Renaissance Set - Creative Team
Hi guys, I talked with @ningyounk a bit and decided we need to create a creative section to the Rezatta. I came in a bit late, but now I will almost solely be working on this section of the set.
This is our current situation for the lore...
By @Ningyounk
Welcome to the plane of Rezatta which lives at the rythm of the muses cycle! At times it's a quite plane cloaked in a dull winter, but when the Muses return, they bring a spring full of inspiration for everyone. For some, it means creating art so beautiful it spontaneously comes to life. For others it means discovering new worlds or making huge scientific progress. But there are also tortured minds which, once inspired, just create more evil and crazy schemes.
A hidden society secretly plots to steal a Grand Muse, an etheral being of emotion, to harvest its power for themselves. In parallel of showing the wonders of Rezatta under the influence of the muses, the set follows the story of five character who fail at stopping this evil organization plot. Their failure leads to accidentally corrupting a Grand Muse which kill all the other Grand Muses and goes on a rampage while twisting everyone's emotions. The five heroes will finally manage to unite and deal with the corrupted muse. But making things right will require a much greater sacrifice as they themselves become the new Grand Muses to restore the emotional balance of Rezatta.
CHARACTERS
This is especially blurry. We still don't know. This is the characters we are the most likely to have:
1) Da Vinci as a character. So far, we've called him Avinzi. He's a genius in both science and art. We believe he likes to take ideas from other planes to get his most out-of-the-box creations. Notably, he could help resolve a conflict by bringing to this plane artefacts from other planes like hedrons of Zendikar or moon shards from Innistrad that are known to seal problematic entities if we put one in the story (a Corrupted Muse storyline is one of many under discussion.)
2) Ekoma Rai. She's the character among the five original characters that made the strongest impression. She's a blue-aligned musician that is mute, causing her to be uncomfortable in most situations. She can express her feelings and thoughts through music though.
These are the other characters we talked about:
1) Salendi Kortha is the red-aligned original main hero. She's a female painter that's gregarous and unabashed. We've talked about making her a dude to avoid the Chandra comparison.
2) Maren Faresight is the green-aligned original main hero. He's an elf and a poet. He's introspective but wise.
3) Jennel of Matereth is the white-aligned original main hero. He's an aven that's outspoken and a natural leader. (You'll notice most of them are a little too close to their Gatewatch counterpart.)
4) Kedrah Selme is the black-aligned original main hero. He's the only one who is not an artist as he steals the creations of others to combine them. He's cynical, arrogant, and devilishly charming.
5) Vicine is a black-aligned character that was mentioned for a "Cult" storyline. His main role is to betray the heroes, then switch to the bad guys side and betray them too.
6) As I mentioned above, a Mona Lisa planeswalker would help reinforce the Renaissance theme. I pictured her as black-aligned and secretive though not necessarily evil.
This is our current situation for the lore...
By @Ningyounk
Welcome to the plane of Rezatta which lives at the rythm of the muses cycle! At times it's a quite plane cloaked in a dull winter, but when the Muses return, they bring a spring full of inspiration for everyone. For some, it means creating art so beautiful it spontaneously comes to life. For others it means discovering new worlds or making huge scientific progress. But there are also tortured minds which, once inspired, just create more evil and crazy schemes.
A hidden society secretly plots to steal a Grand Muse, an etheral being of emotion, to harvest its power for themselves. In parallel of showing the wonders of Rezatta under the influence of the muses, the set follows the story of five character who fail at stopping this evil organization plot. Their failure leads to accidentally corrupting a Grand Muse which kill all the other Grand Muses and goes on a rampage while twisting everyone's emotions. The five heroes will finally manage to unite and deal with the corrupted muse. But making things right will require a much greater sacrifice as they themselves become the new Grand Muses to restore the emotional balance of Rezatta.
CHARACTERS
This is especially blurry. We still don't know. This is the characters we are the most likely to have:
1) Da Vinci as a character. So far, we've called him Avinzi. He's a genius in both science and art. We believe he likes to take ideas from other planes to get his most out-of-the-box creations. Notably, he could help resolve a conflict by bringing to this plane artefacts from other planes like hedrons of Zendikar or moon shards from Innistrad that are known to seal problematic entities if we put one in the story (a Corrupted Muse storyline is one of many under discussion.)
2) Ekoma Rai. She's the character among the five original characters that made the strongest impression. She's a blue-aligned musician that is mute, causing her to be uncomfortable in most situations. She can express her feelings and thoughts through music though.
These are the other characters we talked about:
1) Salendi Kortha is the red-aligned original main hero. She's a female painter that's gregarous and unabashed. We've talked about making her a dude to avoid the Chandra comparison.
2) Maren Faresight is the green-aligned original main hero. He's an elf and a poet. He's introspective but wise.
3) Jennel of Matereth is the white-aligned original main hero. He's an aven that's outspoken and a natural leader. (You'll notice most of them are a little too close to their Gatewatch counterpart.)
4) Kedrah Selme is the black-aligned original main hero. He's the only one who is not an artist as he steals the creations of others to combine them. He's cynical, arrogant, and devilishly charming.
5) Vicine is a black-aligned character that was mentioned for a "Cult" storyline. His main role is to betray the heroes, then switch to the bad guys side and betray them too.
