Adventurer Guilds in Khorvaire
Organizations serving independent adventurers · Major guilds in Sharn: Clifftop, Deathsgate · Continental: Wayfinder Foundation, Circle of Song
"Sharn is a magnet for those who seek adventure and opportunity. Forgotten treasures are hidden in the ruins below the towers, and expeditions leave for Xen'drik every day. At any moment, dozens of sages, spies, and nobles around the city are searching for capable agents to help with their schemes and investigations."
A bizarre assortment of odds and ends cover the walls of the Drunken Dragon tavern in Upper Dura: the trophies of a hundred expeditions to Xen'drik, the Demon Wastes, and stranger lands. The pub is one of the oldest in Upper Dura, and its owner — Hascal d'Ghallanda, a cheerful middle-aged halfling — presides over one of the widest selections of exotic alcoholic beverages in Sharn. Mror ale and Lhazaar mead, the orcish hrak of the Shadow Marches, fermented honey-milk brewed by the shifters of the Eldeen Reaches — if it's strong and strange, it can be found here. The slow service and poor food are beside the point. The Drunken Dragon has become one of the main places in Sharn to hire adventurers, and if a party has no specific agenda and simply hopes to find work, it could do worse than to have a few drinks and wait to be found by someone with a problem.
This is the world the adventurer guilds inhabit. They occupy an unusual position in Khorvaire's social and legal order — neither mercenary companies (which operate under House Deneith's licensing framework) nor criminal organizations nor arms of any crown. They are something the continent's legal codes have largely declined to define, which is precisely what makes them useful to everyone.
The Legal and Social Position of Adventurers
Khorvaire's law does not define "adventurer" as a category. In most jurisdictions, an armed party operating under contract occupies an ambiguous space between licensed mercenary, private investigator, and freelance problem-solver, depending on the specifics of what they are doing and who is watching.
In practice, guild membership functions as the closest thing to legitimization available. Watch commanders in cities like Sharn maintain contacts in established guilds and use them to source deniable capability for cases they cannot or will not pursue through official channels. The Watch hires adventurers to catch adventurers; it contracts them for bounty work it lacks the manpower or will to pursue internally. Guild membership is the mechanism that makes those relationships legible. An adventurer vouched for by Clifftop or Deathsgate is a known quantity. An unaffiliated party operating in the same district is a problem waiting to happen.
This relationship is not warm. Many Watch commanders view adventurers as uncontrolled violence and unwanted attention. The arrangement is one of mutual utility, not trust. People in power — city councilors, guard commanders — often keep an eye on skilled adventurers, and such people often have jobs they need done, often shady tasks they cannot afford to be openly associated with. A party charged with a crime may be approached by an influential personage before trial and given a choice: perform the requested task and the slate is wiped clean, or refuse and face a trial that the VIP ensures goes poorly.
FROM THE SHARN INQUISITIVE
Watch Commander Lian Halamar, in charge of the large and prestigious Daggerwatch Garrison in Sharn's Dura quarter, has long been suspected of ties to the infamous Boromar Clan. Though these suspicions are often dismissed as simple prejudice in the assumption that any halfling in Sharn must be associated with the crime syndicate, the Voice of Breland, in cooperation with civic-minded members of the Clifftop Adventurers' Guild, have uncovered stunning evidence confirming this connection. The Clifftop guild denies claims that these accusations embody the latest fracas in the long-running tensions between the Daggerwatch Garrison and the city's various groups of heroes for hire.
Guild Membership: Standard Benefits
The two major adventurer guilds in Sharn — Clifftop and Deathsgate — offer comparable material benefits despite their significant differences in character. To join either guild, a character must gain the approval of at least five current members and pay the annual dues: 13 gp for Clifftop, 12 gp for Deathsgate. In exchange:
The guild will store items for members free of charge for short periods, with a fee of 5 gp per item per week for longer storage. Both guilds maintain an adamantine vault and a steel vault for this purpose.
Lodging at the guildhall costs 5 silver per night. The accommodations are modest, but the guildhall provides the same security precautions as an upscale inn.
The guild maintains vetted references for hirelings and inquisitives who have worked with members before. Parties that source help through the guild can be reasonably confident in their reliability.
Guild archives and the collective knowledge of other members provide a meaningful research advantage. Members can gain advantage on any skill check to research a subject in which the guild has expertise or experience.
Most importantly: the guildmaster connects parties with patrons and jobs suited to their capabilities. That brokerage function — not the lodging or the vault — is the central value of guild membership.
The Clifftop Adventurers' Guild
Location: Clifftop district, Upper Dura, Sharn · Dues: 13 gp annually · Guildmaster: Summer Korranor
Founded roughly 150 years ago by a dwarf named Shekkal Korranor — whose descendant now leads it — the Clifftop Adventurers' Guild has built a reputation across Sharn as a source of reliable, principled explorers. Clifftop adventurers are known for their courage and integrity, and Guildmaster Summer Korranor holds members to an explicit code: keep your word, stand by your comrades, uphold the law, and never intentionally endanger innocents with your actions. These are not merely aspirational guidelines. Members who develop reputations for cutting corners, betraying clients, or causing collateral damage find their guild standing difficult to maintain.
