Limited Territory

The thief will almost certainly be told that certain areas and activities are definitely off-limits. This is likeliest to apply to major crimes and big heists when junior thieves are the hopeful plotters (the guild is unlikely to allow such inexperienced people the chance to bring the wrath of the law down on everyone's head). But territorial restrictions may be just as important.

The simplest form of this is that certain thieves will have their "own patch". Pickpockets are the most clear-cut example. A notably busy thoroughfare, one where merchants and (especially) foreigners throng, is a patch which a skilled group of pickpockets will fight determinedly to keep as their own, exclusive territory. Protection rackets are another obvious case of a demarcated territory where other guild members do not stick their noses in. These will include warehouses and offices and homes which are off-limits to burglars, because their owners pay a sum to the guild to avoid being robbed.

A more complex example of this is where sub-guilds control definite sections of a city and expect that only their own people are usually allowed any activity at all within that section. Exceptions are allowed only after careful consideration by the leader(s) of this group. This situation may happen if a guildmaster is weak and the second-rankers start carving out territory for themselves, but it might arise for simple reasons of historical accident (in a walled city with major internal divisions, gates between town quarters, and so on—the City of Greyhawk is an example). At its most extreme, a city might in effect (if not in name) have several thieves' guilds, each controlling one section or quarter of the city, with the boss of each splinter faction meeting with the others at regular times to try to co-ordinate efforts and defuse tensions.

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