Lia Tsashu’s Guilds and Guild Politics

Now that we know what kinds and how many of each type of business Lia Tsashu has, we can work out how many guilds there are and how powerful each of them is, how they relate to each other, and what part they play in Tsashu politics.

Lia Tsashu’s town council—it’s main governing body—is split between merchant guilds and craft guilds. Every trade in town has it’s own guild, but not all of them are large enough to play an important part in the town’s politics. The town council needs to be big enough to allow interesting conflicts between its member, but not so big it’s unwieldy for the GM.

The Guilds

Based on sheer numbers, Tsashu’s most influential guilds are:

Merchant Guilds:

• Dockworkers (including boat handlers)
• Millers
• fishmongers
• Livestock dealers
• spice merchants
• “Hospitality” workers (inn-keepers, pub and restaurant owners, hostlers)

I put millers here, rather in the craft guilds. While millers do, indeed, produce flour, they act more like selling agents for the grain farmers.

Craft Guilds:

• tailors/clothiers
• Barbers
• leather-workers
• jewelers
• shoemakers
• Masons (for simplicity, lets include all building trade workers here, including roofers, framers, etc.)

Additionally, a couple of businesses would have more clout than their numbers would suggest:

Others:

• Banks/moneychangers (after all, money talks. Especially in Kukuri)
• Fix-its (because of their magical abilities, minor as they might be)
• Magic-shop owner (because he’s a sorcerer of PC-level ability)
• Priests/shamans (because of their influence on the townspeople).

• Farmers (who don’t actually have a guild, but do send a representative to the Council)

That gives us 17 council members, not including the mayor and the two magistrates (the “mayors” of Bigtun and Littletun).

Politics

Now that we’ve figured out who comprises the council, we can figure out its politics. Here’s where we can start to bring in the theme I’ve chosen for this city (stagnation vs. growth.) to flesh out the bare structure and give the council some life.

Basically, the town council is split into two factions: the craft guilds and the merchants guilds. We can postulate that the mayor and magistrates’ sympathies lie with whichever guild they belong to. Or they can form a third, neutral faction. The merchant guilds would have much to gain from increasing the town’s size and increasing the mining operations. While the craft guilds would also benefit from more people (who equal more customers), they’re the older guilds in town and, therefore, are more conservative and would prefer things to remain “status quo”. They oppose the mining operation and the Seafarers’ control on the basis that both bring an increased number of “undesirables” to the town.

The merchants are a newer influence on the town. Lia Tsashu hasn’t been a mining and trade town for very long—it was primarily a farming town until the Seafarers’ Guild took it over. Now it’s becoming a stop on the Seafarers’ trade route, as well as supplying ore for the Seafarers’ tool-makers. This has caused a rapid growth in the city over the course of the last five years, to the tune of 30%, which raised Tsashu from a population of 2800 to 4000 in a very short period of time. This rapid growth has caused resentment between “old-timers”–those born and raised in Lia Tsashu—and the “newcomers” who’ve recently moved here.

Articles Zemanta thinks may be related

• Tinderbox Station (iflybynight.blogspot.com)
• New Magic Item – Order Signet (seaofstarsrpg.wordpress.com)
• Grandeur In Plain Sight (dungeonmastering.com)
• There is now a Guild Leader’s Handbook (destructoid.com)

Popularity: unranked [?]