A thief run town... How?

[Irda Ranger]

Specifically I'm having trouble working out how exactly a (fantasy RPG) town can be run by thieves.

I guess you've never been to Sicily or Chicago then?

EDIT: Damn, Treebore & S'Mon beat me to it. Should have known ...

So can anyone out there in ENWorld offer suggestions as to how to create a compelling, playable fantasy city that's run by the Thieves Guild but where the tThieves are still operating in the shadows.

Thieves aren't always in the shadows. Some are pretty brazen.

But just imagine if all of the Keiritsu Mercantile bosses of Tokyo had a Yakuza standing right behind them with a dagger held to their [fill in your preference here].

 

[Irda Ranger]

What you never heard of Chicago?

Oh, how original.

 

[Deuce Traveler]

What about the town near Hommlet in the T1-4 series? That was a pirate and smuggler's haven which I would consider a kind of thief-run town.

 

[Minigiant]

I played a game where the Thief Guild loobied to have certain laws to be breakable by person who had special licenses. They paid off the citizens to vote the laws in and put their guys in charge of the licenses. So as long as you paid for the license, its upkeep, and only broke the laws you were allowed to break; you weren't classified as a Black Hand. Black Hand were to be killed on sight and came with a reward of at least 50gp.

My elven rogue had:
A license to kill (up to 10 people a day)
A license to steal (up to 20,000 gp worth per robbery after division)
A license to create minor undead (unintelligent)
A license to create, purchase, and tranport explosives.
A license to not pay property taxes
A license to drink ale and wine outdoors (was stolen, that why I brought the license to kill)

 

[Imp]

But I'm having trouble with a town that is totally under the thumb of a Thieves Guild. Specifically I'm having trouble working out how exactly a (fantasy RPG) town can be run by thieves. Assuming a standard fantasy town with Lord Mayor, temples, trade guilds, town guard, etc. If all of them are run by the thieves doesn't the fact that they run it make them the government? Why then do the thieves need to be secret at all? Is skulking in the shadows just habit? Or do the thieves suffer from some middle class sense of morality that makes them punish their wicked ids by forever hiding in darkness?

I haven't seen this specifically addressed yet though this thread is quite good. My ideas:

1) Popular revolt. This happens in real life: I visited Sicily several years ago and there was a huge anti-Mafia campaign brought on by the assassination of a judge. (Typical D&D-type kleptocracies aren't at a police-state level since the thieves are not that organized.) In RPG terms, if the thieves are too brazen, they risk heroes coming in by popular request and messing up the works. Obviously you might want to have them get too brazen.

2) The existence of some other power center that gives them some veneer of legitimacy by tolerating their acts. Probably a temple or similar. Or, the city's military. There's a limit to how much they can screw around the city's army before it becomes too weak for defense, and thieves aren't much for leading armies directly.

 

[Gilladian]

Anyone wanting to see a really good portrayal of a Theives Guild which runs at least part of a city should pick up and read Tamora Pierce's "Terrier: The Legend of Bekah Cooper".

Bekah is a "puppy" - a trainee member of the Provost's Guards - in a day when the Guard and the Guild are almost two sides of one coin - when the guards are paid by their own exertions (read extortions), and are hardly more trustworthy than the guild that commits open blackmail and murder in the streets. It's a great story and a really good image of a time period of transition from not-quite-chaos to law.

 

[Dr. Prunesquallor]

So can anyone out there in ENWorld offer suggestions as to how to create a compelling, playable fantasy city that's run by the Thieves Guild but where the tThieves are still operating in the shadows.

I guess the simplest thing to do would be to make the city part of a larger nation or empire. The thieves can run things easily from the shadows, but if they declared themselves, the national or imperial government would crush them.

The Thieve's World series dealt with such a place, on the edge of a failing empire.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

And all that jazz...

