The Great Guilds
Your race decides your power. Nothing decides these. The four great guilds cut across every race and every border, they take members from all of them, and a citizen joins or leaves on their own account.
| Guild | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Trade Concord | A pan-faction merchant guild with an office in every capital. It owns the caravan routes and the harbour tariffs. |
| Free Caravan | The nomadic haulage network: cross-border freight and message running. Independence is sacred to them. |
| Shadow Pact | The underworld syndicate. Smuggling, information brokering, and the grey economy nobody admits to using. |
| Wildoria Council | The religious and diplomatic council seated in the capital. A neutral mediator with members drawn from every race. |
Why they matter
A power can only act where it holds ground. These four act everywhere, which makes them the only bodies in the world with a genuinely global reach, and the reason a citizen's standing is not simply a function of where they were born.
Two of them are also the world's quiet counterweights. The Council is what keeps the neutral capital neutral; the Shadow Pact is what exists because somebody always wants what the Council forbids.
Your reputation with a guild is its own number, tracked apart from the power that claims your homeland. Doing well by the Trade Concord does not make your own republic think better of you, and falling out with the Shadow Pact does not show up on any official ledger at all.