Freelance Merchant's Guild of Terra / FMGT

The function of the guild is to provide networking opportunities and several services to non-corporate merchants of all classes. It’s good to have a friend to enter a venture with. It’s nice to have backers. Perhaps you’re heading through a dangerous system and would like a convoy. We hope to facilitate these interactions, providing members a common place to seek out collaborators for their economic endeavors. In essence, this is less of a proper organization with a strict direction and hierarchy, and more of a center for networking, IE, a proper guild.

Requirements for joining are quite simple: do you have an interest in trade, or working with merchants? If so, you are welcome in our halls. Of course, the guild is intended to be more than a glorified forum, and trusted members who make regular donations to guild coffers will be provided the social safety net typical of any good guild.

Services we hope to issue include
- Loans (with interest)
- Letters of Credit (to avoid piracy, give your cargo to us, and we will give you a letter you can redeem at your destination for money or cargo of equal value, either with the local branch or with an affiliated organization)
- Collective negotiation to protect the interests of freelance merchants
- A database of trustworthy and untrustworthy professionals. If you find a good claim, you shouldn’t have to worry about the miners you hire to extract the resources selling the location to pirates.

These services will, hopefully, be expanded upon as time goes on. It is intended, however, that this not become a large, impersonal, corporate affair. We are all freelance traders for a reason – for many, it is our dislike of the impersonal and bureaucratic nature of large corporations. We do not intend to become one. Our primary objective is to foster a community. Our secondary objective is to facilitate collaboration and help people get back on their feet or reach greater heights.

There are three places wherein all sense of human decency, righteousness, and pity, flee before the wanting of human ambition. We are referring to love, war, and of course, the market place.

The Freelance Merchant’s Guild of Terra recognizes the shades of grey that the galactic market is colored in, and no planetary mindset clouds our vision. As a consequence, we have attempted to restrict our members as little as possible.

Our rules are quite simple indeed.

1. Do not steal assets of the guild.
2. Do not, with malicious intent, harm assets of the guild.
3. Any damage incurred to the guild must be compensated in a reasonable time frame.
4. We shouldn’t have to tell you this: reputation is everything. Keep your word, to your fellow members and to the guild.
5. Ensure that any particularly sensitive cargo which is sold to or given to the guild is no longer sensitive by the time it reaches our hands.

The guild is a resource for all its members. These rules are in place to ensure its survival, that it may be counted on to exist for all of us in the future.

Employees, however, are not nearly so unrestricted. Like any group of respectable law abiding citizens, we fear the ire of the Advocacy. While our members (customers of the Guild) are not in the employ of the Guild (and we are therefore not accountable for their actions), we most assuredly believe in holding our employees to the highest reasonable standards. Therefore, in addition to the rules above, the following rules apply to the Officers of this Guild.

1. We shouldn’t have to tell you this: illegal activity is forbidden.
2. As a representative of the guild, be punctual, trustworthy, show yourself to be capable, and accord people the respect they deserve. All other aspects of your person are left to your discretion.

As we have no desire for the bureaucratic nightmare of rules often associated with large corporations (had we any love for them, would we be Freelance Merchants?) we shall limit our policy restrictions to these two.