Merchants and artisans are the middle-class framework of a medieval society’s economy, but they’ve never gotten much attention in D&D. The guild most likely to get fleshed out in a DM’s campaign is a local thieves’ guild, either as something for a party’s rogue to belong to or antagonists for the PCs to fight. So when I saw the Guild Artisan background in 5E, I was definitely intrigued.
We often say that the choices a player makes while creating a character tells you something about what kinds of stories they want to see. Guild Artisan is an intriguing one, because, on some levels, it’s so mundane. And that could be part of the story that the player wants to tell. Does their character want to stay rooted in their mundane profession, even as they become an adventurer? Maybe your rogue is also a first-class baker. Maybe your fighter smithed all her own weapons. Or maybe your wizard still maintains a trade as a glassblower, fashioning bottles with the same methodical patience they use to fashion spells.
The flip side to this is that, by most accounts, medieval guilds were anything but mundane. Any organization is likely to become a hotbed of intrigue, politics, and the like. It could be that branches of the player’s chosen guild are working against one another, each trying to gain some kind of political upper hand. Or perhaps the player hopes to take control of the guild someday, thereby fully diving into the pool of connections, favors, backstabbing, and character assassination.
One thing that’s nice about a guild artisan PC is that it lends a small amount of predictability to the actions of a PC when the group enters a new town. It seems likely that, regardless of whether they treat their guild as a political situation to be exploited or just a place to get some cheap accommodations, a GA PC will head for their guild early in their explorations of the new place. This predictability means that a DM can prepare a bit of story ahead of time, in the form of a cast of characters, a location, and even some plot.
The guild as a whole can be something of a character. A guild in one town might be friendly, open, and helpful. Another town’s guild could be a bit more suspicious and taciturn, less given to being open-armed with newcomers. Yet another could be friendly to a creepy degree, possibly because they’ve been infiltrated by a cult of some darker power and hope to lure newcomers into their web.
All kinds of plots can be tied to a guild, giving you the chance to introduce storylines via the GA PC. Imagine if a seemingly lowly but expansive guild becomes infiltrated by cultists, or compromised by doppelgangers. You could have a whole storyline about exposing the guild’s corruption, or stopping them before they use their unobtrusive nature to stab at the seat of power.
A guild can also be a source of information. A stonemason or architect’s guild might be aware of secret passages in a noble’s manse. A carpenter’s guild might have noted certain irregularities in chests they’ve been asked to construct on behalf of a new temple in town. An alchemist’s guild might be worrying, as they’ve recognized that the ingredients a wizard is buying could be combined to make a large quantity of poison. Any of these things might be dropped as gossip in a PC’s ear, giving a reason to investigate and perhaps leading to adventure and danger.
Even more overtly, a guild artisan PC may get offers of adventure for a group to follow-up on. An NPC member of a jeweler’s guild may need a rare component, like the shell of a basilisk egg, for a commission and be willing to pay handsomely for the adventurers that bring it to him. A blacksmith’s guild needs to know why the copper mine they paid hasn’t brought them ore or ingots lately, ultimately leading the PCs to discover a mine taken over by duergar slavers. Any kind of guild might hire a group of adventurers to guard a caravan of goods, or to try and rescue guild members captured by goblins.
I hope this has made you think about the fantastic potential for adventure that this seemingly mundane background possesses. Next month, we’ll be delving into the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion for that most high-flying of heroes, the Aarakocra. Until then, may all your 20s be natural.
Oh, I love medieval guilds as a concept so much! Okay. Some things that fascinate me:
I love glass, and the history of glass, and if you’re looking at the history of glass in Europe you wind up inevitably looking at Murano, Venice, because it is THE European glass centre from the 7th to the 18th centuries.
A fascinating couple of paragraphs from the Glass of Venice website:
“By the late 1200s, the production of glass objects of the finest quality was the city’s major industry as confirmed by the establishment of the Glassmakers Guild that laid out rules and regulations for the craftsmen. The purpose of the guild was to safeguard the secrets of the trade and ensure the profitability of the industry. In line with these objectives, a 1271 law prohibited the importation of foreign glass or the employment of foreign glassworkers.
