copyright 1999, 2002 Roger White
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Fellowship and Allegiance are ways of sharing experience points. Players can physically hand around money and items, but there is no way to manually hand around experience. So sharing experience is the main purpose of fellowships and allegiances.
A fellowship is a temporary association. It is created sometime after a player logs in and will dissolve when a player logs out. While it won't survive a log out, it does survive death, when you die and resurrect, you remain in the fellowship.
There are three forms of fellowship:
The Non-XP-Sharing form does not share experience between the fellows -- you get experience only for the damage you do, and others get experience only for the damage thay do. This kind of fellowship is is open to any mix of character levels. It is used to facilitate communication, and optionally, to share the opening of corpses. With this kind of fellowship you can communicate easily with characters who are far away (such as in town selling and resupplying or in another part of a dungeon), and if your group is producing big piles of monsters as you kill, you don't have to sort through monster corpses to find the ones you killed when looting time comes.
The XP-Sharing with bonus can only be created when all the members are within five levels of the character who starts the fellowship. (If a 15th, a 20th and a 23rd level want to fellow, the fellowship with be XP-sharing with bonus only if the 20th level starts the fellowship.) In this kind of fellowship the XP is shared equally among all characters, but there is bonus XP added for each additional member of the fellowship. If the fellowship consists of two members, each will get 75% of the XP they generate together instead of 50%. If three join the fellow, each will get 60%. If nine people are gathered the XP bonus amounts to roughly three times the base XP. If nine people in a fellow are busy killing, there is going to be a lot of XP produced. But big fellowships are hard to set up, and there are few killing areas that spawn enough monsters to keep such a big group busy.
Physcial proximity is important for gaining XP in a fellowship. If all the players in the fellow are in the same dungeon, all are getting maximum XP. Those that have gone to town to resupply (or are runnnig back to the dungeon after death) and are far from where the killing is taking place, will get some XP, but at a reduced rate. If some players are killing in a dungeon and some are outside killing in the nearby wilderness, that is not as efficient as if all are in, or all are out. (However, if players are spead between two or more dungeons that have the same name, such as Hall of Metos, Ayan and Hall of Metos, Teth, or Black Spawn Den, Ayan and Black Spawn Den, Obsidian Plane, that doesn't seem to hurt XP gain.)
All players over 50th level are considered "high level" when it comes to setting up fellowships, and all 50+'s can join in XP-sharing with bonus fellowships. This is an enourmous benefit for those who are in their 50's.
Finally, we have XP-sharing fellowships with no bonus. These are the least common. The no bonus fellowships can be set up between players who are within ten levels of the character who starts the fellowhip, and the XP is shared among the characters based on their relative levels. If you look in the fellowship window, and see you are part of a fellowship where each player is getting a different sized piece of the pie, it's a non-bonus xp-sharing fellowship.
This kind of fellowship is useful for moving experience from characters who kill well to those who are not as good at killing. Those who are not as good at killing can either be mules who never kill, or mages who are healing and buffing characters, and debuffing monsters in this session, rather than tossing War spells and Drains at monsters.
A player must have the "accept fellowship" button checked to become part of a fellowship.
Fellowship members can chat exclusively with other fellowship members, and fellowship members show up as green dots rather than white dots on the radar screen. This is very handy for keeping the fellowship together, and for allowing members who die to find the group after they are revived back at a lifestone.
The fellowship relation is a peer-to-peer relation. The leader's only distinct functions are recruiting new fellows and disbanding the fellowship. New recruits must meet the leader face-to-face to be recruited, and if the leader logs out or disbands the fellowship, it disappears.
Some players find the XP sharing system in a fellowship disadvantageous. Lower levels, in particular, worry if they are getting their "fair share". Fellowshipping or not is a personal choice, but my experience has been that I almost always gain more XP when I'm part of a fellowship than I do when I'm solo because a group working together can take on more and bigger monsters than a solo player can.
The second consideration is that fellowshipping allows specialization within the group. If you want a Life Mage to concentrate on healing party members, if you want someone to overburden and "mule" for the group, if you want someone to "watch your back", you need need to share XP with fellowshipping.
If the level differences of players in the party members is extreme (over five levels), let a middle level start the fellowship. The level difference restrictions are based on the leader's level.
Allegiances are different from fellowships in three ways. They are longer lasting: logging off doesn't affect an allegiance. There is a superior-inferior relation in allegiance: there are vassals and patrons. Experience isn't shared: vassals get a full share of whatever experience they generate, patrons get a small extra percentage on top of what the vassal generates for him or herself.
Allegiances are also social stuctures on Dereth. They help structure who you will spend time with on Dereth. You should get help from your patron in a monarchy, and be sharing hunting and questing experiences with other members of your monarchy.
Allegiances are hierarchical: a character can be a vassal to only one character, but be patron to many.
How much experience flows from vassal to patron is based on three things: how much experience the vassal generates, the vassal's loyalty rating, and the patron's leadership rating -- the higher these are the more experience flows up.
A character can swear allegiance only to another character, and that character must be of same or higher level -- you can't "power level" a lowly 1st level by having a 20th level swear allegiance to him or her, and then have the 20th level do a bunch of killing.
In the patron-vassal relation it's clear what the patron gets. The patron gets a flow of experience points and use of magic items that have an allegence ranking requirement. What the vassal gets is determined by negotiating with the patron and the monarch. It is common to offer prospective vassals money, equipment, a fun playing environment and time "power leveling." Your task as a prospective vassal is to find a good "fit" with a patron and a monarchy.
Characters don't lose anything by becoming vassals. What they should gain is a pleasant playing experience with their patron and their monarchy. Here are some reasons to become a vassal:
Some magic jewelry and weapons require the character to reach a certain rank before their magic will activate; buying a mansion requires a monarch who has reached rank 6. For these two reasons having a deep pyramid of followers is good. In a Rank Pyramid each patron has two vassals. However, a deep pyramid of followers is not the optimal way to arrange followers for moving experience from vassals to patrons. For passing experience the followers should either be arranged horizontally (one patron, many followers) or vertically (one vassal per patron, making a long "chain" of pledges).
The result of these two different goals is that a single monarchy will often have two distinct sections: a rank section composed mostly of mules organized in a pledge pyramid, and an XP section which will be mostly mains organized in a long, thin pledge chain. When you join a monarchy, especially a monarchy that aspires to own a mansion, keep in mind that your mules may be valuable to the monarchy as members of a pledge pyramid, and your main may join a monarchy XP chain.
That's the fellowship and vassal system in a nutshell. Use fellowships to share experience, loot and communication in a temporary peer-to-peer way. Use allegiance to move XP from vassal to patron in a longer-term relation.