The Butchers' Guild

Membership in this guild totals 80-20 master butchers , 35 journeyman butchers, and 25 apprentices. The guild maintains no Guildhall; meetings are generally held in the house or store of the Guildmaster, and in normal circumstances only the master butchers are invited to attend.

The Butchers' Guild is the city's oldest guild, formed following an unfortunate and fatal outbreak of food poisoning at an important state banquet attended by the Directorship and ambassadors from neighboring powers, and naturally deals with the butchering. seasoning, preparation, curing, and storage of all manner of livestock, game and poultrv.

All the butchers withm the guild have served an apprenticeship to a guild recognized butcher and thus produce an established high quality of salted buffalo steak, spiced boar-meat salami, Galdawood-smokcd hogsfiesh, and pickled Celene skylarks, to name but a few items in lhe guild's vast repertoire.

However. the present Guildmaster, Grendel Trinkwasser, is one of the guild's specialist butchers, catering mainly to the decadent tastes of the citizens resident in the High Quarter. Grendel often boasts that he can supply any type of meat within two days if the pnce is right. and he has lined up to this boast in the past. To this end, Grendel has dealings with Harral Shastri of the Shapechangers (see Chapter 5).

The Butchers' Guild, although the first guild to be granted a charter from the Directorship, does not possess a monopoly within the Free City on the sale and preparation of meat. Other butchers do exist within the city, most especially within the Foreign Quarter where the preparabon of meat may vary for reasons of religious necessity or national preference. Ultimately, those who choose to purchase their meat from nonguild butchers do so at their own risk!

The Butchers· Guild will occasionally sponsor adventuring bands to seek out new varieties of edible flesh with which to tempt the purses and palates of the Free City's assembled gourmets. In association with the Merchants' and Traders Union, the Butchers' Guild is also known to purchase whole herds of cattle, buffalo and other types of free-ranging livestock, and pay good rates to drovers prepared to make the often perilous cattle drive back to the Free City.