I personally took a very video-gamey approach with mine. The whole world is using a JRPG-styled TTRPG system to run it. Fabula Ultima for those that are curious. So I wanted to emulate a game-y feel with a few aspects of the world. Like most things in the setting, the guilds are owned by the nobility as the setting never experienced any shock great enough to push it out of feudal systems. So like many, the guild is more or less just an office the nobles installed in their lands to handle mercenaries and those that were down on their luck. Pretty much every town has a unique guild, and every region approaches these guilds differently. However, the model has basically been boiled down to similar functions. More or less, the adventurer guilds act as job centers and intermediate schools for the populace. They're the places most commoners learn magic as well as useful mundane skills. Given most people are able to gain the knowledge to fight at a basic level, it can wierdly keep crime-rates down and helps nobles keep good track of the flow of basic resources. Children and the poor can also get basic jobs to ensure they can network with fields that need more permanent work and don't have to go hungry.
I mean if the premise of the world is being very JRPG like, a classic adventuring guild is a must have. But even then there are ways so make them a real part of society like you did. I like it.
I didn't think I had any, but with your slightly broader definitions, I could certainly consider the competing groups who seek more exotic and flashy monsters for the gladiatorial arena in the City of Gates as such. There's also the Shepherds, which, behind it's Golden-Dawn-esque façade is an assassains' guild.
As long it's an organisation in need for people that go exploring, monster slaying and other adventuring work, it's an adventuring guild. So yeah. Assassin's guilds technically too.
One nice trick is to have an adventurer guild that only exists in or is at least only based out of a single country in the region, possibly have the guild master be determined as an officer of that countries royal court, then the guild has an inherently political nature and determines which bandit groups they don't go after in nearby countries or even duchies within the sponsoring kingdom.
Taking a lesson from history, competing Museums going after the same type of ancient artifacts provides a great source for side quests and conflicts to be encountered by an adventuring party. The Indiana Jones movie franchise is all about this "race to recover" trope.
I could see adventuring guilds acting as a sort of recruiting agency. The jobs they get require diverse teams with various talents. And these guilds can assemble the talent necessary to complete such tasks. And if your adventuring party finds themselves missing a member, the guild can find you a replacement.
I generally use local People of importance or General Guilds and Organisations as Questgivers. Functionally they are like Adventurers Guilds, but that way it seems like they are more Fleshed out and players can choose between several "Guilds", or even actively work against some of them if they so choose.
The three major "travelling adventurer" employing guilds in my Kingdom of Bennis are the Cartographers Guild (official name is Bennis Royal Guild of Cartographers and Mapmakers), the Bard Guild (official name is The Academy of Higher Arts of Dovarhoim) and the Royal Historian Guild (official name is Bennis Guild of Scribes, Recordkeepers and Related Professions). Only the Cartographers Guild has royal ascent, having been directly established by the crown with the purpose of measuring the lands (for tax and conquest purposes) and keeping maps up-to-date. They have since then broadened their tasks to locating lost sites and "protection" of historical artifacts, both local and foreign. Originally, the Bards were out to collect and spread the songs, poems and odes of the world's lore but have since grown into more lucrative ventures, such as tomb raiding and ruins pilfering. Being collectors of old stories, they have a keen understanding of the riddles and traps that protect the locations of ancient ruins and temples. The Historians started out as the Scribes and Accountancy Guild in the royal capital city until their accountants noticed how much wealth the Cartographers and Bards were collecting with their foreign endeavours. Through the exchange of favours and funds, they managed to gain the cooperation of royal and guild record keepers to form the kingdom's highest (or so they claim) authority on keeping of accurate record of the history and events in the kingdom and surrounding countries. Through their illgained influences, they have become the administrative authority handling the census and tax colelctions, which lets them send agends across the kingdom and annexed vassal countries. This, along with their network of troubadours and town criers, makes them the defacto largest and most informed of the three guilds, knowing not only where all the currently owned treasure is but also able to influence who will own the artifacts in one or two generations time.
In many of my world adventures are super power marcanrys to keep them out of the hands of anyone kingdom and to prevent a super human arms race the advantages guild was created. Members of the guild can be hired for just about any job but they have to stay out of political matters between it's member kingdoms. In theory the guild can act as an elite military order for any of it's founding kingdoms. So the guild work convertible to prevent conflict between manager powers.
Whenever possible, I build campaigns around an adventuring academy. Specifically, I model the main quest hub and quest givers after the SeeD gardens from Final Fantasy VIII. Throw in the bounty boards from Final Fantasy XII, and you have everything you need to get players invested in sticking to and finishing the quests you give them. Towards the end of sessions where they finished the last quest, let the players pick one from 3 or so quests you're willing to run as if they were posted to the bounty board. Make tiers of success out of the different outcomes of the quests, then when they get back to the academy, they're offered different rewards based on how well they did. Perks, boons, or bonus feats for big wins. Maybe just restocking consumables if they barely squeaked by. If they hit it out of the park on a quest posted by the Dean of the Academy them they might be given the chance to pick out one mid to high tier magic item from the Academy vault. For the Academy campaigns, I also ban variant human and give players a choice at character creation. 1. Start the game as a student and gain all the stuff in variant human on top of your real race. Or 2. Start the game as a non student adventurer who joins the party and starts auditing classes. Non Students start the game with a +1 magic weapon or similar tiered magic item. Once the party hits level 4, everyone has earned a +1 weapon, and everyone counts as a student. Another thing I do sometimes is lean on the Renown and Piety systems found in the Ravnica and Theros books for 5e D&D. Whatever faction or church your character belongs to gives you points for advancing their goals. As you progress, rewards open at different thresholds of renown and piety. Typically, I give everyone one free feat at level one and then tell them they can't use ability score increases to buy feats. If they want more feats, they have to earn 10 renown or piety. At which point their faction will put them in contact with a tutor or trainer who will teach them a new feat.
