Should Adventurer's Guilds Exist?

in fantasy Media or any media that seeks to evoke a medieval-ish setting we find guilts adventurers guilds Merchants guilds Craftsmen guilds all of these things are Staples of fantasy discourse but one of these things is not like the others Craftsmen and Merchant's guilds were real social groups during the medieval period especially in Europe the adventurers Guild not so much sure exploratory Expeditions were sponsored by Nobles States and the church but without monsters to slay and damsels in distress adventuring was a relatively Niche profession all the way up until we get cartographers guilds and geographers guilds we have no real organization of people who call themselves adventurous or explorers even compared to these geographical societies adventurous guilds are very different monster slayers fixes odd job men all picking from the collected list of quests unlike our Craftsmen and Merchants guilds nothing like that has ever really existed in our world so today let's examine what exactly a guild is and was where this Trope has come from and how The Adventurous Guild that we see so often in fantasy may actually make a lot of sense from a world-building perspective stick around to the end to hear how I managed to argue that [Music] what do we know about guilts well before there was industrialized labor there were guilts long before the first guilds were social clubs organized by like-minded people in ancient Roman societies they were called collegia and encompassed everything from merchants and Traders Craftsmen political alliances and religious orders it was essentially a way to formalize a group allowing the sharing of collective assets and creating a stronger lobbying Voice by being part of a community some of these colegia can be seen as potentially some of the earliest western style companies if you were a Craftsman a Trader or most likely both it would be an excellent idea to get yourself involved in the collegium that represents your craft it allowed you to collaborate on pricing structures and act as more than an independent Trader several attempts were made in the Roman era to ban this practice most notably by Julius Caesar himself but collegia endured for most of late Roman history even surviving into the Byzantine Empire after the West fell all the while of the concept of a worker's Guild was being slowly refined by ad900 we see Byzantine kilegia narrowing down their specialism into specific crafts and traits butchers Bakers and indeed Candlestick matekas ran their own collegia as independent units to protect their specific trade and their specific industry especially in larger cities where these Craftsmen were better able to organize collectively and by this point the collegial themselves required specific rules specific practices and quality controls for any products around this time in Europe and continuing on for a little bit being a merchant was a horrible profession you were constantly on the Move shifting goods from place to place in the hopes that your knowledge and your speculation would inform you where these goods are going to be most valuable you were at risk of Bandits Highwaymen and wild beasts out on the roads it was a lonely life the only people who could really understand and relate to you were other Merchants so naturally Merchants banded together and as they did they found they could not only rely on each other for protection on the road they could also share in all sorts of other ways from sharing knowledge to divvying up the more Pleasant tasks and so in the burgeoning European economy of the 11th century Merchant skills were born or depending on your definition reborn this allowed Merchants to protect their trades through Collective investment facilitated larger scale and longer distance trading opportunities and crucially allowed some Merchant Masters to actually settle in towns safe in the knowledge that their fellow Merchants would be spread out across the local community essentially doing their old job for them all of a sudden Merchant became a desirable profession for some and these burgeoning guilds bloomed being able to create monopolies on trade goods controlled distribution and prices and stop other Sellers from selling their Wares on their Turf I think it's time for a little detour on our way to discuss the pre-industrial labor market firstly kiss your weekends goodbye the largely Christian Europe observed Sunday as a holy day and so tended not to work on that particular day but Saturday was not quite so lucky many worked for most of the day with some having Saturday afternoons off but for self-directed professions like farming and early mercantilism you had to work as many hours as there were in the day to get a competitive advantage on your fellow Traders thankfully for everyone's sanity candles and oil were a little too expensive to make it a regular habit to work long into the night but that doesn't mean that Merchants were always off the road come night for sometimes you've simply had to travel throughout the night to the next safe place a small Saving Grace for those who were actually able to stay at home was the relatively common practice of waking up partway through the night setting a candle or lamp and having some family time or personal time for your projects this would last for an hour or two before you went back to bed for your second sleep until the morning so as you may be able to tell working was largely determined by the light during the summer months a farmer May easily end up working 16 hour days but during winter that same farmer may be confined to his home working on his personal secondary craft projects or doing home-based labor as his family does the same so the world of work is very very different to how it seems now when we see our guilds blossoming almost everyone has some small craft to keep them going throughout the winter or to at least prepare for a more profitable summer this pushing and pulling in profitability is not an easy thing to navigate and the idea of selling your family's crafted skill out of a workshop say is a relatively attractive one because that's the business that can work during summer and winter months of course your Workshop needed to be well known and have no direct competition both of those problems were solved