An even more radical law was passed in 1291 that laid the ground for the establishment of Murano as a premier glass-manufacturing center. This law required that all furnaces used for glassmaking be moved from Venice to Murano to avoid the risk of fire from the furnaces spreading onto the largely wooden structures of overpopulated Venice. Many historians agree that the true motive for this law was to isolate the glass craftsmen to a location where they wouldn’t be able to disclose trade secrets. A subsequent law passed in 1295 forbidding the glassmakers from leaving the city confirms this theory.
Artisans working in the glass trade were well rewarded for their efforts. They had a privileged social status, and their daughters were allowed to marry into the wealthiest and noblest of Venetian families. By applying this clever approach, Venetian government ensured that the glassmakers encouraged their offspring to carry on the trade, and that trade secrets stayed in the families and fueled creative processes leading to innovation and further success. This, along with Venice’s convenient location at the crossroads of trade between East and West, gave Venice monopoly power in manufacturing and selling quality glass throughout Europe that lasted for centuries.”
Venice as a city state set laws in place to establish, isolate and control their glassmakers guild on an island to protect trade secrets and maintain a continental monopoly on their trade. Trade secrets, historically speaking, were a HUMUNGOUS deal.
You could have so many stories here. Are you a foreign guild member, rocking up to the city with your letter of introduction, ready to be greeted by your brethren, and absolutely shocked by getting turned out on your ear? Maybe a shady sort wants you to smuggle trade secrets out to them. Maybe your guild branch wants you to smuggle secrets out to them. Maybe you found notes in a dungeon or wizard lair that would revolutionise certain processes, and suddenly you’re the target of every guild branch in existence hoping you’ll give or be persuaded to give the process to them and them alone. Maybe your party encounters a local guildmember who wants to leave the city and wants you to smuggle them out, breaking local guild laws and potentially fatally damaging your relationship with your overall guild in the process. Maybe the guild as a whole wants your help to break free from their city-state’s restrictions, or maybe only certain sections of the guild, and the rest are perfectly fine with their privileged lives or else deeply and genuinely believe that their secrets should be protected for the good of the city and the pride of the guild.
You’ve got options here. Murano is a very fascinating example of medieval guild-and-city politics.
On a broader scale. Moving to London here, and the Livery Companies (essentially guilds). There’s a lovely page on Wikipedia on the mottos of the Livery Companies, and it is fascinating. The mottos of a guild suggest so many interesting things about them, even when you have no idea of the history involved in how that motto came about.
Some examples:
The Worshipful Company of Bowyers (bow-makers) don’t have a latin phrase for a motto. Instead, they have three names. “Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt”. AKA the three battles where the English Longbow is considered to have decisively won the battle for the English. Like. That is just excellent and incredibly pointed marketing. “Here’s what our wares do, next fucking question!” Amazing.
The clockmakers have ‘Time is the Commander of All Things’. The Worshipful Company of Cooks has, for some reason, ‘Wounded Not Conquered’, and I’m desperately curious as to why. Musicians have ‘Preserve Harmony’ and the Glass Sellers have ‘Discord Weakens’, which is funny and makes me deeply hope their guildhalls are across the road from each other (I don’t think they are, but it’d be amazing). The Painter-Stainers have the extremely ominous ‘Love Can Compel Obedience’, which, if you need an incredibly random guild to have been infested with a cult, can I suggest?
On a similar note, the Poulters have ‘Remember Your Oath’, which, again, curious and ominous?
The Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards has ‘With Upright Heart All Are Exalted’, which is hilarious and feels very much like they were trying to get in ahead of the inevitable gambling association.
A lot of the mottos are clearly biblical quotes loosely related to the industry at hand, like the Paviors (pavers) ‘God Can Raise to Abraham Children of Stone’. The Shipwrights have ‘Within The Ark Safe Forever’. The Needlemakers have ‘They Sewed Fig Leaves Together And Made Themselves Aprons’, which feels very much ‘the first day out of Eden, we were there and doing the work!’. There’s a lot of flag-planting and general ‘you’d be lost without us’ in these mottos, which is excellent.