@@worldbuildingsage School... Mercenary company... Same diff. Typically I start those campaigns in the "Graduation Dungeon Crawl" at the point where the students open a door and bump into the non students. The students effectively stop needing to take classes except when they get a training reward or go talk to a professor/expert about a quest. Non students take classes as downtime and rests. But the whole party is still tied to the Academy through access to quests all over the globe, higher end rewards from the campus item shop, and the sneaking suspicion that the Dean might be a 10,000 year old lich who periodically gets killed off by students who uncover his secrets and take over the school for a few decades until the lich gets tired of his "vacation" and takes the Academy back by force.
The most basic adventurers' guild that I like a lot is the fighters guild in the Elder Scrolls video game series. It's literally a mercenary guild. It has no grand goals, except for maybe maintaining law and order. But the guild members don't have any set of common principles, they just want to make money. This works because it's very believable, and their conflicts are similarly believable. The guild has competitors, and it gets involved in political conflicts in foreign lands, since it's an Imperial institution and not everyone likes the Empire. It is part of the world, rather than something separate from it. Also, they rank members as any trade guild would, by the time you've invested in the fighters' guild, by how much they trust you to work within the guild and maintain its reputation for fulfilling jobs that need doing. They're also genuinely a guild. There are no wizards and thieves in the fighters' guild, it's all "fighters," the kind of person that beats people up for a living, and they share tips on fighting. Also, the guild clearly regulates prices and what jobs they accept, with some non-guild quests being opened up with some annoyed peasant decrying the fighters' guild for not accepting their job. Meanwhile, the grand quests, the great monsters to be slain, etc... are not found through the fighters' guild, because the fighters' guild is about common problems. On top of this, their mercenary attitude is very apparent. In The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, fighter's guild officials might offer you quests that pay the same as dangerous dungeon delving ones but are literally just clearing out a few giant rats in a house, and tell you "some members actually prefer this tedious work." Why? Because mercenaries want to live, they want to put food on their table and get home more or less unharmed. I think a lot of adventurers' guilds make no sense because they're supposed to be guilds for mercenaries, and yet they aren't mercenary! They're often heroic, with lofty goals. That shouldn't be, and that's why I think many adventurers' guilds seem weird and uninteresting. "Adventurer" used to mean "mercenary soldier," not "explorer," and that's what it means in the context of adventurers' guilds.
Hello, this is an idea I had watching your video! How about, instead of a guild with a board covered with pinned papers, having a sort of arena/theatre where to show off your skills? Here's the pitch. Adventuring is a dangerous business, so people who need help, or whom have already been given missions are often looking to assemble a team, so that specialists may bring in their own abilities, and help spread the risks, because hey, if they can take an arrow in your place, it's good right? But of course, recruiting people is expensive, and also means having to split the loot and rewards. The compromise then, is to recruit as few people as possible, but whom are as skilled as possible. This is where the 'arena' (for lack of a better term) comes in: adventurers looking for a job demonstrate their abilities and get recruited. The local authorities have mixed feelings about this: the spectacle provided by the demonstrations attracts commerce, and make it easier for them to recruit potential mercenaries, but sometimes there are 'side effects', like damages to property, which is why the place is well guarded, and creating a commotion in there is not recommended ...
I see this easily turning into a spectacle for spectacle's sake, but that's just another interesting point to make about the organization once they realize they make more money through Gladiator combat then through Adventuring.
The local powers that be formed an adventuring guild to keep potential murder hobos busy with missions that maintain, rather than undermine, public safety and the political status quo. Those powers that be occassionally use the adventurers to perform assassinations and other dirty deeds that require a degree of plausible deniability. An ancient dragon has founded a smaller but wider ranging adventure guild, sending the members to collect specific items the dragon wants for it's horde. Any incidental treasure the adventures collect is their to do with as they please. Instead of a dragon, a powerful church could create a similar organization to scour the world for holy artifacts.
I don't have them featured much in my games. The Lord of the land is lord because he protects his people (whether by army or by sword arm). If a dragon moves in nearby the Lord better add 'dragon slayer' to resume or lose his lordship. Lords historically protected commoners from bandits or rival kingdoms. 90% of bandits will be killed/eaten by the new things the commoners need protection from. The presence of hostile warlike races might cause humanity to band together. The reasoning for why an aristocrat needs to protect commoners are vary different problems in a fantasy world. Each noble needs to be a PC of their own story or rich enough to afford their own personal band of heroes.
Sigma Company: an organization that collects jobs seeking high skilled individuals without many scruples; such jobs include bounty hunting, tracking any manner of beast/undead, clearing bandit camps, and of course assassination. Most contractors work alone but are masters at their craft and tough as nails, only joining up with others for big jobs like internally destabilizing a foreign country in times of war or "Sapping" as well as contending with uppity self-styled "Raider High Kings" who inevitably rise in the peripheral territories once in a blue moon there are other larger organizations out there, but if you want a job done right... Sigma Company will see it done ahead of schedule and under budget, unless following the schedule is necessary
These videos are the "teach you how to think" variant, but I fail to learn, not quite connecting all the complicated dots. To me it still feels like "People going about doing things" but not sure how to put it into practice.
The way to think in this case is: Think beyond the box of an adventurer's guild like portrayed in most fantasy, and think off organizations that need adventurers for their work instead.
