Guild Design (5e Guideline)
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This page is incomplete and/or lacking flavor. Reason: As a community guideline, this page will forever be incomplete. Feel free to jump in and add your wisdom and insight to the community's standards!!
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5e Guild Design Guide[edit]
Guilds are organizations characteristic of a lot of the medieval environments that are staples of Dungeons and Dragons. However, guilds can also be reskinned or reflavored to represent cults, businesses, and general groups! A guild is a great way to add flavor not only to your character, who may have a background tied with said guild, but also to the overall world where the guild establishes its existence. Extant examples in DnD include the Harpers in the Forgotten Realms, or the factions in Ravnica. They are external to a character, but a character can glean a lot of history and resources from them too, and this can encourage more interactions with the world that don't always go the way of violence. In the official books, Acquisitions Incorporated does offer variant rules on designing your own franchise and business, often funded by a larger shareholder, but these are more for ongoing constructions while a campaign is already going. This guide is meant to create and help insert a guild that is established beforehand with the DM to fit into the world and also incorporate players.
Preload Walkthrough[edit]
OK, when designing a guild, you have a LOT of freedom. Let's start with the concept: what is the organization mission statement? What do they want to accomplish, as in goals? This is a bit more important than thinking of the name, honestly, because the last thing you want is some cool name and a guild with the attention span of an unsupervised preschooler. Guilds sometimes have very general purposes as organizations in general. For example, a union for the local bartenders would be primarily geared towards protecting the wages and craft of their members. In contrast, a shady cult would probably want to do generic bad-guy things like take over the city or bring back some evil big-bad.
As a result, a guild should be designed to be thematically focused and organized. The name of a guild can be closely associated with its goals. Alliances with the guild would usually also be born of its aims, as well as how it is structured and controlled.
- Good examples of a guild's goals include
- Ensuring safe working conditions and adequate insurance for adventurers
- Providing healing for all to promote unity and kindness
- Wanting to summon an eldritch god to grant a wish
- Committing crimes to perpetuate despair and lower morale so it's easier to manipulate people
For the wiki, we generally prefer guilds be written generically, or with concepts behind names that can be easily reused regardless of setting. The main reason for this is, as a publicly available resource, we have no idea what campaign setting any given person is going to be using! However, unlike the constraints on backgrounds, using names and locations can actually strengthen your guild and its feasibility. These specific traits can then easily be renamed and used in another setting.
For example, in the Grey Creed, there are many names of contacts and locations where the group has influence. However, these are easy to reskin and rename for another campaign other than the Forgotten Realms.
In order to make a structured guild, try to think about the members of a guild in relation to its purpose. A circus would hire a cornucopia of weirdos, but a guild dedicated to a faith would never have apostates or heretics in their midst. Think about this for alignments and rationale typical of a member in the guild. An evil guild would probably have evil-aligned characters with nefarious reasons, for example. These reasons can be generalized so players can sympathize with them, thus giving them more incentive to cohere to the guild if they belong in it.
Unlike backgrounds, guilds are potentially more exclusive, meaning you can think about requirements a guild might expect of members. A guild specifically focused on fey would favor elves, maybe. A discriminatory business might want only halflings. Even classes are able to be filtered. A church-like guild might want only clerics or paladins, for example. Once you have these criteria down pat, you can probably easier imagine how joining the guild goes. If there is a prerequisite or preferred property, you can make up the process through which candidates are vetted. A preferred race would mean they check over your heritage, for example, while a financial fee would mean you pay before joining.
Background[edit]
Within this section is a handy background that you can make for players who reside within the guild. For help on making a background, see the backgrounds guideline. Keep in mind that this background will probably be significantly different from normal backgrounds, and will probably have guild-based features even. It is also viable to take a background from outside the guild and incorporate yourself that way instead.
Spellcasting guild-special spells is an optional goodie you can give for incentive to take the background given by the guild, though not all guilds may have this benefit.
Contacts[edit]
Contacts for a guild are very important, as they are some of the benefit of being in one. Contacts allow a player to have roots in the world, rather than a drifting stranger all the time. Guilds usually have two types of contacts: those within and the other outside. Inside contacts are guild members themselves usually. Outside contacts are non-guildies, but they interact amicably, or at least have relations with the guild on some basis. Giving them a name is less important than their description, as that will determine their role as a contact. You don't want to make a contact pointless. They are great segues as campaign seeds, as many of them may have their own share of issues that they need fellow guild members to help with. So, if they aren't totally there to help, they're there to give work!
Fitting In[edit]
This is the section where you can be more meticulous with how a guild organizes itself. A terrorist organization might have cells, in which case, a member would have some cell members that they interact with a lot. This draws a lot from the previous portions, specifically the reasons a person might join the guild. Consider how the guild might assign players. Cultists, for example, might travel in pairs. Adventurer guild members might be assigned to loosely organized teams, and so forth.
Rank and Renown[edit]
Now is where you finally consider the organizational structure of the whole thing. You already know who is in it and what it does and wants to accomplish. Now, put that into a system. How does the guild carry out its jobs? A cult would probably have some sort of head priest, who leads a bunch of worker bee cultists and assigns them all tasks. In contrast, a vigilante group might be entirely anarchic, with no order and members scattered without organization. If there are ways to climb a hierarchy, include it here, as well as all the levels known, and what they do.
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