The thing these mottos do is suggest history, ideology, story. Some of them feel defensive, some of them feel defiant, some of them feel ominous, some of them seem incredibly incongruous and make you wonder what the history is (again, why do cooks have ‘wounded not conquered’?).
From a worldbuilding POV … you can put things like this in your world. Like. Was your Cooks Guild hugely involved in a particular war? Was it born out of camp followers way back when? Does your glass sellers guild have a huge and longstanding hatred and rivalry with the local bardic college? Are your wood-metal-and-cloth stainers randomly an ancient fertility cult for no apparent reason? Do several of your guilds have close and sometimes hidden relationships to various deities and practices (are pavers the primary makers of golems)? Are the local weaponsmiths or bowyers extremely arrogant and proud of their craftmanship for extremely specific historical reasons? Are the needlemakers fed up of being looked down on when you’d all be fucking naked if we weren’t here?
Guilds are so much fun. You can do a lot with them, with their histories and hang-ups and beliefs, their relationships with their cities and each other, their reputations and reactions to how people view them, their prominence and decline as various industries crest and fall in different cities and different times. They’re an awesome set of organisations to play with in a world.
Tags:
#long post #history #D&D #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Radiant isn’t specifically a “holy” damage type in D&D; holy magic often inflicts radiant damage, but there’s holy magic with non-radiant damage types (typically fire), and non-holy sources that inflict radiant damage – most relevantly, lasers!
Maybe Pelor should stop making people’s skin peel off, then. =P
As for the latter, nah, force is D&D‘s “pure magic” damage type, and has the specific attribute of being able to strike intangible or ethereal targets. I don’t know what real phenomenon would be analogous to that, but whatever it is, I’m reasonably certain I’ve never been injured by it!
Concept: a D&D campaign where the players start out by creating high-level characters and jump straight into a final boss fight with an evil chronomancer. Whether they win or lose, they’re just barely too late to prevent an apocalyptic ritual that unravels the timestream.
Once the prologue is complete, they level their characters down by one level and play out the adventure immediately preceding the fatal confrontation. The next session, they level down again and play out the adventure before that, and so forth, with each adventure successively further back. No separation between player and character knowledge is enforced, effectively affording the player characters knowledge of future events (i.e., the “previous” adventures they’ve already played); exploiting this knowledge is encouraged.
Armed this this information, the player characters are able to make changes to history. They can’t prevent their final confrontation with the chronomancer without causing all sorts of nasty paradoxes, but due to the vortex of Time Fuckery™ surrounding it, the battle itself is exempt – i.e., they’re allowed change history in ways that give themselves advantages in the fight. Changes “close” to the event (i.e., only a couple of sessions in) confer only modest advantages, while changes further back in history (i.e., many sessions into the campaign) are more influential.
Every adventure ends with a flash-forward to the final battle with circumstances revised to reflect whatever changes to history the player characters just made. The campaign ends when they successfully prevent the chronomancer from blowing up the space-time continuum, thereby locking in the new timeline.
(If they manage to get all the way to level one without stopping the chronomancer, their “first” adventure has them bumping into a random NPC who they now realise is a low level, not-yet-evil version of that same chronomancer. The same no-preventing-the-final-battle rule applies, so they can’t just kill the poor schmuck, but now they’ve got an opportunity to really throw a wrench into the works!)
Every single D&D party I think I’ve ever been in would adopt him into the party.
Every single one.
You can absolutely do that, if you end up getting that far, but the Power of Friendship isn’t exempt from the no-preventing-the-final-battle rule, so all befriending the chronomancer’s past self gets you is an Anakin-versus-Obi-Wan “how could you do this, we were friends!” moment in the final battle.
(Of course, you could totally exploit that for tactical advantage, if you were bastardly enough!)
So in Goblin Squad D&D yesterday, our Barbarian had just… the stupidest, DUMBEST, most terrifying, absolutely godlike thing happen to him.
This is a story of numbers, but it’s still beautiful.
We were fighting a dragon.
