How does a player go about starting a Wizard's Guild?

[shadowthorn]

My character is a 5th level Wizard / 6th level Planewalker (Horizon Walker adapted for arcane spellcasters) who plans to take Leadership soon and start his own Wizard's Guild. The only two existing Guilds are inaccessible, one due to an arcane sickness/curse that prevents him from traveling to that area, the other due to his status as public enemy number one in that city.

Fortunately, the PCs have a large keep far removed from either city, and my wizard is thinking of turning part of the keep into a sort of Arcane Guild. The cohort would be the guild's administrator, running the place while my PC adventures. The followers would be low-level mages, guards, etc. The specialty of the school would likely be extraplanar studies, since that's my character's area of emphasis.

I'm looking for any ideas you have about:

1. Requirements. What does my PC need to acquire to start the guild. An arcane library (10,000 gp), certainly, as well as copies of most of the lower-level spells, an arcane lab, summoning area. What else?

2. Layout. What features should the place have? It may be in its own tower, or it may be within the keep somewhere - like the basement levels. Other than the rooms mentioned above, what sorts of areas can you imagine?

3. Rules. What sorts of membership rules ought there to be? What kinds of penalties for those who violate them? What should the dues be, and the benefits of membership?

4. Misc. What fun, odd, quirky, endearing touches can you think of for the place? Odd little magic items, gizmos that assist in mundane tasks, etc?

Please feel free to contribute any ideas you may have. I could certainly do this alone, but would really love to see what y'all come up with. It will give me so many more ideas than I could ever generate by myself.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you may have.

 

[Andor]

You might make it an arcane university as well as a guild. That should give you plenty of adventures in and of itself. Plus a town will rapidly grow up around the keep/guild/academy.

Considerations: Is this going to be a 'hardcore guild'? IE: Are unaffiliated mages allowed in it's territory? What are your membership requirements? Dues? Duties?

For example: You might require a new applicant to bring a new sample of some kind of extraplanar item that the guild does not yet have in their collection. This then leads to your guild possesing an archive or museam of extraplanar items and knowledge. Eventually you'll see mages comeing to ask permission to study from your collection. Or to steal something you didn't realize was important...

If you want a good look at what some of the reasons for a wizards guild are, and how to found one, read 'The night of Madness' by Lawrence Watt-Evans.

-Andor

 

[EricNoah]

My AU group is about to start helping an NPC who wants to start a magic guild. Their first task is to clear out a suitable location -- an old fort that once served as a wizard guild. The upper levels were "public access" areas -- shops and public libraries and dining areas for visiting nobles. There were also forges for making magical armor and weapons, alchemical and herbal laboratories, quarters for students of magic, and elaborate quarters for the leaders of the guild. The upper areas could be scried by means of a special device kept in one leader's room. The lower level, beneath the surface, had summoning areas, a magical garden, private magic libraries, portals to other parts of the world, "firing ranges" for spellcasting practice, more workshops/labs with homunculus assistants, and a fairly elaborate series of defensive glyphs all powered from a central "generator room." This room has four holding tanks with walls of transparent, magical crystal. Inside are summoning circles that repeatedly summon energons (xag-ya and xeg-yi or whatever they were called in the old days). When an energon appears in one "cell" of the holding tank, it sees a rival energon through the transparent wall of the adjacent tank and rushes toward it. When it hits the crystal wall, it dies, and its energy is dispersed into the crystal, which is connected throughout the lower levels of the guild and provides magical power for traps and other gizmos. Also parts of the lower level allow "enhanced" magic to be cast (in AU parlance, characters can cast heightened versions of spells without using a higher level spell slot if they make a certain skill check).

Of course in my game, all of this is in the past and now the traps are all screwy, some of the energons have escaped, a fiend lives in the upper levels, etc.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

You're planning on specializing in extraplanar studies, eh?

It seems to me, then, that the guild should have lots of extraplanar goodies.

