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Old 02-19-2021, 10:05 PM   #11
Shostak
 
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Default Re: Is the Wizards' Guild international

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Originally Posted by JohnPaulB View Post
So the next thing to figure out is how co-operative neighboring or far flung Wizards’ Guilds are. Some suggestions were made here already. Would it be like: "I have $250 in my Dran Wizards Guild account. I'm going to be a week in Kel, maybe I can transfer that to the Kel Wizards Guild? Or maybe the Guilds are affiliates and I can use my Dran Frequent Magic Miles to get some hotel time at their hall?"
It might be a bit like a professor visiting another school's campus. Are they affiliated with an Ivy League or major research university that gives them a fair bit of cachet, or do they work for a community college? They might get a bit of professional courtesy, but that might be accompanied with some backhanded compliments if their guild is of a much lower caliber, or it could be poisoned with jealousy if the other way around.
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Old 03-19-2021, 12:12 AM   #12
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Default Re: Is the Wizards' Guild international

I joined a professional fraternity in college, and I'd sort of assumed the Wizards' Guild had a similar structure to that.

Nominally, it's all unified, and everyone follows the same code of laws. Meetings of regional leaders happen on a regular basis, creating some broad, high-level coordination between chapters. But, in practice, each local chapter is an independent entity, led by elected officials, and if the organization's codes are being violated at the chapter level... well, who's telling?

For example, Guild law might set standard rates for a given service... but a local chapter might decide to exploit their monopoly and charge more. As long as complaints don't get too loud, they'll pretty much get away with it. (Once complaints *do* get loud, regional authorities might act to get their fellows back in line... or not, depending.)

This would, I think, be a fairly stable arrangement. Power being what it is, any competing upstart Guild or other magical society would likely find itself getting stepped on pretty hard. As soon as the local WG chapter saw it as a threat, they would be able to draw on their existing ties to local government and other regional WG chapters, to aid in crushing the competition. And non-Guild-affiliated wizards would likely find themselves relegated to "back alley" status, just like someone practicing medicine (or any other trade) without a license.

So... is the Wizards' Guild international? Yes. Gates and Long-Distance Telepathy make communication and coordination easy. Global? Well, Cidri *is* pretty big...

Also, even where the WG dominates, you might easily have prominent groups of wizards who are non-Guild-affiliated. Perhaps they belong to a religious order, which the WG doesn't see as competition for whatever reason (or, it's a state-sponsored religion and they can't directly oppose it). Or maybe they're part of a military, or a mercenary group powerful enough that the local WG doesn't think they're worth opposing.

TL;DR basically larsdangly's approach
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Old 03-19-2021, 06:58 AM   #13
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Default Re: Is the Wizards' Guild international

I had to assume 80%+ popularity of the Guild in Dran in order to recruit enough to keep running at listed level of economic output.

https://www.hcobb.com/tft/wizards_dran.html

If your guild is less popular than that then either the wizards just don't do as much for the general public as listed or you are using a vastly different magic system. The entire edifice rests on the underpaid labor of the Apprentices. Compare to grad students in the USA.
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Old 03-19-2021, 07:45 AM   #14
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Default Re: Is the Wizards' Guild international

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I had to assume 80%+ popularity of the Guild in Dran in order to recruit enough to keep running at listed level of economic output.

https://www.hcobb.com/tft/wizards_dran.html

If your guild is less popular than that then either the wizards just don't do as much for the general public as listed or you are using a vastly different magic system. The entire edifice rests on the underpaid labor of the Apprentices. Compare to grad students in the USA.
Seems to me that you'll have trouble maintaining a steady state with these numbers. There's a high ratio of apprentice to full-fledged wizard, right? If we keep the number of apprentices constant, you'll have to have eighty deaths or retirements of wizards each year to keep pace with the incoming wizards.

Or else you end up more like the post-grad system than you might realize. Your numbers suggest that the bulk of wizards work for the guild or in public service. Unless the number of positions there grows steadily over time, there aren't enough positions for the average 80 new wizards coming in. It's the same problem we see in Philosophy, for instance, where there are more doctoral candidates than number of retirees and most of them want a job in academia, but it's damned hard to find anything but part-time because the competition is too high.

Consequently, you're going to have a whole lot of adjunct wizards, doing part-time work for meager pay.

Mind you, I don't have a whole economic model for wizardry in Dran. I don't think about it much in my campaign. But if you're going to do this and want it to make sense, you should imagine what happens over time. The number of incoming wizards has to be roughly the same as the number of retiring or dying wizards or things get skewed from your original ideal numbers pretty quickly.
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Old 03-19-2021, 11:04 AM   #15
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Default Re: Is the Wizards' Guild international

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Unless the number of positions there grows steadily over time, there aren't enough positions for the average 80 new wizards coming in.
"And every year twenty 16-year old apprentices graduate after ten years of basic wizard education. An additional two wizards are produced elsewhere in the duchy each year through private or informal education of various kinds." 22, not 80.
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Old 03-19-2021, 02:08 PM   #16
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Default Re: Is the Wizards' Guild international

Ah, yes, I did miss that the apprenticeship is four years, so twenty new apprentices and twenty new wizards each year. Hence, you have to have about twenty wizards ending their careers each year so that the system maintains stasis. That's a more reasonable number I suppose.