The dragon is hopping around while the Barbarian is just racing around trying to catch up to her
Dragon finally decides, no, really, fuck specifically THAT ranger and goes hog fucking wild on me (I LIVED!) but holds still long enough for the Barbarian to finally rage and LEAP ONTO HER BACK and go STAB
Dragon sees this and goes, “Oh. Sick.”
and just goes VERT
Pro: I am not tanking anymore
Con: She instantly moves FOUR HUNDRED FEET STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR…. with our raging Barbarian holding on for dear gottdamn life
One round later, she’s another 160 feet up, still getting stabbed by a Barbarian who has somehow held on, now getting attacked by ballistae and we’re all starting to get CONCERNED
Because if they take that dragon down, that is 560 feet our Barbarian is also falling out of the sky, and he is not attuned to the ONLY THING WE HAVE that can save his fucking life from that height
I’m sitting there doing math, trying to determine if 560′ is enough to kill him outright, silently being very grateful we still have exactly ONE diamond to rez his ass
and the dragon just goes VERT again, ANOTHER four hundred feet in the air
The Barbarian, now finally free from any potential collateral, cackles, as he is at long last, unshackled by the restraints of his conscience.
He has a tattoo, you see, which allows him to cast Fireball once per day
centered on himself
with a save which he autofails
But he is a tiefling.
And this fucker still has 160 hit points by the time it’s done exploding. But the explosion sends him backward as he fails the Athletics check to continue holding on and he begins to fall.
He falls for 3 fucking rounds and we can only watch our friend fall to his certain death.
The DM… has to roll ninety six d6s
let that number sink in for you
NINETY. SIX. D6s. They normally roll with real dice, you can hear the clickety clack through the discord, but they had to get out a fucking app for this because they do not OWN ninety. fucking. six. d6s.
It comes out to 402 fucking bludgeoning damage he takes on impact as he leaves a Barbarian shaped crater in the center of the forum, 10 feet wide, 5 feet deep, a cloud of dust and broken brick shooting out as he lands.
And do you know what happens next?
Do you know what the fuck we see as the dust settles?
We hear a cough, and a see a thumbs up come out of the crater. 1 hit point left.
402 damage. Raging as he landed, halved to 201. He had 160HP left, it only brought him down to -41, not enough to kill him outright (you have to get equal to negative your max HP), AND HE’S LEVEL 12, which means he has access to Relentless Rage: the first time you’d drop below 0 HP, if it doesn’t outright kill you, you have to roll a Con save of 10 or higher to instead drop to 1 HP. He rolled an 11.
He fell almost a THOUSAND feet from the air off the back of a fucking dragon, took NINETY SIX D6 FALL DAMAGE, AND LIVED.
His arena name lived up to the hubris of this fucking swan dive. All hail ALTANIN, THE UN-FUCKING-BREAKABLE
Tags:
#D&D #storytime #death tw? #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
I love how so much of the wizards’s repertoire in D&D implies something awful.
Like, there’s an 8th level spell where you cut out a chunk of somebody’s living flesh and use it to spend the next several months growing a bottled clone that’s bound to their soul, so if they ever die, the soul will transfer to the clone.
This is a standard, core-book piece of wizardry that literally any player’s wizard can choose to learn when they reach the appropriate level.
This is a game that has very specific built-in assumptions about What Wizards Are Like, is what I mean to say.
Tags:
#what do you mean ”awful” #is there some horrible catch not stated in this post? #because as stated that sounds *great* and I *want* one #*fuck* clinging-to-life-with-a-mere-single-body #D&D #death tw #transhumanism #and I suppose I’ll follow OP’s lead by tagging it #body horror
Inadvisable D&D campaign premise #137: the Old Republic’s code of laws is unique in that it binds the natural world as well as human society. While these laws don’t always work in humanity’s favour, they establish a web of obligations that can be leveraged for humanity’s advantage; thus it’s possible to bargain with a storm, make contract with a river, or take the seasons to court. As the the features of the natural world have no particular ability to communicate or assert their needs, they’re assigned human advocates, who swear fearsome (and magically binding) oaths to represent the best interests of their “clients”.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. The Old Republic fell apart centuries ago, dissolving into a loose affiliation of sporadically warring provinces that each claim to be the Republic’s only legitimate successor. Even in this fractured state, the old laws retain their temporal power, but they can’t be modified or repealed, as no valid legislative body can be convened. In the campaign’s present day, those laws are nearly four hundred years out of date, which often places them considerably out of step with the needs and concerns of contemporary society – but any province that tries to simply discard them loses the protections they afford and is promptly ravaged by natural disasters.
