Specialist Help

Obviously, the fence is a form of specialist help, but the guild can also act to put members in touch with specialists to help them with certain ventures in more direct ways.

First, certain guild members will be specialists in themselves—expert lockpickers with exceptional Open Locks skill levels and others such. Multi-class thieves are also important people for many jobs—a mage-thief with such spells as invisibility, levitate, and knock (to consider but second-level spells) is of obvious value. Having one accompany a thief on a robbery increases the chances for success considerably, but even if this isn't possible, a simple invisibility spell precast on the hopeful robber gives an important edge for sneaking past guards and the like.

Then again, other adventurers might be called upon. Depending on the guild's relations with other bodies, a cleric (with find traps, among other spells) would be a most useful accomplice for many tasks. If the DM's campaign world has a deity which is an obvious patron for thieves (such as Olidammara of Oerth, or Mask of the Forgotten Realms), clerics of such a deity might well have very cordial relations with a thieves' guild. This is considered in more detail below.

The guild can thus act as a clearing-house, with names and meeting places to assist a PC thief hoping to pull a job but needing help. Again, whether these contacts actually agree to help will depend on many things—notably the reputation of the PC thief! However, the fact that they are there at all can be helpful for the PC thief, possibly for his friends as well, and can be very useful indeed if the thief PC wants to pull some job away from the rest of his usual adventuring group, when he must have some such extra help for success.

Of course, a thief may simply need the assistance of others of his own kind for some job he has planned. This may be a simple decoy person to help with pickpocketing in the streets, or an eagle-eyed lookout for a warehouse job. Either way, the guildhouse may be a better bet than hanging around dubious taverns and hostelries. The flipside of this, of course, is that an impoverished PC can hang around the guildhouse touting for offers of work himself!

Finally, a well-organized guild will even be able to help its members if they get into serious difficulties. A jailer may be bribed, a magistrate bribed or blackmailed, a man of law paid to plead the thief's case in the courts (if the judge or magistrate cannot be bribed). If the captured thief is very senior in the Guild, even a commando-style "liberation" may be possible! Such actions will leave the thief indebted to his guild for some time to come . . .

So, these are the main functions of the thieves' guild, as far as a PC thief entering the guild can see them. There are certainly other things the guild will do, and we'll look at them in due course. Before that, let's look at the other side of the coin—the responsibilities the thief has to the guild. For all the advantages, what does the guildmember have to pay one way or another?

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