Everything has a price. Especially the things that are free.

Core Concept

The Broker’s Guild is not a nation or an empire; it is the closest thing the Kith have to a formal society. It is a loose, galaxy-spanning trade union, a professional association built on a single, shared principle: the sanctity of the bargain. The Guild does not have laws, only contracts. It does not have leaders, only arbiters. Its purpose is not to govern the Kith, but to regulate the marketplace of souls in which they all trade.

Species

• Primary: Kith (exclusively). One cannot “join” the Guild in the traditional sense. A Kith is a member by virtue of its existence and its adherence to the universal ethics of the deal.
• Associates: The Guild maintains professional, if wary, relationships with other transactional factions. They are the primary business partners of the Janus Ascendancy.

Ideology (Faith / Fiction)

• Core Faith: “The Contract is Sacred.” The Guild’s only absolute moral law is that a bargain, once struck, must be honored by both parties. They do not judge the content of a deal—trading a lifetime of happy memories for a moment of power is a valid, if perhaps unwise, transaction. But to break a contract, to renege on a payment, is the ultimate sin. It is a violation of the cosmic balance they exist to maintain.

• Core Fiction: “The Fable of the Broken Bargain.” Their only cautionary tale tells of a primordial Kith who, out of a strange and illogical flicker of pity, healed a dying star without taking a payment of light in return. The resulting imbalance, the story goes, created the first black hole, a wound in the universe born from an act of charity. This fiction reinforces their core belief that every gift must have a price, for the sake of cosmic stability itself.

Goals & Motivations

• To Facilitate Exchange: The Guild’s primary function is to create and maintain the infrastructure for their unique trade. They establish neutral grounds (like hidden bazaars or pocket dimensions) where deals can be struck safely.
• To Enforce Contracts: The Guild’s “Arbiters” are its most feared agents. If a contract is broken, an Arbiter will be dispatched to collect the debt. Their methods are not violent, but metaphysical. An Arbiter might not kill a debtor; they might simply repossess the limb the Kith regenerated, or reclaim the memory that was paid for a service, leaving a gaping, and often educational, hole in the debtor’s being.
• To Maintain Neutrality: The Guild is aggressively neutral in all galactic conflicts. They will sell their services to any and all sides. To them, war is just a particularly vibrant market with a high demand for their unique… solutions.

Relations with Other Factions

• Janus Ascendancy: Business Partners. This is their most crucial relationship. The Janus Ascendancy are the wholesalers of Eidos; the Kith are the bespoke, artisanal retailers. The Janus might buy a thousand generic memories of “childhood happiness” in bulk from a refugee crisis, which a Kith can then use as a low-cost “payment” to a host who needs a minor cure. The relationship is symbiotic, profitable, and utterly amoral.
• The Hegemony: A source of constant, low-level friction. The Hegemony despises the Guild’s unregulated, black-market nature but secretly relies on their services for deniable operations that require metaphysical manipulation.
• The Unchained: Frequent customers. The Rune-Scarred’s obsession with self-modification makes them prime clients for the Kith’s biological and Eidic alterations, though their chaotic nature makes them notoriously unreliable at paying their debts.

Player Interaction

• As a Kith: The Guild is your safety net and your rulebook. Adhering to its principles gives you access to its network of safe houses and information brokers. Breaking a contract will get you blacklisted, or worse, earn you a visit from an Arbiter.
• As an Outsider: The Broker’s Guild is a dangerous but powerful resource. They are the ultimate “fixers.” There is no problem they cannot solve, no wound they cannot heal, no secret they cannot uncover… for a price. The player must always be prepared to pay, and the currency is always a piece of themselves.