What Is an Affiliation?

An Affiliation represents a character’s membership and standing in an organized body within the game world — a group, faction, order, or institution the character belongs to. It records not merely that a character belongs, but how far up they stand: their rank, role, and title within that body.

Think of an Affiliation as a credential. It states who a character answers to and what standing they hold; it is not, by itself, a list of powers or skills. A priest’s affiliation says they are a rank-3 priest of their church — the invocations they can call on are recorded separately as Mysteries and Mystical Abilities.

Where It Appears

Affiliations appear on the Profile tab of Beings, listed in a table with Rank / Society / Office / Title / Notes columns. A + Add control creates a new one, and a character may hold several affiliations at once.

Why Use an Affiliation?

Use an Affiliation whenever a character’s relationship to an organization matters to play:

To record social standing and connections — who the character answers to, who owes or is owed loyalty, and the doors their membership opens.
To capture rank within a hierarchy — the single most useful thing an Affiliation tracks. A layperson and a senior member of the same body are treated very differently, and the Level field is where that difference lives.
To give institutional standing a single, canonical home, rather than scattering it across other items.

When to Use One

Reach for an Affiliation for any organized body the character belongs to. Common cases:

Religion — membership in a faith, with Level as the rank in its hierarchy. Rank 0 is usually a lay member; rank 1 an initiate, acolyte, or novice; a fully ordained, accepted member (a “priest”) is usually around rank 3, with higher ranks for greater offices.
Arcane school — membership in a school or convocation of magic, with Level as the grade within it, from student through master.
Faction membership — the political, courtly, or interest-group factions a character has thrown in with.
Criminal organizations — thieves’ guilds, smuggling rings, or other outlaw bodies, with Level marking the character’s place in the pecking order.
Guilds, noble houses, and military units — a trade guild, a house the character is sworn to, or a rank in a fighting company.

Recording religious and arcane rank. The Level field is the home for a character’s rank in a religion or grade in an arcane school — it keeps “what the character is within an order” together with the rest of their membership. This standing is a capability credential: a Mystical Ability tied to this affiliation can take the rank into account, so a full priest and a layperson of the same faith can differ in what they can invoke. The affiliation only informs such a derivation — invoking a power is always the player’s deliberate act, never something the system does on its own.

Additional Properties

Along with the Standard Item Properties, the following properties also appear in the Properties tab:

Society: The sub-group, sect, order, or convocation the character belongs to within the larger organization.
Office: The role or function the character fills within the organization, if any — for example a stewardship, a command, or a ministry.
Title: The title of the character’s rank within the organization — the named form of their standing, sometimes influenced by their Office.
Level: The character’s rank within the organization, as a number, with higher numbers indicating greater rank. Rank 0 is usually a lay member; rank 1 an initiate, acolyte, or apprentice; in most organizations a fully trained and accepted member — such as a guild master or an ordained priest — is around rank 3.

Intrinsic Actions

An Affiliation is a credential rather than an activity, so it defines no action of its own. It carries only the standard actions every item has:

Action	Shortcode
Edit	`editDocument`
Delete	`deleteDocument`
Output Description to Chat	`outputDescription`

All three belong to every item and are described on Base Item, which covers what each one does, how it is invoked, and what it produces.

Nothing is rolled against an affiliation. A power that takes the character’s standing into account is invoked from the Mystical Ability that names this affiliation, and it is always the player who invokes it.

Affiliation