Any group can form a free company instantly, a Telegram group with a guild bot, chat, roster, and recruitment. Companies can run caravans, take contracts, and even hold small settlements, but they are the starter tier.
A charter graduates a company into a chartered guild and unlocks the real operating tier: territory control, guild property, settlement building, and full economic privileges. A charter is not an item and is not bought and sold. It comes with the lord subscription, and it is a right you hold rather than an asset you trade. See Membership & Store.
While the game is free, the lord tier is not on sale and charters are handed out by hand, a few at a time. A charter has never come with territory and does not now: it is the right to go and take some. See Membership & Store.
What a charter cannot do is protect what it holds. Nobody can take the charter off you, and everything it operates is fair game: every node, every settlement, every title, and everything standing on them. A lord who loses a war keeps the charter and holds nothing, which is precisely where a new lord begins.
Guilds can swear to one another. A smaller guild takes a charter and becomes a vassal under a lord, and great houses stack charters to seat sub-guilds across many territories.
Holding a place has two separate layers:
The two are independent. You can occupy a town you do not rule, and rule a town you cannot hold.
Occupying ground you do not govern is expensive on both sides of the ledger. The governor's revenue falls the moment the ground is contested and keeps falling for as long as it stays that way, until people begin leaving. The occupier pays a premium on garrison upkeep for holding ground they do not rule, and draws no revenue from it at all.
Territory is contested through sieges and economic pressure; nothing is simply deleted. Guilds also build: bridges, ports, and civic works on the land, up to globally-unique Wonders, apex megaprojects that crown a great city.
A siege runs on supply. A besieging force consumes stores every day it sits, and the defenders consume theirs. Fortifications add days to a defence.
Sacking is destructive. A raid ruins more than it takes, the people who lived there scatter to neighbouring towns as refugees, and the ground stays wrecked for a time.
A domain has a mood, and it moves on what you actually do: what you tax, whether people are fed, whether you defended them when it mattered, and whether there is work.
Anyone sitting in a tavern can read the room. No rank and no spy required. You look, and the room tells you which of these you are standing in:
| The mood | Where it sits | What you can see |
|---|---|---|
| Low | 0 to 25 | nothing. Most domains live here |
| Restless | 25 to 50 | wages asked higher, hiring slower, the unattached drifting out |
| High | 50 to 75 | shifts unfilled, businesses short-handed, the watch stretched thin, petitions stacking up |
| Critical | 75 to 100 | organised refusal. Strikes, closed shutters, a market that will not clear |
| A rising | 100 | it stops being a mood |
Playing: Combat · The Economy · The Sea · Tournaments
Always: Mortmain · Start Here · Reference