This is a pretty special installment of the Plane Shift series for me, because I was the creative lead for Ixalan world building. Perhaps betraying my fourteen-year history working on Dungeons & Dragons, Ixalan is a world of exploration and treasure, marked by ancient sites waiting to be explored by intrepid heroes. One of those sites, shown on a card in the Ixalan set, is obviously inspired by a classic D&D adventure, The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. This plane lacks only dragons to be a fully realized D&D milieu—there's even a world map!
Ultimately, that means that writing Plane Shift: Ixalan was both a ton of fun and relatively easy. The people who populate Ixalan have a lot in common with D&D characters already, and mapping them to existing classes and backgrounds was a pretty straightforward task. Similarly, the creatures of the plane—especially the dinosaurs—had a lot of analogues in the game already. And still, this is the longest installment of Plane Shift yet!
That's partly because I had the freedom to really cut loose on ideas and inspiration to help you play a character in this exciting world. You'll find more tables in here than ever before—tables of personality traits and ideals to flesh out your character, of treasures to flavor your hoards, and inspiration to bring your party together. This sort of thing is both really enjoyable and really challenging to write—a lot like the flavor text on Magic cards, actually, because each one is a self-contained nugget, a complete idea in a single sentence. I hope that all this stuff enriches your game.
The appendix in this document is an extended musing on the colors of Magic and their relationship to D&D characters and spells. This is the sort of thing that dominates a lot of lunchtime conversations with members of the Magic creative team who are also avid D&D fans, and also the sort of thing I get a lot of questions about on Twitter. As with much of the rest of this document, the focus is more on roleplaying and character building than on rules. It's a first stab, though, toward a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the worlds of both games.
As always, The Art of Magic: The Gathering—Ixalan is the definitive resource for information about the plane. With this document, you can use that information to build a campaign with a minimum of changes to the fifth edition D&D rules, which you can find here. And even without the book, you can find lore about Ixalan on the Magic web site.
There's a lot of open space on that map. I hope you have fun exploring the world of Ixalan!
