Custom Guilds on Immortal Realm: Halls, Tiers, Maintenance, and Order Affinity

Stock UO guilds are tags on a name. Immortal Realm guilds are real institutions players run — with a claimed hall, a maintenance budget, a vote-driven governance layer, an officer-role system, a perk catalog, and an Order-affinity binding that connects the guild to the shard's institutional Orders. This page covers what's different, how the system actually works, and how to engage.

What's Different from Stock UO Guilds

Stock UO gives you a name, a tag, a roster, alliances, and war declarations. That's most of it.

Immortal Realm adds, all live:

• A claimed hall. You run [guild claimhall inside a player house with a Guildstone to convert that house into your guild's Hall. Halls have tiers (1 → 2 → 3) with rising vault capacity and rising daily upkeep.
• A maintenance budget. Daily tick at 04:00 UTC; missing it puts the guild on a failure ladder that ends in dissolution if not corrected.
• A treasury vault. Real shared gold with vault-cap-by-tier, deposit/withdrawal logging, vote-gated major withdrawals, and an emergency gold→token conversion path.
• A governance layer. Guild votes for major decisions (treasury threshold, perk activation above a cost, Order affinity binding/unbinding, declarations, member removal); officer roles with delegated authority.
• A 13-perk Phase 1 catalog. Storage, cooldown abatement, governance, hall services, logistics — each perk activates from the catalog gump for a token cost.
• A 6-perk High Ledger Phase 2 subtree. Unlocked when the guild binds High Ledger affinity. Adds audit, governance, treasury, and civic-legitimacy perks on top of the Phase 1 catalog.
• Standing. A 0-1000 scalar tied to raid completions, PvP hunts, contract closures, health-state transitions, and similar events.
• Forum integration. Membership and rank surface on the website forum's IdentityBadge.

A guild on Immortal Realm is closer to a small civic institution than a chat group with a name.

The Guild Command

Members open the guild surface with [guild (registered as AccessLevel.Player). The command takes subcommands:

How to Form or Join a Guild

Forming uses the standard UO guildstone mechanic — guildstone placed by the founding guildmaster, name and abbreviation registered on the shard. Joining requires an invitation from a sitting member with invite authority (Leader or Recruiter). Acceptance registers the character on the roster and triggers the forum sync so the IdentityBadge updates.

You can be in only one guild at a time.

Claiming a Hall

A guild can claim a house as its Hall. Mechanics:

1. The guild must own a player house with a Guildstone inside.
2. The Leader (or a Quartermaster authorized via [guild authorizehall) stands inside the house and runs [guild claimhall.
3. On claim, the house is bound to the guild as Hall Tier 1.

Hall tiers determine vault capacity and unlock perk slots. Phase 1 caps at Tier 3.

If the underlying house is demolished, transferred, or has its Guildstone removed, the hall enters a 7-day grace window. A new house can be re-claimed within the window and the guild keeps its tier, vault contents, and active perks. After grace expires unclaimed, hall tier resets to 0 and vault contents return to the leader's bank where possible.

Maintenance and the Failure Ladder

The guild treasury is billed daily at 04:00 UTC. The cost formula:

• Base: 10g/day flat
• Per-member: 1g/day per member above the first 5 (free tier)
• Hall tier: 5g/day per Hall Tier (so a Tier 3 hall pays 15g/day from this row)
• War participation: 20g/day per accepted war
• Security agent retainer: reserved for Phase 3 Velvet Hand contractors; 0g in Phase 1

Miss a tick and the guild slides down the failure ladder:

A 14-day shard-wide grace period pauses the ladder for every guild after the rollout anchor — a new guild gets equal runway to learn the system before the failure clock starts.

When the treasury runs dry, the emergency gold→token conversion path on the Treasury gump lets the guild mint operational tokens at 1,000g per token (intentionally poor — a bounty's natural token income is far cheaper). It's there as a last-resort recovery, not a primary supply.

Officer Roles

Roles are bitwise flags — a single member can hold any combination. Verified live powers:

The Leader has all powers implicitly and is not represented as a role flag.

Voting and Governance

Major guild decisions can pass through a vote rather than guildmaster fiat. The system enforces a MajorWithdrawal vote on any direct treasury withdrawal above the per-guild threshold (default 10,000g, configurable between 1,000g and 100,000,000g via a member-scope TreasuryThreshold vote). A PerkActivation vote is required for any perk whose activation cost exceeds 150 tokens (the only Phase 1 perk currently above that threshold is Vault Tier II at 200 tokens).

Other vote kinds include OrderSpecialization (bind affinity), OrderUnbinding (unbind affinity), declarations (war/alliance), and member-removal flows.

