Climb the ladder.

The guild ladder

Daggerfall guilds are the only progression system in the game that is not combat, and they are also the only one where you can lose ground by being careless. There are six joinable faction categories: the Dark Brotherhood, the Fighters Guild, the Mages Guild, the Thieves Guild, the Knightly Orders and the Temples. Each one runs on the same ten-rank structure with the same advancement formula, but the perks behind those ranks are completely different, and some of them are worth far more than others.

One restriction shapes everything: you may hold only one Temple and only one Knightly Order at a time. Switching temples means giving up your current rank and starting again at rank zero, so the decision of which deity you follow is a real commitment rather than a respec you can undo for free.

What a rank is actually worth

Ranks are not titles you wear for flavour. Fighters Guild rank multiplies quest rewards and cuts repair prices. Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood ranks give you a chance to bribe a judge out of a serious crime. Mages Guild ranks hand you the spell maker, the library and eventually a teleporter. Knightly Orders ranks give you free ship travel at rank six, which is the single most valuable perk in the entire system if you travel at all. If you want the value of those perks worked into your planning, our shopping guide covers what gold buys elsewhere.

Rank advancement

Advancement requires all three of the following at once: faction reputation at or above the rank threshold, one guild skill at or above the High skill value, and a second guild skill at or above the Low skill value. Three conditions, not two. Many players hit the reputation number and one skill and then wonder why nothing happens.

Two further rules catch people out. You are promoted to the highest rank you qualify for, so ranks can be skipped entirely if your skills are already strong enough. And you must wait 28 days between promotions, no matter how much you have grown in the meantime.

What does not count toward your skills

Lycanthropy and vampirism each grant a +30 skill boost, and those boosts do not count toward the High skill or Low skill requirements. This is the most commonly repeated false belief in the guild system. If you became a werewolf to get a free combat skill bump and then wondered why the Fighters Guild would not promote you, the boost was never in the calculation. Your real trained value has to be there on its own.

The promotion clock in practice

Worst case, rank zero to rank nine is nine promotions at 28 days each, which is 252 in-game days of waiting. Skip rule makes that unlikely if you arrive with skills, but the clock never stops. Reputation also drifts one point toward zero every 112 days, so a promotion you earned in March can quietly become invalid if you stop doing quests.

Rank titles

The titles themselves are cosmetic, but they are how you identify your standing at a glance, and each faction uses a different ladder of words. Templars, assassins and thieves all reach their tenth rank under completely different names, which is why players often misread each other's progress in game chat.

Temples are the only category with a gendered top rank: the ninth rank is Matriarch for female characters and Patriarch for male ones. Knightly Orders are the only category whose first rank is not called Apprentice, and the only one where a rank can be reached without a single training session.

Which guild you should actually join first

Here is the honest verdict, weighing the 28 day clock against what each rank really unlocks. Everyone's answer is different, and the wrong pick costs you a quarter of a year of in-game time.

Pure fighter

Join the Fighters Guild, and treat rank zero as valuable on its own. Free rest in any guildhall means you can sleep your way across Iliac Bay without paying a single inn bill, and that perk alone justifies the membership before you have any rank at all. After that, the repair discount scales from the full repair price down to a tenth of it, and quest rewards scale from one times to nearly double. If you clear many guild quests, the reward multiplier pays for itself.

Rank six gives 24-hour guild services. Do not plan a tier of the ladder around waiting for it, though, because the per-rank discount and quest multiplier apply at every single rank.

Pure mage

Join the Mages Guild. Rank zero is the most generous starting point in the entire game: every member gets item identification and access to the Spell Merchant, and rank zero adds the Spell Maker plus free magicka restoration for Sorcerers. The Spell Maker is the reason to join, and it is why our alchemy guide pairs with this one.

The important target is rank two, which opens the Library and a large set of spells you cannot buy anywhere. The endgame target is rank eight and the Teleporter Service. Work the ladder deliberately; mage skill requirements are steep, and rank nine needs 87 in your primary school.

