To me, a Fighters Guild would be several independent mercenary companies, that have came together for profit and saftey. No one wants to die, so they peacefully negotiate, and equally divide up the work. That would result in specialization of the mercenary companies and the formation of a counter organization, perhaps a similar group from another region or nation.
Could just be the only mercenary company that has a contract with the kingdom, hiring freelance mercs so the client has 3 degrees of separation from any wrong doing, hiring the better of those freelancers to a sort of inner circle, poaching recruits from anyone that could compete with them, making themselves more central than the actual guard
Also that some people can exist in more than one faction, someone may be in the Anti-monarchy faction that is obviously against the King, but could also be in the Pro-military faction, that the King himself is a part of. I sometimes see the planet of hats approach to factions, where everyone is neatly placed into one faction and they only ever tow the faction line instead of having any other beliefs, thoughts or political leanings, people are complicated and often hypocritical.
(long post below) 1:28 There's probably an argument to be made here that kingdoms/empires can be factions on a large scale, such as a very important war or in the context of an entire continent. However beyond that kingdoms and empires are really just symbols of the faction that is most capable of keeping the other factions from killing each other, whether that's through politics or military strength. Medieval level kingdoms are in the vast majority of cases going to be very decentralized (unless they're really small, VERY politically adept, or have access to some sort of magic), so kings will more often than not have to appoint vassals and maintain relationships with them to keep the realm united. Depending on a vassal's relationship to the monarch, there will AT THE VERY LEAST be two factions that form: those who support the king, and those who want to replace him. As you mentioned though, there will also be sub-factions that arise within those factions. I'll use the example of a typical fantasy kingdom to illustrate this. I'm gonna warn you now, this idea is very incomplete and should really only be treated as a set of notes. I don't intend on fleshing it out more, and it really only exists as an example. We start with two factions within the kingdom for simplicity's sake: some loyalists, and some rebels. The loyalists are mostly nobles from old families with long traditions of rule over the kingdom's heartlands--generally rich in resources and well-developed. The rebellious vassals come from lesser/newly appointed nobility, as they have been chosen to rule over a treacherous border region that has recently been conquered by the king. This area is the historical home of several goblin tribes which frequently raid the human settlements. There is a tenuous peace, as the king has temporarily satisfied the lower nobility by granting them land, but said land is very dangerous. Maybe the king has allied with a somewhat friendlier tribe of goblins because they provide access to a valuable mountain pass trade route, but a sizeable portion of his loyalists really don't trust the goblins (for whatever combination of reasons such as historical differences or maybe they want to control the pass directly)--so much so that sub-faction might consider putting their differences aside with a less radical group of the rebels to put someone else in charge. Let's say they go through with deposing the king through a civil war, and they win--but the anti-goblin loyalists want to install the king's brother, and the brother happens to be very unpopular with the rebels (again for whatever reason, I don't intend on fleshing this out completely). . . but the rebels are in a much weaker position after the war (plus they would probably already have less access to resources than the higher nobility), so they have to concede for now; maybe some of them were granted some better land in exchange for their service. And already with this brief (and thus quite flawed, I think) example this can go any number of ways. Maybe the old king's son survived the war and he is gathering his strength to regain the throne from his uncle (which would essentially be the plot of Hamlet, but I think some interesting stuff can still be done there), or maybe another human kingdom is becoming more powerful so the new king has to make concessions with the goblins, which would disappoint the high nobility and potentially lead to more internal strife (when they really should be uniting). Again this by no means a perfect example, but I think it holds somewhat well in displaying how factions can form (mostly through splintering off from each other due to disagreements) in a typical medieval fantasy setting. Another great video. It inspired me a lot to think more about factions, as you can see above.
Fantastic channel. I’ve started creating a fantasy world and these videos are giving me a lot to think about, thank you! Looking forward to more content.
The most nonsensical is adventurers' guild. It's essentially PMC with effective members and *somehow* has no problem existing within society/kingdom. Yes, sometimes you have rivarly with "corrupt nobles", but realistically king and nobles would like to eliminate this expendable competitor from politics as soon, as possible.
True, making adventurers guilds in fantasy make sense in-world always creates a lot of headaches, i haven't found a single story that feature them and is well integrated in the world
I often find 'thieves guilds' in fantasy weird when they are portrayed as a bunch of criminals just hanging out for some reason and usually being too open about their illegal activities, in some cases with their whereabouts being very easy to find or almost public knowledge ("Yes adventurer, I'll mark the thieves guild location in your map"). But I played a lot the first two Baldur's Gate games and I remember there being some interesting factions in both and them, and a significant portion of the story in Baldur's Gate 2 revolves around the conflict between a thieves guild that's basically an organized crime faction that bribes corrupt government officials to ensure higher stability and also forces people to join or pay them fees in order to be allowed to do business or certain illegal activities within their territory (otherwise they risk being imprisoned or executed by the faction), with sub-factions that often try to overthrow each other and with the higher ups in the chain of command being often paranoid about each other and constantly trying to keep each other in check, and a newly created and very agressive thieves guild comprised of mostly sentient undead, their mind controlled slaves and former members of the older thieves guild, and different people and factions in the city will have different opinions on the conflict, with some being afraid of the chaos and damage it might cause, others being more positive hoping to get better deals with the new faction and some even thinking that the two factions might destroy each other and make it easier overall for the law to hunt down the remaining criminals.
@@lordtea7688 ufff, yeah now I remember. I subscribed to your channel from the Gothic videos but got hooked for the other videos. Looking forward to your next video. Cheers!
A restaurant takes many different people with different expertise. Yet they are everywhere and do just fine (usually). The "various" skills you described are not so distinct either. "Fighting" isn't one thing. A professional soldier will know things that arent directly "fighting". Like survival skills, navigation, etc.
And yet restaurants are a thing in our world and "fighter guilds" are not and never were. Restaurants have 1 purpose that require a certain set of skills, all those skills that different people in restaurants have combine to fulfill 1 specific goal. Fighter guilds in fantasy do a lot of vastly different things with completly different goals different priorities, time durations, amount of work, resources etc. those are completly different jobs. It's like saying that both a plumber and a helicopter mechanic know how to use a wrench therefore they should cooperate to repair stuff.
