llorenth on 27/8/2006 at 23:14

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Hello all. I'm a long-time lurker here. Recently I finished a 2.5 year DND campaign based on the Castlevania games from Konami. While talking with one of my players from that game about future gamemastering endeavors, I was hoodwinked into agreeing to run a Thief game. I've gathered from some reading here that others have also had this idea - I know it isn't original. I just wanted to introduce myself so there is some context to my posts.

The world of the official Thief canon seems deep while playing the game: there are these factions, all these characters, tons of minor details (ex: the rent sheet in the Shipping mission of T2), and just a lot of personality in the whole world. Looking at the games from 'outside,' though, with a mind to creating a playable setting, there is a lot less data to work with. So many questions with no answers outside of kidnapping Terri Brosius and Dan Thron and 'interviewing' them. :p

The biggest concern I see is that the actual world of the Thief games is barely even sketched out. I must give HUGE props to all the taffers working on the effort to map out the City. Obviously that is the main setting for any game using the Thief world. However, unless the Thief world is actually some tiny domain in Ravenloft (a la Paridon, which is quite similar to the City), it has to have a surrounding world. The games give a tiny bit of background here:

1. There is a Baron who rules the City. His rank suggests that the City is part of a Kingdom, which I see as the England to the City's London. The City must be a coastal trading port (docks a plenty), it has a river through it (like London again), and it must have the necessary farmlands and support surrounding it to be a viable city.

2. Some nearby cities and suburb-type places are mentioned, and even become important in T2, a la Dayport and Newport. Another mentioned is Bohn, suggested as a a source of antiquities. Dayport has a 'view of the mountains,' presumably the Esse Mountains mentioned to be near the City. Another location close to the City is the Hand Brotherhood's compound: its proximity is necessary as it is linked to the City by the sewer system. Cragscleft prison, perched atop an abandoned mine, is also outside the City but not too far from it. The bonehoard is somewhere in the area surrounding the City too, I guess.

3. Locations far from the City are very rarely mentioned. Two are "Lesser Hrabota" (just realized the pun there!) and "Addonizio" (where fine crystals are found/made).

4. Long before the City and the current civilization was that of the Precursors. Their city of Karath Din is somewhere near the City, underground. The Sunken Citadel of the Kurshoks may be as old, and may or may not be connected. The Precursors had their own gods, but the Kurshoks, like other 'beastmen,' had an association with the Trickster. The Precursors had a well organized society but were not particularly technologically advanced.

(I have a scenario for this, a creation myth where the Trickster, in a time before Man, took animals and made them into humanoid racesm with humans among them. Humans grew tired of living in fear, and one among them challenged the darkness with ingenuity and became the Master Builder of legend that the Hammerites worship much like a Christ figure. The Kurshoks saw the success of humans in defying the Trickster, and tried it themselves, but failed, as the Trickster was wise to the rebellions.)

Part of my issue with the Thief world being so small is that many of my potential players will have never played the games. They won't be familiar with the City at all, so they will have a lot of trouble playing as natives. Having most of them come as outsiders (as Zaya does in T2X) is thus ideal, so I'm left with the problem of developing the world outside of the City myself, and thus straying WAAAAAY outside of canon. I may have to do that, and I've been thinking about it.

Solabusca on 28/8/2006 at 07:21

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Actually, there's a hell of a lot of canonical information available about the City, if you know where to look. Not to mention reams of debate about the minutia of City-life. Add to that the specious and non-canonical/extrapolative projects like Theif World Map and the Keeper Theses (now very outdated, but still some good ideas to pick from), not to mention FMs and campaigns like Calendra's and T2X, and you have a nigh-inexhaustable amount of material to work with.

Search is undoubtedly your friend in these cases.

Consider the City and surrounding areas a self-contained campaign-setting. Just take a look at what's been done with Ptolus for a number of ideas.

What truly interests me, however, is what you've chosen to use for a system. Ages ago I was a proponent of D20-based gaming - I still think a good job could be done with Iron Heroes, True20 or the like; these days however, I think the truly appropriate systems would be something along the lines of Savage Worlds, Burning Wheel or one of the various Forge-bred systems.

Take a look for "All's Well...", for instance - it's basically a Thief PnP Rpg with the serial numbers filed off.

DarthMRN on 28/8/2006 at 09:05

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Without turning this thread into a "which RPG is best?" -thread, have you considered World of Darkness' Storytelling System? Thief is not combat-twink oriented, you don't fight huge monsters, and having extravagant amounts of hit points runs contrary to what Thief is about. You are forced to play stealthy and think carefully becuse you are very fragile in a fight, and in my experience that doesn't happen to any meaningful degree in D&D. In WoD on the other hand, you are fragile no matter how powerful you are, which would be very important to the suspense-factor of a Thief setting.

I have played Garrett in several fantasy-themed WoD settings to good effect.

llorenth on 28/8/2006 at 15:32

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Yes, I stumbled over (and over and over) all of this material AFTER posting the above message ;). Let it be said that a search for "RPG" didn't turn up anything (odd, that, considering the older posts I *DID* find with that abbreviation in their subject line!), but searches for "Blackbrook" and even "Brosius" turned up all kinds of good stuff. That Thief World Map especially takes a lot of work off my hands :). I just re-installed Thief Gold last night - all this Thief research has driven me mad to play the games again. I also downloaded the first two Calendra's missions. I had a great time playing T2X shortly after it was first released, so I have some high hopes for the Calendra series.



I don't really need the distant stuff for anything but flavor. A world seems unreal if there aren't distant horizons and far-off lands of legend. Especially legendary lands that player characters can come from and be unfamiliar with the City. ;)



My ideas have started framed around DND 3.5 mainly because that is the system I used for the last game, and in many previous games. So familiarity, for myself and my players, was the initial determinant. I admit I am open to the idea of using a different system, but one of the reasons I favor DND is the very well structured dual-flavor magic system, which seems to resemble the magic of Thief.

I should note that I'd be using the Wound/Vitality system (originally from Westend's Star Wars RPG) to make both PCs and enemies more realitistically vulnerable. The game I'm planning is SET in the Thief world, but the characters won't all be playing thieves or anything like that. I tried to make my Castlevania game close to the videogame experience, and that was probably the least popular aspect of that campaign. So what I'm really working for is setting, though of course I still want setting-specific concepts and items like elemental crystals/arrows, flash bombs, electric power, etc. DND is handy for making prestige classes for concepts like Keepers, Keeper Enforcers, Hammerite High Priests, etc.



I checked out the Savage Worlds test drive PDF you had posted in another thread. I liked the simplicity of the main combat / conflict system. It reminded me of two favorites: the AEG games pre D20 (Seven Seas and Lo5R), and even more of Deadlands (is there some relation there, seriously?), with the use of the card deck and tokens/chips/'drama dice'. Those two systems are great for their native settings, and far faster in combat than DND, but IMO fall flat on implementing a comparably rubust magic system. As for White Wolf's system, I'm very familiar with the 2nd edition of that, and I don't feel it works well at all for magic, and can be very cumbersome with the dice pool system.



Is that the name of a stand-alone system? I tried Googling it and couldn't find anything. My main aim as far as systems go is to take one I need to modify only very minimally. I don't want to write my own system, or modify one a lot.

jtr7 on 28/8/2006 at 21:30

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There ARE plenty of threads covering this topic, but the search function isn't functioning. :nono: