Welcome to Mad Jack's Guide to Thievery. This book has been long planned ever since I first began gaining experience as a thief really.

When I first came to Rolehaven I traveled with a group known as the Brotherhood. The old group comprised of, Me, Brennan, Dave, Lars, and a few others. This was back in the day when Gary ran the games and there were about 40 players a week, constantly.

Now this group although not a bad group at all, had an abundance of useless characters known as thieves. It was not the thieves fault they were so useless, (I was one of them) There was just no use for them in the game at that time. So I contented myself with brigandry and other less artistic thiefly pursuits. After a time though I got tired of it. I was a thief, an Elven thief, who wore studded leather armor, a helmet, and wielded a broadsword and a circle shield. Not exactly the spitting image of the light and nimble stalker in the night.

So after becoming bored with the bandits life I quit playing Elwyn and made a mage named Valdorn. I enjoyed mild success with this character gaining alot of cool spells and had a ton of fun roleplaying him, but in my heart I was a thief and wanted badly to become Elwyn again. A year or so after creating Valdorn (playing Elwyn on and off) I decided to MAKE thieves useful in the game. At this point the Brotherhood had broken up and I was a lone traveler.

I began playing Elwyn again, I started bringing lots of game money and buying people off and those kinds of things and the new Elwyn was born. I was frustrated that there were no guilds as I wanted to join the thievesguild very badly. So again I took the intiative and started one. Of course I was the only member but I had decided to change that.

Calling the group "The Rogues of the Crescent Moon" for legal reasons. (At the time Gary passed my idea for a hush hush thievesguild and threatened to jail me if his character or any others who weren't friendly to my kind found out about it.) So the deal was struck. The thievesguild was official and I was guildleader.

After allying with a strong and somewhat evil group of mercenaries known as "Black and Company" I pursued thieves who did not belong to the guild and persuaded them (sometimes with a forceful hand) to join. Membership grew steadily and soon the guild flourished, almost every thief in Rolehaven was a member and some of my best friends (to this day) joined up in the beginning.

Now, Gary still had tournaments, four to be exact, one for each profession. Back then the winners of these tournaments were known as The Town this and that (The Town Thief, The Town Cleric etc.) and Elwyn won the title Town thief twice in a row (it was legal back then) and this wasnt only one or two thieves that enetered, rolehaven had at least 11 thieves that enetered those tournaments to my memory.

Now I ran the hush hush thievesguild as well as being the Kings personal thief. (twice, did I mention that??)
So, now Im a cool thief with loads of thugs and power and theres still not much of a use for me. But at least by this time roleplaying my thief was VERY fun. I established a few guidelines that I believe thieves should follow and I just started seeing what I could do to further my profession.

Thuggery was always lucrative back then but "The Rogues of the Crescent Moon" did other things as well including starting a tavern known as The Rogues Alley Inn. It was an inn that anyone could buy from but if you were a member of the guild there was a backroom you could talk and hideout in. We made plans to over throw groups we didnt like, we planned assassinations (another lucrative job back then) and executed them. We were a criminal organization, FINALLY!

We became feared and we did what we wanted, the law did nothing to stop us as they were all on the take from the guild anyway,(awww, the good old corrupt days).

So the moral of this part of the book is, if it isnt there, make it there and kick those that oppose you in the ass with a quick blade through the skull.