Thieve's Guild

This article is in relation to the Source Lands Setting, and the shadowy Westerland-based organization known as the "Thieve's Guild".

Origin
The Thieve's Guild traces its roots back to the resistance and rebel cells that formed among humans who lived as slaves to the High Elves. After the first city had fallen, the rebels sent out agents who infiltrated the other Elven Strongholds and formed resistance groups among the slaves.

Before the Fall
This initially sounds heroic, but it is important to remember that the humans didn't necessarily feel particularly oppressed at the time, and that for the majority, their lives didn't change after the fall of the Elves, as they largely traded one master for another. It was a criminal action, to form these rebel cells, and the people who orchestrated them were promised prominent positions in the world to come. It was primarily those who were already outlaws in the Elven Society that grasped the chance to join the rebellion first.

After the Fall
When the Elves were ousted, the humans left in charge of the many different settlements acknowledged the budding Empire in the making (what would later become the Westerland Empire). The many rebels had been in touch and formed a network, but it wasn't long until that very same network became a complicated conspiracy of spies and criminals. For some time, it worked as intended, and served the interests of the growing Empire, but this same network soon came to be known as the Guild of Thieves, and later the "Thieve's Guild".

Post-Imperial Era
When the Empire itself began to crumble, the Thieve's Guild became much more real than it previously had been. The Thieve's Guild had always functioned in a similar fashion to a "mafia", but now it was legitimately just a massive collection of independent organizations that loosely worked together and shared a number of traditions. Since then, many have attempted to reunite the Thieve's Guild into one proper organization, and many still regard the many Thieve's Guild Chapters as one massive network, which isn't necessarily entirely untrue, but the sense of unity that the Guild once shared is now gone.

Conduct
The Thieve's Guild uses a special set of symbols and methods of communication, made possible only by the fact that the High Elves originally taught all humans the same language - Common. The guild itself functions as a network and as an actual Guild, that protects its members from "unfair practices", but promotes internal competition between member-groups and individual members, but also sets down a number of rules.

The Code
The Thieve's Guild has a complex code, but among their more curious ideals is that they refuse to steal from the poor, and attempt to manage their rackets in a way where the poor tend to benefit. This is naturally not nearly as noble as it seems - the Thieve's Guild would not exist if the poor turned on them, as they shroud themselves in the hordes of impoverished underclass citizens who are NOT members of the guild, and quite frankly, the poor have nothing to steal. Less benevolent are their codes regarding those who violate the guild rules - generally, these rules are very finite.

Services
The Guild offers some services to all members - mainly access to information. While there are factions within the guild that are hostile to each other, certain international organizations offer their services to all who can pay through the guild, and exclusively through the guild.

The Guild Bank
The Thieve's Guild runs a number of local "banks". These banks are a combination of actual vaults and long-term investments into both local businesses, actual banks and anyone else who might prove profitable to loan money to. Members pay a percentage to the guild, or alternatively provide a flat-rate tribute.

Fences
The Guild pays a large number of people to remain "neutral" and function as general fences. Just because they are neutral, it doesn't mean that they will necessarily deal with anyone.

Information Brokers
The guild buys and sells information through a number of employed information brokers. Generally speaking, these are also neutral and unaligned. They function as middle-men, allowing members of the guild to remain anonymous, when selling the services of someone a given member might have in their pocket through blackmail or otherwise, to someone who might have need of said services.

White-Washing
Obviously, it would be far too easy to bust the thieves, once a known criminal suddenly has hundreds of gold-pieces. The Guild utilizes a number of rackets to white-wash money. In the medieval sense, that mainly means using businesses by buying them out of goods, at slightly higher than base-value of the items, paying in gold and then reselling the items under market value, for copper and silver pieces, or simply finding other ways of exchanging Gold for lesser coins, often at a slight loss, but thus putting money into the hands of many people at the same time.