A guild in Shadowrealm is an economic entity, not just a chat channel. It has a treasury, buildings that produce for everyone, buffs that apply to every member's own actions, a share of what its members earn on raids, and, if it holds one, a city that pays it directly. The parts that catch people out are all about the difference between a shared pool and a personal reward.
Founding a guild requires Rank 3. A guild holds 20 members by default, and can grow to 30 by hitting membership milestones. Roles carry a full permissions table, so a guild can hand out the ability to invite, to spend the treasury, or to run the Warcamp without handing over everything.
Members donate gold to the treasury, which costs a 2% fee on the way in. The treasury then pays for two quite different things: timed guild-wide buffs, and permanent Warcamp construction. Choosing between them is the main strategic decision a guild's leadership makes.
Timed buffs apply to every member at once, up to 15% depending on the tier purchased, and they are the right call before a coordinated push: a raid night, a boss window, an event. They expire, so buying one during a quiet week is largely wasted gold.
Donations and Warcamp production are not the only way gold reaches the treasury: a guild that holds a city is paid directly out of it, every day, with no member having to donate or claim anything. See "Controlling a city" below.
Warcamp buildings go up to level 20, on a cost curve that multiplies steeply with each level, so the top of the ladder is a long-term guild project rather than somewhere a guild arrives quickly.
The single most misread mechanic: production figures are whole-pool, not per player. A building that reads as producing a given amount per day produces that for the ENTIRE guild, and the closed cycle is then split evenly between the members when it is claimed. What that whole-guild figure is built from, though, is a per-member wage: the camp pays each member roughly 50% of what the equivalent Stronghold building would pay them alone, and the pool is that wage multiplied by the headcount. So recruiting does raise the pool in step, and nobody's share shrinks when someone joins. Read the big number as the guild's payroll, not as a fixed prize being cut into thinner slices.
The Camp Vault's pool cap scales automatically with what the Quartermaster's Depot and Smugglers' Cache actually produce: it holds a number of days of the camp's CURRENT daily output, starting at 2 days at Vault level 1 and growing by 1 day per level after that. There is no separate race to level the Vault ahead of the producers: whatever the camp is producing today, the Vault already holds several days of it. The one thing that still wastes production is simply not claiming: a cycle sitting unclaimed for long enough eventually expires.
Not everything in the camp pools, either. The Drill Yard produces nothing to claim: it is a permanent guild-wide percentage bonus to the XP every member earns from their own actions, which makes it the one building whose value scales with how ACTIVE the guild is rather than how large. The Warbanner is the other non-producer: it adds 3% per level to what the Depot, the Cache, AND the Drill Yard all make, reaching 60% at maximum, and because the Vault cap is measured in days of current output, raising it raises the cap too.
One cost worth planning for: not every building is paid for in gold. The Smugglers' Cache and the Warbanner are built from the guild's GEM treasury, on their own gentler cost curve, so a guild that only ever donates gold will find two of its five buildings stuck at level 1.
Guild raids split their gold: 30% goes to the guild treasury and the remainder to the player who ran it. Rounding on that split always favours the player rather than the treasury. It is worth telling new members this up front, because a raider who does not know about the cut tends to assume the payout is broken.
Every one of the four cities can be controlled by exactly one guild at a time. Holding one pays your guild directly and automatically: the city's daily gold income lands straight in the treasury with nobody having to claim it, and on top of that, 0.25% of every casino bet placed in that city is skimmed into the same treasury as it is wagered, whether the bettor is a guildmate or a stranger. Each city also grants a standing perk to every member of the guild that holds it, applied automatically to their own actions with nothing to activate.
The Shadowmere perk above is the one with a knock-on effect worth planning around: holding it makes every other city cheaper to claim or to fight for, so guilds that intend to expand their territory tend to prioritise taking Shadowmere first.
An unclaimed city can simply be bought: any officer or leader can spend the guild treasury to claim it outright, at the base cost listed above for that city. The purchase is atomic and checked at the moment it happens, so two guilds racing for the same unclaimed city cannot both succeed, and it fails outright, with the treasury left untouched, if the city was claimed by someone else a moment earlier or if the treasury does not hold enough gold.
The figure quoted above is the baseline: like every other gold cost in the game, it is scaled up by the same server-wide inflation multiplier described on the Crafting Materials page, which never drops below 1x, so the live cost can sit above what is listed here. Holding Shadowmere discounts that already-scaled figure by a further 20% before it is charged.
A city already held by another guild cannot simply be bought, it has to be taken by force. Any officer or leader can declare war on such a city from the World Map screen, which starts a siege: a 24-hour preparation window, after which the outcome is decided automatically.
What has to be true to declare war:
Declaring costs a base gold fee identical, city by city, to that city's own claim cost listed above, scaled by the same live inflation multiplier and discounted a further 20% if your guild holds Shadowmere, and it comes out of your guild's treasury, never a member's personal gold. If the target changes hands to a third guild before your siege resolves, it is simply voided and no gold moves either way.
The siege resolves automatically once the prep window ends. The odds are your guild's total power divided by the combined total power of both guilds, using each member's own "Power Level" stat from their profile, summed across the whole roster on each side, so a guild of a few heavily-geared members can outweigh a much larger but weaker one. If both guilds somehow have zero measurable power, it is decided by a fair coin flip instead of an automatic loss for the attacker.
If the attacker wins: control of the city transfers immediately, its income timer resets so the new owner starts earning right away, and 25% of the losing guild's treasury is plundered straight into the winning guild's treasury. Either way, the city is left under 48-hour war protection the moment the siege resolves.
If the defender wins: the city stays exactly where it was, the attacker's spent declaration fee is paid to the defending guild's treasury as a bounty, and the city still gets the same 48-hour war protection, even though nothing changed hands, so successfully defending buys the same breathing room as losing a city would.