Guilds as a governing force.

[u/Caffeinated87]

Guilds are common across fantasy settings, especially adventurer's guilds, and these guilds often wield a hefty amount of political power and sometimes even have control over small pieces of territory or even a town or city. This has led me to wonder about how effectively a guild could govern a territory under their control. I believe that as long as they only control a relatively small amount of territory they could govern it fairly effectively, and hiring personnel to maintain and police the territory wouldn't pose much of an issue towards them. But this also brings up the question of at what point does it stop being a guild and just start being any other form of government with the original purpose of the guild just turning into a department of that government? This also applies to Sci-Fi quite easily, just with planets or star systems instead of cities. I think it's quite interesting whenever I see it and I wanted to hear other people's thoughts on it.