Guilds show up in fantasy RPGs and campaign settings, too; every city has a thieves’ guild and a wizards’ guild. It’s mostly lip service, though, because those guilds seldom do anything other than issue vague threats (thieves’ guild) or accidentally blast their guildhalls through dimensional portals (wizards’ guild).

So what should a guild do? What DID a guild do? Or in other words, why should your character pay dues? (Yes, there are dues. The name “guild” comes from the gold collected in membership fees.)

It’s easy and natural for modern minds to compare medieval merchant guilds to our modern trade unions, but that’s a bad comparison. Guild members were not employees; they were independent business owners who shared a common industry. In modern terms, guilds were more akin to small business associations.

By the late Middle Ages, guilds were highly specialized: harness makers and harness polishers, for example, had separate guilds. In FRPG terms, longbowmen and crossbowmen probably wouldn’t mingle in the same 14th Century guildhall, let alone hang with those knuckle-dragging sword swingers. That’s a bit extreme. Unless that degree of specialization serves a purpose in your campaign, I wouldn’t carry things to that degree.

In practical terms, a guild fulfilled three purposes.

First, it passed along the trade secrets that made a skilled craft possible by overseeing the training of apprentices. The guild wasn’t responsible for actually training anyone, but it did verify that training was being absorbed. Candidates for membership progressed from apprentice through craftsman, journeyman, master, and finally grand master.

Second, the guild protected those secrets. The first period of an apprenticeship often involved a lot of drudge work and very little training. It was more a vetting process than a training program. Before revealing the secrets to making a quality sword, shoe, or glove to a new apprentice, the guild wanted to be sure that he or she could be trusted with secrets. Trade secrets were the life’s blood of every member in the guild. If everyone knew how to make a sturdy wagon wheel, wheel sales would plummet. Membership in a guild was sealed with powerful oaths of secrecy and allegiance for just this reason. These oaths were so strongly worded that the church cracked down on some of them, claiming that they crossed the line into conjurations.

Third, the guild protected the reputation and livelihood of everyone in it by vouching that all its members were competent at their craft. A guild’s reputation depends on the quality of its product. If you buy a pair of boots in Wellingtown and the soles fall off before you reach Skull Tower, your medieval mind lays the blame on the Wellingtown bootmaker’s guild for certifying an incompetent cobbler and letting him tool the Wellingtown guild trademark onto his product. Those shoddy hikers reflect badly on everyone who is patented by the Wellingtown bootmaker’s guild. If it licensed one idiot, it probably licensed dozens. For guild accreditation to be a plus instead of a minus, the standards need to be high.

Now that we’ve reviewed what guilds did, what can they do for your character? What are the benefits of membership?

Every guild was established by some form of charter from the king, the ruling noble, or the mayor or city council. Charters conferred certain rights and privileges on guild members, and those privileges will be jealously denied to anyone who doesn’t pay dues into the guild coffers. You can set whatever privileges you like in your campaign, but #1 would be practicing a trade at all. A powerful wizards’ guild probably would be within its rights to prohibit nonmembers from casting spells in its territory. You want to cast spells? You need to join the guild. Enforcement might seem a problem, but if you’re the guild master concerned about this, you’ll figure out something.

Another common privilege was the wearing of special attire. Guilds were sometimes called livery companies because members were entitled to wear clothing denoting or befitting their profession. The “costume” that denotes a warrior is armor. The local warriors’ guild might well have a provision in its charter prohibiting nonmembers from wearing armor, or armor above a certain grade (chain mail or better, for example), or armor that’s enchanted.

Like trade unionists, members of related guilds tend to support one another. A group of adventurers might be able to buck the warriors’ guild, the thieves’ guild, and the wizards’ guild when they come to town, but what happens when they visit the weaponsmith, the armorer, and the alchemist for repairs and resupply? If they aren’t members of their respective guilds, they could be refused service out of solidarity with those associations.

Remember that guild masters are, by definition, masters of their trade. The head of the local warriors’ guild won’t be some schmuck with a rusty glaive left over from a war twenty years ago. He or she will be the best fighter the area has to offer. That’s not the person you want to cross on your first day in town.

