CREATING A GUILD

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This guide will focus on significantly larger roleplay situations, the formations of guilds, groups, and orders, as well as the different "genres" of group roleplay. Most will agree that roleplaying in a group of several people is much more fun than roleplaying in a small group of 2-3 people. This is because of the volatility of the roleplay. Since characters create the story, the more characters that exist in one story, the more volatile the situation will be.

Your characters will have opinions about other groups or orders as well. Your character may hate a certain military with a fiery passion, but have a kindly attitude towards a group of pilgrims, who roleplay a religious journey across Overdark. By joining a group, your character will be greatly changed in his or her interaction with the group, and may even be forced to change their opinions as a result! So let's take a look at the formation of roleplaying guilds and groups.

It is important to note that there is a major difference between 'Guilds' and 'Companies'. Roleplaying guilds focus on many roleplays at a time. Trying to increase the depth and standing of their member character in-game, but will perhaps chase one ultimate goal. While companies are formed outside of guild borders, and welcome roleplayers of all guilds to join in on the fun. For this reason, adventuring scenarios will be much more interesting with a 'Company' in most cases, while a 'Guild' is much more suited to military operation, in part due to the uniformity of a tabard, and to the ease of long-distance OOC communication through Guild Chat.

It is generally easier to form companies, as opposed to guilds. On highly-populated roleplaying servers, most players will already be in some sort of guild, but since there is a substantially-less competitive environment in PvE and PvP progression on most Roleplaying servers, it isn't difficult to recruit. Groups can be formed to serve a simple purpose, such as manning or roleplaying a tavern staff, or the much less modest goal of seeking an ancient book of cures for diseases that are plaguing a city, and so on.

In order to go public with your guild and start bringing in and retaining members, you should host a multi-guild based campaign to promote your guild's goals, IC and OOC, as well as advertise in the Guild Recruitment board, which is a given. What you're really looking for is a way to get the other guilds on the forum involved in your guild's activities through engaging multi-guild campaigns/roleplays.

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GUILD TYPES
Keep in mind, members can have multiple characters in the same guild. But there must be at least three separate people who join. In the same way, members can join multiple guilds but their characters can not. A character can only join one guild at a time.

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MILITARY GUILD
(Requires five characters to create)
Military guilds are by far the most common in Overdark. This is due to the fact that the guild structure supports a military-like organization, since it is based on a hierarchical system. Military guilds are often RP-PvP guilds, and focus on hosting World PvP campaigns that are relevant to their storyline and that of their member characters. They are usually the most uniform of guilds, and require a considerable amount of patience to keep in order. Good officers are your friends, here. A military guild without a substantiated member base will fail, so grow fast, and pick good members. Elect officers to help you recruit on off days.

ADVENTURE GUILD
(Requires three characters to create)
While not wholly suited to the structure of the guild, adventure guilds can be quite fun. They require much fewer members. Most adventuring guilds are small. This is a good starter guild, and can be hybridized as a Leveling-RP guild, in order to "Adventure" the wilds of Overdark, and gain in points, respect, forum rank, etc. With more active members, these can become raiding/hybrid-like guild.

PROFESSIONAL GUILD
(Requires four characters to create)
Professional guilds focus on in-game commerce, trade, city government and so on. These guilds are typically made up of trader/merchant characters. Professional guilds require a moderately-sized member base. Because of the large amount of reagents involved in trader RP guilds, they can also be hybridized with leveling or PvE guilds, but rarely have room for PvP involvement. Then again, I suppose you could deal arms/supplies to a guild for PvP, but I suppose it isn't in the nature for merchants to fight.

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I can't tell you how important it is to have a well-structured guild ranking system, with a team of headstrong officers. It is important to pick a wide variety of personalities to compose your team of officers, and I'm talking purely OOC. You want people who can lead, who know how to speak up when there's a problem, and who aren't afraid to boot a character from your guild when they're acting up. These are all qualities you should look for, but go for one person who is a bit more merciful, one person who is more of a lawbringer-absolutist type, who always follows and reinforces the rules, and a few other officers somewhere in-between. This will give your officer meetings a variety of different perspectives, and will help you diversify your guild's ideas. Make sure you host officer meetings OOC and IC often, as this will be important in maintaining your guild's infrastructure, and the integrity of that structure.

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