Delver's Guild

For the last five years, the Delver’s Guild has grown in influence, becoming both popular to join and wealthy. The Delver’s Guild offers its members information about job opportunities and events pertaining to the exploration of regions below Ptolus. The guild also maintains the city’s most extensive collection of maps of the underground realm and an impressive library for research.

Members receive passwords that allow them to access secret chambers within the underground regions. These secret chambers, called waystations, are stocked with food and simple supplies. High-ranking members gain retrieval insurance, which guarantees that, if they should die while exploring, guild members will retrieve their bodies and have them raised if possible (retrieval and raising paid for out of a special guild account funded by the insured).

The guild’s membership hovers around eight hundred. In addition, there are said to exist at least four hundred delvers not affiliated with the guild. At any given time, about one-fifth of this total (about two hundred fifty people) is exploring the Dungeon.

It is estimated that for every ten delvers who go down each week, one does not come back. About one hundred new adventurers come to Ptolus and some twenty-five are raised from the dead every week. Since the Delver’s Guild began keeping records three years ago, approximately eight thousand adventures died permanently while exploring the Dungeon. Another two hundred thirty have permanently retired, either in the city or elsewhere.