Finally, guild members travel (journeymen, remember?). If characters upset the guild in one town, word will get around—possibly faster than they do.

Those are all things the guild can do TO you. What does the guild do FOR you?

It starts by opening doors. If you roll into town as a guild member in good standing, you’ll find readymade contacts who are duty-bound to provide support just by checking in at the guild hall. In a dangerous world, locals might not talk to or trust strangers, but it’s a different story if you can produce guild credentials. A guild master rated you as a responsible, accomplished person, and even if he or she is from a hundred miles away, that opinion carries weight.

Second, a guild ranking grants you instant credibility as a professional who deserves respect. Any clown can pick up a sword and shield or don a pointy hat and a robe festooned with stars. Your journeyman status testifies that you’ve proven your proficiency to an acknowledged master of your trade. Consider it the Angie’s List of a sans-Internet world.

Third, guild sanctioning can give you access to special services that are reserved for members only. Healing tops the list, but magic item identification, equipment repairs, specialized gear, access to private libraries, and clearance to hire men-at-arms, sages, or alchemists should also be included. Hirelings in particular form an interesting case. Even if the guild doesn’t strictly prohibit nonmembers from hiring in their town, most of the people worth hiring probably are guild members, and they might not be willing to work for an outsider with no credentials. If they are willing, they may charge more than the standard rate and give less than 100% effort. Anyone available for hire who isn’t a guild member raises the flag of why not? If he or she was rejected by the guild, you might not want this person watching your back or your supplies.

Finally, membership offers some protection against poaching on your skillset. If your group runs afoul of another band of adventurers, guild members can lodge a complaint with the adventurers’ guild and possibly see some results. Nonmembers are going to be shown the door, or possibly the window.

Modern scholars have mixed thoughts on whether medieval guilds promoted economic and social stability or stifled innovation and growth. I suspect they did a little of both. Uncertainty over their legacy is no reason to ignore them in your fantasy campaign. If anything, it’s a license to employ them in creative, unusual ways.

Has one of your characters ever belonged to a guild? Was it worth the membership fee?

If that sounds dismissive, it’s not meant to be. There’s a lot to be said in favor of “yes, but.” As GM philosophies go, it’s better than most.

It can, however, become a trap for the unwary or overly generous GM who’s trying to build a world with a strong theme.

In my experience, players fall into three categories when it comes to creating characters. Group 1 tends to make the same character over and over. Even when they try to make another type of character, it winds up talking and acting just like all its predecessors. Group 2 likes to experiment but sticks with the classics. This player might roll up a human fighter in one game and an elf wizard in the next, but you won’t often see them playing bladelings or gunslingers. Group 3 never plays the same character twice, and never plays a character that could be considered typical of anything. In a group filled with human fighters, elf wizards, and halfling rogues, this is the player behind the minotaur artificer who rides a mechanical elephant and suffers from crippling claustrophobia. That idea might have just popped into his or her head as characters were being created, or it might be something that rattled around in there for years before finally percolating to the surface in time for the latest game.

One of the GM’s many responsibilities is to create a convincing fantasy world for the characters to move around in. If that world is meant to evoke the feeling of Middle Earth, then a minotaur artificer riding a mechanical elephant is going to clash.

The argument gets made–validly, but only within limits–that player characters are ipso facto exceptional. If someone wants to play the only minotaur artificer in Gondor, why not allow it?

If the GM is comfortable with or even intrigued by an odd choice, then by all means, he or she should allow it. But there are two good reasons not to automatically say “yes, but” when a player requests something that breaks the mold of a setting, especially one that’s just getting underway.

First, allowing exceptions complicates the GM’s job, which is taxing enough without assumption-breaking character tropes. Is the just-beginning Middle Earth campaign really the best place to try that concept for a minotaur artificer or a mechanical elephant? There will be other campaigns; perhaps you could keep that idea in your pocket for the next one.

