A DnD homebrewer has brought Magic: The Gathering’s noir-steeped streets of New Capenna to the world of Dungeons and Dragons, crafting a 68-page setting guide complete with monster stat blocks, unique treasures, new 5e backgrounds, and more – in other words, everything you’d need to run a DnD campaign in the recent MTG setting.
It’s the third DnD guide to a Magic plane made by US freelance visual artist, Gabe. This year already, he’s put out ‘plane-shifted guides’ to Kaldheim and Kamigawa (we covered the latter here) adapting them to be game-ready.
“I think for me the most compelling part of the New Capenna setting is the atmosphere,” Gabe says. “It’s all art deco, 1920’s mobster film, cabaret; it’s such a drastic change of scenery from other DnD settings that are all some version of high-fantasy. New Capenna still has fantasy races and magic, but it’s all in a brand new context.”
For his New Capenna guide, the homebrewer spent a long time figuring out how to handle the various vying mafia factions, which dominate the Streets of New Capenna MTG set. “a lot more time was spent with the lore and creating features and rules that revolved around that concept.”
He toyed with various homebrew mechanics, but as Gabe aims for his guides to be ‘as close to official material as possible’, ultimately he “decided to just adopt the rules for renown in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, which provide simple rules for tracking reputation in a faction.”
Gabe is most proud of the visual design of his New Capenna booklet, and says it’s his best-looking guide to date. While he feels he “can’t take much of the credit since it’s really all thanks to the amazing and talented artists that worked with WotC on this card set,” Gabe says he put plenty of work into “combining that art with a great layout and finding interesting ways to present the visual identity of the setting.”
While some MTG settings, like Theros and Strixhaven, have already been turned into official D&D settings by Wizards of the Coast, there are plenty of gaps remaining, and Gabe intends to fill ’em. He lets the Reddit community decide which world he covers next, and says it’s looking like Eldraine will be the subject of guide number four.
However, he’s created a rough outline for all the planes on his plate, with a skeleton of the contents and some basic rules. “In the future, expect guides for Tarkir, Eldraine, Ikoria, Llorwyn-Shadowmoor, and Shandalar at the very least,” he says.
Gabe released his first planeshifted guide a few months ago, and has already had feedback from people using the content in their campaigns. “It’s definitely not an overwhelming amount of feedback,” he says, “But it’s always positive, and I’m sure as time goes on there’ll be more people who discover the guides and even more campaigns.”