Originally published on Armed with a Book
Although my first book is called Guild of Tokens, the eponymous guild spends most of the story off-page. But when it came time to write the sequel, Guild of Magic, in which that organization plays a much more fulsome role, I knew I had my work cut out for me. The broad contours of the Worshipful Company of Alchemists, otherwise known as the Guild, I had in the back of my head while writing book one, but the exact contours, membership, bylaws, and other details, those were just beyond the Hatch, so to speak. Luckily, for whatever reason, popular media loves a good secret magical organization, so I had plenty of examples to draw upon, so much so that I distilled everything down into five easy steps that I used to guide my creation process.
Step 1: Keep the organization a mystery as long as possible
Creating a sense of mystery around your secret magical (potentially evil) organization, or SMPEO for short, is essential to landing the big reveal. Having the organization show up in broad daylight on page two is a no-no that leads to big problems. Fortunately, we see many creators adhering to this rule.
In Kingdom Hearts, when Organization XIII first appears, they’re all hooded and anonymous. In Bleach, we don’t get the whole Gotei 13 turning up in Karakura Town to fight Ichigo the first time, it’s just Renji and Byakuya. The entire premise of Harry Potter is that there’s a magical society hiding amongst us and staying hidden is one of their primary goals. The Adjustment Bureau uses the banality of identically dressed government bureaucrats to operate in plain sight. Ignoring this rule has its consequences, as demonstrated in The Wicked + The Divine, where the members of the Pantheon, the 12 gods reborn again every 90 years, reveal themselves to the entire world as soon as they awaken. This shines unnecessary light and scrutiny on the organization, which immediately backfires by the end of the first issue.
So, applying that to Guild of Tokens, you don’t actually learn that there is a Guild until a third of the way through. And then, it’s only mentioned in passing. And by the end of the book, what you thought you knew about the organization is turned completely on its head. But mystery can only get you so far. Because if there’s nothing else interesting about your SMPEO beyond that, then when the curtain is thrown back, it’s a lackluster reveal and you’ll lose any emotional investment that you’ve gained from your reader. Therefore, we must apply additional steps!
Step 2: Titles are your friend
Titles establish order and hierarchy in your organization. Plus, they provide the perfect opportunity to give everyone a cool nickname. Fullmetal Alchemist had this in spades, with the various State Alchemist titles: the Flame Alchemist, the Strong Arm Alchemist, the Crimson Lotus Alchemist, the Sewing Life … err, you know what? Let’s just leave off that last one. And although the soul reapers in Bleach eschew cool-sounding titles in favor of the generic Captain and Lieutenant, when one first learns there are 13 divisions/squads, each with their own set of officers, one cannot help but get excited to see which officer will appear next (which ties in nicely with step 1). This is repeated again with similar results with the introduction of the Espada and their numbered ranks. The recent X-Men comic reboot uses titles in a different but equally effective manner, choosing to divide the new ruling Mutant government, the Quiet Council, into four tables: Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring, each with three seats.
In coming up with the Guild’s ruling structure, I borrowed the idea of Tables from X-Men, but instead of seasons, I used the names of four of the original Dutch settlements in North America, New Amsterdam, Breuckelen, Orange, and Pavonia, as the Guild first established itself in America under the cover of the Dutch West India Company. This allows for rivalries and factions to develop amongst and within the different Tables.
Step 3: Know your archetypes
Whereas titles provide the bones, archetypes flesh out the substance of your organization and can provide built-in conflict. You’ve got your hotheads, your quiet, introspective types, your rebels, your outsiders, the list goes on. The Wicked + The Divine mixed mythological and musical archetypes to great effect. Kingdom Hearts and Fullmetal Alchemist manifested their archetypes through character design and power sets. Bleach was really the epitome of how the selection of the right archetypes can basically sustain your story by itself.
The challenge in using archetypes though is knowing when you are venturing too far into cliché, because if you do, you end up with one-dimensional cardboard cutouts. This has been the greatest challenge thus far in forming the Guild, as I like to form my characters by first imagining who would play them in the movie version. But I am cautious to only use that as a starting point and never let the character’s inspiration become everything that character is.
Step 4: 12 vs. 13? The eternal debate
Study enough SMPEOs, and you’ll start to see a pattern: the number of members is usually set at either 12 or 13. In Alias, there is the Alliance of 12. There are 12 members of the X-Men Quiet Council. 12 members of the Pantheon in The Wicked + The Divine. Organization XIII has of course, 13 members. Gotei 13 is made up of 13 divisions. Even the Espada are technically 13 if you include the three fallen soul reapers. Sure, there are exceptions, the Nine Pirate Lords, Nine Templars, Nine Nazgul (on second thought, maybe I should rename this step), but there is a primordial conflict going back centuries of 12 vs. 13, or at least, there ought to be!
Deciding whether your organization should have 12 or 13 members often comes down to the simple question of whether there should be a built-in tiebreaker avoidance system. Because, as we all know, every time you get an organization involved in anything, there will always be votes! For the Guild, I chose 12 members, for both the numerical symmetry of four Tables of three Seats and for the challenge of figuring out a way to use a deadlocked vote as a plot device.
Step 5: Everyone gets a magical item or weapon
So now you’ve got the secrecy, you’ve got titles galore, archetypical characters with depth, and an organization with a proper numerical foundation. The only thing left is to give everyone an awesome weapon and/or magical item. As a corollary to step 2, these weapons and items must have really cool names. Here again, Bleach is the standard by which all others are measured, as almost every character has a sword with a proper name that also has a more powerful mode with an even cooler name. Bonus points if your magical item/weapon has an independent personality.
If you’ve read Guild of Tokens, you know about the Relics: ancient weapons and items of phenomenal power. You’ve seen what the Medoblad, the Blade of Medusa, can do (or you can probably figure it out from the name). At the start of Guild of Magic, Jen, our protagonist, is no longer in possession of the blade, which is bad news for her, as she quickly runs into the holder of another Relic: a dagger called the White Hilt which has connections both to the Guild and to people Jen has already encountered in book one. And with 12 Guild members, there remains a bounty of weapons and items yet to be revealed.
So there you have it: five easy steps for creating your own SMPEO. I’ve taken each of these to heart in creating the Guild and I hope you will enjoy learning more about this fine organization in Guild of Magic, which is out now!
Guild of Magic
Joining the Guild was only the beginning. Now Jen's next quest could spell life or death.
Jen Jacobs thought she was in over her head when she first discovered the secret Quest Board and the world of alchemy and magic hiding just out of sight in New York City. But after a ghost from her mentor Beatrice Taylor’s past nearly kills the two of them, Jen finds herself on the cusp of joining the fabled Guild. Except now Beatrice has gone missing, leaving Jen alone to face the shadowy organization and its 11 members by herself.
If that wasn’t enough, the Guild’s chairman forces Jen to complete yet another dangerous quest to prove that she belongs: stealing a long-lost vial of Dragon’s blood that is the key ingredient to recreating the legendary Philosopher’s Stone.
As Jen’s past mistakes begin to catch up with her, she’ll need to muster all of her ingenuity to survive in the cutthroat world of ancient Relics, magical dynasties, and a possible immortal secretly directing things from behind the scenes.