Second, at the start of a campaign, the GM has a clearer vision of the world than any of the players have. He or she may have been imagining this place for months, if not years, before ever bringing it to the group. That vision is a big part of what’s driving his or her excitement for the upcoming game sessions. It’s what keeps the GM at the computer late into the night plotting adventures, describing the local inns and thieves guilds, and sketching out the nearby troglodyte warrens that connect to the hollow core of the planet. The early stages of a new campaign are when the setting is most purely the GM’s own. Just as it’s best to play a new board game by the standard rules a few times before adding your own, it’s best to spend some time exploring a new campaign setting before asking for changes. Try to understand why it is the way it is before reimagining it.

If you’re the GM and you have a strong vision for a setting without some class, race, or monster that’s included in the rulebook, no matter how iconic it might be, you’re well within your authority to say no and stick to it. Perhaps there’s a way to say “no, but,” as in “no, you can’t play an elf, because their extinction is a core feature of this setting, but you can play a revenant who is the reanimated spirit of one of those long-dead elves, or a half-elf, since that race is all that remains of the elves’ watered-down bloodlines.”

It boils down to this: I value a setting’s unique atmosphere much more highly than unlimited race and class options. If excising a few races and classes makes the world a more interesting place, then cut away.

Have you excluded races or classes from a setting, or played in such a campaign? What was your reaction? Did anyone really lament the loss?

I can’t talk about elevator pitches without declaring how much I hate the term. Once that proletarian complaint is out of the way, I’m ready to proclaim that the elevator pitch is a great tool for sharpening up a product.

Did I say “product”? Absolutely! Even if your worldbuilding effort is entirely for private consumption, treating the work as a product is constructive.

Every campaign idea needs to be “sold” to someone before it gets played or read. For most worldbuilders, “someone” means your local group of friends and D&D players. When pitching your world, you need to hook your potential audience by the imagination and not let go. How many times have you listened to someone ramble on about their pet campaign idea, the whole time thinking “when is this nincompoop going to shut up? I wouldn’t spend five minutes in the place he’s describing.”

Time is the ultimate limiting factor. No one wants to waste their time playing in a lame RPG campaign. They want to know from the start that their time won’t be squandered. If you can get people excited about your setting and make them eager to play with just a one- or two-minute description, then you probably have a strong concept.

The vital element here is not salesmanship. The last thing you want to do is trick your friends into playing in your setting with a deceptive sales pitch. They’ll figure out the truth soon enough, and then your credibility goes down the drain.

The vital element is value. Players and readers want to feel that what they got out of a four-hour gaming session was worth more than something else they could have done with those four hours. When it comes to a new campaign, players are asked to pledge potentially hundreds of hours. They deserve good information about what they’re committing to.

The web offers many excellent tools and guides that can help you build an effective elevator pitch. Every one of them tells you to start with a quality idea. The “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” law is in full effect here.

The better your product, the easier it is to pitch. If you’re having a hard time coming up with selling points for your campaign, consider that a clue. Maybe it’s the setting, the theme, and the plot that need sharpening up, not just the pitch. If you can’t communicate the elements that make your setting cool in under a minute, then maybe the concept is too complex—or maybe it’s not as cool as you think it is, and those aspects need spicing up. If you can’t keep the pitch sharp and focused, you might be emphasizing so many elements that they blur together instead of standing out.

Sharpening an elevator pitch this way can’t help but hone your world concept, too. As the concept grows stronger, the elevator pitch becomes more compelling, and the odds go up that you’ll actually get to send players on adventures in your creation. Since that’s generally the point, devising an elevator pitch to describe your world shouldn’t be an afterthought. It’s really an integral part of the process that can strengthen and guide the whole effort.

But ask yourself, what does the 21st Century offer to rival the seven wonders of the ancient world?

The American Society of Civil Engineers has a list of modern engineering wonders and, make no mistake, it’s impressive. Yet I can’t escape the nagging feeling that our steel mills, steam-driven excavators, tower cranes, and computer-aided structural analysis constitute cheating on some level.

The question is not whether we could re-master the 3rd Century B.C. technology that built the Colossus of Rhodes the first time around. I’m sure we could. The question is whether we’d have the stomach for it. Could we muster the political and economic fortitude to spend 40 years piling behemoth stones with our backs and our hands until they made a pyramid that would last 5,000 years?

