You may be wondering at this point, my friend, how your shiny new Thieves’ Guild actually, well… functions. What’s in it for you, the administrator? How are you feeding all those Urchins? How are you bringing in enough gold to pay your Master Thieves? Remember, you can’t stiff a Master Thief on payday, as they’ll just make it up by walking off with something particularly valuable from the Guild’s foyer. Quick tip from someone who’s run a Guild or two: don’t keep anything valuable in the foyer.
At any rate, those are all excellent questions. Indeed, they had better be, since we saw fit to include them in this manual! Now, since you likely founded your new Thieves’ Guild in a particularly well-populated neighborhood, you’ll be happy to learn that the surrounding area should be positively filled with resources. Don’t see them? Look closer.
A boring, everyday person might look at a building like that and see somebody’s home. A sharp-as-knives Thieves’ Guild administrator, however, sees that mansion as a lucrative opportunity. Send a Master Thief figuratively knocking at a mansion’s door and they’ll come back quick as you like with a big sack of gold. The downside, of course, is that Master Thieves are very thorough: once they’ve robbed a target, there’ll be nothing of note left to grab on subsequent visits.
But what to do with all that loot? Well, you didn’t think that your guild would be specializing in smash-and-grabs, did you? No, sir! That’s why you employ a small army of Urchins! You WERE planning on employing a small army of Urchins, right? Haven’t you been following along? New Urchins can be recruited fairly cheaply by handing out some of that ill-gotten coin on the streets outside of your Guild. Not only that, but once you’ve got a few on your side, you can send them to infiltrate the local Orphanage!
Conditions there are downright deplorable, so it won’t be hard for your mischievous lot to start sending you a steady stream of new recruits absolutely free. Just make sure that the local authorities stay out of their hair.
Once your Guild is full of motivated employees, there’s no limit to the havoc you can wreak. Urchins are more than happy to infiltrate larger, more lucrative targets, like Banks. With the right equipment, they could even help you with dirtier jobs, such as, say, the occasional assassination…
But that’s enough about that for now. If anyone asks, you’d best pretend you didn’t hear anything about that.
