Editing Magipunk:Organizations (section)

=== Gold Guards ===

The Glassmaker's Alliance's security forces wear a distinctive yellow tabard, and are referred to by the general populace as the Gold Guards or, derisively, the yellow-bellies. 

The eponymous tabards of the Gold Guards are embroidered with a low powered protective spell (obsolesence varies from 1 to 3 – older tabards are retired), and the guards use a particular, and slightly odd, magically enhanced club. The club, which is about three feet long and fairly slim, has two long grooves on opposite sides in which slats can be inserted. These wooden slats hold the actual two spells that the clubs use – one spell designed to stun/put to sleep the victim of a hit from the club, the other designed to kill. The theory of these clubs was that the modular spells would allow the Gold Guards to flexibly respond to threats, while keeping costs down, as if one spell became dangerously obsolete, the other need not be replaced at the same time. In actual fact, the cheaply-made wooden clubs often fail to hold the slats properly, and having one slat fly entirely off the club is a not uncommon result of using the clubs in combat. The spells for the stunning and injuring similarly vary from obsolesence 1 to 3, and they are frequently of different obsolesence ratings from each other. 

The Gold Guards actually constitute the single largest police/military body in Atathorn, a fact of which the paranoid old guard of the Glassmakers' Alliance is painfully aware. As such, supervision of the Gold Guard is fairly tight. The Alliance forbids the Gold Guards from collecting or using their own weaponry or other sorcery on-duty, so a Gold Guard encountered by the PC's is actually likely to use his club and tabard. Gold Guards are issued two power tokens at all times (a testiment to the incredible wealth of the Glassmakers), but accounting for those power tokens is tight – if a Guardsman thinks he can get away with using just his physical abilities in a situation, he probably will, as it's a huge headache to explain the discharge of a power token to the Glassmakers' suspicious accountants. 

Gold Guards are decently paid, but almost universally despised in Atathorn, as the Glassmakers use them to squeeze the city tight. As such, most Gold Guards have a chip on their shoulder and something to prove, being used to the scorn of most of their peers. As such, brutality by the Gold Guard is unfortunately commonplace, particularly "forgetting" to use the lower-power settings on their clubs and going straight to the kill setting.