Guilds within PlaneShift

Guilds are a critical part of gameplay in PlaneShift. You cannot miss to be part of one!

Guild: An association of persons of the same trade or pursuits, formed to protect mutual interests and maintain standards.
Guilds allow you to know more people, to team up for completion of larger and more complex tasks, to choose your side and outline better the identity of your character.
To create your guild in the game, you need to have 20,000 tria and four other people readily available to join within 5 minutes of creation! If you do not have five members in your guild within five minutes, the guild will disband and you will not get a refund. So have people ready! It shouldn't be hard to find other members if your guild is interesting and thought-out. Read on to find some tips on guild creation.

Defining Your Guild

Creating your guild should be a long but rewarding process, if done right. Guilds are not organizations of friends - that is the purpose of groups. Guilds are permanent, solid foundations built on similar crafts, goals, or ideals. A successful guild takes a fair amount of planning. It is best to take time to clearly define what your guild is about and why they exist before physically creating it. As this is a roleplaying game, the longest lasting and biggest guilds have a reason for being who they are. Some exist to wreak havoc, some exist to spread peace, some unite around a certain god, etc.

Along with the guilds goals, many guilds like to have a history written up. A short (or long) story outlining how the guild came to start. This doesn't mean a story about how you were sitting at your computer one day and said to yourself, "Hey! This game is great, I'm gonna create an awesome guild!" The story should be written as it pertains to your character.

Interact with maximum realism. Even though this is a fantasy setting, it has its own rules; it's singular reality. Attempt to keep from establishing referrences from or dependencies on alien data (i.e. Dragons, Allignment Systems, Vampires, Werewolves, Greek Gods, Tolkien's elven, etc.) If you are unsure if something fits, ask a Game Master, a Moderator or anyone in the PS Team.

Also, keep in mind that guilds which endanger the Yliakum Government should fear action from its authorities, and guilds who wish to be elected should try to produce and contribute to the system, and independent guilds should try to remain so, while not carrying any misfortune on themselves. It will contribute greatly to the roleplay atmosphere while it will keep us ready for the future of Planeshift.

Ranking

Simply throwing everyone into a guild and saying, "Ok we're [guildname]" isn't going to work. Within your guild there should be numerous ranks, titles, and jobs that allow members to advance in their position. This helps you, as the guildleader, in sharing out responsibility. This also allows you to be creative. The guild should define 9 levels of hierarchy, with level 9 being the leader. Your different ranks should all have descriptions, in order to indicate what someone in that rank has to expect.

Rules

It's always good to have a set of rules by which the guild needs to adhere. Rules from how they should act, what they should say, etc. Remember that as a guildmember what they do and say will reflect not only themselves but the entire guild.

The Name

Guild names should be unique and well thought out. That short few words is what a potential recruit will first see and if they do not like the name they may overlook the guild completely.

Warriors of, Army of, or Knights of, type names are not the most creative and have been done over and over. Those take little thought to come up with. Some guild names you will notice have their names in other languages: The Calen Vakhar (Elvish-The Green Guardians), Incensio Tenebrae (Latin-Burning Darkness).

Others have names such as: The Cabal, Arcane Order, The Mercenary Guild, The Blitzers.

The point is be original.

Finally - A Place to Put It

All guilds, large and small should have some sort of place out of game to communicate. Whether it be forums, a site, or simply through messengers. Preferably all of those. All the items discussed here should be plainly set out somewhere on your site or in your forums.

(For those of you who have no experience with creating sites or forums simply ask those here at PlaneShift. There are more than enough with experience here and many will be more than willing to help out.)

If you follow all the above steps you should have a well defined guild, ready to shine its glory all over Yliakum. You might choose to present it to others, via a thread in the Forum. If you do so, make sure you're typing correctly and that you remember your grammar rules. This way your guild thread should have the quality necessary to interest its readers.

Your guild thread should contain the following information: Your Guild's Background, Rules, Ranks & Hierarchy, Goals and information about the sort of people you'd like to recruit. Informing about ranks isn't merely naming them. Try and give a small description for each one. You can also add other types of information at your own risk. All these should be posted in a clear and accessible way.

Handle the criticism well. Some people will point at your guild's flaws. These people will be doing you a favor, so respect them and change what you think you have to.

With all this in mind, remember to have fun!

Written by Aendar and Sangwa