A career lasts thirty years on average, you say. You have 666 adult wizards in the population, which isn't too far off from the 660 expected from 22 new wizards for each of the last thirty years.
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Old 03-20-2021, 03:09 PM   #17
Skarg
 
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Default Re: Is the Wizards' Guild international

Despite ITL talking about the Wizard's Guild as if it were world-spanning and the same everywhere, and mentioning a certain number of known continents, etc., that is clearly just a default suggestion for a starting context. As you say, GM's can and do choose whatever they want for their own campaigns.

The TFT campaigns I and my friends have run have featured rather limited general knowledge of the geographical layout and extent of nations, unless/until PCs did actual travel, research, map-acquisition, consulting scholars, etc. And while our campaigns featured scores of maps like the Dran map at the original 12.5 km/hex scale, the scope of play and of campaign world connections was limited to a few continents at most, and much more usually, people were focused on where they were, and neighboring places.

In our campaigns, the Wizards' Guild tended to have as much or more long-distance awareness of affairs in distant countries, than the countries' governments, because of their strategic and business interests, and their intrinsic abilities with magic such as gates and long-distance telepathy. Unlike Henry's (or Legacy Dran's) vision, our Wizards' Guilds tended to mainly use such abilities and knowledge for their own uses and benefits, rather than aspiring to provide bargain-basement mass transportation gate networks for society.

So a Wizards' Guild member or someone who knew them would likely know that their local guild did have (mostly business and practical) relations with the guilds in neighboring countries and some others. But unless they were in the right circles, they probably wouldn't know much about how far-reaching those connections were. And/or they mostly weren't often much farther than another nation (or perhaps three) away.

While in theory our Wizards' Guilds were mostly sort of the same organization, specific chapters and regions tended to mainly be concerned with local affairs, showed regional differences and allegiances and factions, and there were nations and regions where wizards were organized differently (and/or had little or no Wizards' Guild presence).

In many cases, our Wizards' Guilds were divided by nation, or by empire or great kingdom. Aggressive, militant, and insular nations often had Wizards' Guild divisions along national lines, and/or their own types of national wizard organizations. Similar divisions existed along strong religious or cultural lines.

That often wouldn't stop them trading with each other, but they didn't seem to answer to a higher level of Guild authority, or when they did, it was little known and almost never showed itself conspicuously to non-guildmasters.

I would expect that most GMs don't try to think about or involve world-spanning Wizards' Guilds, and so even though some probably do, I'd say that the nature of people having different campaigns that don't know about each other, makes it pretty clear that there is no entirely world-spanning Wizards' Guild authority, or if there is, it isn't even known about by the GMs of many established campaigns. ;-)


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Originally Posted by JohnPaulB View Post
If it is Independent Wizards' Guilds by country, does the king have power over the guild or does the guild's power make it completely independent of rulership influence?
It seems to me this would vary from country to country.

In our campaigns, most kings and governments claimed authority over the guilds (some more than others) but the type of authority was often limited. Usually kings didn't claim to own the guilds, and the guilds would do whatever they could to have some international rights to some level of autonomy. There were usually ongoing negotiations between the Wizards' Guilds and nations both on that point and about what the wizards would do for the state (and on what terms) and vice versa, and of course trade in magic items, potions, services, information, legal rights, looking the other way about various behaviors, etc. (This is one part of why commoners would rarely find magic items or enchanters available for list price, if at all.)


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Originally Posted by JohnPaulB View Post
If it is Independent Wizards' Guild by country, is there an overriding UN type Wizards' Guild agency for ironing out different WG alliances and upsets and promotions?
I don't remember us having that per se. I do remember higher level and foreign WG authorities coming in for such, but not from a dedicated UN agency. It's an interesting idea, though, that I could see existing.


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Originally Posted by JohnPaulB View Post
So, is there a Wizards' Guild for each nation that does its own regulationing of that country's wizards? Let's say Elyntia's Wizards' Guild. Tanander would have had its own (and probably there is still one extant in the area). Ardonirane and Ars Vaskul might have their own, but Ryuvatar would refuse to have one.
In my campaign, each Elyntian Duchy has a Wizard's Guild Senior Chapter for all the other chapters in the Duchy, and there's also an umbrella Southern Elyntian Senior Chapter and an overall Elyntian Grand Chapter. The Tanander Chapters were reorganized (as are the newer nations that rose after Tanander's fall, south of the Huldre Forest). Ardoniraine and Ars Vaskul are totally unknown in my campaign (at least as far as any PC has ever discovered).


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Originally Posted by JohnPaulB View Post
If each nation has its own Grand Chapter, then the norms of that nation would probably dictate Guild customs for that nation. That would mean that National Guild regulated its own members.

Would one national Wizards' Guild negotiate with another Wizards's Guild for mutual exchange?
In our campaigns, it depended on specifics, but generally yes the WG tended to prefer to have enough of an international identity that wizards could migrate relatively freely, as that can often be very helpful to avoid feuds, legal issues, and reputations.


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Originally Posted by JohnPaulB View Post
If Joe Wiz of Ardonirane goes to Elyntia's Kel, would they accept his Ardonirane membership card and can he have his wizard's funds transferred from Ardonirane to Kel easily or would membership not be recognized and red-tape?
Membership probably, as long as they re-agree to the local rules. Members are always wanted (as long as they obey the rules and don't cause too much trouble). I wouldn't expect accounts to be transferable unless the guilds have an agreement about accounts that can translate to actual value.
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