6) As I mentioned above, a Mona Lisa planeswalker would help reinforce the Renaissance theme. I pictured her as black-aligned and secretive though not necessarily evil.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
I also want to mention the nature of the conflict on Rezatta has not been determined yet on the main thread, it's still under discussion. So the paragraph about a hidden society that wants to steal a Muse is just one of many options we talked about.
The same is true for the characters. Just a bit of context because I'm unsure it's clear in the introduction, this is not a list of the characters we will have in the story but a list of potential characters that we could use and talked about at some point, but we don't have to use them all ^^ Da Vinci and Ekoma being more likely to actually make it into the story than the others for now.
About the characters, yes we can have non-planeswalkers characters, it's just like a regular set
What if we told a story that's similar to the Conspiracy stories?
That sounds fun! Beware that Fiora has kind of a natural italian Renaissance flavour as well so, as usual, for this to work we need to find elements that make the story unique and different from the rest.
Yes, of course. I meant that it was a non-world ending threat. It was a political battle for power.
Do you want to join us in our quest?
I got an idea...
What if the muses were allied with two colors. White and green could both be joy for example... I have an idea that would really work if this was excepted.
There was a looooong debate over the best way to depict the Muses. To avoid stalling on this topic indefinitely, we decided to lock in the monocoloured versions, which means we won't change this unless it really doesn't work ^^ We did consider multicoloured versions (I even tried four-coloured versions) but the monocoloured ones just had more impact. There are a lot of elements that factored into this decision, including mechanical ones ^^
Yes, that is an interesting approach
Why thank you.
Cool!
Which means it's time to start talking creative design again =D
As a reminder, here the most important stuff we still have to figure out:
1) What kind of story are we telling? Is it a war? Is it a race? A fish-out-of-water story? Something big? Something intimate?
2) Who are our main characters? We have the mute musician and the Da Vinci planeswalker so far.
3) What makes our world unique? We know there's living art and muses of emotions for instance.
____________________________________
But before we start exploring potential stories again, I'd like to have a warming round. I was reading the latest Making Magic article a few days ago and stopped at this:
"Usually, to get a sense of what we're trying to do, the creative team will make a few images to help give us inspiration."
— Mark Rosewater
With this image:
So I thought it could be a good idea to share our best-fitting illustrations for the set, in order to get some inspiration and find the feel of the set? I'll start with the illustrations that I think are the bet at giving the set its identity when combined =D
Card links:
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/towering-masterpiece
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/unhappy-citizen
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/knowledge-hungry-thief
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/sprite-dancer
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/practicing-lutist
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/aspiring-novice
I think for the Unhappy Citizen, and perhaps thematically for Rezatta, we could bring the Serf subtype back.
1) Historically speaking, serfs were more representative of the middle ages as opposed to the renaissance era. They were the lowest class on the hierarchy scale. While wizards isn't always for historical accuracy, with the most recent example being the Ixalan block, this is something we do need to keep in mind.
2) After brief research, there are no currently existing serfs. (Possibly as a result of an errata.)
I just don't think that bringing around a type that's been errata'd away is a good call when we consider that serfs weren't really related to the renaissance era itself, and a "random" type on a few cards for no evident reason just kinda feels bad.
Seems reasonable. It wasn't "errata'd" away, however, it was only ever on a token.
Produced by: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=106638
I was thinking it might be a nice way to clearly show those without artistic tendencies.
Edit: Is there a way to look at segments of your DeviantArt collection? Otherwise, I might have to quit DeviantArt for personal use and just use it for collecting artwork.
Would you guys be willing to give us the lowdown on what tribes are in this set, currently? We have a lot of muse artwork and some other artwork that might fit in the right circumstances.
Wonderful artworks, thanks a lot! =D
The Serf subtype is an interesting idea, we can always try it and see if it helps connect some cards together thematically. If it feels unnecessary we can always go back later ^^
@Everyone
Don't hesitate to post illustrations you like, I'll let people gather some inspirational artworks over the week-end before really going into deeper stuff ^^
Here are some cool Gorgons with statues:
At WotC it's only been done extensively with Birds (Aven), Cats (Leonin), Elephants (Loxodon), and Rhinos (Rhox)?
We could definitely revisit the idea though, it's always a cool added value to the set independantly of whether we need it to fill some holes or not ^^ Here are some antropomorphized artworks I have:
First, there's Chichapie (Jerome Jacinto) who has a lot of antropomorphized characters, sadly he deactivated his Deviantart account but we can still find his work on Tumblr or other websites. This is just a few examples of his work because he has dozens of illustrations like these, as he worked on a game card called Armello (that has very distinctive Renaissance/Medieval clothes on top of that) and a portfolio called Redwall featuring a bunch of squirrels (still pretty much in the Renaissance clothing style):
And this is from other artists:
Finally, I remembered a thought from Mark Rosewater in his last Nuts and Bolts article about creative elements where he advises custom set designers like us to be creative and create our own creature types. So this little guy is not as antropomorphized as the rest, but I like the idea of this as a potential made-up creature type, it's kind of a baby dragon but it looks funny when it's a baby with little wings (created by an artist named Anritco, the series is named "Tod"):