Thief

Join the Thieves Guild, and join it for the dungeon reveals rather than the fence. Membership reveals one undisclosed dungeon on your map, and ranks six and eight reveal more. Chasing those reveals gets you paid quests, which raise reputation, which is the actual bottleneck.

Rank two gives you the Fence, where you can sell magic items, and rank four makes you Spymaster. The bribe-the-judge chance scales as (Rank + 1) / 20, so it is worth having but it is not the headline. Your first promotion target should be rank two.

Hybrid

Join a Knightly Order. It is the only faction that trains nobody, so it does not compete with your training hours, and its benefits are passive. Rank zero gives free inn stays in the order's own region, rank four extends that to anywhere in the Iliac Bay, and rank six gives free ship travel.

Free ship travel is the reason hybrids should pick an order first. It removes the single most expensive recurring cost in the game without demanding a skill value you would rather spend on combat or magic. Read the beginners guide first if you have not locked a build yet, because the order you pick is a long commitment.

Mages Guild benefits

Every rank in the Mages Guild adds something concrete to what you can buy or cast, which makes it the cleanest ladder in the game to plan. Here is the full table.

Two jumps on that table are worth planning your calendar around. Rank two is the Library, which is where the spell list opens up for the rest of the game. Rank eight is the Teleporter Service, which turns every journey in Iliac Bay into a short walk from a hall door. Neither costs gold after the promotion. Both cost you calendar time.

Fighters Guild and Knightly Orders

The two martial factions work on completely different principles. Fighters Guild rewards you for spending time in the guild, and Knightly Orders rewards you for existing in the right region.

Fighters Guild formulas

At every rank, weapon and armour repair is discounted to ((10 - Rank) / 10) x RepairPrice. At rank nine you pay a tenth of the normal repair cost, which matters enormously once you are carrying Dwemer or Orcish plate. Quest rewards are multiplied by (10 + Rank) / 10, so rank nine is a 1.9 times multiplier on everything you turn in. Rank zero additionally gives you free rest in any guildhall. Rank six gives 24-hour guild services.

Knightly Orders

Knights do not train skills. That is the entire appeal and the entire trap: you can sit at rank zero of an order forever and never gain a single skill point from it. Their perks are all passive:

• Rank 0: free inn stays in the order's region
• Rank 4: free inn stays anywhere in the Iliac Bay
• Rank 6: free ship travel
• Rank 9: a free house in one of the order's regions

Free ship travel at rank six is the best value-per-day in this whole guide. If you plan to work the interiors, you will cross water constantly, and each crossing otherwise costs you a fare you would rather spend on potions.

Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood

These are the two criminal factions, and they share one mechanical gift: at every rank you may bribe the judge to walk out of a charge, with success chance (Rank + 1) / 20. At rank nine that is a fifty percent chance to escape a murder conviction entirely.

Thieves Guild specifics

Joining requires committing to petty crime: pick ten or more pockets, or break into a store without using an Open spell, then wait for a letter telling you where to go. The guildhall location is always secret, and it is genuinely secret: the building opposite a style-1 Thieves Guild always houses an indoor witch coven instead, which is a well-known trap for players looking in the obvious place.

Beyond the bribe, ranks six and eight reveal further undisclosed dungeons on your map, rank two opens the Fence where you can sell magic items, and rank four makes you Spymaster.

Dark Brotherhood specifics

The Dark Brotherhood takes the same bribe formula for murder charges and additionally reveals a dungeon on each promotion rather than only at ranks six and eight. Its traders arrive on a slower schedule: Potion Seller at rank one, Potion Maker at rank three, Soul Gem Merchant at rank five and Spymaster at rank seven.

Temples and what each deity pays

Temples are the only faction where the benefits are partly unique per deity, so picking a god is picking a playstyle. The table below gives the rank required for each temple service. Columns are, in order: library, free healing and attribute restore, buy potions, and potion maker.

