Plane Shift Your 5E D&D Game Into Magic: The Gathering — Innistrad

May 1, 2021

Campaign Settings/ Dungeons & Dragons/ Free Nerdy Things/ Plane Shift/ Previews/ YouTube

Salutations, nerds! You’re probably already aware Wizards of the Coast is releasing Adventures in the Forgotten Realms — the first Dungeons & Dragons themed expansion for Magic: The Gathering — but they’ve already done something similar previously with the Plane Shift supplements for fifth edition D&D even before even before Guildmasters Guide to Ravnica and Mythic Odysseys of Theros. We’ve been revisiting Amonkhet, Dominaria, Innistrad, Kaladesh, Zendikar and Ixalan, which all all Plane Shift-ed over to 5E D&D. So without farther ado let’s get into Innistrad!

MTG chocolate in 5E D&D peanut butter

Plane Shift: Innistrad presents a 40 page PDF jam packed with loads of great stuff. In preparation for Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica release back in 2016 and 2017 WotC game designer and writer James Wyatt put together several fantastic 5E D&D supplements to represent various MTG planes for gamers who love rolling those funny shaped dice. It’s been several years since those releases and with tremendous numbers of new players discovering 5E D&D along with the imminent Adventures in the Forgotten Realms set on the horizon (with an MTG revisit to Innistrad right behind!) it feels like a terrific opportunities to revisit 5E D&D Plane Shift ourselves and rediscover all the awesome material within.

“On the plane of Innistrad, horrors stalk the shadows and scratch at doors in the night. Humanity is beset on all sides: vampires thirst for human blood, werewolves live for the thrill of the hunt, the restless spirits of the dead haunt the living, and no corpse is safe from reanimation at the hands of cruel necromancers or cunning scientists.” — James Wyatt, Plane Shift: Innistrad

The World of Innistrad

With the release of Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft it’s a great time to revisit Plane Shift: Innistrad. You might develop this plane as your own Domain of Dread using the material in the book to help. The nightmarish realm of Innistrad is definitely in line with the horror themes found in the book.

Horrors of the Night. First of all you need to understand Innistrad is full of monsters. So many monsters. There’s the more obvious threats like werewolves and zombies but just straight up animals like hounds can be a problem too because of the madness that sinks into everything here. You’re not even safe around the angels. Now that we’ve established how everything, including your neighbors, could be trying to kill you…

Defenders of Humanity. There’s the Church of Avacyn. The long story made short here is the big bad angel, protector of humanity, fell to madness and the followers of this angel decided it couldn’t be because the angel is flawed and it must be because humanity has sinned. So now we’re dealing with militant fundamentalists as well as more blatant kinds of evil. Careful not to grow any inconvenient warts or let your black cat play outside.

Life on Innistrad

The population of Innistrad is mostly human and Plane Shift: Innistrad recommends player characters come from this race. Most setting books and similar for 5E D&D include curated content like this but Dungeon Masters and players can adjust things to their taste of course.

In addition to these human variations the document includes Innistrad specific guidelines for each 5E D&D class like organizations associated with them, how languages differ in this plane and an in-depth look at the Church of Avacyn, which touches on Cathars (the soldiers of the Avanynian church) and Avacynian Archmages.

Gavony. Normal boring humans. These ones live in cities and out on the moors. Mechanically they don’t do anything differently. Culturally they’re the villagers who all close their shutters when strangers wander into town. Enough said.
Kessig. The craftsmen of Innistrad these people work a lot with their hands and they are fast. (Probably from having to run from monsters a lot.) When they use the Dash action difficult terrain doesn’t cost extra movement on that turn and if they make a melee attack against a creature it stops the creature from making opportunity attacks against them for the rest of their turn whether or not they actually hit. Ultimately what this means is the Kessig are built hardy…and built to run away. Or to give chase depending on how you’re going to play it.
Nephalia. Market boat merchants! I love the idea of the Nephalia to be honest. “There’s vampires on land, so we’re going to live on boats.” There’s a certain pragmatism to this. They get proficiency in any four skills or four tools and considering those proficiencies aren’t easy to come by I’m going to call this one an excellent investment if you want to play a very skillful paladin or some other class without a lot of skill proficiencies.
Stensia. These guys live in the shadow of Dracula’s castle. By which I mean close to vampire strongholds. This means a lot of them get eaten and it’s usually the weak and slow ones. And wow this is grim but I think the idea here is since their weak have been culled they’re baseline a little bit tougher than most people. Their trait increases their maximum hit points by 2 every level, which doesn’t sound like much but if you reach level 20 that’s an extra 40 hp in your pocket.
Background — Inquisitor. If you’ve ever wanted to play some guy with thumbscrews and a pilgrim hat, raving about heresy, now is your chance. Inquisitors have the authority to arrest criminals and in the absence of other authorities pass judgment and carry out sentences. Let’s be honest — the player characters are going to do this anyway. But hey, having the backing of the big bad church is nice!