by the introduction of The Craft you see by collaborating with local people in local craft communities you could negotiate who makes what specific items while also ensuring that all of the products that come out of your town and your Workshop are of a satisfactory quality and crucially the ability to promote your town as a Haven for this specific craft trade or industry now we understand what guilds are for and how they came to be let's tackle this anachronistic adventurers Guild the concept of the adventurers Guild comes mostly from Fantasy games there are some few examples of similar things in fantasy Works before this but it's worth noting that their main introduction comes through gaming culture starting out with the granddaddy of role-playing games Dungeons and Dragons we see a clear and deliberate need for a place where quests are simply given to the players there is a clear need for a context for adventuring DND began as two or three games stuffed into one one was a broad map based exploration on the way to the quest and another was a smaller scale grittier more personal dungeon skirmishing tactical Adventure The Narrative through line was the quest a discrete unit of Adventure that needs to be communicated embarked upon and completed before session or stories end the most convenient way to organize this in game design well a central Hub location where these quests are given out and the rewards from them collected at the same spot this concept of a job or notice board in the center of town grew into the idea of an adventurous Guild as we see in an awful lot of fantasy gaming media nowadays but we especially see it in anime why does anime specifically have such a fascination with this concept of the adventurer's guild while Western fantasy media has a long and storied history of borrowing from the greats and the classics those seminal Works written far far before RPGs came into the world Japanese fantasy tradition was entirely different so for some creatives in the Japanese media landscape Dungeons and Dragons when it came over became the sort of groundwork the classic of the western fantasy at least gaming genre especially as video games are Japanese specialty began exploding in worldwide interest from Dragon Quest all the way through to Modern anime concepts of the adventurer's guild and slimes as introductory enemies both seem to be ported somewhat from Dungeons and Dragons and they emerge as these strange ubiquities which flavor Japanese fantasy worlds and the adventurer's guild structure for gaming makes an awful lot of sense as mentioned earlier it's helpful to have a Hub location that your players can keep coming back to to get new quests and new content and it's also helpful to delineate the tasks they can do by how difficult they are using difficulty classes although why Japanese media doesn't take into account The Guild portion of the adventurer's guild by calling them Apprentice journeyman and master levels of difficulty is beyond me that's right there instead we tend to use metals or letter ranks so with all that said all that history and media criticism discussed How could an actual fantasy adventurous Guild function first it's likely to be a hybrid between the craftsmans and the merchants Guild setups that we discussed earlier adventurers are itinerant Travelers in most fantasy media traveling from town to town through Wild Spaces never really finding a safe place to rest their heads because the next Quest the next job or the next villain has arrived this fits the journeyman classification of a guild membership very well indeed as journeyman members were expected to go out into the world and practice their trade in other locations Apprentice adventurers are the ones who study the adventuring craft through rat catching and direct client supervision while master adventurers would be Guild Masters marshalling a collection of ragtag adventurers under their command and sending them on quests around the local region much like in a merchant skill or they will be Master adventurous still active in the field taking on the hardest challenges to get the best results they possibly can as the most experienced venturers out there of course both types of master master adventure and Guild Master would both have the responsibility of teaching and tutoring the next generation of adventurers depending on how high fantasy your world is these guilds could have a responsibility for a small locality or a large swath of land perhaps they even go International if you're magical or technological Communications tech is powerful enough but why would an adventurer's Guild establish itself in the first place adventurers are known to be strange folk and not the most tied down or social of creatures well this too we can learn from the Advent of merchants guilts as stated being emergent was a really horrible profession in the early medieval period you were relying on your and your Master's ability to speculatively beat the market while traveling all around your local region hoping that the Wares would not go bad or get broken in transit and of course that you wouldn't die or get robbed we can think of adventurers in a similar way in a fantasy world that includes threats like dragons or hydras or even just wolves that are twice as big as the ones we know from our world leaving the walls of a city is a heck of a lot riskier it's likely that the adventurer profession evolves around the merchant profession starting with simple hired swords to protect Merchant Caravans in transit it would carry on in this vein until some clever individual decides that they'd rather the problem was simply gone for good exterminated so they don't have to keep hiring these Hired Hands for every single Journey these hired goons would start getting hired to take out threats preemptively protecting Merchant Caravans not by wandering alongside them for days on end but by doing a single task a single surgical strike a quest if you will having spent some time around this Mercantile Guild system your adventurers may start to get some similar ideas I would expect a particularly enterprising Adventurer getting on in his gears seeing a merchant Guild Master living the life of luxury it's staying in the same place and just organizing the people around him to think well why don't I try something