What is the story on the Myst-Uru guilds? Are they power hungry? Are they a force for good or evil? Will they be Myst-Uru’s salvation or destroy it? I personally think they will help and are the salvation. But I am also biased. What are others thinking and doing about Myst-Uru guilds?

This is a look at what I find and how I see it. This post will be a series of five posts.

The Guild… Which Guild is that?

Eder Tsogahl in Eder Gira Project - Myst Uru

In the Myst-Uru community there are more groups than just guilds. But, there are more guilds than just the guilds. I the groupings I see are; the community movers and shakers, guild leaders, various fans, various fan organizations, freelancers, bloggers, twitters and of course the guilds. The fans are the only real group. There are the Big Five guilds, which has nothing to do with membership numbers. Big has to do with recognition within the IC storyline. Then there are all the reformed guilds, new guilds, joke guilds and on and on.

The fan site Rel.to lists most of the known Myst- Uru guilds. It is nearly impossible to ever list them all as they change. What it is not listed on Rel.to are the guilds of Uru fans forming in other games. Places like GW, WoW, THERE and Second Life. Some use the same names as existing guilds. These may be affiliated with or independent of the similarly named guilds. With this diverse array of guilds one needs some way to refer to them.

There are the guilds we know of in the game’s history, both IC and OOC, which is the group we probably think of when someone writes ‘guilds’. It is also known by fans that within this group are the historical D’ni guilds of IC storyline and the Reformed Guilds (IC and OOC) of the current day. I think of the combination of these as the Myst Online or MO Guilds in which I include most of the new guilds like Fine Artists.

One of other segments I divide the guilds into is the Trans-Virtual World Guilds or may be Refugee Guilds. These would be the Myst-Uru guilds we find in other virtual world MMO’s, i.e., THERE, SL, GW, etc. Within those there are also distinctions and overlap. For instance the Eder D’Uru Project has a set of guilds and an SL group for them. The Eder Gira Project seems to prefer association with the Reformed Guilds. The GoMa has representatives in SL and a group. Both GoMa and D’Uru have guilds with similar tasks and goals. Also there are new guilds, like scripter’s, that have no direct counterpart in the MO Guilds. So, it is easy to confuse which guild one is talking about.

That brings me to the primary groups of Myst Uru Guilds:

• The D’ni Guilds of History – storyline only guilds
• The Reformed Guilds – IC and OOC guilds fans have joined since Myst Online started
• Refugee Guilds – The Uru fans in other worlds/games forming Uru related guilds.

Do you see this as a workable way to describe the guilds?