Need help with guild ranks / titles

[Davrix]

I'm trying to flush out titles / ranks of the parties base of operation. But i cant seem to find a good list anywhere online of old time guild rank / titles other than your typical Master / journeyman ones.

Anyone have a good resource or some suggestions?

Some thoughts I have are

Highlord
Scrollkeeper
...

yea I'm not very good at this I know :)

[Hellpyre]

Just make some up. Most historical guilds didn't really have ranks beyond apprentice/journeyman/master, since the point of them was generally to leverage control over a craft to improve revenues and reputations. If you want something more like an Adventurer's Guild, you'll be looking to fiction anyways.

[Davrix]

Just make some up. Most historical guilds didn't really have ranks beyond apprentice/journeyman/master, since the point of them was generally to leverage control over a craft to improve revenues and reputations. If you want something more like an Adventurer's Guild, you'll be looking to fiction anyways.

Well that's fine but sense I suck at thinking of titles like this I was hoping either for a resource or some examples from people :)

[johnbragg]

Somebody just got in trouble in the news for saying something like "Say what you want about the Ku Klux Klan, but they do have cool titles."

You could mine the wikipedia pages for the Ku Klux Klan, Freemasons, the Privy Council of the United Kingdom and France.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_...rown_of_France
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Officer_of_State
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotti...gree_structure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klu...and_vocabulary

So you could be talking to the guildmaster of the town's Butchers' Guild, the head of the City Watch and a member of the council of the Wizards' Guild. . Or you could be talking to the Archchamberlain of the Kitchens, the Grand Constable and a Hydra of the Arcane Assembly.

[Vitruviansquid]

I'd think about what each rank would be necessary for.

Your guild would probably need "apprentices" and "masters," because you need newbies and someone to be considered certified not-newbies. Are you allowing any of the not-newbies to teach the newbies, or should that require a separate rank? If so, maybe you need another rank. And then you keep going and asking yourself about how you envision the organization until you feel like it's well fleshed out.

But then, things are never as simple and functional as that. Any organization with a long and prestigious history is going to have artifacts preserved from that history. Like let's say the leader of the entire guild once needed a cupbearer - and having a cupbearer used to be a pretty important thing for your prestige, and being a cupbearer was a very prestigious position. But then having a cupbearer fell out of style with the local nobility, and there is nobody who goes around bearing the leader's cup... but for some reason, the term "cupbearer" is still used, just it now merely means a prestigious position of some other nature in the guild that has nothing to do with bearing anyone's cups.

So one of your titles is Highlord. Well, what does being in that position have to do with lording? Does that person have vassals? Did that person used to have vassals in the past and it's a title that's simply being retained? And if there's a highlord, what happened to all the normal lords?

Same with Scrollkeeper. What does or did your adventuring guild have to do with scrolls?

[eru001]

Assorted Titles of Varied Importance (And Levity)

Grand High Poohbah
Head Honcho
Honcho in Chief
Chief Executive Officer
Chief Executed Officer (Professional Scapegoat)
Director of Executives (Cat Herder)
Director of Expletives (One who's competance both far exceeds both his own authority, and those in authority)
Senior Tube Technicion (Has a high degree of certification, training, and senority in a completely usesless or barely existant field)
Fabricator Marshall
Fabricator General
Fabricator Leftenant
Coffee Retrieval Technician (Intern)
Guildhouse Proprietor (Owns the building and /or in charge of the actual guild building related affairs)
Guildhouse Improprietor (Acts like he owns the place)
Chief Examiner of Comestables (Food Taster)
Vicemaster (lower in seniority to a master, above a journeyman)
Vizemeister (same as above but I think it just sounds better in German)
Backup Vice Assistant Reserve Undersecretary (guy who is never called on to do anything and has no authority, but still part of the guild)
Chief Subordinate Officer (The one reliable guy who ends up having to be brought in as support on literally everything)

[Mike Miller]

The elder scrolls games had interesting titles as you increased in ranks of various guilds and houses. I feel like Morrowind has the best titles although I can't recall them off the top of my head.

[Anonymouswizard]

Also remember that the names don't have to make immediate sense. The UK Government has a position (non-elected, in the House of Lords) called Black Rod, who's in charge of the security (okay, not any more) of the Houses of Parliament and get's the door of the House of Commons slammed in his face when the Queen invites her MPs over. Okay, there's a lot more, none of it hinted at by the title.

Oh, the full title's longer, but in practice it's just Black Rod.

Then again, we've also awarded official ranks to cats (Chief Mouser of X), and there was a village that apparently once posthumously elected a cat as it's mayor to apologise for mistaking it for a French spy (although I'm fairly certain that this one is highly exaggerated). If you want your ranks to retain sanity pick somebody else to emulate!