Outcomes are determined by majority within the vote window; abstentions are recorded but don't count toward either side. Voting attendance itself is a measurable contribution.

Treasury and Contributions

The treasury is real shared gold capped by hall tier (100k / 250k / 1M). Members deposit through the Treasury gump. Withdrawals are gated by:

• The Treasurer role flag (or Leader implicit auth)
• The MajorWithdrawal threshold — withdrawals strictly above 10,000g (default) are refused at the gump and pointed at the vote surface

Treasury deposits credit member contribution XP/tokens, but with two bounds to prevent gold-rich members from buying their way to perfect contribution:

• Per-event cap: a single deposit credits at most 200 XP and 50 tokens regardless of gold amount
• 14-day rolling cap: treasury-derived contribution may not exceed 15% of the guild's total XP/tokens earned over the window (above a 100-XP activity floor)

Phase 1 Perk Catalog (13 Perks)

Verified at GuildPerkIds.Phase1Catalog. Activation cost is a token spend per perk; some are vote-gated (Vault Tier II at 200 tokens triggers PerkActivation vote by default).

Hall Service NPCs (Banker, Healer, Repairer, Provisioner) spawn at the Hall when the corresponding perk is active and stop responding when the guild enters Defaulting state.

Order Affinity (Phase 2)

A guild can bind itself to an Order via a Member-scope OrderSpecialization vote. Binding is a heavy commitment:

• Treasury cost: 50,000g + 500 tokens (deducted on bind)
• Sponsor gate: the Leader must hold the Order's sponsor-floor rank
• Vote: passes through a Member-scope vote
• Reversibility: unbind via OrderUnbinding vote costs 25,000g + 250 tokens, then a 14-day rebinding cooldown before any new bind can open

The Phase 2 Slice 2.1 catalog ships High Ledger only as an available affinity. Other Orders are roadmap.

High Ledger affinity (live)

The High Ledger is the civic and administrative Order — registration, filings, audits, public postings, governance. Binding declares the guild a managed institution under High Ledger jurisprudence.

• Sponsor floor: Leader must be a High Ledger member at Arbiter (rank 4) or higher
• Phase 2 perk subtree (6 perks): Audit Archives, Charter Archive, Chancery Clerks, Ledger Accountant, Quorum Call, Seal of Jurisprudence

These plug into existing Phase 1 systems (audit, postings, treasury efficiency, governance smoothing, civic legitimacy) without replacing them.

Chirurgeons (planned)

The Chirurgeons subtree is reserved in the Phase 2 plan but not yet wired. The catalog ID range starting at 200+ is held for future Order specialization perks.

Velvet Hand (counter-pressure, not affinity)

Per design, the Velvet Hand never joins guilds as an affinity. Their role in the guild ecosystem is the opposite — counter-pressure. A Sleeve+ Velvet Hand operative crafts a Guild Raid Deed (verified at GuildRaidDeed.cs) targeting a guild with a seated relic, which structures the raid declaration the Relics system supports. The Phase 1 maintenance config also reserves a SecurityAgentRetainerCost line for future Phase 3 contractor work — guilds may eventually retain Velvet Hand operatives as external security, but never as members.

Standing

A 0-1000 scalar tracking the guild's broader civic reputation. Standing deltas:

Standing displays on the Hall Status gump and is one input to the guild's public reputation profile.

Forum Integration

When a member posts on the website forum, their guild affiliation surfaces via the IdentityBadge alongside the post. The badge updates automatically when the member's guild changes — no manual signature edits.

This means guild reputation extends from in-game into web-side social spaces.

Why Custom Guilds Exist on This Shard

The shard's design instinct: institutions should have public verbs, and guilds are the most player-driven institutions in UO. The custom layer makes guilds:

• Visible — hall in the world, perk NPCs on the floor, forum badges, public roster.
• Strategic — hall tiers, relic seating, raid vulnerability, Order affinity unlocking subtrees.
• Internal — voting, officer roles, vote-gated treasury, contribution tracking, audit log.
• Durable — schema-versioned state, lazy-backfill migrations, 14-day grace and re-claim windows that respect downtime.

A guild that engages with the full system is a different kind of social structure than one that just has a tag.

Where to Read Next

• For the relics + raids layer that builds on hall seating, Immortal Realm Relics.
• For the High Ledger Order whose affinity unlocks the Phase 2 perk subtree, High Ledger Guide.
• For the Velvet Hand whose Raid Deed structures attacks on seated guilds, Velvet Hand.
• For the broader institutional system map, Immortal Realm Custom Systems.
• The download page is the on-ramp when you're ready to play.