Guild Charter
Adventurer Guilds are much on my mind these days. That’s because my long-running megadungeon campaign just created one.
The circumstances that lead to the formation of the Delvers Union were bizarre, and pretty dang unforeseeable. My players had encountered a tribe of cave-dwelling hill giants down on level 10 of the dungeon, and wonder of wonders they decided to negotiate rather than fight. They proved themselves to the tribe, traded favors with them, and the gnome alchemist even became godfather to a hill giant infant (he named him ‘Stinky.’) When they returned several sessions later to find their adoptive tribe massacred, they put one and one together and realized it was the anti-party that did the deed.
Furious with their ‘friendly rivals,’ they confronted them at the local inn back in town. Taken aback, the rival party responded with, “Well how were we to know? They’re evil bloody giants then, aren’t they? It’s not like we have badges to identify ourselves to one another’s allies.” And that throwaway line caused a light bulb to pop on over my players’ heads.
After four years IRL and 12 levels of play they finally looked at the anti-party, the various low-level parties running around town, and the increasingly hostile town council (“Monsters followed you back to town and wrecked up the place again!?”) and realized they needed to organize.
It was weirdly satisfying watching the players run their own session. They invited the various NPCs to the table, laid out a dues system, and began plotting ways to get their own representative elected to the town council. They even began to talk about designs for membership badges. It was one of those sessions with zero combat and much talking, and I haven’t seen my players so energized in months.
As a GM, I sometimes like to think of myself as a storyteller. That’s not exactly right though, because the campaign isn’t exactly my story. I watched my players get an awful lot of joy from creating something for themselves, and I was proud that I helped to set up the circumstances that lead to that kind of enthusiasm. The longer I play, the more I realize it is the job of the GM to provide an interesting situation rather than tell an interesting story. As it turns out, the story is what happens when the players pick up the narrative and begin playing with it for themselves.
Question of the day then. Have you as a player ever created some original story element that managed to surprise your GM? Perhaps it was an organization, a new spell or magic item, or maybe even a homebrew race or class? What was it?
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We once had a group of high level characters that started their own organization, dedicated to destroying a resurrected evil god. Which may or may not have been our fault.
We all rolled up agents at a much lower level who we played for minor missions. Of course our main characters still took care of the critical things personally. It seemed appropriate that our high level characters could send the agents on the supplies run instead of having to do it themselves.
Also we decided that the agents didn’t have easy access to magic, so starting healthy ended up being a difficult thing… Natural healing is SLOW.
Nice! I’ve always wanted to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a campaign. Maybe play as the main PCs’ apprentices and squires, or even Watership Down style as the familiars and animal companions.
How did your low-level dudes interact with the main party? Was that all off-screen?
Generally off-screen. Basically my mage was spending all of his time researching how to destroy an evil artifact sword and if any annoyance was better fixed by sending out the “regulars” it meant he could get ahead on that research. (And the other members had equally important duties.) So we were incentivized to choose our party carefully in order to balance the time pressure of completing the research vs. keeping the organization running.
Of course, whenever our low level party unearthed big trouble we called in the big guns to save their butts.
If you ever run this game, i’ll bring Squeak. 😀
Absolutely not. No way am I GMing for something that’s too adorable to kill. 😛
The closest I’ve come to this was being my pseudo-sneaky sorcerer (pathfinder) and after taking money from a chest (mimic that nearly ate my face off), I used it to buy and rebuild a burned out casino. Profits for said Casino propelled me to expand to accommodate our living spaces as a group, help rebuild the city after the final showdown, and make a home for some plant based creatures. So maybe not so much a guild, but very much created floor plans, and got specific about building costs without a ton of input from the GM.
You added to the campaign setting through the actions of your character. That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!
You mention floor plans and building costs. Out of curiosity, how much IRL time did you spend on the project?
Not a ton, probably a few hours at most. But that’s because one of the floors was designed for the other players to fill out their own quarters with the design and furniture of their preference.
I love the creative side of stuff. I don’t know if I’ve ever “surprised” my GMs, but I’ve done many things like making gods, the sky version of the Underdark*, NPCs, races, and classes. GMs don’t tend to offer me the opportunity to make up items all that much though, sadly.
*It’s called the Upperlight. One of the other players suggested it in a “terrible joke we’re obviously not going with” sort of way and I decided the only response was to make it canonical.
I like that guild’s symbol btw. What’s the guild’s name?
Ima need an explanation of the “Upperlight.” Is it a cloud kingdom? Another layer of the planet? A sort of Dyson sphere?
Amusingly when we were world building I did throw out Dyson sphere as an idea.
The Upperlight, the world of the sky, is populated by cloud-cities, floating islands, and the tops of the tallest mountains.
The cloud-cities are made and maintained by the work of cloudsmiths.
Trade between cloud-cities and floating islands is fairly common, even between groups that normally would not get along. This is because in the Upperlight today’s neighbor is often tomorrow’s speck on the horizon. Which is not to say others don’t simply choose to raid whatever comes near their homes.
Common civilized denizens of the Upperlight are winged tieflings, winged aasimar, aarakocra, air genasi. But there are others, mainly who live on floating islands, that manage by getting around on trained pegasi, griffons, hippogriffs, drakes, giant birds or insects, and there is even a floating island of witches with flying brooms known as Which Island.
Air elementals, perytons, wild griffons and hippogriffs and drakes, harpies, ghosts, wyverns are common threats of the Upperlight. But many things that fly are also roaming around, including dragons of course. The Upperlight also has it’s own host of aberrations that come down from the stars that the Surface has probably never seen.
My character, Allietta of Cirrus Dawn in Summer, comes from the Shadowless City, which is true to it’s name. Nothing there casts a shadow, a feature that serves as a helpful early warning system for danger for if you see a shadow, it was not cast by anything from the city. The city is home largely to winged tieflings and aasimar.