To my mind, at least, the ancient world’s monuments of bronze and stone have a magnificence that can’t be matched by modern constructions of steel and concrete, no matter how high we pile them up. Maybe that’s because a part of me can still imagine gazing at the Temple of Artemis or the Statue of Zeus, with little knowledge of machines beyond the lever and the ramp, and wondering with amazement, “How did they do it?”

We humans are the only creatures on this planet with the drive to build monuments, and that drive seems to be universal among us. Some element in our nature pushes us to make things that are taller, wider, more permanent, and more beautiful than anything has ever been before. Is it because we just can’t get enough of those opposable thumbs? To impress the hairy monkeys with our big brains? To reassure ourselves that we are masters of the universe? Or do we build monuments because we are the only creatures who foresee our own deaths?

One thing is certain. If elves, dwarves, halflings, dragonborn, giants, Klingons, droyne, and badders share that spark of essential humanness, then they, too, will build monuments. With the aid of magic, mutations, and antigravity tech, their marvels might well put ours to shame.

What’s vital in your fictional universe is that the sense of wonder isn’t made humdrum by magic and technology. If the Burj Khalifa seems less impressive to you than the Lighthouse of Alexandria, then you know what I’m talking about.

Monuments inspire awe because of what they convey about the human spirit. They measure the limit of what humans can achieve. If magic or technology reduces the question of what’s possible to a question of return-on-investment, then the impossible task becomes finding a way to stir feelings of true wonder in readers and players.

A world without secrets is a world that doesn’t need adventurers. It might need heroes to save it from some catastrophe or looming evil, but it doesn’t need explorers willing to strike out into the darkness with no guarantee that they’ll make it back home to the light or investigators driven to peel back layers of concealment and deceit from ancient horrors or modern crimes.

Let’s look briefly at three types of secrets that can be buried in a campaign: geographical, historical, and magical.

Geographical mysteries are the most straightforward. Most of them can be expressed with questions as simple as “what’s on the other side of those hills?” A points-of-light setting—which is often just another way of presenting a post-apocalyptic setting—has a big advantage in this regard, because the whole world is a blank sheet. At the beginning of the campaign, neither the players nor the characters may have any reliable information about the world more than a mile from their doorsteps. Just learning what’s out there will play a large role in this type of campaign. Filling in the blank spaces on the map is an end in itself.

There aren’t many places on the surface of our planet Earth where people haven’t gone, but there are plenty that have been visited only a few times because they are so difficult to reach. If you can get there only by walking—or worse, only by walking behind someone who is cutting a path with a machete—then the odds are high that few people have gone there. The deep jungles and rainforests of South America and New Guinea almost certainly still hide a few tribal societies that have never had contact with the larger world.

If you’re likely to die in a place without special gear, that’s another big discouragement.

But the best geographical mysteries are those with a larger-than-life aspect. It’s tough to go wrong with classics like Atlantis, El Dorado, inaccessible tropical valleys stalked by dinosaurs, chasms that could comfortably house the Grand Canyon, and steaming entrances to the underworld.

Historical mysteries are secrets from the past that have been forgotten or concealed until they disappeared from living memory. The only record now lies hidden in misplaced tomes of lore or a city in ruins. The answer exists; the ancients knew it, but we’ve forgotten. These types of secrets are especially prevalent in post-apocalyptic settings, where so much of the past was out-and-out destroyed. Whether you need to uncover the identity of the true heir to the throne, the key to deciphering Rongorongo, the purpose of the thousands of stone men that line the crests of the hills, or the reason why the next valley glows blue in the moonlight, someone in the past must have left a clue somewhere.

Magical mysteries aren’t simply questions like “how does magic work,” although that question could drive a lot of adventure in an RPG. The secrets of the gods are magical mysteries. So are the existence, function, and location of magical artifacts like the Fountain of Youth or crystal skulls, the Nazca Lines, or the alignment of the pyramids. Yes, we think we’ve cracked those enigmas now, but we were awfully puzzled for a long time.

When thinking about setting design for an RPG, you can forget the rule concerning Chekhov’s gun. The more mysteries you hang above the mantle in Act 1, the better, even if most of them are still uninvestigated in Act 3. Such riddles are adventure bait of the highest order. You can’t offer too much.

