Backgrounds With Class: Rakdos Cultist
I'll be honest: Ravnica has always fascinated me. I was a high schooler when the first set came out, and I was immediately consumed creating characters for the setting. Now that we've actually received my long-awaited crossover, I thought it would be nice to write a love letter to the setting in the form of another Backgrounds with Class series. After all: some guilds have natural class choices tied in, from a conceptual standpoint. Boros and Fighter, Izzet and Wizard, Selesnya and Druid. But guilds aren’t class-restricted, and so I wonder what it would look like if you paired every class with every guild background, even the ones that seem at odds, like Izzet and Barbarian, or Gruul and Artificer. So I thought about it, and this is what I came up with. Some character concepts for each class, and each Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica background for each class.
Rakdos Cultist
The Rakdos Cultist Artificer is what you get when you cross a bartender with a stage pyrotechnician. Not much of a talker, he’s pursued the mixture of dangerous liquids ever since his pa brought him to bring-your-child-to-work day with him in the Izzet lab he worked. The fizz and spark of the fluids, the pop and bang of the explosives, and the screeches of dismay and inspiration sat heavy in his mind ever since, and he’s chased that high all the way from the top of a magister’s tower to the underground club where he makes sure the stage lights cast the best illumination and the pyro’s always on point.
The Rakdos Cultist Barbarian has been a fan of the circus his whole life. From when his Orzhov parents first stood enthralled on the street by the carnival’s call to when his sister walked the razor-tightrope to her own end, he has always felt a burning for life and the fleeting performance that no cold coin can cool. Now, roustabout in his free time and blade-juggler on stage, he chases his dream- to throw himself body and soul into the cult’s every move, be it stunts on stage, drinks in a dive, or a riot set to ruin neighborhoods.
The Rakdos Cultist Bard has skipped out on his parents’ legacy of kill-suiting in favor of better blades over more blades. Born for the limelight like many of the cult of Rakdos, his small stature is as much a surprise to audiences as his opponents, as is the killer-slapstick routine he’s working on. This routine, “The Bumbling Swordsman,” is an acrobatic marvel, integrating his natural athleticism and skill with the blade to make sure his co-performers meet various hilarious “accidental” ends throughout the performance and has, so far, even killed a member of the audience from sheer hilarity.
The Rakdos Cultist Cleric is walking proof that not every member of the Cult of Rakdos belongs on stage. Painfully clumsy and gifted with a total lack of a sense of humor, he instead leverages his massive frame to roustabout for his troop. Between shows, he studies tactics, convinced that Rakdos mobs shouldn’t limit themselves only to frenzied orgies of violence. This unusual focus on warfare has started getting him some attention at parties- after all, every party needs a planner to blow it up.
The Rakdos Cultist Druid has an uncanny connection with the various beasts that make themselves at home in Rakdos clubs, fight-pits, and pitfight-clubs. Capable of speaking to and guiding the many rats loyal to Rakdos himself in performance and defense of their buried territories, his ‘pets’ have earned him the honorary title of ratcatcher. That this half-ogre is a runt for his kind and has a bad back to boot matters little when a chittering carpet of filthy fur and teeth can back him up in combat.
The Rakdos Cultist Fighter never could pick between fire-breathing or axe throwing. When his troop’s leader asked him drunkenly “why choose?,” the path became clear. Now, he breathes fire without oil and blocks the other thrower’s axes with magic, the better to put death-defying stunts in his shows. Part-time enforcer, part-time performer, and part-time miner, he’s operated on minimal sleep for years, claiming the sleep-dep hallucinations and irritability only sharpen his edge and heighten his performance.
The Rakdos Cultist Monk, like many in the Cult of Rakdos, is not one to miss a party. Unlike most, though, his legendary constitution makes sobriety a daunting wall to climb- and not for lack of trying. Despite a constitution given by his demonic grandfather, he can blackout with the best of them, and his appetite for new and stranger drinks and other intoxicants is insatiable. And when the call goes out for entertainment, he’s always third to heed the call, bobbing, ducking, weaving, and knifing with the best bar brawlers in the Cult.