similar after all this Adventurer would have years worth of connections and a realistically pretty fast approaching sell by date at this moment an adventurous Guild is structurally it would look quite similar to a Merchant's Guild where the central Guild Master sits in a Hub location and sends apprentices and Journeymen out to do the actual work using of course the accrued knowledge of the Guild Master to pick the best contracts and negotiate fees crucially this Guild would pretty easily be able to enforce a monopoly you see Craftsman's guilds were able to establish their monopolies pretty early by virtue of being the only people in town a collection of them sure but the only people in town able to do a specific craft or make a specific item that was necessary adventurers who are hired to protect people and to slay monsters have a skill set that is not easily replicable any collection of towns operating with an adventurous Guild in play would simply put a blanket ban out on any hired swords or spellcasters that were not part of the Guild's structure unfortunately for the local area this could mean that the local adventurer's guild could actually become a massive political power either through intense and Powerful lobbying or a mafia style protection racket for the highest bidders indeed considering all the Uproar we saw with the power of the collegia in Rome it's most likely that a group of people who are trained with the blade are going to be a heck of a lot more dangerous politically and uh protection racket wise than a collection of stone masons after all they're the insane individuals who go outside the city walls and kill monsters they're armed to the teeth they're practically unionized and they've seen far more action than your local Guardsman or militiamen the biggest obstacle to an adventurous Guild actually setting up then is local law and local nobility if a landowner allows such a guild to establish itself he may reasonably expect that the price of protection will continue to Skyrocket as this Guild would have a monopoly and he may also anticipate that his lands may become increasingly unsafe unless people agree to continue paying the extortionate fees on the other hand and if they ban such a guild from forming there may be two very unpleasant responses firstly the Merchant's guilds would almost certainly Lobby for the creation of an adventurer's Guild as their business relies on being protected by the monsters and the magic of the world and secondly the adventurers May threaten to take their business elsewhere you see any place that has a formalized collective of monster Slayers hunters and guards is certainly a more attractive place for any reasonable person to be and when a landowner's town is under threat of competition well he may well have to buckle so throughout history people have created guilds or Guild like organizations for so many reasons to set basic standards for a profession to create a collectively bargained Monopoly or simply to make their profession easier more collaborative and do each other's advertising adventurous guilds in fantasy would exist for pretty similar reasons to stop ill-equipped fools going out with the wrong equipment no training and just dying to ensure that adventuring is paid fairly by collaborating and centralizing contract prices or simply to enable explorers to more easily share in their resources their advertising and their services in any fantasy setting where heroism can be commodified I.E people are paid to go and fight against Monsters there may well be nights but that will almost certainly also be independent contractors after all our world history is littered not only with formalized soldiers but also vast and impressive mercenary companies any such world will see adventurers organize at least somewhere and where workers in a dangerous field organize tends to lead to fewer fatalities and better industrial standards we must remember that just because the adventurer's guild fantasy Trope started as really a way to force players to use a central Hub location and get the adventuring going quickly that doesn't mean that it's not a really interesting idea that we should be porting into our fantasy settings after all the original collegia covered almost every form of collective expression from work to religion and politics and in a normal-ish fantasy world much of the concern of regular citizens would be given over to how their labor and their lives may be affected by the horrid monsters that lurk out yes in many places the Guardsmen and knights are responsible for dealing with such things but when their resources are stretched in that's when adventurers start to take root and much like the rats they slay adventurers given respect and proper reward will multiply organize and become too integral a part of a settlement to be ignored that's why I believe that the adventurer's guild is not a Trope that should be limited to gaming or jrpg inspired anime it's a legitimate World building tool that we can all use to inject some politicking and trade disputes into our fantasy towns and our fantasy monster slayers after all that's what everyone loved so much about the Star Wars prequels right thank you for watching I hope this has been an interesting look into a much maligned Trope of video game style fantasy and I hope that you've got some ideas from it on how to integrate the concepts of organization Collective labor and trade unions into your world even when it comes to the big old monster slaying if you've got any cool examples of adventurous guilds Done Right I'd love to hear about them in the comments and of course if you think I've got something wrong or you just disagree with some of the points I made here feel free to let me know in the comments there's no reason that I read every single one unless it's to understand where I can improve and where our mindsets May simply differ that's always part of the fascination to releasing a video like this in any case if you'd like to see more like this please do subscribe but with that said I've been Tom otherwise known as the grungeon master and I will see you in the next video

Channel: The Grungeon Master

Views: 231,266

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Id: aTFqhk2-bCk

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023