I want a thieves guild in my town.Anyone built a working thieves guild?
Created rules around how to join?
I have some ideas, that I'll share, but want ideas on what others have done here. Share your thieves' guild stories.
So, as a player, I'm most known for playing 1e thieves. I've built working guilds as both a PC and a DM.
The thing about a thieves 'guild' is that it is simply organized crime referred to according to the social structures of the day. But fundamentally, as it may be expressed in your fantasy world, it would be identical to any of the structures seen in organized crime societies in the real (at minimum).
The main thing to remember about organized crime is petty theft is the least of their interests. Sure, they may expect a take from the pick pockets working the streets, but that's just a small sideline - more useful for recruiting perspective future retainers and keeping eyes on the street than anything else. All that disorganized individual crime - con artists, begging, theft, burglary, and so forth are more like independent contractors that require licensing by the guild to operate. The guild's main profits can come from any number of things that require organization - smuggling (whether of contraband or tax evasion), narcotics peddling, piracy, slave taking, prostitution, gambling, extortion rackets, blackmail, and so forth. Keep in mind that gambling may also mean pit fighting, dog fighting, ratting, cock fighting and various blood sports, so it may be the case that there is legal gambling and there is illegal gambling, and obviously, the guild will try to control both by leverage its monopoly over illegal gambling and its willingness to do violence to squash legal competitors.
Large guilds will also have legal front operations to handle money laundering and provide a veneer of legitimacy to what the establishments will do - tattoo parlors, barber shops, mercantiles, taverns, inns, massage parlors, bath houses, warehouses, and so forth. Fences and smugglers in particular need legitimate fronts. Brothels and gambling houses may need legitimate fronts if they can't legally operator (for example, out of a recognized temple, as many ancient religions monopolized prostitution as a sacred business endeavor) or bribe the authorities to look the other directions. Guilds may even engage in various sorts of community service, running orphanages, homeless shelters, 'soup kitchen', hospitals, asylums, and so forth. And it may be that many legal trades also have illegal sidelines and thus duel membership both in a legitimate guild and the 'thieves guild'. For example, apothecaries and locksmiths may provide legitimate services, and also sell poisons, drugs, and lock picks to members of the guild.
1) Familial: This is the Mafia or tribal structure. The guild is mostly a group of families that jointly operate a business or a group of related businesses that have commercial dependency on each other. Leadership in the business is quasi-inherited, with actual control of the business tending to pass not patrilineal, but to the relation that proves most qualified. Anyone that's watched something like 'The Sopranos' has an idea of what the structure of a family operation is like.
2) Mystical: This is more typical of Eastern organized crime than Western organized crime, but its particularly well suited to a D&D setting. In this structure, the guild is organized like a religious cult, with secret initiation rites, oaths, secret marks, mysteries, and inner circles. In a D&D context, the guild is probably indistinguishable from the cult of one or more deities that have dominion over or interest in things like larceny, theft, prostitution, drunkenness, narcotics, murder and so forth. Clerics of these deities not only oversee the training and initiation of members of the guild, but are high ranking leaders and supervisors within it. Interestingly, real world guilds actually operated in a quite similar manner to this. The leftovers of that can be seen in things like modern Masonic lodges.
3) Corporate: The real world pirate brotherhoods operated under this model, and it is most similar to the way modern unions - the philosophical descendants of guilds - operate. In this model, the leader of the guild is a CEO, and the members of the guild are shareholders in it. Leaders are subject to review and demotion by the shareholders, and the whole guild operates under a set of bylaws which can (at least in theory) be amended by majority vote. The main purpose of the guild is to ensure that the conduct of the business (piracy for example) is done in an organized professional highly profitable fashion without trampling on the working conditions of the people at the bottom, and ensuring that in the event of accident that the member will have some sort of payment on discharge or retirement to live off. Depending on the degree of actual representation that the members of the guild have, and how profits are distributed, this model can be highly democratic or very authoritarian. Keep in mind that all this apparent devotion to fairness may be done in the service of raping, murdering, and plundering everyone outside of the organization.
4) Revolutionary: The idea here is the guild believes that they are the legitimate government, and that the current government is illegitimate. As such, it sees no problem disobeying the laws of the current government. It tries to set itself up as an alternative government, with an alternative judicial system and alternative tax laws. The Mafia actually started out with this structure back in Sicily, and the depending on what sort of government that they want to overthrow and what they want to set up you may have anything here from Robin Hood and his Merry Men to ISIL.
5) Gang: This is structure without structure. It tends to be a fairly early stage of development of the institution, usually just first or second generation before morphing into one of the above. The early signs of where it is heading may be present. It's also typically indicative of complete, if perhaps localized, social collapse. Basically, this is just a band of brotherhood, that allies together to protect itself, often from similar institutions. If there is any government left, its relationship to the gangs is from the gangs perspective indistinguishable from its relationship to other gangs. A good example is 19th century New York, where the police force actually literally was one of the gangs (yes, the NYPD really did start out as a street gang). Alternatively, for a more modern example, LA in the 60's and 70's, and most cities in modern Latin America. In the middle ages, gang structures typically developed in the aftermath of wars, when the kings no longer needed mercenaries. Large mercenary companies soon found themselves out of work, and with no possessions. Few had savings or skills necessary to rejoin society - which had a rigid social structure anyway - and if they hadn't been cheated out of their pay by the noble, then they tended to have squandered their money and then claimed that they'd been cheated out of their pay because it made a good story. The result was you'd end up with bands of armed men roaming the country side living as bandits, extorting the locals and robbing anyone that didn't pay or which seemed like an easy target.
One of the best representations of the inner workings of a thieves guild in literature is Mark Twain's 'The Prince and the Pauper'. Other excellent reading is Oliver Twist, which features a very realistic gang hiding under its sentimental sometimes sanitized language, and Hugo's 'Les Miserables'. For game specific reading, the 2e Thieves Handbook is still the best material on a working guild (and probably the best 2e era supplement).
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