Deity-specific effects

• Akatosh: rank improves fast-travel speed.
• Arkay: discounts disease curing.
• Kynareth: extends breath duration.
• Mara: adds your rank to persuasion rolls with the opposite sex.
• Stendarr: gives a Rank x 2% chance to avoid death.
• Julianos: has no free healing at any rank. If you follow Julianos, plan on buying potions in town forever.

Stendarr's death avoidance is the sleeper perk here. At rank nine that is an eighteen percent chance to walk away from a killing blow, which turns certain dungeon bosses from impossible into merely dangerous. Arkay's disease discount pairs well with dungeon runs where rot is common.

Skill training

Guild rank requires skills, and skills come from trainers inside guildhalls. The rules are short and completely unlike any other Elder Scrolls game.

Session cost

100 gold times your current level. A level 15 character pays 1,500 gold for one session.

Non-members

Temples charge non-members 400 gold times level for the same session.

Session length

Three in-game hours, costing 30 fatigue.

Fatigue floor

Drop below 31 fatigue and you collapse to the floor.

Cooldown

Nominally once every twelve hours, but the three-hour session counts, so you really wait 9 hours.

Shared cooldown

All trainers share it. Training with a Fighters trainer blocks Mages training for the same nine hours.

Hard ceiling

A trainer can raise a skill only to 51. Beyond that you are on your own.

Payoff

One session is worth roughly 15 uses of that skill.

The 51 ceiling is the second thing to plan around. Rank nine needs 87 in your high skill, so no trainer can get you there directly, and any rank above six is outside the training system entirely. The high-skill column is not a training schedule; it is a use-it-in-combat schedule.

Faction reputation

Faction reputation runs from -100 to +100 and starts at zero. It is separate from regional legal reputation, it is tracked per faction, and only quests move it. Donations to temples are the single exception.

How reputation changes

• Donations: 2,000 gold gives +1 with that deity, 4,000 gives +2.
• Quest success: usually +5, sometimes +10.
• Allies and enemies: gain or lose half of that, rounded down.
• Quest failure: -2 with the faction, -1 with allies, and an enemy faction gains +1.
• Drift: all reputation drifts one point toward zero every 112 days.

Read the failure line again, because it is the one that ends runs. Failing a Fighters Guild quest gives the Dark Brotherhood a point. If you are dual-laddering a lawful and an unlawful faction, one botched quest advances the wrong side of the map.

Regional reputation and the courts

Regional legal reputation is a second, per-region scale from -100 to +100 with its own ladder of titles. It affects guard behaviour, prices and whether you get arrested at all.

What each crime costs you

Getting arrested

You get arrested if you are injured while guards are pursuing you. This includes falling damage and sun damage, which catches people constantly in the Iliac Bay at midday. High Streetwise lets you lie your way out of a charge, high Etiquette lets you argue your way out, and the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood can bribe the judge for you.

There is no Water of Life

Let us be direct, because players hear otherwise: there is no Water of Life, spell or item that resets reputation. None. The only two real routes back up are time and repair quests.

Waiting works because regional reputation regresses one point per in-game month toward zero, so Pond Scum in a bad region heals slowly on its own. The repair quests work faster. A Mix-Up gives +110 on success, but accepting it first sets your reputation to -100, so you start in the basement. Smuggling gives +100. The Escort gives +10, but only about a quarter of the time, and it is the only quest of the three that raises positive reputation rather than merely repairing a negative one.

And if you are choosing where to spend an evening, remember that reputation changes your prices before it changes anything else. A criminal in a town pays more for everything, which quietly wrecks any budget built on our alchemy price tables.

Guild questions

Once your rank is climbing, the next thing that will decide your run is what you do inside the barrows. Our dungeon guide covers which floors reward a guild promotion quest run, and the spellmaking guide is worth reading before you spend rank-five gold on a spell you cannot cast.