The guild system was a core part of Yggdrasil.
Players could clear dungeons to claim ownership of guild territory, then use it to build up a guild, form parties for PvP, create NPCs, build out a home base, and more.
The system offered a ton of variety.
Some guilds came with a corresponding Stronghold Point value, which could be spent to create exclusive NPCs.
Guild tiers ranged from as low as 0 points up to a maximum of 3000.
Yes, the lowest-tier guild strongholds couldn’t create any NPCs at all.
City-type guild strongholds, meanwhile, capped out at 700 points.
700 points meant you could create five level-100 NPCs and four level-50 NPCs.
Making all seven into level-100 NPCs wasn’t possible, not without spending real money to make up the difference.
Getting a higher-tier stronghold meant clearing an extremely difficult dungeon.
Yggdrasil had nine worlds in total, and each one contained a special dungeon holding a top-tier, 3000-point guild stronghold.
In the original story, Ainz Ooal Gown’s guild stronghold sat at 2,750 points, just barely short of the very top tier.
At the same time, creating NPCs required a fixed amount of gold as a baseline cost.
Plenty of guilds weren’t unable to build them, they just couldn’t afford to keep them.
The one exception was undead NPCs, whose upkeep cost was zero, or, alternatively, owning the World-tier item Throne of Kings, which reduced upkeep costs for NPCs of other races.
That was exactly why Ainz’s guild had built itself around undead NPCs.
It came down to saving money.
With NPC costs kept so low, Ainz Ooal Gown genuinely ranked at the top when it came to defensive strength.
None of that had anything to do with Roy, though.
He had zero interest in guild rankings or guild wars.
He wouldn’t even allow anyone to announce that he owned a guild at all.
He wanted the whole thing hidden.
His guild existed somewhere out there in the world, and yet it could never be seen.
Tucked away in some corner of it.
Considering some World-tier items never came to light even by the time the game ended, it made perfect sense that Roy’s guild never surfaced either, start to finish.
As for how it should all be laid out, that was obviously a job for his team to handle.
Roy was already paying for it.
Why would he also have to bother designing it himself?
What was the point of having designers and ops otherwise?
Sure enough, the dev team came back quickly with a proposal.
“Boss, the guild’s all designed.”
“This guild setup is called the Incredible World City.”
“It’s split into ten regions: World City, Sky City, Ocean City, Forest City, Desert City, Machine City, Elemental City, Eternal Night City, Golden City, and Hell City.”
“World City sits entirely on the moon, higher up than even Sky City, overseeing everything else.”
“It’s somewhere a normal player could never reach.
Only by clearing all nine branch guilds across the worlds could it possibly come to light.”
“Meanwhile, the nine branch guilds would be scattered across the Nine Radiant Worlds.”
“Those nine branch guilds, together with World City up on the moon, add up to ten top-tier guild strongholds in total, 30,000 points combined, enough to create 300 level-100 NPCs.”
“Boss, what do you think?”
Professionals really were professionals.
Roy couldn’t go against the game’s own established rules, that a single guild stronghold capped at 3000 points.
That was fine.
The lead designer had already worked it out: treat Roy as a world-tier boss.
Have World City rule secretly over the other nine worlds’ guilds from the shadows.
Only once players actually triggered that quest line would the server-wide event to hunt down the world boss even open up.
Judging by the gear set the lead designer had custom-built for Roy, they didn’t think any player could ever actually clear that quest.
That way, the game could run forever.
Except Roy wasn’t satisfied at all.
“Add a covenant.
Call it the Pact of Non-Engagement.”
The lead designer looked surprised:
“Boss, what do you mean?”
Roy answered:
“I get your design.
Every top-tier guild can stumble onto clues pointing to the hidden guild.”
“Openly, once all nine dungeons are cleared, information about the hidden world starts leaking out, right?”
Matsuno Hideaki nodded, resigned:
“That’s right, Boss.”
“Then add a rule: after all nine dungeons fall, I have to be the one who makes the first move before players can even trigger the related quest.”
“Only after that would the call go out to gather players from all nine worlds to take down the World King on the moon.”
That was it.
Matsuno Hideaki named the quest “World King.”
If Roy’s guild weapon were ever destroyed, he’d be left holding only World City itself, and every other guild outpost would get exposed.
The lead designer needed that weakness on the books to keep everything consistent with the game’s own logic.
Normally a player could only hold one guild stronghold, but Roy had one in each of the nine worlds, plus one extra special dungeon on top.
That went beyond the game’s own logic, but the lead designer patched it over using world-boss logic instead.
A player acting as the world boss.
Completely insane.
In the end, Roy simply locked the quest trigger down entirely.
As long as he never used his guild to declare war on anyone, no information could leak at all.
Matsuno Hideaki agreed.
He couldn’t believe anyone would build out a guild this elaborate and then just never use it, not even once.
What was the point of building an empire nobody would ever get to see?
And sure enough, from the moment the guild update went live, Roy never touched it, not once.
Matsuno Hideaki nearly gave himself an ulcer over it.
“Boss, come on, we put so much care into designing this quest.
Why won’t you trigger it even once?”
“Every player across all nine worlds is basically your toy.”
“They’d all band together to come after you for the World-tier item, and you’d just toy with them the whole time.
Isn’t that fun?”
“Given how your defenses are set up, it’s genuinely uncertain whether every player on the server combined could even break through a single stronghold.”
He was out of his mind!