Clifftop's home district reflects the guild's character. It has long served as a crossroads for adventurers and soldiers of fortune, and many local businesses cater specifically to the trade. The Dragon's Hoard sells a wide assortment of wondrous items and offers a five percent discount to guild members. House Tharashk maintains an enclave in the district, offering guide services and inquisitive referrals that complement the guild's own networks — and better deals on Xen'drik guides can often be found at the Clifftop Tharashk enclave than at the grand hall in Dragon Towers. Adventurers seeking hired help in Sharn, whether short-term or long-term, should at least begin their search in Clifftop; all standard hireling services are available, and the hirelings in the district are accustomed to working with adventurers. Barristers specializing in adventurers' concerns keep shop in the district, experienced with everything from property disputes and charges of plundering to wrongful death suits.
And then there is the Drunken Dragon — the guild's informal social center and the primary place where parties without a current contract can sit, drink, and wait to be found by someone with work. The two private rooms in back are where the real deals get made.
Clifftop's relationship with the Sharn Watch is formally correct and practically adversarial. The guild falls under the jurisdiction of the Daggerwatch Garrison, commanded by Lian Halamar — a man with documented Boromar Clan ties and open contempt for adventurers. Halamar is happy to catch guild members on the wrong side of the law, and shadier officials like Halamar and Councilor Thurik Davandi have been known to frame adventuring parties as a way of extorting their services. Clifftop members operating in Dura conduct themselves accordingly.
The guild's rivalry with Deathsgate is fierce, decades old, and not always confined to drunken boasting. Guild members traveling on contract have encountered Deathsgate rivals stirring up trouble mid-mission often enough that it is considered a practical hazard rather than a surprise.
The Deathsgate Guild
Location: Deathsgate district, Middle Tavick's Landing, Sharn · Dues: 12 gp annually · Founder: Kassh "Blackaxe" Droranath
People from all walks of life and all corners of Khorvaire can be found in Deathsgate. Former soldiers and war wizards rub shoulders with explorers and aspiring artificers, and conversations in half a dozen languages can be heard at any given moment. Named for its proximity to the City of the Dead and established two centuries ago, the Deathsgate Guild makes no pretense of Clifftop's civic idealism. Founder Kassh Droranath's principle has never changed: he does not care how his members do their jobs, as long as they do not fail. The guild draws heavily from Last War veterans, soldiers who came home to a post-Treaty world with no obvious place in it and found that the skills they had were marketable if channeled correctly. Deathsgaters rarely take work for altruistic reasons — they demand prompt payment and reciprocal arrangements, and they are honest about that.
The Deathsgate district offers an exceptional range of services, but these are rarely the best the city has to offer. Many magic items are available, but the ceiling on prices keeps characters from acquiring exceptionally powerful items. The pawnshops generally offer forty-five percent of value for almost any sort of goods, except those that are obviously stolen, and are more than happy to buy or sell partially used charged items. House Jorasco maintains a large house of healing that does brisk trade with guild members who survive their contracts in variable condition. House Deneith operates a small recruiting enclave from which it drafts many of its Blademark warriors — there is genuine overlap between the Deathsgate membership pool and Deneith's Blademark drafts, and veterans who want steady work sometimes find the guild a useful transitional arrangement. House Sivis has an office of the Speakers Guild including a message station, translation services, and barristers who specialize in the many concerns of adventurers.
Also in the district: Karr'Aashta's Investigations, a small agency whose members can find out anything a client wants to know — for a price. Karr'Aashta has a reputation for taking on cases that the other Tharashk inquisitives won't touch, and he specializes in jobs dealing with the Cogs.
Deathsgate's rivalry with Clifftop is mirrored. The guild's reputation as a home for people who will take any job and do what is necessary attracts members for whom Clifftop's code would be a constraint, and the institutional cultures have calcified around that difference over generations.
The Wayfinder Foundation
Location: Headquarters in Fairhaven, Aundair; guildhalls across Khorvaire and in Stormreach, Xen'drik · Membership: By invitation; experienced and renowned adventurers only · Patron: Lord Bornman ir'Dayne
Where Clifftop and Deathsgate are working guilds — organizations that provide structure and brokerage for active adventurers of varying reputation — the Wayfinder Foundation is something closer to an institution. Founded by the renowned hunter and explorer Lord Bornman ir'Dayne, who now suffers from a wasting curse that prevents him from undertaking expeditions of his own, the Foundation admits only experienced and distinguished members. Dayne has channeled his considerable personal fortune into sponsoring great expeditions, turning his inability to adventure into a patron relationship at continental scale.
