RogerBW's Blog

This Dungeon Fantasy supplement deals not just with guilds but with organisations that interact with adventurers: the congregation, the cabal, organised crime, nobles, and the like.

It's another Dungeon Fantasy supplement that gets away from the traditional focus of going down holes in the ground and killing stuff. In fact, it feels a lot like a Dungeon Fantasy implementation of Matt's excellent Boardroom and Curia, which gave a system of organisation stats for mainstream GURPS.

The first section gives the rules for defining a "guild": who its members are and why they've got together, what it's trying to achieve (particularly by hiring adventurers), and what they can provide: supernatural support, information, special equipment, and plain old money, among other things. It lists advantages which might define a relationship to an organisatoin (Claim to Hospitality, Rank, etc.), and examines how to adjudicate requests for help, including several worked examples (warm bodies, escape from legal trouble, etc.).

The second section lists types of organisation, in terms of the rules from the first part. This includes delving guilds, extended families, military companies, and even the town watch. Each of these gets a page or two laying out the sort of people who are members of the organisation and what facilities they may have, what those members may be asked to do, the sort of job for which the organisation will hire outsiders, and the kinds of payment that can be offered. An appendix lists some sample titles for each type.

The Dungeon Fantasy purist may regret the lack of things to bash and things to bash them with, but I find this more interesting as a series of miniature organisation writeups for a pseudo-mediaeval fantasy campaign. Mind you, the author reckons it's mostly to let you bash things in subtler ways. In any case, Dungeon Fantasy 17: Guilds is available from Warehouse 23.