When designing a fictional world, you’re actually aiming for the opposite reaction: “It’s a terrible place to visit, but I’d love to live there.”

Your world is a terrible place to visit because it’s falling apart at the seams. It might be threatened with conquest by a godlike necromancer and his undead legions; it could be undergoing some sort of magical catastrophe; it might be in the final throes of social collapse, overrun by zombies, engulfed in war, split into dozens of squabbling city-states ruled by iron-fisted, would-be emperors, or at the beginning stages of rebuilding from the ashes in the wake of any of the above.

The lone fact that your setting is ripe with possibilities for adventure is enough to mark it as a place where life can be difficult and dangerous. As real-life Indiana Jones prototype Lawrence Griswold wrote in Tombs, Travel, and Trouble, “Adventures, in retrospect, are pieces of extremely bad luck that missed a fatal ending.” Thanks to tabletop RPGs, we can enjoy 80% of the excitement with 0% of the danger.

Any good setting evokes a desire to visit. What child didn’t want to spend a few hours in Candyland, Neverland, or the land of the Wild Things? What grownup hasn’t daydreamed about drifting down the Mississippi River on a raft, knocking on the door of 221B Baker Street, or sipping a mint julep at Tara?

A truly compelling setting, whether for an RPG or a novel, goes beyond idle escapism. Readers and players don’t want to just visit; they want to live there. You don’t need to be unbalanced, misanthropic, or even unhappy with your life to suspect that maybe you really belong somewhere else. No one learns to speak Klingon or Sindarin on a whim. Is there a gene that’s common to enthusiastic fans of Middle Earth, Earthsea, Midgard, and the Forgotten Realms? It wouldn’t surprise me.

This idea is as old as fantasy fiction and make-believe worlds. It found one of its purest expressions in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, in which the hero, John Carter, is mysteriously transported to Mars without his knowledge and against his will. Eventually he comes to love the Red Planet and its people, and to understand that Barsoom is where he belongs. When he suddenly and inexplicably finds himself back on Earth, Carter is nearly destroyed, and he devotes his life to finding a way to return to the strange planet and the woman he loves.

Burroughs set the bar high, but as a builder of fictional worlds, his mark is your ideal. Readers and players should feel at least a bit, like John Carter, that their real home is that other world. When the book is closed and the dice are bagged up, there should be a twinge of yearning to get back to that place that feels more like home than home.

Is that a surprise? Take a moment to think about it.

The most obvious footprint of the apocalypse is the ruins it left behind. When was the last time you saw an RPG campaign map that didn’t have a symbol for ruins in its key?

Somewhere in the Gazetteer there will be a discussion of the empires that rose and fell in the centuries leading up to the current era. The causes for their downfalls always involve megawar, anger of the gods, or techno/magical calamity on an unimaginable scale—assuming the place wasn’t just overrun by zombies.

The fact is, an apocalypse has much to offer a world of adventure.

It’s the ultimate adolescent fantasy. Every bored kid in high school daydreams about surviving the Big One and taking command of a world without grownups, homework, and rules. It’s part escapism, part wish fulfillment, and part revenge fantasy—the bullies, popular kids, and coaches all were smashed into jelly by the rain of meteors or eaten by dinosaurs (it’s my apocalypse, so I can have dinosaurs). Most RPG players get started as adolescents, so it’s only natural that those teenage fantasies loom large in our tabletop fantasies. A world in collapse is a smorgasbord of freedom and opportunity where bold adventurers can take what they want and live according to their own rules.

There’s a precedent. We already live in a post-apocalyptic world. During those history classes when you were drawing dungeon maps instead of paying attention, the teacher spoke for hours about the rise and fall of societies, civilizations, and dominions. The Dark Ages, the default model for most D&D settings, are what was left after the destruction of one of the longest-lasting, most accomplished, most powerful empires ever to decline and fall. For centuries, peasants dragged their turnips to market over Rome’s decaying roads, decorated their crude castles with its magnificent sculpture, and filled their cracked water jugs from its colossal, crumbling aqueducts. No sooner did Europe claw its way up to the High Middle Ages than its very own horseman of the apocalypse, Pestilence, gruesomely slaughtered half the continent’s population in a generation. A century and a half later, Europeans brought their unique brand of apocalypse to the New World when they toppled empires with the sword, the cross, and the microbe.