The Rakdos Cultist Paladin wasn’t always the proud middle-finger marauder he is today. Once he was a Boros Legionnaire, training to serve as angelic honor guard. Then everything changed when he was sent to Precinct Four for a month of border watch. In that month, he saw Gruul raiders rip through disciplined troops like a ball through pins, izzet wierds level buildings, and his fellow legionnaires ignore noncombatants in danger. It got to be that his nights unwinding at the local Rakdos clubs were the only thing that made sense, and when the rest of his squad pulled out, he stayed behind, forsaking his rank in favor of the mad hedonism of the club floor.
The Rakdos Cultist Ranger has a deceptively difficult job: taking care of the beasts for the cult’s performances. Not so easy when the beasts include horses with nightmare sires, just-barely-not-hellhounds, and rats the size of cats with the temper of wolverines. Still, she’s quick with a beastmaster’s blade and whip, and has an eye for training beasts to perform alongside her, so she might go far yet. In the meantime, she also finds herself playing crowd control when the audience tries to escape to upstage the other cultists.
The Rakdos Cultist Rogue walks the path of the blade bravo, full of tall tales and braggadocio too grand to believe- almost. In truth he is a talented swordsman, and an ambitious performer- his boasts are the show, and with a packed bar to play off of, he can claim greater and greater impossibilities- that he fought the sun, that Tin Street’s named after his family, that Isperia of the Azorious Senate is a casual ‘playmate’ of his. Of course, making such boasts in mixed company has brought him trouble before, but that’s what a quick blade and a quicker step are for.
The Rakdos Cultist Sorcerer doesn’t really know where he came from or why. Born in the Undercity and manifesting unusually scaly skin for a human, he aways assumed he was the runoff from a Simic experiment. He spent a lot of his youth running with freaks and geeks from the Rakdos’s mining operations between his own stints in the mines. It wasn’t until he was nearly an adult before the scale color came in and he realized he wasn’t a failed krasis or guardian project subject, but that he somehow ended up with high-octane dragon blood and the sorcery that came with it.
The Rakdos Cultist Warlock has always felt the thunder in her soul, like so many of her herd; unlike the rest, she is content to surround herself with drums and chase the pulse of the crowd. After lancing three of her roustabouts in a grim comedy routine Rakdos himself chuckled at, she swore to make the ringmaster laugh- and he pulled a lance from his own flesh to hand to her, mark of her promise. Now she’s a rider after his own humor, aiming to plant her charge where it can hit the hardest- a striker fit to bust a gut.
The Rakdos Cultist Wizard puts a lot of effort into only burning the right things for his performances. A fire-juggler by trade and a student of Evocation magic by fancy, he specializes in acts of pyrotechnic grace and complexity on the stage. Currently he’s thrown his lot in with a handful of like-minded souls, and they lowkey compete to see who causes the most property damage at their venues. To the winner go the nightly spoils- a new brand and a drink. He’s got four brands already, but there’s always room for one more.
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A common topic of hack standup comedy in the 80s was the fact that Beastmaster was often shown on HBO repeatedly. Dennis Miller said that HBO stood for “Hey, Beastmaster’s On.” Dennis Leary, endlessly cynical about technology, said that HBO now gave you all kinds of new choices, like the choice between watching Beastmaster at 2am, or a showing of Beastmaster at 5:30am.
Beastmaster actually bombed at the box office, but, along with Clue, was rediscovered because of repeated airings on a widespread technology exploding in popularity at the time, cable television. Usually, movies are sold to cable companies as a part of a package deal, so if you want, super blockbusters like, say, Top Gun, you also had to show less successful films as well. Because Beastmaster was not really a movie most people would go out to see deliberately, but was instead turn your brain off fun TV watching, the equivalent of Ridiculousness, it was like it was perfectly designed for cable and basic cable, which you could watch just because it’s on. And since Beastmaster was not a hit but they were contractually obligated to show it, it was often shown late at night, where the irony-poisoned, couch-locked stoner audience that would later form the core of Adult Swim and Space Ghost Coast to Coast’s audience rediscovered the movie, and made it a beloved cult/stoner classic. Come to think of it, if HBO had been more on the ball in the mid-80s and realized they had an audience there, they could have created Adult Swim 2 decades early.
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