Setting

Where is the character from? This will have an effect on what sorts of skills the thief may have picked up. City, countryside, and wilderness are all possible settings; or the thief may have been a wanderer all of his life.

City: Any place where people gather in large numbers, there will be those who live off the sweat and toil of others. Besides politicians, thieves are often among this group. A city background will open many possibilities of specialization for your thief. Because a city is a complicated web of many people, each person tends to have more specialized functions. This is true for thieves as well as normal, respectable citizens.

Note that thieves in cities, especially those who have very specialized skills and abilities, are most likely connected with a thieves' guild; or, if they are not, they will surely run afoul of one sooner or later. If your thief hails from an urban center, be sure to figure out what his relationship to the local thieves' guild (or, in some places, guilds) is.

Countryside: A few thieves are able to make a living in a single populated, rural area. They tend to be quite different from their city-dwelling cousins—pickpocketing, for instance, is probably not going to be practiced much without the shelter and anonymity of the urban crowds. Extortion, banditry, burglary, and various similar thefts are more typical means of making a living from the peasants and their rulers in the countryside. Fences also may work the countryside, selling wares that may have been stolen in distant cities.

Thieves' guilds often have an active hand in populated rural regions, though it is not as firm as in the cities.

Wilderness: Thieves are, by definition, those who garner their living from others, so few are to be found making their permanent abode in the wilderness, far from human settlement. Those who do are usually bandits, with a stronghold set up somewhere secure, from which they can make raids on nearby settlements or trade routes. In AD&D fantasy settings, there are also innumerable possibilities for thieves who survive by taking liberties in their relationships with the local non-humans.

While few thieves' guilds would claim any wilderness as "territory," thieves from these regions are typically affiliated with one or another organized band of miscreants. These bandit groups don't have the organization or sophistication of the urban guilds, but they are still formidable, and their rivalries may run as deep as any among the big city guilds.

A great many demihuman thieves originally hail from a wilderness setting, although they do not necessarily fit the "bandit" mold common among humans. (See the section on demihumans, below, for more information.)

Wandering: Finally, some thieves have never called any place "home." They travel town and village, city and wilderness, wherever they think fortune might grant them better opportunities. Charlatans, those who make their living by duping others with all sorts of fraud, are often wanderers: They will stay in one place as long as there's money to be made, but they hope to be long gone, preying on others' gullibility, before their scams are uncovered.

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