Reverse Guild Sniffing

[Talia]

Lyksae, Tor, Borsail, Winrothol, the AoD, the Tuluki Legions, the Fist...none of these are mercenary groups. You can't hire them to come fight for your cause. The T'zai Byn is the largest, most well-known, most effective mercenary force in the Known.

[brytta.leofa]

I was always under the impression that they were universally considered a cut below most standing fighting forces, even if they were the best mercenaries, with the order of "eliteness" being something like... Lyksae/Tor > Legion/Arm > Borsail/Winrothol > GMH and Byn.

Borsail's forces (and, presumably, Winrothol's) are likely better and more expensively trained than either city's regular army, but they're not really good at the same things.

[Tisiphone]

The Byn is (should be?) like the French Foreign Legion, as far as social acceptability and expertise, methinks.

[EldritchOrigins]

There is the IC view of the Byn, which is going to be different depending on who you talk to.  Nobles and templars will talk them down, because they are promoting their own forces.  The Byn get a bad rap by these guys, but it's all IC.  It's important to not "drink the kool-aid" so to speak in this regard.

Many players that join the Byn go in thinking if it isn't fun (and they survive), they can always leave and join some other clan as a valuable asset.  The Byn after all used to be a newbie school of sorts, and still serves that purpose.

When evaluating a clan, one should first look at the NPCs and all of the virtual part of the clan (that usually makes up a much larger percentage of the clan than the PC portion), however this may be difficult because most people almost always are interacting with the PCs in the clan and that is determining their impression of the clan.  So it is often easy to get a misrepresentation of a clan based on the players in it (one good reason for players in a clan to try to represent that clan accurately).

[My 2 sids]

The Byn is (should be?) like the French Foreign Legion, as far as social acceptability and expertise, methinks.

The Byn is actually more like a temp agency -- they're not "employer" so much as "service provider".  It is a brand name

For the nobility/wealthy that brand names makes it easy to pass out contracts -- no real need to do background checks or fear the mercenary group is going to turn around and bite.

For the mercenary that brand name means a fairly ongoing stream of good/solid contracts.  Not to mention the "street cred" of belonging to a well-known gang of thugs (no one is going to try and take that contract from you behind your back) and a chance at networking with more seasoned mercs who can show you a thing or two about life and making sid.


What the Byn is NOT is a House   Houses are actual, full-time, employment be it serving the nobility or GMH families directly.  (The difference between working at the local "we build computers" shop in town and actually being able to say, "I work for Google/ Apple/ etc"

[Riya OniSenshi]

This doesn't look like the topic anymore...