There are certain things I feel we’ve glazed over in the MAGIQverse. We all took the Guide, we got a snippet of an idea of what the guilds were from the resulting descriptions. For many, these descriptions resonated powerfully. Six guilds, all unique.
But…why do they exist? Where did the guilds come from? How did the affinities become a thing? I know that might sound silly. But I have to wonder, how did the houses grow to be distinct? Why were these delineations created?
I don’t have a full answer, but I can share what we know and we can all put our tin foil hats on for a bit.
Most of it comes from the Guide descriptions, but also this thread. Specifically, this image:
I’ve emphasized the important part.The Houses were at one time royalty, and the delineation of royal titles were based on the 7 tenets of the Faith. But here’s the question - this image references the Collector. We know from Mr. Wideawake that the Collector is a term used by Monarch’s Mountain. However, based on what we learned from Sullivan Green we also know that Monarch’s Mountain didn’t create the guilds - they simply found written histories of them. So…are the houses truly borne from royalty, or is there more to this story?
I would love to hear your theories on this. How did the guilds come to be? And what do you think makes them call to people so strongly?
Also, I’d love to hear your theories on what kind of people ruled the original houses. Who were the first rulers of the houses? What were they like? There’s no way for us to know for sure, of course, but it’s fun to imagine.
I am not done with the book yet, but this also makes me question if the locations of the guilds established their distinctive affinities? I mean, all these Mountaineers are on the same quest of searching for the lost “Book of Briars.” I might be wrong, but what if each of the old guild rulers wrote their own cryptic contents (some kind of secret magiq), and that was how the “Book of Briars” came to being, the composition of all the guilds’ secret magiq? Correct me if I am wrong, but was there another guild according to the picture of the “Royal Houses”? What’s up with the “House of the Unnamed” not being part of the current 6 guilds? Was it a bad guild that tried to go after the “Book of Briars” and that was why it was erased from history? I’m sorry for not answering your question clearly, but your points just create more questions for myself as well
I’m sure there’s a grain of truth to the whole nobility thing. For most of human history the bulk of the population was focused 24/7 on pure survival. People with the free time, resources and connections could spend their time studying magiq, but not most people. So those with the time to be intellectually curious probably made the greatest strides in it’s study.
Maybe not all were noble houses.
I could see Thornmouth being more of a higher education thing, a group of learned scholars who secreted gathered to study the most rare tomes and trade the most esoteric knowledge.
Ebenwatch could have been the remnants and descendants of old Knight orders. Crusaders or other champions with lots of wealth and lots of interesting artifacts to study and pass down from the corners of the globe.
Gossmere might have been nobility but if so they were likely the most philanthropic kind.
I’m sure Adepts were born to all classes, but some Adepts could parlay their abilities to noble status, and others were just sought out by the rich to teach them their ways or at least try to get some favors from them.
See… Gossmere and nobility just don’t meld in my mind for some reasons. It leaves so many questions as to why we are the guild we are today, while so many other guilds can seemingly easily trace a line of traditions back to their houses.
I think it is to Gossmeres great credit that they have no obvious lineage. Every culture anywhere needs its healers and its spiritual centers. It matters not their country, class or creed they all have the same core needs.
What better way to represent the common drum then to be a part of every lineage? You are the people who don’t let your labels define who you are and who you help. Thats what makes you the ones we can all turn to.
I can try to clear up a little bit of information for you, though it may be more confusing until you finish both books.
Books in the MAGIQverse refer to time periods rather than literal books. The Book of Briars is the modern age, but there have been books before. So the Book of Briars being pursued is a relatively new thing, if that makes sense?
The Mountaineers are a specific group of people that seem to have come out of the Book of Kings. Originally it was thought that the Mountaineers began in the mid-90s, but it’s not clear that is the case. Based on some things we learned from Augernon, it’s probable that Mountaineers existed in the 1940s as well, and maybe some others before that.
We don’t know anything about the seventh guild, only that it was lost to time. It popped up during the second assessment, but that’s all we really know beyond this picture. I used to have a conspiracy theory that the Silver were the seventh guild, but I don’t know if that’s the case since the guilds actually predate both the paths of wool and silver. It does bring up serious questions as to why they were lost, and not the other six guilds! Was that intentional?