Creatures of the Night

Werewolves. First of all it doesn’t look like the werewolves transmit their lycanthropy by biting people on the Innistrad plane. Apparently there’s a secret shrouded ritual they use, which makes werewolf fights a different sort of threat and suddenly more viable to use regularly. A stat block for a Krallenhorde Werewolf is included along with a sidebar presenting special traits for the werewolves of Innistrad.
Vampires. Meanwhile the vampires in Innistrad are beautiful, can create a magical silence around themselves and all around do most of the things vampires in horror movies can do. Shapeshift, fly, go into a frenzy, cast spells (depending on their age). They also all come from twelve specific bloodlines, ancient sires who were involved in Markov’s ritual to brought them into being. A stat block for a Vampire Neonate is included along with a sidebar presenting special traits for the vampires of Innistrad.
Geists. We’re talking ghosts over here. Not all of them are bad. Some of them are helpful but a lot of them just want to terrorize or possess you. On a plane where everything is trying to kill you, you have to imagine there’s going to be some trauma leaving ghosts around. A stat block for a Geist is included along with a sidebar presenting special traits for the ghosts of Innistrad.
Necro-Alchemists. This is where things start to get really cool so buckle up. Sometimes they call themselves Geistmages but necro-alchemists are basically Dr. Frankenstein with Nikola Tesla influence dialed up to 20. They suck the souls out of things to power their mad machines and it’s awesome.
Skaberen. These ones are zombie mages. They rob graves, gather body parts, stitch together new undead creatures and animate them to create skaabs, which is just a grosser way of saying flesh golem. Includes a sidebar presenting special traits for the flesh golems of Innistrad.
Ghoulcallers. Vanilla necromancers, check. There’s even a spot here for liches (as if this plane weren’t horrifying enough).
Demons. The opposite side of the angel coin here, in Innistrad some demons were once human and corrupted because they sold their souls for power. Avacyn has the church, the demons have cults. On this plane the difference between demons and devils isn’t alignment, the devils are just shorter than everyone else.
Cults and Witches. As far as I can figure cults crop up around pretty much anything in Innistrad. Demons, angels, a planeswalker who was there for a while and sculpted stone…some of the people involved in them mutate and basically become the image of the thing they’re following.
Dragons and Wurms. The good news is dragons are super rare on Innistrad and even if you encounter one you’re probably not going to be enough to qualify as a tempting meal for it. It’s going to want to go for a werewolf or some other kind of monster. Wurms are big ole serpent creatures and corpse eaters so don’t worry too much about those either. They’re one of the few things that probably isn’t trying to kill you in particular.
Constructed Creatures. These are either animated by magic or possessed by geists including creatures like gargoyles, scarecrows, golems, animated armor, creepy dolls and so on. Oh also, the creepy doll has a stat block. It’s a challenge 2 creature and it can put you in the doll body while it takes over yours.
Elementals. Embodiments of the forces of nature. I’m pretty sure they don’t come from the elemental planes in Innistrad. They’re just fire and plants made manifest.
Angels. They were here to protect humanity and then Avacyn went crazy so while some of them are still trying to fulfill their original purpose a lot of them are just as much a danger to you as anything else so look out for them. There are a bunch of different flights with different purposes. I highly recommend this section in particular because it’s interesting stuff. Includes a sidebar presenting special traits for the angels of Innistrad.

The Coming of Emrakul

I don’t know how much you know about the eldrazi of MTG so here’s a quick refresher. They’ve got big eldritch horror energy and Emrakul is just sort of lurking in Innistrad causing casual degeneration of minds and bodies. She is probably the worst thing here. Emrakul’s cultists have degenerated into beastial things themselves. She’s just kind of looming over there ready to destroy all the things and I’d advise not thinking about this too hard. You know, because of the mentally corrosive nature of the eldrazi.

Curse of Innistrad

Okay, bear with me just a little bit longer. You might have been reading through this document with me and thinking the same things I was thinking. “Wow, this has a lot of similarities with Barovia!”

And you’d be right. In fact the last thing in Plane Shift: Innistrad are a bunch of tips for running Curse of Strahd in Innistrad instead of Barovia. This includes changing up a bunch of the NPCs and locations and the nature of quite a few of the quests you can find in the book. It’s a nice fresh paint job on familiar material if you can keep all the differences in mind. Personally I’d probably just leave it as is and take some of the things out of the plane shift suggestions like Ruby and Carmine and just expand the adventure that way.

If you’re excited about the new Adventures in the Forgotten Realms D&D based MTG set and you haven’t already checked out Plane Shift I highly advise you do so. If you’re still thirsting for some cool undead content might I gesture you on over to the Death Pit for some more zombie fun? Anyway, as always come yell at me @Pyrosynthesis if I’ve gotten the lore wrong and as always, stay nerdy! [NERDITOR’S NOTE: When you sign up for Nerdarchy the Newsletter in addition to weekly news, views and homebrews straight to your inbox you’ll receive several free bonuses, one of which is $9.99 in store credit to get Death Pit or whatever you want!]

You can check out our other delves into the Plane Shift documents for 5E D&D through the Plane Shift category. If you’re interested in Dominaria, any of the other Plane Shift documents or MTG in 5E D&D in general here’s where to find such things. Remember — every Plane Shift document is 100% free at DM’s Guild, which you’ll find here:

*Featured image — Innistrad takes its inspiration from Gothic fiction set in 18th and 19th century North Eastern Europe. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

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Plane Shift Your 5E D&D Game Into Magic: The Gathering — Innistrad