Guilds, Houses and Towns

Sims have a society. It was not authored — it is played out, and it changes.

Guilds are founded by fighting

Beat another unaligned sim and you raise a banner. The ones you beat swear to you. Once a guild is large enough, one of the three great houses takes it in.

Guilds carry names, crests and tags, and a sim wears its guild the way you wear yours — visible on the character, in /who, and in the PvP death announcements.

Guild names are drawn from a pool of thirty-two, and each has a written character: what they believe they are, how they actually fight, and what everyone else says about them. The gap between the first and the last of those is usually the interesting part.

The three houses, and the fourth

There are three great houses, and that number is not guaranteed. Unaligned guilds can build a bloc of their own and unseat one of the three, so "the three houses" describes the current state of the world rather than a fixed rule of it.

Standing between houses is tracked as a signed ledger running from friendly through hostile to open war. It moves on what actually happens: kills, defections, and who came to whose aid.

Guilds build towns

A sim guild founds a tree and then works through a build order, one step at a time:

1. Bank — the first thing any guild wants
2. Inn — nothing further up the order can be bought until this is ranked
3. Forge — repairs and buys junk armour, the first thing a town earns from
4. Sage — scrolls now, bane circles later; a house without one can never besiege anybody
5. Barracks — the point at which taking the town starts to cost something
6. Towers, four of them — a single tower is a landmark; two are a crossfire

The staff

Their buildings are not empty. As each one goes up the guild hires the NPC that belongs in it: a Bursar in the bank, a Steward in the inn, a Sage in the magic shop, and a Guard Captain in the barracks. The forge and the towers hold nobody.

The Guard Captain is the one to care about. He is not a shopkeeper — he spawns guards and brings more of them as he ranks, which is what turns a sim town from scenery you can stroll through into somewhere that fights back.

Construction is paid for by what the guild's members actually do out in the world. Kills build a town. Killing players builds it considerably faster — roughly twenty-five times faster per kill — so a house that is genuinely dangerous to players visibly outgrows one grinding boars in a field.

The reverse is also true, and it is the interesting half: the fastest way to slow a hostile guild's town down is to stop dying to it.

Guilds go to war

Once standing between two houses reaches war, a guild may bane a rival's tree.

Which tree it picks is decided by a named war doctrine rather than at random. A house operating under one doctrine goes for the weakest thing it is angry at; another waits until somebody else is already bleeding; another simply pushes outward at its border.

That matters because it is learnable. A house that always goes for the tree keeps going for the tree. An enemy whose choices you can predict feels intelligent in a way that a random one never does — which is precisely why the choice is not random.

A house's doctrine can also shift in response to its own recent history, so a guild that spent last week losing ground may not fight the same way this week.