The player characters in this campaign are a roving team of lawyer-adventurers who specialise in devising and implementing solutions to the bizarre legal conundrums that emerge from this state of affairs.
Tags:
#story ideas I will never write #fun with loopholes
Me “I can raise the temperature of a space by 5 degrees (Fahrenheit) per success” DM “Okay.” Me “And that’s 6 successes, so 30 degrees…” DM “Okay…” Me “And ‘inside the human body’ is a space, right?” DM “…I don’t like where this is going.” Me “So I’m going to raise the temperature inside his body 30 degrees.” DM “Yeah, so he’s dead now. He was fine, and then went through all the stages of heat stroke in half a second before his body went ‘No thank you’ and just shut off to stop it from being so hot. Good job.”
love the idea that infernal is a language tieflings don’t have to learn, they just have it built in from birth, and they quickly discover that they can say anything they want out loud in infernal, since almost nobody else understands any of it.
thieves have thieves’ cant, tieflings have the secret language of satan
Yes, good post, I love this. In my head it’s kind of a subconscious language at first. Babies might babble some words in infernal, but as they learn their parents’ language, that’s gonna be what they use to communicate. Kids might shout in infernal during emotional outbursts without quite knowing what they said or where they learned it. As a young tief grows up they will grasp and truly understand the language they have inside them more and more, along with learning to control and understand their inherent magic.
hmm i need to digest this before i buy it and inevitably start conlanging it. a system of language with much, much stronger and more specific universals is a really interesting concept. imagine the breadth of individual variation
(until now i’ve treated tieflings who know infernal as, like, people who learned a heritage language. which really resonated with me as a first gen immigrant)
Okay, so. It’s not done digesting yet, but I’ve developed a couple notes on one possible way to do this:
Vocabulary emerges from the kiki-boba effect turned up to eleven. Instead of associating a bunch of characteristics with one sound like we do (e.g. /k/ is hard, cold, metallic, and spiky, while /b/ is soft, warm, organic, and round), they associate a single concept with a sequence of sounds. Which, well, is how vocabulary works anyway when you’ve learned a language, but in Infernal language acquisition the associations are fuzzy and lead to…
Polysemy and autantonyms. Consider the word “dust” in English. It’s a noun, but it’s also a verb, and the verb can mean to add dust, or to remove dust. Infernal vocabulary items all have a whole bunch of meanings they can acquire, but they only acquire a subset of them for any given speaker. So one speaker might have “dust” just mean the noun, but another speaker might have it also mean “to add dust to”, while another speaker has just “to remove dust from”. So two Infernal speakers might have the same words as antonyms of each other! And unlike in English, this effect applies to every single vocabulary item. A linguist studying Infernal can make a list of, let’s say 600-odd word roots and all the different meanings they tend to acquire. Any particular Infernal speaker’s idiolect has the territory of meaning partitioned and parceled out between these roots in a unique way, but not unique enough for Infernal speakers to not understand each other.
Since the kiki-boba effect isn’t strong at all in case marking for human languages but word order effects are pretty strong, I think, if we’re imitating human language acquisition, it makes the most sense to have Infernal as a strongly isolating, analytic language. Combined with the word class flexibility described above, this makes it grammatically similar to Classical Chinese or Yoruba. Because I am unoriginal and have studied too many Papuan languages (and just love this feature anyway), I’m gonna say that serial verb constructions are a universal feature of Infernal. This can get a little hairy if many words can be both verbs and nouns, but that’s part of the fun.
Since SVO is the most common word order, I’m gonna go with SVO(VO…) for the word order.
Since language acquisition otherwise works like human language acquisition just with universals that are several orders of magnitude stronger, Infernal still develops dialects and regional variation. Areas more densely populated with Infernal speakers will be more linguistically homogeneous, while more sparsely populated areas will have more unique idiolects. That scenario that @koolkevk wrote about where two Infernal speakers who are siblings grow up together thinking it’s their secret made-up language is totally possible and in fact probably very common among tiefling siblings (but probably not extremely common, because there are probably tiefling siblings who are part of tiefling communities with their own dialects).
