The Greatest Thieves in Orm

-

Thieves Guilds

Whether it be petty larcenies, street side flimflam, or complicatedly executed heists: all crime in Ur-Dun's population centers are run through the local thieves guild. While none reach the grand scale of the syndicate that once regulated all criminal pursuits in the nearby seat of the Empire-That-Was, these operations can still operate with a masterful secrecy and ruthless efficiency matching even the most storied guild of days passed.

The guilds of Ur-Dun vary greatly in internal custom, style, and work culture but they do share several traits across region that allow thieves and other criminals to practice with craft smoothly and the guilds to maintain their parochial power bases. Some of them include:
  • License of Operations- Anyone seeking to work within the territory of a guild needs to pay a monthly cost of 2d10gp per month. Anyone caught operating but not having paid for license quickly find themselves on a guild hit list.
  • Thieves Cant and Code- All guilds in the region share a spoken cant and written code secret to members of the criminal class. This jealously guarded system of communication enables thieves to discuss business, mark territory, and relay important warnings to members of the community. Each guild possess their own unique symbol making it easy for traveling rogues to know when they have entered their territory.
  • Safety- If a thief possesses membership in a guild, they can find a safe space among any guildhall for a night. No questions asked.

The Crooked Hand

Apologies to Jack Kirby.

Crime in Orm is run through the Guild known as the Crooked Hand whose guild hall mark rests in the door frame of the Lamplighters Guild located just east of the Monument of the Old Gods. The Crooked Hand is a mostly unfriendly lot but will do the following services for player characters if they pay:
  • Fencing- Items can be fenced on the black market of Orm via Flower. She collects a 10% of sale price fee and demands no questions about where the item goes be asked.
  • Spying- For a 100gp fee, the guild can deliver general intelligence, such as the observations of someone in a non-critical roles, on a target of interest. The intelligence gathering will take (1) week.
  • Loans- The Crooked Hand can offer an alternative line of credit to player characters in the guild's good graces. up to 1000gp. The guild requires no collateral but takes 25% compounding interest per week. If the debt is not paid off in (2) months, the debtor earns a spot on the guild's hit list.
  • Locks-The guild's resident yeggman, "The Duke", will attempt an lock possessing no active traps for 100gp. If "The Duke" ends up having to deal with any traps, by intention of the player characters or not, he will require a one-on-one knife fight to resolve this violation of his cardinal rule.
  • Membership- Player characters (thieves, theft acrobats, or a similar class) looking to join the Crooked Hand must use downtime activities to Cultivate a Relationship with a guild member. Only after advancing the clock on the relationship (3) ticks to Friends will the Crooked Hand member (known as a finger) will recommend the player character to undertake the rights of initiation granting true membership among the ranks of the Greatest Thieves in Orm!

Outstanding Business with the Crooked Hand

At the time of this post, two player character possess outstanding business with the thieves guild in Orm:
  1. Fräänk Shäärk seeks to begin the steps for membership into the Crooked Hand. Fräänk player, Avi, must select a guild member to Cultivate a Relationship with and post in the comments below how he desires to start such a process.
  2. Bindle is currently on the Crooked Hands hit list after a botched burglary in Orm. The guild offered Bindle to opportunity to square things for 400gp but Bindle had to turn them down due to having a anemic coin purse. Bindle's player Joe must either post in the comments how the Level 1 Thief attempts to lay low while th heat cools or compose a reply resolving the issue some other way.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Downtime Activity- Find the Right Buyer

-
Image
  Dungeons are packed with treasure. After all, isn't that why adventurers decide to plumb their depths? While treasure finds of items that spend easily like coins of precious metals, gems, and jewelry often make up the winnings of successful adventuring expeditions; they are not the only items of value a party will haul back to the surface world.  Eager to make the most out of a group's expeditions, they often grab anything that looks like one could turn over for a quick coin or two. To turn such items into gold, though, adventurers have to locate an interested party to sell these art objects, non-magical tomes, trade goods, and other valuable dungeon oddities. Below is a new downtime system for locating buyers for dungeon treasures not inherently valuable like coins or gems or easily pawned off due to being made of inherently high-value items (like jewelry, items made of precious metals, etc.). The activity is based on some of the other downtime systems designed by Ben L. w...
Read more

Adventuring in the Twilight Age

-
Image
Welcome to the Twilight Age Ever since the Empire-That-Was receded, no human endeavor under the fading red sun has reached its heights. Some say humankind no longer possesses the know-how to reach such grandeur. Others claim that confronting daily a sun that could fail them at any moment has filled folks with a spirit of defeat. Regardless of the reasons, it is in the face of such apocalyptic ennui that we find the peoples of Ur-Dun. Just south of the fallen Imperial capital city, this series of towns have become petty city-states just as embroiled in squabbles as they are in desperate dependencies fundamental to their survival. These human-led settlements are not the only civilized peoples in Ur-Dun. The mortal regents possess delicate treaties with distant Elfin Courts. The Gloaming Hills below the Slumbering Mountains are populate with small pastoral settlements of the hill dwarf (re: gnome) descendants of the folk that built the Imperial-era structures that litter the r...
Read more

Red Riders of the Drinking Crow Sessions #81-85, 87-89, and 93- The Black Pyramid

-
Image
 Back at the dawning days of autumn, a group of the Red Riders left from the Drinking Crow to journey into the Complex. They aimed to join a pair of lunar elves, Aureal and Ruitat, on their spiritual quest give to them by their Dreaming Tree: journey into the plane-hopping dungeon called the Black Pyramid. Visions of this foreboding structure had plagued the citizens of Orm for over a year. They grew more ominous and vivid with each passing day until it had materialized within the Great Cavern. What would they find within the pyramid? The Red Riders that had lived among lunar elves had been told it contained wealth beyond their wildest dreams. More importantly, the structure was a spiritual trial that could result in profound understandings. This view was not shared by others. The Phantomorians who had been staying at the Lazy River warned of the existential threat posed by the Black Pyramid. They preach that it is the embodiment of the left hand path that stands in opposition of t...
Read more