The Foundation's reach is unusual for a guild of its kind. Guildhalls across Khorvaire give members infrastructure that the Sharn-based guilds cannot match, and the Stormreach guildhall makes it the preeminent organization for expeditions into Xen'drik. Morgrave University maintains extensive connections with the Foundation and treats a letter of recommendation from a Morgrave professor as useful currency when members are seeking Foundation grants or resources. The relationship works both ways: Morgrave scholars need capable parties to staff expeditions, and Foundation members provide what university researchers cannot source internally.
The Foundation's exclusivity is real and maintained. Membership is by invitation and reputation, not application and dues. For working adventurers, the Wayfinder Foundation represents a kind of arrival — evidence that the broader community of serious explorers has taken notice.
The Circle of Song
Location: Outposts throughout Khorvaire; oldest outpost at the Golden Horn, University District, Upper Menthis, Sharn · Membership: Open to any bard who knows the customs and can find an outpost · Dues: None; donation expected for significant use of resources
The Circle of Song is not strictly an adventurer guild — it is a network of bards, entertainers, and information brokers who have found that shared infrastructure serves all of them. Founded long ago by some of Sharn's finest bards, it has spread through most major cities and many smaller communities across Khorvaire, with outposts typically established inside existing taverns and inns as hidden areas accessible only to members.
Membership has no formal cost. Members are expected to entertain in exchange for food and lodging, and to provide minor assistance to fellow members when called upon — gathering information, causing a distraction, embarrassing a minor noble. The reciprocity is informal but real; anyone who draws on the network regularly without contributing to it will find the outposts less welcoming over time.
Membership provides several concrete benefits: food and lodging at any circle outpost (though you might be expected to entertain the patrons in exchange, and if times are tough the quality might be a step below the inn's usual standard); advantage on ability checks made to perform research or gather information while in a circle outpost, provided you have an opportunity to peruse archives and talk with other members; and the ability to call on fellow members for minor favors. These favors have no monetary cost, but anyone who helps you will expect similar assistance when they need it.
The Circle's most significant asset is information. A bard traveling through Khorvaire who stops at Circle outposts gains access to a distributed network of observers in every city who have been watching, listening, and performing for years. For adventuring parties that include a bard, Circle membership is often more valuable as an intelligence resource than as anything the guild formally offers.
One rule is absolute and enforced: violence and combat within a circle outpost are prohibited, regardless of personal rivalries. Violation means immediate expulsion. The outposts function as neutral ground, and that neutrality is what makes them useful.
Key Relationships
The Sharn Watch. Mutual utility without trust. Watch commanders — particularly those who lack the official mandate or political will to pursue certain cases — maintain contacts in both major guilds and contract work outward. This happens most commonly with bounty work, investigation in lower districts, and operations requiring deniability. Commanders who dislike adventurers, like Lian Halamar, use their authority to make guild operations difficult when they can. Most guild members navigate this relationship carefully, staying aware of which garrison commanders view them as assets and which as nuisances.
House Deneith. A parallel rather than a competitor. House Deneith's Blademarks Guild operates under legal recognition, strict contracts, and the backing of dragonmarked institutional authority. Adventurer guilds operate in a different register: smaller parties, more varied work, lower overhead, less formal documentation. There is overlap — Deathsgate in particular recruits from a similar pool of Last War veterans — but the two systems serve different client needs. Deneith brokers scale; the guilds broker flexibility.
Morgrave University. A source of contracts, grants, and institutional legitimacy. Morgrave's expeditions to Xen'drik and to Dhakaani ruins require capability the university cannot provide internally; adventurer parties, particularly those with Wayfinder Foundation connections, are a natural fit. Morgrave University and the Wayfinder Foundation both send teams to Xen'drik on a regular basis, and Sharn hosts a thriving antiquities market that provides demand for items recovered from the continent by both official and amateur expeditions. The relationship is not always clean — Morgrave's open secret of ties to artifact smugglers and the black market creates ambiguity about whose interests any given contract actually serves.
Criminal Organizations. Deathsgate, by virtue of its "results over methods" ethos, operates closer to the edge of criminal entanglement than Clifftop does. Individual Deathsgate members may have working arrangements with Boromar Clan associates or tolerated relationships with Daask that Clifftop members would not sustain. Guild membership does not formalize those relationships, but it also does not prevent them.
Travel to Xen'drik
Many adventurers come to Sharn solely to get someplace else, using the city as a launching point for expeditions to Xen'drik. The Cliffside ward is a good place to find ship captains experienced in the passage, who have contacts with the sahuagin of Shargon's Teeth and can secure safe passage through those straits. The journey from Sharn to Stormreach is about 1,500 miles. A standard sailing ship makes the trip in a little over a month for about 300 gp. A House Lyrandar sailing ship (without elemental power) can make it in 11 days for about 1,500 gp. An elemental galleon can do it in three or four days for 3,000 gp. Airships do not normally make the trip.
House Tharashk dominates the guide services market for Xen'drik expeditions, using both their dragonmark abilities and their extensive mundane experience. An unmarked Tharashk guide costs 1 gp per day; a dragonmarked guide with the least mark costs 3 gp per day. City guides within Sharn itself run from 1 sp per day for basic directions to 25 sp per day for an armed escort.