Why would Roy let them come attack his guild?
That was all his property.
If they broke something, were they going to pay for it?
That was also exactly why the massive World King expansion ended up falling flat.
From that point on, Yggdrasil went into decline.
Because that update only touched a small part of the guild system.
On paper it looked like a massive patch, but in practice nothing actually happened, and the whole rollout had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward players.
Players tore into it:
“What garbage did you even patch in today?”
“We downloaded all that data, and all we got was a tweak to guild NPC AI?”
“This is bullshit!
Refund!”
The designers and ops team had no way to explain themselves.
And they absolutely couldn’t leak the real reason.
Every MMORPG has one open secret: free players exist to give paying players a better experience.
For the sake of the paying players, it didn’t matter how much the free players complained.
Roy, meanwhile, was thrilled, and kept spending like crazy.
Honestly, most of what he spent went straight into the guild.
First, stronghold points.
The top tier for a Yggdrasil guild was 3000 points, but you could actually spend real money to push past that.
The cost was brutal, though, one of the rare cases where even hardcore spenders balked at it.
5 million yen bought you 100 points, with a hard cap of 300 extra points.
Completely not worth it.
Part of Yggdrasil’s whole selling point was that every original NPC needed its own AI, which drove operating costs way up.
Expanding the number of original NPCs meant a serious jump in investment.
Even the biggest whales hesitated over it.
Ainz’s guild, at least, hadn’t been willing to spend on it.
For Roy, though, he only had one complaint:
“Only 300 points?”
“And it’s too cheap besides.
Raise the cap, and raise the price.”
The lead designer hurried to speak up:
“Don’t worry, Boss.
Take a look at what the World-tier item, the World Crown, can do.”
This was the first time Roy had actually gotten hands-on with a World-tier item.
It was a bit like the Great Tomb’s own World-tier item, the Throne of Kings.
Except one was a throne, and the other was a crown.
Both were World-tier items built specifically around guilds.
World-tier items, generally speaking, tended to have fairly narrow, singular effects.
But the World Crown, like the Throne of Kings, boosted a guild across the board.
Just with a different focus.
The Throne of Kings, first, defended against detection and information-gathering, and second, cut NPC upkeep costs while protecting the Great Tomb.
Ainz’s group had managed to stockpile 410 billion gold coins, and while gold was relatively easy to farm in-game, the real reason came down to the Throne of Kings.
They didn’t have to burn through huge amounts of gold every day just to keep their NPCs running, the way other guilds did.
The World Crown, on the other hand, focused on domination and boosting NPC points.
What did domination actually mean?
No NPC, of any kind, could attack the World King while inside World City.
To use a slightly unfair example: if Ainz marched a whole army of NPCs into World City, every single one of them, even at level 100, would drop to their knees in submission.
Unless they were carrying a World-tier item themselves, none of them would escape it.
They’d just start obeying Roy’s orders directly.
That was the World Crown.
That was the World King.
Second, in terms of NPC points, it raised the cash-shop cap from 300 points all the way up to 2000.
Meaning that for 200 million yen, he could get 50,000 points’ worth of NPC levels.
Absurdly cheap.
Roy couldn’t help but ask:
“This World-tier item, it’s not custom-built just for me, is it?”
“Don’t worry, Boss, absolutely not!”
The lead designer said, a little sheepishly:
“We’d actually already planned to launch the World King expansion near the very end of the game, right around shutdown, to give player interest a boost.”
So that was why the whole World City design felt a little too polished.
Turns out it had already been a design plan in the works.
Roy had simply swooped in and claimed the original World King boss slot for himself.
So the World Crown had originally been designed as the reward for the guild’s ultimate quest.
The Throne of Kings in Ainz’s hands was part of the same quest chain.
Once he knew all that, Roy said, satisfied:
“So the NPC points, can’t we push them even higher?”
The lead designer went pale:
“This isn’t enough?”
Even if Roy made every single NPC level 100, that would still mean crafting five hundred of them.
Designing a level-100 NPC actually took a huge amount of time.
A normal player might pour two or three months into one, sometimes even a full year.
How long was this supposed to take?
Poor guy didn’t get it at all.
Roy wanting that many original NPCs obviously had nothing to do with combat strength.
Like, say, five hundred level-100 angels marching into the Great Tomb and scattering Ainz’s bones to the wind.
Roy wasn’t nearly that bored, and he wasn’t about to waste NPC slots on something like that.
Same as always: Roy wasn’t chasing stats.
He was chasing mechanics.
So what did he actually want most?
The answer was obvious.
Every class, every race, every spell, he wanted all of it backed up.
Strong or weak, good or bad, didn’t matter.
Because it all held potential.
700 races, over 2000 classes, over 6000 spells, and a massive pool of special skills.
He wanted a copy of every single one.
Strong or not was beside the point.
The mechanics had to be preserved.
Of course, there weren’t actually 700 distinct races.
Vampires and True Ancestors, for instance, counted as two separate races, which was part of how the count got up to 700.
Factor in that higher-tier races already contained lower-tier ones, and the real number shrank down to around 410.
A normal player typically had around seven classes.
There was no real need for that many original NPCs.
But Roy had his preferences.
Life-skill classes like craftsmen, chefs, and farmers needed multiple NPCs to properly cover.
So he wanted quantity.
He wanted completeness.
Only by ruling over every race, every class, every spell, and every skill would he actually be worthy of the title World King.