An affiliation is a character’s standing with some body of people: a religion or one of its sects, an arcane school or convocation, a craft guild, a criminal syndicate, a knightly order, a household, a war-band. It records not what a character can do but who will vouch for them, and how far.
This is a different thing from a skill, and the two answer different questions. A skill asks whether a character can perform an act; an affiliation asks whether they are entitled to. A physician with no guild standing may set a bone as ably as any master, but they cannot draw on the guild’s teaching, its houses, or its protection when a patient dies under their hands.
What an affiliation records
Four things, of which the last is the one with mechanical weight:
- Society — the body itself: which temple, which guild, which convocation.
- Office — the position held within it, where the character holds one.
- Title — the form of address the office carries, where it carries one.
- Level — the depth of the character’s standing, from nothing upward.
Level is the part that moves. It rises with service, patronage and the slow accumulation of good standing, and it falls with negligence, scandal and transgression.
A character may hold as many affiliations as their life has earned, and they need not sit comfortably together. Standing in two rival houses is a complication worth playing, not an error.
Affiliation as credential
Level is not decorative. An affiliation is a character’s capability credential, and it is where religious rank and arcane grade are recorded — not on a skill. A character’s skill says how well they work a rite or an incantation; their affiliation level says what grade of practitioner they are within the body that taught them.
That distinction has mechanical weight. A Mystery or a Mystical Ability may name the affiliation that credentials it — the temple whose rites a priest is ordained to perform, the convocation whose teaching an arcanist was admitted to — and an ability which names one may consult that level when working out what the character can do with it. Standing can therefore bear on whether a spell may be cast or a rite performed at all, and on how effectively, quite apart from the character’s skill at it.
Level begins at 0, which is ordinarily a lay member: someone of the faith or attached to the school, but holding no grade within it. It rises from there with service and advancement. Because level is a modifier rather than a bare number, effects can adjust it without overwriting what the character has earned — a dispensation raising a priest’s effective grade for a particular working, a censure lowering it while a disgrace stands — and the underlying standing remains legible beneath the adjustment.
What an affiliation never does is act on the character by itself. It informs what a practice is capable of; it does not decide for the player whether to attempt one, and it does not reach into a character to enforce a sanction. A character stripped of standing keeps everything they were taught and loses the right to use it, and what follows from that is played out, not applied.
How far a body presses that right is a matter for the body being described. Some treat their teaching as a trade secret and count its unlicensed use as theft; others care only that the rites are performed correctly, by whoever performs them.
Using affiliations for particular bodies
The same four fields serve very different institutions. What changes between them is what standing buys, and what it costs to lose.
Craft and trade guilds. Level is the apprentice-journeyman-master ladder, and office is where a character sits in the guild’s governance. Standing buys the licence to practise openly, access to guild workshops and materials, the right to take apprentices, and the guild’s weight in a dispute. It rises with accepted work and dues paid, and falls with shoddy work, undercutting, or practising outside one’s grade. Where a guild holds a monopoly, an unaffiliated practitioner is not merely unsupported but unlawful.
Religions and their sects. Level is depth of ordination and standing in the faith; office is the priestly rank. Standing gives the right to perform rites on the congregation’s behalf, access to temple resources, and a claim on the hierarchy’s protection. Record the religion as the affiliation and the character’s relationship with the god through Piety and Grace — the two are related but not the same, and they can diverge sharply. A devout priest may fall foul of their temple’s politics without their god caring in the least, and a heretic cast out by the hierarchy may retain every scrap of divine favour. That gap is worth playing.
Arcane schools and convocations. Level is the grade of admission to the body’s teaching; office is a position within the school. Standing gates what a character may be taught and what texts they may consult, so it tends to govern acquisition rather than use — an expelled arcanist keeps every ability already learned and simply learns nothing further. Convocations are often jealous of their material, and using it without standing may be treated as theft of the work itself.
Criminal syndicates. Level is position in the organisation and office is the role held within it, but standing behaves differently here: it buys protection, fencing, safe houses, information and muscle, and it is paid for in obligation rather than dues. Two things distinguish a syndicate from a guild. Standing is usually secret, so it confers nothing a character is willing to invoke publicly; and it is dangerous to lose — a guild expels, whereas a syndicate is owed something, and collects. A character’s standing may also be worth more to their enemies as leverage than it is to them as an asset.
Orders, households and war-bands. Level is rank and office is command; standing is held together by fealty and service rather than dues or contracts. It buys maintenance, equipment, the right to command others, and a lord’s backing, and it is lost through dishonour or broken oath. Obligation here runs in both directions, and a character can be as much held by their standing as helped by it.
The pattern generalises. When adding a body of your own, decide three things: what standing buys, what raises and lowers it, and what happens to a character who loses it. A body where the answer to the third question is “nothing much” is probably background colour rather than an affiliation.
Where the affiliations are
SoHL ships no affiliations of its own. Religions, schools, convocations, guilds and syndicates are all setting material: they belong to a particular world, its history and its politics, and none of that is assumed here. What is defined here is the mechanism — the way standing is recorded, the way it moves, and the way a mystical practice points at the body that credentials it — and the bodies themselves are left to the setting.
Setting modules supply them, as they supply the skills, creatures and mystical practices particular to their worlds. A campaign that wants guilds and temples should install the module for its setting, or author its own affiliations directly in the world.