Keith Guild

"Keith Guild Motto"

- Rance IV

About
The Keith Guild (キースギルド Kīsu Girudo) is an adventuring guild operating in the Free Cities Alliance founded and led by Keith Gold. While its original location was in the Free City of Ice, it later moved to a larger building in CITY of the Copa Empire sometime prior to the events of Rance Quest. In addition to changing the location of its flagship building, the Keith Guild also opened several smaller branches in various other Free Cities, further increasing its range of business.

It is a renowned and high-profile guild that does business throughout The Continent ranging from jobs as minor as finding a villager's lost pet to as important as doing bodyguard work for royalty. There are no restrictions to the kinds of requests that can be made, meaning that adventurers are often hired from it to handle shady operations that would generally be considered illegal by other similar organizations. It has several dozens of mercenaries under its employ, all of decent but varying ability that do work around the year. Keith claims that he values "quantity over quality" in terms of his employees, preferring to optimize the guild's potential income rather than focus on hiring the best possible adventurers. A ranking system for guild members does exist, however, which tracks both the total number of jobs they have completed as well as the speed at which they have completed them, allowing for the more skilled and driven adventurers in the guild to remain motivated to work hard through competition with their peers.

Its most notable member is Rance, who was put under Keith's care after his previous caretaker, a former guild member herself, died. Rance is a highly unreliable employee who only ever takes on jobs when he is short on money, and even then only ones that give him a large reward for a comparatively small amount of work. Despite this, Keith knows Rance better than anyone else on the Continent, and has successfully motivated him into taking on incredibly difficult and high-paying jobs countless times by emphasizing that the person of note in them is a woman. While Keith is generally willing to cherry pick jobs with women involved in them for Rance, if there is difficult work that he believes only Rance can accomplish, he will simply lie that the client is a woman to incentivize him. Despite using this strategy countless times, Rance has yet to see through it and falls for it whenever Keith uses it.