Allietta had one of her wings damaged in a fight against a flock of Perytons and fell down to the surface like a meteor. Thankfully her fall was broken by a nice soft…. library. Upon her crash landing she was, physically and psychically, imprinted with many of the tomes. Mostly arcane and historical. (This is also how she learned Common.)
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this concept in print. You get floating island settings of course, but usually they work on the notiong that “the whole world is floating islands.”
I honestly think this good enough to work as a product, especially if you make it an easy “slap this onto any normal setting you like” sort of setup. You’d have to have a reason why these flying denizens rarely interact with the world below….
Have you ever considered developing this into some kind of setting supplement?
I have no idea how to develop anything in a remotely professional manner and am wise enough to know that I’m not a good writer by any means.
Also I just sort of came up with it on the fly like a month ago.
As for why the flying guys don’t interact with “the Surface”, it’s so high up that while they can tell it’s down there, it would take far beyond normal means of endurance/strong magic to get back up so it’d be a one way trip for all but the most powerful of beings. You could in theory hop off at one of those tallest in the world mountains if your island or city was close enough, but your home would probably be forever lost to you as it floats away out of sight before you’re even down the mountain so again… one way trip basically. They also have no idea what’s down there and regard it the same way surface people think of the Underdark as some fabled place you know is really there but has unknown dangers and locals and whole breeds of monsters you’ve never even heard of.
Now I wonder what’s above the Upperlight? Probably Starjammer.
I’m STing Exalted, my players are Infernals and many years ago they ended up in a Fighting Brothel where you can watch people fight in cages and then decide to have sex with them. The Scourge jokingly bought a Dune Person as a pet for the Slayer.
Growl, the Dune person, really grew on the Slayer! The PC went from being a self-proclaimed monster with a an explosive temperament looking to make heroes powerful enough to kill him to someone with actual self control who cares for others.
The Slayer eventually proposed to the cannibal by cutting off his own arm and eating it with her. She then wore the bones as jewelry.
Of course things have then happened to make it not so fun, she ran away with the circus and became an Abyssal hell bent on killing the Slayer’s boss, Ligier, for putting a collar around the Slayer’s neck.
You had me at “Fighting Brothel.”
Hehe, you only have to go to the seedier parts of the Imperial City to find it. 😉
Heh… does rearranging the world map on a continental scale count?
As the finale to the first campaign of my long-running D&D game, we had Orcus manifest in physical form, rampaging towards the good-aligned lands at the head of his limitless army of undead.
To stop him, my long-suffering DM had given us a MacGuffin that basically worked as a Wish spell that wouldn’t try to screw you over. Uses he suggested briefly were creating a giant wall around the good countries, or punting Orcus into deep space so that he could be some future generation’s problem.
As the resident arcane expert (with a somewhat loony player), my human wizard was given the task of pointing this gigantic chunk of magic in the right direction. After some thought, I decided to rip the good kingdoms out of the ground wholesale and turn them into a floating continent, while the resulting tidal wave got rid of Orcus and crew.
Courtesy of a series of improbably good rolls on my part (I think that those may have been the best consecutive rolls I’ve ever gotten), the newly-airborne continent was stabilized several miles in the sky, with barely so much as any breakage of glassware, a new, magically-sustained hyperbaric atmosphere, and steady, paradisical weather conditions.
… my character also fundamentally changed the attitude of his people towards arcane magic users (before his whole save-the-world bit, they had been viewed with disdain and suspicion… kind of like the Untouchable caste in India), founded what eventually became the greatest magic school in his hemisphere, more-or-less accidentally rediscovered the secrets of planar travel, built a business empire while not even being there, and completely accidentally created the franchise restaurant.
… he’s had a busy few years >.> (give or take half a millennium, courtesy of a timeskip he hibernated through >.<)
And all while being a short, grouchy, 'socially-awkward' at best pyromaniac. It’s always kind of fun to watch NPCs’ brains melt when they get to meet this borderline-messianic figure of impossible arcane might and he’s just some short rude jerk.
You know why Wish is such a powerful spell? It’s because it represents trust.
“Here,” says the GM. “You get to be the writer now. Do something awesome.”
Sounds like you did. 🙂
Wait, does the girl has cheek blush?
At least somebody enjoing her own job.
It’s stylistic cheek blush! Unrelated! Gah!
So this is something that happened in a campaign I’ve been DMing for a few years now. It’s a homebrew setting. The PCs are the rebellious princess of a kingdom called Sendor and a group of mercenaries hired to assist with various black ops type missions during an ongoing war.
On one mission the BBEG manages to delay their return by several months and when they come home, they find he has managed to replace them with very convincing impostors. The party considers their next move for a bit, then the princess looks at me and asks if she can have a contact in the castle who’d believe she’s the real one. I roll with it, and ask her for suggestions.
She decides that her nurse, Nana, would of course know right away that something was wrong. She decides to have her familiar carry a note to Nana that simply says “I’m not in the palace. Can you find me?” She then happily roleplays Nana’s reaction to this note, which consists of grabbing a tea set and sandwiches and marching out of the palace and straight to the secret room where the party has been hiding out for the past week.
Nana has since developed into a sort of Mary Poppins expy who has been the nurse for the royal family of Sendor for… well, no one’s quite sure how long. She has no combat abilities whatsoever, but she knows everyone in the city and often serves as a source of lore or contacts. She is easily the most iconic NPC in the campaign, and she came about specifically because I allowed Princess Rina some creative freedom.
Dragons and fireballs and swords of power are a dime a dozen. Player buy-in is the real magic. Well done incorporating a cool idea! Nana sounds like an amazing character.