Dungeons! Extensive yet mysteriously abandoned subterranean building complexes don’t play starring roles in every campaign, but where they do, they scream “apocalypse!” Why would anyone construct something like that? For the same reason 20th Century Americans dug fallout shelters beneath their gardens and hollowed out Cheyenne Mountain—to survive Armageddon. We give tours of the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker now, but if we turned our backs on it for a few years, I have no doubt that it would be crawling with kobolds and umber hulks before anyone knew what was happening.

Downfall is the prelude to redemption. All stories with happy endings achieve some sort of renewal or rebirth. Killing the monster, vanquishing evil, and completing the quest are not enough. If the hero or heroine doesn’t return safely home to be reunited with the one person they love and continue turning the wheel of life, their ending will be bittersweet at best. Our roleplaying heroes seldom experience the type of personal growth and realization of characters in novels or films, but as players we still crave it as part of the happy ending of the successful hero. We have been conditioned to it by a thousand-year tradition of storytelling that relies on that standard form.

If the characters aren’t likely to complete that cycle of renewal in themselves, the world might. An engaging RPG world is like another character in the campaign. Players can get the same satisfaction from its rebirth as they might from any protagonist’s. The world doesn’t need to be rescued from imminent, universe-ending peril to be saved in the end. Halting its slow slide toward chaos and putting it back on the long road toward renewed civilization can be just as satisfying.

When beginning to sketch out a new world, the first question I ask is not about cultures, races, geography, politics, science, or gods. All of those come later. Question #1 is, “What happens here?”

If your imaginary world will be the setting for a novel or short fiction, then the story is clearly the motivator for most world design decisions. If you’re building a world as background for a roleplaying game, however, then the world probably won’t be oriented around a single defining event or plot. Instead, you must ask what characters will do in that setting. What types of escapades will heroes be drawn into? Will their top concern be staying alive in a world of horror, becoming rich through guile and martial skill, exploring the unknown, reclaiming the wilderness, overthrowing a tyrant, staving off evil, or saving the world itself from destruction? What type of game/story will this world facilitate?

So ask yourself, what will adventurers do in this world of yours? Once you have an answer, you can tailor elements of the setting to fuel those types of adventures. For example:

Characters will explore dungeons, kill monsters, and take their stuff. You’ll need to seed the world with dungeons. Then put some thought into why all those dungeons exist and sprinkle the world with legends and clues that can lead characters to these lost and lonely subterranean mazes. Forget about complex trade connections, dynastic trees, and religious strife. They can come later, if at all.

Characters will walk from place to place, meet people, get into adventures. You should begin by watching as many episodes of Kung Fu as possible, if you don’t already have them all committed to memory. Then approach your setting in terms of sets and episodes. An episodic campaign doesn’t demand a high degree of continuity from place to place, but it does need plenty of small locales where interesting problems can arise.

Characters will carve their own strongholds from the wilderness and push back the limits of darkness in the world. This begs for a points-of-light setup. Since characters will begin at just one point of light, you can focus your effort there and leave everything beyond the confines of the heroes’ small world literally unexplored by them or you until a need for it arises. The world can evolve as it’s revealed.

Characters will be central figures in a world-shaking calamity that threatens all existence. You set yourself a challenge when you adopt this structure. Such a story is most effective when players care about the world. Otherwise, they’ll either go through the well-rehearsed motions of saving it pro forma because that’s what’s expected of them, or their attention will wander to other, more attractive stories like killing monsters or walking the earth. For the world-saving epic to work, the world needs to be extensive, the players need to have seen a lot of it, and they need to care what happens to it. You need to know your players, design an extensive world that catches their hearts, and be ready and willing to manipulate their emotions by threatening what they care about.

The purpose of clearly answering the question “what happens here?” is that it helps to eliminate awkward find-the-fun moments when players are between adventures and don’t know where to turn for the next one. When all else fails, a well-themed world itself can provide the signpost.