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Seriously, I could write a book on those Thief games. Yesterday, in issue 205: Parting the Digital Sea, The Escapist published my all-too-short article, “Robbing Gods,” which just scratches the surface of the game’s world-building by looking at how it uses religion to frame us, the player, as mobile outsiders while simultaneously using it to define a rich, nuanced world for us to explore. Go and read that, and please do leave a comment over there if you have one — these kinds of articles are sometimes measured by the extent that they’ve provoked the audience, I think.

Click through for the complete notes on the Thief-inspired RPG campaign I ran in 1999.

Ridiculous Fandom Artifact

Ridiculous Fandom Artifact

If you’ve clicked over here from The Escapist, here’s a look at those d20 System stats for the Burrick I made. I make no claim to their worth, only their existence. This was rediscovered online, along with my old Thief fan page, sadly.

To demonstrate just how influential Thief: The Dark Project and its descendants have been to my design style, I’m sharing with you one more look at my embarrassing past, left adrift online like the flotsam it is: The Thieves’ Game website.

Somehow, this thing is nearly intact in the ground, a decade-old archaeoludological artifact from a time before blogs, when I put stuff online like an idiot, for just a handful of people to reference. And of course I wrote it as if it were being viewed by people who didn’t play in the game with us every week. Lunacy.

Look at that site design. Whatever you have to say, my response is likely to be: “I know, right?”

Of no interest to you are the (amateur shitty) illustrations, exhaustive histories, treasure list, and thin coverage of the fantasy city of Ulster. Of potential interest to some of you, though, might be the page of house rules we used for the SAGA system, our game mechanics of choice at the time. (Thus I can date this campaign to late 1999 and early 2000, as we switched to D&D, and a new campaign when 3rd Edition debuted in 2000.) “Thieves’ Game” was a lot of fun, very dramatic, with a really wonderful character-driven narrative unfolding from actual choices and consequences. I did almost no planning of story, only character goals and setting detail. This campaign taught me a lot about player freedom in closed environments.

The parchment texture gives it that fantasy vibe.

The parchment texture gives it that fantasy vibe.

It was also a corrosive, troubling experience, full of player-versus-player scheming and backstabbing. (This is, more or less, why we switched to D&D so quickly.) Some of that skullduggery spilled outside of the game sessions into metagame exploits meant to build tension or sway player choices. The players, in a sense, slipped outside the boundaries of normal player limits and stole portions of the Narrator’s role — all of this in ways that would be old hat now, with shared-authority indie RPGs, but it was a little troublesome then.

Players were keeping secrets from each other, lying for their characters about the location of stolen goods and what characters (both PCs and NPCs) knew about the PCs’ plans. This culminated in a secret plot hatched by half of the PCs to get one of their supposed comrades caught or killed by a band of rival NPCs, because they discovered their comrade had been stealing from them. They planned that operation for weeks, whispering over midnight tacos when the game was supposedly done for the night.

Oh, and the characters were all brothers. It was a great game.

Anyway, when I found this online, I thought it might work as a kind of Portrait of the Writer As A Young Man. But, yeah, it doesn’t so much.