I wonder if the setup of Mer Gost was less like the Western kings and queens, and maybe more tribal? There may have been a wise-person who wasn’t necessarily a ruler but more of a guide?
Actually, I’m somewhat more confused by this, now that I think of it. When I first read it, my assumption was that each of the houses worked like a mini-kingdom. So like, you had a monarch, some noble titles like dukes/barons/etc, and then everyone else in the house would be the common people. But it honestly sounds like the Royal Houses were just that, only royalty? But what does that mean for everyone else? And there surely must have been an ‘everyone else’ or else there would have been no power in the titles. If everyone’s royalty, then no one is, you know?
I have to admit - and I will say part of this is me being a 21st century person - I don’t like the exclusivity. Does it bother anyone else to think that the guilds might’ve started as an exclusive club? They’re so open now. It’s weird to think of them so differently.
That’s actually my train of thought as well, Rev. It would explain why our guild hall are the nomadic grounds of our guild, rather than a big palace or expansive workshop. I also like your thoughts, Robert, and appreciate the compliment to Gossmere. While I think we certainly have/had our own traditions it seems they were certainly among the most… disperate, and like the common drum, they are unique to the individual.
But like you said, Rev, we have come a long way now. The doors are open, and people are flooding in. I like to think that while we have a bit of our old houses in us, we are the best parts of them.
@Revenir Thank you for clarifying that the Book of Briars is a time period and not a literal book . Now I can keep this in mind while finishing up the book. Yeah, the seventh guild is a complete mystery right now, and I am waiting for someone to come up with a theory about it disappearing.
In my mind, the Royal Houses were what the Wool tried to build from the remnants of what they found in the ruins of Neithernor, post Anne of Brittany’s death.
I imagine it was like trying to rebuild the workings of a middle-kingdom Egyptian dynasty from etchings on a wall. Or maybe they knew the didn’t have it right and they were building their own concepts on top of what they found.
I wonder if The Book of Briars came to them at some point or not. I wonder if they were all lost in the War for Neithernor. Maybe that’s why we know so little.
And if I’m right, which I might totally NOT be, then the Silver may have been the unofficial 7th house. Remember, a deal was made to allow them to take up residence in Neithernor. The other houses may have given them the title of Unnamed or the “Unwritten” house, because there was literally nothing written about them in the old ruins.
I was gonna say, I don’t think it’s impossible for the House of the Unnamed to be the Silver, especially considering they’re the only other large, persisting group of known magiq users we’re aware of.
I’m more interested in the original circumstances of the Guide to MAGIQ, and especially way the Guilds sort of self-perpetuate wherever they’re found? I think I said this in a thread a long time ago, but when AGP originally published the Guide, who were they writing it for? How was the assessment administered, and what happened after you finished it? In some ways, more than anything else we’ve found, the Guide feels like a relic from another world.
And yet, at least the many of us now on the Forum feel like we need to do something with that result; be with others in our Guild and do things. Same with the Order’s Houses - they stumbled onto the ruins of these societies and, instead of just preserving and studying them, attempted to recreate them, even with so little information about the original Guilds available. And the fact that each Guild has a corresponding magimystic element makes me wonder if the Guilds aren’t based on natural distinctions in Magiq that are continually drawn and redrawn in every new iteration of magimystics? Like, even without the Guide, given time and information about the elements, would we ultimately suss out schools like the Guilds anyway?
This has been pre-caffeine Friday thoughts with Viv.
Knowing who they are and what they’ve become, for some reason this statement gives me serious chills.
Drawing on this idea that the guilds are essential derivations of the natural elements of magiq, maybe that casts the House Unnamed as a cautionary tale about what happens to magimystics who buck the harmony of the order of the elements/guilds.
Possibly, although their being “unwritten” just means we don’t know details of what they did. Were they really operating outside an elemental structure? Or maybe they didn’t collectively preserve the harmony of the elements, by cutting out some and keeping others? Or perverting them to do creepy, evil things? Who knows, maybe the Silver had, like, corrupted Dark Guilds…
I think that’s one of the important things about what we have here on the Forums, though. The Monarchs/Monarch’s Mountain/Wool folks have consistently been an inexclusive and archaic. The same could be said of their versions of the guilds, as much as that’s something that we might not want to admit. That’s because the Monarchs haven’t made the effort to be more adaptive and inclusive, and the guilds they created from the houses aren’t much better.