The "well" is really just a large cistern with a once-per-day Gate to the elemental plane of water.

The kitchens have "Cabinets of Holding," and possibly a coldroom with a minor gateway to the paraelemental plane of ice.

Summoning chambers - complete with permanent Magic Circles - are an absolute must.

Particularly dangerous items / spellbooks are kept in their own pocket dimensions.

 

[_Magnus_]

I like the idea of a university, since that gives you much more versatility. It depends on whether or not you want it competitive or not. If it is a university for the higher level mages in the world, then I would add requirement such as the contribution of gold or rare artifacts to the university, a pact binding the mage to the school, or emphasis on a very specific school of magic. If it is a lower level university, I would have less severe requirements.

For higher level mages, I would have rooms to experiment/tweak with magic items, trainging rooms, and a complex layout of the building. I would also have servitors to do more mundane upkeep chores, sicne the wizards might be far too busy to do trivial things themselves.

if it is a lower level university, have classrooms, resources to create lesser magical items... probably training rooms as well, but with supervision of higher level mentors...

 

[drnuncheon]

To have a true "guild" in the original sense, you need to have the cooperation of the other area magic-users. It would be an association for mutual benefit and regulation of trade - setting standards and the like. (Casting a spell of the first circle costs this much) You'd want to have either the support of the local law, or be powerful enough that you need not worry about the local law.

J

 

[shadowthorn]

Excellent ideas. I’m going to have to implement a lot of them down the road, cuz my resources are scant and I’ll be starting with a fairly small crew. I do intend that this guild be a research center and arcane academy.My guess is that I’ll have a cohort of 9th-11th level to run the guild, with 15-25 1st level followers (mostly wizards) and maybe a 2nd level follower as well. Something like that.

So, I won’t be able to have too many high-level features in the place, save for my character’s own research, as well as the cohort’s. But we’ll certainly plan on using higher-level features down the road as the place grows. The party owns an inn near their keep, and encourages adventurers to spent time there. Since we also run a contract brokerage, those low-level followers will have the opportunity to gain XP and level up.

FYI, their isn't much of a local community - it's all sprung up around the party's keep, which is rather isolated. I don't think that competition with the other guilds will be an issue - but I could be dead wrong on that. Depends on our DM, of course.

Please, keep the ideas coming. Thanks!!

 

[shadowthorn]

Kerplunk! My thread has sunk. Don't be shy, folks. I'm still hoping to greedily gloat over a pile of Wizard's Guild ideas to occupy my character for the rest of the campaign. Thanks!

 

[The_Universe]

If you're getting cohorts and followers from the Leadership feat, remember that in the RAW, your followers only have levels in NPC classes. So, all of those first level followers can be, at best, adepts.

I have a house rule IMC that lets people with the leadership feat "exchange" second level followers for others with only one level in a PC class, and that seems to largely work out OK.

 

[F5]

I've been thinking about settign up a guild for my wizard PC, and I decided that Leadership is a good place to start, but not the best way to build a guild overall.

The mecahnics of the leadership feat just don't jive with how I would imagine a wizard's academy would run. Mainly because your followers don't ever go up in level, you just get more as your leadership score increases. That would leave you with a school of wizardry in which none of the students ever learn anything. Kinda' sucky.

Use Leadership to fill out the staff of the academy/guild, not the students/members. Get a few staff spellcasters, guards, a few experts to serve as accountant, cook, whatever. The actual students would not necessarily be your followers, but regular NPCs who come from far and wide to learn the Art from a master.

Since you're a specialist in extraplanar magic, consider using Planar Binding to call in some highly exoic guest lecturers...

Some permanent summoning circles in defensible areas are an absolute must-have.

You should absolutely build your library in some kind of extradimensional space, so it's bigger inside than out.

Lastly, for plot purposes, you absolutely must have some way for a group of plucky first-year students to get into trouble way over their heads, unleash something terrible on an unsuspecting world, and have you and the other PCs have to come in and save the day. Your DM will thank you.