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Think about the real life pirate town of Tortuga (or even modern-day Somalia) and mine that for ideas.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Hey everyone, thanks for the replies. Sorry to take so long getting back to this but was away sunning myself on a beach for the weekend. (And I left you folks to do all the hard thinking for me. )

Rechan wrote:
Having the veneer of "Everything is normal" is a very powerful tool,

I like this, especially for a town that is run by a single, monolithic Thieves Guild. They keep the forms of government as a cover/distraction/sop/target. Also very handy if that town is part of a larger political organisation (ie: a kingdom.)

Which I guess segues into all those of you who mentioned looking at the history of Chicago (and other similar places). I should have thought of Al Capone myself. D'oh. Good old Alphonse was the unofficial mayor of Chicago for a while there but could only ever be unofficial, thanks to the Feds. He needed to keep the forms of legitimate government and pretend to be a legitimate Italian businessman. Not that he pretended very hard at all. But the legal forms were all very well taken care of. This works very well for a thieves guild operating in an otherwise Good kingdom. A thief town would be a pocket of hidden (or at least plausibly deniable) corruption within the larger Good kingdom. With Detect Lie spells, plausible deniability would be essential. Hell, the thieves would even enjoy their rather open flaunting of the laws and government.

Loonook worte:
A guild for thieves is part think tank, part market, and part political machine...

Clavis wrote:
... Thieves' Guild is a Guild; it doesn't just commit crimes, it also regulates crime.

I like this too. Combined with what Rechan said about a guild operating as a corporation this is making all sorts of evil ideas dance in my little brain. Very cyberpunk ideas. A guild that looks for new and interesting ways to rip people off, er, I mean provide essential services for clients. (Just like a marketing department.) Pyramid scams, gaming, extortion, protection, prostitution and drugs all work so well in this sort of setting. And I do like the suggestion of corporate espionage.

Just thought of a VERY lawful guild, in which all these areas are broken up into different departments, each with its own rules and regs. Maybe even a complaints process. I can see it now, honest citizen Joe X goes into the guild to complain that he was robbed even though his payments are up to date. 'Nah mate, this is Protection. YOU pay US to protect YOU from THIRD PARTIES. What you're talking about is Extortion, where YOU pay US to protect YOU from US. Room 3b.'

CleverNickName wrote:
Competing syndicates of thieves run everything, from law enforcement to religion. Every guild (or club, or family, or whatever) has a "legitimate" face to their business, which gives the appearance of an ordinary town...

JDJblatherings wrote:
Don't have one monolithic thieves guild. Have crime families and lesser gangs. The crime families are tolerated by the "real" (but totally ineffective government) because they keep the lesser gangs and solo rogues in check a good amount of the time.
There could be a "Thieves Guild" but it should really be a more of meeting hall and means for the families to solve disputes without resorting to messy assassinations or open violence.

Oh yeah! The rival gangs thing is working for me. ESPECIALLY with the ineffectual 'real' government' and ordinary folks caught in the middle. On a small scale you can have Yojimbo (or A Fistful of Dollars for that matter) on a larger scale a full-on roaring 20's style Chicago complete with government corruption, St Valentines Day Massacres and outbreaks of public outrage at same. Plenty of room here for PCs to work on any side: for a gang; for the Syndicate as special 'cleaners' to prevent/hide excessive breaches of the peace; for the government as a secret anti-gang police or to silence 'unofficial' criminals; as outside heroes determined to clean up the town; as outside crooks looking for a piece of the pie.

Treebore wrote:
Plus don't some historians suggest that the Roman Senate and the thieves guilds/families were one and the same?

I've not heard this but I will definitely do some research. Actually... Just remembered a tale of how Crassus became the richest man in Rome. He used to head up the fire department. He would show up with his fire fighters and, if paid sufficiently, would put out the fire. But his preferred modus operandi was to offer to buy the building for a tiny fraction of its worth. Then, once he owned it, his boys would go fight the fire. And I'll bet dollars to donuts that more than a few fires would have been started by Crassus. Now that's what I call a really privatised public service.

Once again thanks to everyone for the replies.

Cheers,
Glen