuge into the Suvnican society. Although by now the very idea of people living outside the Compact of Castes was deemed entirely heretical by most Suvnicans, and particularly the Zhavi, many Artin did integrate into Suvnican castes, particularly into the Gilrog and the Grohm. And yet all the horrible events they had described, the increasingly monstrous and deformed creatures the Hermland spewed far away from Suvnica grew closer, grew ever more horrifying until only a few still dared to ever exit the walls of the city. Eventually Suvnica had to abandon its outposts, whose population were evacuated back to the city, and who are now, centuries later, all but myths of their own.

Suvnica, as the Artin call it, was defending itself against a magic alien to itself. The seemingly neverending waves of horrors that periodically swiped through the city were in fact planar "antibodies". And the increasing hostility of the land itself, a planar inflammation. For the most part, however, Suvnicans, who have now for centuries battened down the hatches and shuttered themselves inside their city, are entirely unaware of the situation, a situation which, if they take no actions against it, is bound to result in the annihilation of the city an most, if not all its inhabitants.

And yet this is not even the sole danger looming over the complex social structure that Suvnicans ahve come to regard as the only possible one. For reasons that were never disclosed to the Consortium, it was crucial that the experiment remain as isolated as possible. To this purposes, the Rimid were also charged with hunting down any Planeswalker that may have arisen among the Suvnican populace or who happened to planeswalk to what they believed was an empty plane. They have not been nearly as successful as they should. This has resulted in the inevitable apparition of a growing casteless population, poor souls that are unlucky enough to be born to visitors, or who were actually ostracized from their birth caste.

Despite the best efforts of the Zhavi to clamp down on the casteless (which they tellingly refer to as the "Riffraff"), the population has steadily increased in number, further taking in those Artin that refused to join the caste system. Forbidden by the Zhavi-dominated hierarchy that seeks their ultimate extinction to reside in the city proper, most of the casteless have resorted to establishing the Walltowns. These settlements are built literally against the wall, hanging off the battlements and outcrops of the roughly hewn structure. Between pogroms and the constant horrors produced by the Hermland, the Walltowns are still less dangerous to live in than the Hermland himself, which has been largely abandoned to the few guilds (primarily the Grohm, Gilrgo and Cisme) that still dare visit and explore it.

However, discontent is spreading amongst the casteless. The Zhavi have over time lost the support of several castes, some of which are now actively opposed to the compact, and top-dog caste may now prove ill-equipped against an enemy that is not and cannot be forcefully bound by the magical laws that compel the Zhavi themselves.