This has also more broadly inspired me to think about alternate ways languages could arise in a fantasy world, rather than just the usual way of getting cooked up through people’s language lazily drifting across the vast world of possible languages over the course of millennia and millennia. What other ways can you have? Well…
Everyone knows Arcane is just an inexplicable programming language embedded into the universe that you have to replicate if you want magic to happen when you say things. Its phonology is luckily lax enough to be able to be picked up by all sorts of races with a wide variety of phonological capabilities. I quite like Sam Hughes’s take on it in his online novel Ra.
Primordial is actually just thermal noise, the only thing all elementals share. They put absolutely no effort into communicating using it; they exert a passive effect where the noise somehow “learns” the information that one elemental wants to share, and assembles itself into a pattern that is personally meaningful to another elemental and gets that information across. To “learn” Primordial, you need to have a permanent enchantment cast on you that allows you to passively influence thermal noise in this way.
Celestial is an Ithkuil-like conlang that was designed by a large committee of gods. Its source text is bound in a holy book in a sanctum somewhere in the Celestial planes. If you alter the source text, all Celestial speakers will have to alter their language accordingly. (Many will do so automagically, because they are enchanted to speak in whatever language the book says.) Breaking into the sanctum to make an important change could be a fun adventure. For example, imagine that you need to change the ruling of a Celestial court to be semantically ambiguous, because it’s imprisoned one of your party members or something. (What language is this book written in? Well, Celestial, obviously. Good luck.)
Abyssal is not actually a language. It’s whatever grunts, screams, and body language you can use to convey your message to a demon. Its linguistic universals are the same linguistic universals that mammals have when communicating with each other. Do you know how to communicate with your cat/dog? Great, you can figure out Abyssal, too.
Dark Speech is a telepathic language, or more precisely an empathic language. The only way to evoke the correct telepathic signals to “speak” it is to voice aloud your most credible insecurities, fears, and intentions of self-destruction in a way where you know someone will understand you. It doesn’t matter what language you use for that; you point is that you have to authentically claim darker and yet darker thoughts out loud. The telepathic flavor of your pain is what communicates the information. Because everyone’s pain is different, everybody can only speak a small subset of Dark Speech. The pairs of people who can communicate the best using it are people who share similar kinds of pain, and the individual people who communicate the best using it are people who have experienced many differenty kinds of pain. The psychological toll of speaking it destroys all speakers eventually, except for fiends. Unlike other entries in this list, Dark Speech could actually be subject to significant variation and language change if it had enough speakers, and should arguably be classified as a whole language type rather than just one language or even just one primary language family. In practice, however, its speaking community is so small that there is only one Dark Speech worth learning. (It is, nevertheless, constantly evolving, like human languages.) (I don’t really need to say this because people naturally avoid this sort of thing, but do not try conlanging this IRL. It is meant to be psychologically destructive to speak; designing it would be exponentially more so. It would require you to consider all possible traumas that people can undergo and assign semantics and grammar to them. If you have conlanged it and not caused yourself significant psychological harm, either you’ve done it wrong or you’re incapable of… something. Regardless, this could be an actual language, for people who are capable of discerning complex emotions from speech. I guess you could consider it if you’re running a death cult or something.)
I also have half-baked ideas about languages that are actually the genetic code of living, symbiotic entities that connect people (and “speech” is these entities having sex), languages that arise when a certain astronomically- or meteorologically-obsessed species sees a pattern in the stars or sunspots or pulsar waves or clouds or wind or whatever and bases its communication around it, languages that elven children acquire first in their written form from patterns in tree bark and are later taught pronunciation rules for, and are transmitted by people carving the patterns they want their kids to see in the tree bark, oligosynthetic languages that arise from ephemeral gatherings of a particularly linguistically intelligent species, where they construct a new language for each gathering based on just a couple linguistic universals they all share but also based on geographically local traits…
Tags:
#language #story ideas I will never write #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 