Lore24 - Sudilitas: The Capital Guilds

Mar 18: The Capital Guilds are a relatively new alliance that practice an ancient organizing structure of guild control of various tasks. This turns out to be very helpful when it comes to training individual experts in skills and passing down knowledge. But they also integrate themselves into trade relationships, which can be helpful or frightening for the community.

Mar 19: The Capital Guilds are focused on maximizing the efficiency of action, using fiat currency to do this. I admire the efficiency on a small scale, but worry about the aggregation of power to a few based not on diplomacy, military rank, or democratic norms, but on the accumulation of imaginary resources.

Mar 20: Applicants to the Capital Guilds will be measured by various tests of skill, cunning, and phrenology (for those with skulls) and be sorted into their Merchant, Craftsman, or Guard classes. Craftsmen are then further apprenticed into various craft guilds. More common for those of you reading this are the merchant and guard classes who are sent on deals with outside communities. 

Mar 21: On these junkets the Guildmembers will be fulfilling existing arrangements (for which they will have been provided a script, or have an older Guilder as a leader); they are expected to support and complete their mission, and for the guards at the cost of their lives if need be. They will, by my reckoning, we be asked to take extraordinary risks. 

Mar 22: The guilds will rank the materials being delivered or returned with more value that the guards, certainly, and the merchants perhaps. Because the secret I impart to you now is this: you will never move up in the Guilds by fulfilling existing obligations. You must create new markets, new agreements, new deals. You must always be closing.

Mar 23: Most trips involve sending a single wagon or a small caravan to a location and back - all of which must be guarded - but canny Guildsmen will set up what they term triangle trades, and that is a sure route to guild status. And in so doing, like the Peace Brigade, they expand the soft power of Sudilitas, making literal client states. 

Mar 24: Still, most often the new applicants are sorted as guards, who are then traded cheaply (in my opinion) for the work of protecting objects traded for ephemera. And yes, I see the irony of a military man complaining about the creation of cannon fodder. But I can see the difference.