The Guild id most like to see are The Druids. Heres my thoughts..

Without getting into their past, the Druids are an ancient but secret guild with unique magic that combines life, holy, lunar, and elemental. This 'good' sorcery was as feared as all others keeping the Druids to their secrets in the wilderness.

Druids hate anywhere that isnt wilderness, suffering it's effects even more than Rangers do as they cannot prepare any spell. The wilderness keeps them and a majority of the spells are defensive minded and plant and animal based. A spell list might include:

Beast Control: One can mentally control creatures of a given level.
Mana Manuver: One can alter the mana type in a room.
Entanglement: One can creat a growth of roots that will block a direction or an egress for a time.
Sluggish: One can cause an engaged opponent to recieve double roundtime for all actions for a time.
Bolster: One can cast at alchemy products and herbs to enhance their desired effects.
Bloodstop: One can cast at a bleeding wound and it will perma-tend.
Wood Wrought: one can harden a wooden weapon increasing its stats for a bit.
Quicksand: One can cause the ground to liquify beneath a target causing them to sink more with every action except PULL <name> which reverses the sinking with a long roundtime. Victems that go under have their dead body resurface.
Quickstone: One can liquify the ground beneath an enemy and then solidify causing their footwear to become stuck for a short bit. Victems can step out of footwear and leave them behind or wait. Barefoot victems, non-flying familiars, and mounts have to wait.

Druids are fond of alchemy making the best herbs as they dont use empaths for healing. They love animals and train it's lore extensivly. Druids dispise metal as Barbarians dispise magic. Another trait they share is the ability to meditate with a flame to obtain boosts and abilities or scry visions. Perhaps the Druids are the missing link between the mana using and the manaless guilds.

With sorcery becoming more prevalent and even talks of it being allowed, a Druid Guild with 'good' sorcery would balance the scales against the 'bad' sorcery of necromancy. It could easily be sewn into the history and present storyline.

Just a thought...

I've kind of been thinking lately that it would be a cool ranger ability to summon golems, earth spirits and things like that ala necro's zombies. Kind of druid like but no reason it couldn't be a ranger thing in DR, or maybe a sort of ranger path choice.

>natural animals.

That works too. The funny thing though about your statement about earth spirits and golems and their relatedness to warrior mages was that it was about opposite of what occured to me in retrospect after I posted that. But I do agree that some may be in the realm of warrior mages but I think that it would be golems, magically powered constructs, they would be more warrior-magey and nature 'spirits' would be more life magic and therefore ranger oriented when I think about it. IE I could see a warrior mage spell that uses elemental magic to bring 'life' to earth, air, water, etc, where a ranger would use a spell to summon the 'life essence' avatar of some sort of natural thing, a forest, a river, etc.

My understanding of WM lore is that they don't really summon 'spirits', they summon entities from the elemental planes. So if he meant earth-golems like 'embodiment of elanthia's gaia' or similar nonsense they wouldn't need to conflict. And I think the last discussion I read had WM 'summons' pegged as more user-body-transformation. Like you voltron it up with the earth and become a sort of elemental plane avatar.

>Kind of druid like but no reason it couldn't be a ranger thing in DR,

I believe Necros are the premier 'pet class' in DR, so no other guild will have as many or as good pets. Design kinda changes and I'm not fully up on how DR3 effects that, so I could be wrong. But rangers I think typically get a mix of 'non magic' feats, like snipe, and other survival feats, and moderately powerful magic, since they're magic tert.

---

Adding nothing to the conversation since 1834.

>earth spirits and golem

I was thinking of earth spirit kind of link the elementals that show up around the Warrior Mage guilds. The word 'spirit' is too ambiguous. Familiars are 'spirits', so the WM guild has a history of interacting with them. When you put the name of one of our elemental books in front of it, pretty confusing.

Golems, to me, aren't necessarily specific to any type of magic. Since they're just material magically enchanted, I felt they should fall under the enchanting skill if they were ever to exist.

Elemental Lord Opieus, Master Warrior Mage of Elanthia
"For a bunch of radical empiricists, the Philosophers' system relies on a whole lot of faith." ~Armifer