Experience Levels of Thieves

Table 17 below shows the experience-level ranges of thieves as a function of how many there are in a guild. More populous guilds, which will always tend to be in major cities and towns, and rich places, are the ones which will attract more experienced thieves to them.

Table 17 should be used as follows. In the left-hand column is shown the number of thieves (this is the total number in town, not just in the guild). The next five columns show dice rolls which need to be made for the five highest-level thieves in town. The following column shows numbers, and levels, for the middle-echelon thieves; those above the level of apprentice, but not members of the senior ranks. All remaining thieves will be first-level apprentices.

The seniors should be taken as the top echelon of the guild. The highest level rolled will be the guildmaster (if there is one), or the most powerful guild-affiliated thief. The other seniors can be used to make up a ruling council (if there is one), or used for key positions such as accountant, quartermaster, deputy guildmaster, subguild-master (for one quarter of town), or others. The number of seniors can be slightly increased (at the lowest experience level) for really sizeable guilds. Freelancers will come equally from the middle-echelon and apprentice levels. If the DM wants any middle—to high-level freelancers, these should be scripted as individualized NPCs and not the result of any dice roll! It is important to separate out guildmembers and freelancers at this stage in the thief listing the DM makes.

Experience Levels: A Note

The levels from Table 17 will be low to medium, except for guildmasters of major guilds. This is designed to be suitable for campaigns which are not top-heavy with over-powered, high-level characters. If you have PCs running around at 15th level, or even higher, and you want a thieves' guild as a source of enemies, you will need to up the levels somewhat. You could always consider resting these PCs and playing at more reasonable levels, of course.

Table 17: EXPERIENCE LEVELS OF THIEVES

No. of			Seniors			Middle Echelon
Thieves	A	B	C	D	E
1-5*	1d3	1d2	1d2	—	—	n/a
6-10	d4+1	d4	d4	—	—	2xd2
11-15	d4+2	d3+1	d3+1	d2+1	d2+1	3xd2
16-20	d4+3	d3+2	d3+2	d3+2	d2+2	2x(d2+1),5xd2
21-25	d6+3	d4+2	d4+2	d4+1	d2+2	5xd3, 5xd2
26-30	d8+3	d6+3	d4+3	d4+2	d4+1	4x(d3+1), 4xd3, 6xd2
31-40	d6+5	d6+4	d4+4	d6+2	d4+2	4x(d4+1), 5x(d3+1), 8xd2
41-50	d6+6	d6+4	d6+4	d4+4	d6+2	6x(d4+1), 8x(d3+1), 12xd2
51-75	d6+8	d6+6	d6+5	d6+4	d6+3	8x(d4+1), 12x(d3+1), 15xd2
76-100	d8+8	d6+7	d6+5	d6+4	d6+3	15x(d4 +1), 20xd4, 30xd3
101+	d10+8	d6+8	d6+6	d6+5	d6+4	10% are d6+1, 10% are d4+1,
						25% are d4, 25% are d3

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