Do any grognards read my blog? (Ha ha, just kidding, trick question! Nobody reads my blog!) It’s a shame because I’d like to discuss guilds and how you can use them in your game. And, on the off chance some poor grognard drunkenly stumbled upon Tales of Asher in a desperate attempt to add more crunch and spreadsheets into their game — let me right off the bat establish the following: Implementing guilds can be as complex or as simple as you like; even boiled down to their bare essence, they can provide interesting roleplaying opportunities and add a lot of flavor to a town or city.

What’s a Guild?

Guilds were organizations comprised of members who shared a common craft or trade. They were thus able to control all of their business within their territory, as well as work to improve their own skills and standing. Typically, the ruler of a city would officially approve of a guild, effectively granting it a monopoly within the city. For instance, if a city had a Shoemaker’s Guild, only guild members were allowed to sell shoes within the city. There were greater guilds, which controlled a broad category of tradesmen, such as Armorers; and there were lesser guilds, which controlled specific specialties within their category, such as Helmet Makers. A key feature of guilds were their common funds into which guild members paid monthly or yearly dues. The guild leadership would decide what to do with this money, but it was almost always put forth to good use in the common interest of the guild members.

How Did Guild Membership Work?

At the very bottom of the rankings, there were the apprentices. The vast majority of apprentices start as children, when they are just old enough to begin learning the family trade. Sometimes, the children are entered into apprenticeships to pay off their parents’ debt to the master. And once in a blue moon, an apprentice is an adolescent or young adult who has decided on their own to learn a craft or art. The apprentice trains under a master, learning the very basics and often doing manual labor such as cleaning the shop or running errands. The apprentice makes no money and pays no dues to the guild; they are completely the responsibility of the master.

Eventually, the apprentice will be ready to graduate to journeyman. Journeymen become employees under their master, and thus earn wages daily or hourly (while the master typically covers their guild membership dues.) Many journeymen are encouraged to travel and work under other masters to learn new techniques.

When a journeyman presents an acceptable masterpiece to their master and their guild, they are officially declared a craftsman or artisan. (The “master” moniker is used sometimes to describe particularly talented craftsmen, or craftsmen who have an apprentice or journeyman under them.) Guilds like to celebrate newly graduated craftsmen with raucous feasts. It is not uncommon for the guild to partially fund the new craftsman in opening their own business.

How Does This Affect My Game?

The really interesting thing here is how political guilds were. In the big picture, the city leader officially sanctions a large group of highly skilled people to control a monopoly over an important trade. Obviously, these guilds are established for the most important trades, and often a city’s reputation rides on the quality of its trades. Imagine if a city, known for its incredible shipbuilding, started selling poor quality ships to customers! City governments and guild leadership councils often become tightly coupled; guild masters commonly sit on city councils, and city officials commonly sit on guild councils. Done properly, this can allow for a unified, efficient economic machine that benefits the entire city. Done improperly, this can lead to a lot of corruption!

And maybe your players want to become guild members. Maybe they want to dismantle a guild. Maybe they want to establish their own guild. Maybe a guild needs their assistance. Maybe the city needs their assistance with a guild. When characters are dealing with cities and guilds, there’s a lot at stake! Both institutions control a LOT of money, but also consider using titles as rewards. A governor might be inclined to provide the characters with land and full citizenship rights if the characters, in turn, head down into the silver mines and see just why production has stopped!

Or Get Deeper…

Perhaps a guild is simply a front to a more complex organization — like the way the Balance Corporation is a big conglomeration of trade guilds that secretly hides the thieves’ and assassins’ guilds that operate in their shadows.

Perhaps a guild can become a powerful ally or enemy to the players. In one of my games, the player characters publicly humiliated someone who turned out to be a guild master. The guild paid for a team of four assassins to hunt down the player characters and make an example of them. And while the player characters successfully evaded the assassins, the guild has bribed their city to charge the player characters with the murder of the assassins, so the player characters are now fugitives in the region! What they haven’t learned yet is that the trade guild hired freelance assassins, however, and an actual assassins’ guild in the region is very upset about this; the assassins’ guild will happily assist the player characters in taking down the corrupt trade guild!

In Conclusion

Guilds are fantastic for adding richness to a game. They are a very common part of life in fantasy medieval universes, and provide for a lot of spice for almost any kind of character. Furthermore, if the players go off the rails and find themselves screwing around in a town… It only takes a minute to think about the town’s trade and come up with an interesting scenario involving a guild. They are fantastic engines to keep the plot moving in sandbox games, and they are incredibly fun little diversions from dungeon crawling in adventure paths. Pretty sweet, eh?

Hey, maybe I should start my own Game Masters’ Guild.