But that doesn’t mean our own interpretations aren’t valid. What @Saberlane said is a really important point: what they made was based on what they found when they went to Neithernor. Our own interpretations based on the guide and what we’ve been able to find are just as valid in that sense. I think that’s important to keep in mind as we’re having this conversation . The guilds may have come from undesirable backgrounds, but we’ve made them into our own inclusive family .
So I’m just trying to piece together what I’ve read so far, but what idea to we have that suggests the 7th guild didn’t have an element associated with it? It might do us well to reverse engineer the process; if we assume the guild is associated with an element, we can figure out what the seventh element is first, and from there learn more about the guild.
But also I might be completely wrong, because this is a lot to take in over the short period of time I’ve been with all of you.
I rather like this notion, and I think it spirals together nicely with what @Remus said about our current interpretations being just as valid. The elemental base is always there, but the cohort that is drawn around it and how the individuals decide to structure themselves could take all manner of forms. Given that the Wool folks who found Neithernor were likely nobles themselves in this world, it makes some sense that they would set themselves up as royalty in this new world.
I also wonder if there was actually a seventh guild mentioned in the ruins, and if so what was the nature of the history found? If the existence of a seventh guild was referenced in the ruins without a name or any information, then calling it “the Unnamed” makes perfect sense, as would using it for other purposes even without knowing the element it represents.
If a seventh guild was mentioned in the ruins specifically as “the Unnamed”, well that has an ominous feel to it all of its own.
This is blowing my mind. I never even considered the gap from the original houses to the Wool discovery being so large! I always thought it would have been a smaller gap - maybe more like the fall of Rome or the start of, like, the feudal system. I can’t even imagine what magiq would look like in the interim.
That makes more sense though. In some ways, the Monarchs made what they knew, with regards to the royalty system. But that still makes me wonder - how did they decide who was royalty and who was not? How did they make up this society? Was it based on mundane titles?
Also I really want to know what’s left? We know that the Monarchs still exist in some form, so what kind of documentation do they have on their history? Now I really wanna know what @Endri found during her time sorting their archives.
And if the Silver were basically made to be a new “house” by the Monarchs, perhaps that’s in part why magiq is in such peril? They changed the natural flow of the six elements by trying to manufacture another, and it caused the balance to be disturbed.
Here’s a concept: maybe the seventh guild is just where the people who don’t mesh with any of the other guilds went? I’m sure there are adepts out there and possibly even people amongst us now who don’t feel quite sure of their guild identity. It’s true that the seventh guild might be the Silvers (and it’s an intriguing and worrying thought!) But isn’t it also possible that they’re unnamed because… They’re just not linked to any particular circle? Just a house of people who are unsure or don’t belong, finding solace in each other. That feels like a warmer concept (and also explains why not much would be written about them?)
I don’t know, just a thought!
This was my initial thinking, when I’d assumed that the Houses predated the paths of Wool and Silver.
It’s one of those things we don’t know. The easiest way would be to, well, ask the Silver. But they’re unfortunately on that whole “destroy the Mountaineers” bent. Well, and I suppose their whole ethos is about hoarding magiq for themselves and destroying anyone who tries to gain magimystical knowledge. Sadly, that makes things quite difficult for us.
The only way we’d ever learn about the Silver and if they are the unnamed would be if someone switched sides and spilled the beans. The closest we got to that was Teddy Fallon, but even then, he was not an actual Silver agent. He was more of a tool. Like, if the Silver was a fast food empire, he’d be the franchise owner, if that makes sense.
This is an interesting question. Historically, what has been done with guildless people? Is there a name for them, a sort of role? I actually previously called myself Unnamed for a hot second because I had the same thoughts as you. I actually think it would be a cool concept to explore.
It does bring up serious questions as to why they were lost, and not the other six guilds! Was that intentional?
. Now I can keep this in mind while finishing up the book. Yeah, the seventh guild is a complete mystery right now, and I am waiting for someone to come up with a theory about it disappearing. 
. The guilds may have come from undesirable backgrounds, but we’ve made them into our own inclusive family 
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