Whats your favorite organization archetype in a tabletop setting? The nobles court? The guilds...

Whats your favorite organization archetype in a tabletop setting? The nobles court? The guilds? The slayer orders (Think Grey Wardens and Witchers)? The Religous clergy or the Cults?

Which of these interest you the most in a setting?

Merchant houses a best!

I generally enjoy the slayer factions. Tends to get romanticized even though it is a grim joyless duty.

Even more warriors of legend

Special militaries/regiments lead by fucking hard as nails badass commanders.

Slayer orders definitely.

You have the potential for both grim, dark fantasy and more hopeful heroic fantasy.

Yes, the slayers will do.

Seriously, though, noble courts.

Nobles' court, no contest. Runner up is probably cults or religious.

For some reason 'Slayers orders' ruin my verisimilitude. I'd be an autist and claim it's 'muh realism', but guilds evoke a much weaker version of the same thing and those were super important historically so I don't know what the fuck my problem is.

I actually suck at picking favorites because fleshing all of them out is a favorite pastime of mine.
My players once admitted that they go out of their way to involve themselves in the affairs of off-handedly mentioned groups because I come up with really interesting faction politics and rivalries.

"Slayer orders" is really misleading anyway. The examples he gives are both very different:
The Witcher Schools were fairly diverse, had different training methods, no guild regulations (it was just a school, no rules attached), likely had nearly unrelated mutation methods (multiple methods achieving similar results), and there was no hierarchy and no one was required to report to anyone else at all.
The Grey Warden on the other hand were a scattered but relatively organized group with actual ranks and were even the effective government in one region and had both rules and diplomatic relations.

The Wardens are more akin to a knightly order of crusaders, while Witchers are basically people who all went to college to learn a single trade, only the college began when you were five and three out of every five applicants died during finals week.

I love cults that are huge and well developed to the point it is contending as a top religion but they sneak around and are near on impossible to find unless your a member.

I really enjoy criminal syndicates. High risk, adventurous, intrigue and backstabbing etc.

Didn't the Grey Wardens all go crazy anyway?

Elite bodyguards

If by "Grey Wardens" you mean "BioWare" and by "all" you mean "entire original staff" and by "go" you mean "entire original staff was fired or replaced by other EA-owned company people before even DA2 got made" and by "crazy" you meant "even the head writer, the only person who actually knows about the details of the DA setting and created it, was in the process of leaving BioWare due to endless interference by EA games during the creation of his games" then yes, absolutely.

I can't believe people out there even LIKE BioWare now when literally not even a single person working there was involved in anything BioWare was famous for before EA Games gutted it like a fish and put interchangeable cheap robot parts inside of it instead devoid of creativity or writing skills.

David Gaider was the LAST member of the old BioWare and he stayed on to work on Dragon Age, but EA's endless interference got to be too much even for him.

To be fair we only see and read about Witcher Schools in their twilight years as they're pretty much about to be snuffed out by civilization.

Noble courts and courtiers in general. Problem is in most games it's very either/or situation - you can either be an adventurer actually doing shit or that social guy who's completely useless outside of royal receptions and haggling for better prices.

We hear more details in the original comic that fleshed out the Witcher Schools and the destruction of the School of the Wolf a bit more.
There were something like 50-odd Witchers at Kaer Morhen when the riot that destroyed it went down and they all knew each other due to their low numbers but it was kinda like how you "know" everyone who went to your highschool to some degree just because you spent a lot of time around them.
The ones remaining are all friends because one is the 300 year old fencing instructor they all grew up with and two others were part of the same class almost a century ago and another was part of another class around fifty years ago.

There ARE no "young Witchers" anymore; guys like Lambert who are over fifty are as "young" as you get for Witchers.

It's a shame because Origins was one of the best games of the 2000s.

Agreed.
DA: Origins was the last BioWare game that was ever worked on by any members of the actual original BioWare team, though they wouldn't know that at the time.

that reminds me of pilots in star wars saga

>about to be snuffed out by civilization.

Sad thing is, they aren't even all being killed or anything (the massacre of the School of the Wolf is an unusual event); instead it's literally the slow spread of civilization making them irrelevant.
The cost of making even one successful class of witchers is too high (it takes years to complete the training and the vast majority die anyway, with the Trial of the Grasses weeding out the rest) and the likelihood of death is so high once they actually set out on the Path that eventually there were just less and less as time went on, with less and less work to be had as civilization gradually eradicated monsters.

Which is actually one of the best aspects of Witcher and one you don't really see often in fantasy. Usually it's "king betrayed you and eradicated everyone" or some variety. It doesn't help that even common people are afraid and hate Witchers, all the while while still begging for their help when they need it.

That's not sad.
That's great. The world is safer from necrotic beasts and horrid monsters so you don't have to spend an entire village worth of fit young men to produce one man capable of defeating a hydra 10 years later.

Well, It wouldn't be sad if there were any likable people in the world outside of sorcerers, dragons and witchers.

The Northern Kingdoms are heavily based on Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which in real-life actually worshipped pagan deities and resisted Christianization until well into the 14th century, remaining a wilder area filled with fueding kingdoms for a long, long time, with Redania basically being Poland with the serial numbers filed off and Nilfgaard REALLY obviously being a stand-in for Germany who went armies of black-garbed Knights Teuton to Christianize the region in several crusades.
Honestly, most witchers would pass up even bothering to try and fight a hydra.
Even by Witcherverse standards they are fucking nasty.

Forgot to add that while Nilgaard is basically the Holy Roman Empire but with Knights Teuton livery, the language they speak is actually a variant of Welsh since it's the Alder Speech.

>spend an entire village worth of fit young men to produce one man capable of defeating a hydra 10 years later.

Especially true since the program used to make witchers was EXTREMELY hit and miss due to how complex the mutations were and thus the effects varied from school to school. Even Geralt is a weird one-off freak of nature, showing how inexact and experimental the process was at the core.
The Cat School witchers for instance nearly universally displayed strong tendencies towards sociopathic behavior as a regular side effect of the methods used in their mutations.

Imagine a School that even AFTER all the deaths and loss of life that comes from the Trials has a near 100% tendency to producer sociopaths as part of it's mutation formulas.

Is anything ever said about any of the other Schools?

Megacorps and PMCs.

Nope.
The different Schools were made up to show what a badass Leo Bonhart was basically, and only Wolf, Cat, and Griffin are mentioned there and not in any detail.

The only other School written about at length is the School of the Cat, who basically are ultimately responsible for the destruction of the School of the Wolf.

Agents of The Crown authorised to kick down doors and take names anywhere they please.