Guild
A guild is an association of people, who come together for a number of reasons. The reason for this can be anything, from creating a merchant's guild to centralize trading, an adventurer's guild to gather like-minded individuals to quest together, to a craftman's guild to hone their craft better by gathering everyone to share their methods and such, and many more. A guild can also be a secret cabal of people working together in the shadows to achieve some greater goal.
When a guild is officially recognized by the state they're in, a guild is capable of being a self-governed body who can enforce certain rules pertaining to their focus and be granted special rights, which can either be good or bad, depending on the setting. Those versed in the ways of /v/ might recognize the term used to designate groups of players working towards a common goal, but most of the time this ends up being "raiding" and "kill big stuff", meaning there's little difference in between them aside from overall skill level.
Guilds in Fantasy[edit | edit source]
As mentioned above, guilds in fantasy typically refer to the player-created ones where like-minded players come together and pool their resources and assistance for the benefit of everyone, although this is not the only way guilds are represented in fantasy. Guilds have typically been a mainstay in many fantasy settings as being a general collection of the finest people in their craft and anyone aspiring to be good enough to join them. Due to this, they usually have a mentoring role with player classes, teaching them the ropes from the start and developing them into full-blown skilled veterans. Being a group of professionals versed in their craft, guilds can also act as a hub for players to get better access to stuff. Blacksmith guilds only recruit skilled smiths, so players could have the smith there craft them a relatively high-level piece of equipment, or a decent merchant's guild has goods coming in from all the land, so players could find rare and exotic stuff there not commonly found elsewhere.
Guilds can also be a source for setting backgrounds, given that they could, in theory, do fuck all and monopolize their services as they see fit. For example: a merchant's guild has the right to control the trade of all goods in their territory. In order to make sure they're top dog; they make sure that every trader who wants to sell stuff has to be a member of their guild (where you would have to regularly hand them a cut of your profits), otherwise, they can legally have that trader arrested. However, the guild is run by money-grubbing assclowns who know they're the only source of vital trade in the land, so they jack up the prices of their goods and demand unreasonable shares from their merchants, overall making everyone poor and unhappy. Tired of this, people then request your aid in bringing them down.
A common example of a fantasy guild is a Thieves Guild, essentially an organization of criminals that band together to provide training for apprentice thieves and facilitate the sale of stolen goods. Sometimes authorities even tolerate their existence as they regulate crime through imposing standards on their members and cracking down on non-guild aligned thieves. Depending on the setting, such an organization can be a brutal criminal syndicate akin to modern-day organized crime, or a honorable organization that has a code of conduct preventing them from killing on the job and stealing from those who cannot afford it.
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