The Guild
Governing the Guild
The Guild is a syndicate of loose-knit groups under the authority of local kingpins. Nine-Fingers and her Lady’s Court head the criminal organization. A web of favors, duties, debts, intimidation, patronage, and gratitude hold the network together. Each of the city’s districts roughly correlates to one kingpin’s territory. The different gangs and kingpins compete, usually bloodlessly, for influence and territory. Nine-Fingers discourages arson, flagrant murder, and other indiscriminate actions that would anger or kill bystanders or upset the general populace. The most prominent gangs include Shar’s Serpents in Blackgate; the Bloody Hands in Stonyeyes; Ganthall’s Gallants in Whitkeep, dubbed “Gallant” for never stealing from females; and the Rivington Rats in Rivington.
Even though the Guild has only a few players in its upper echelons, operations in each district have a strict hierarchy. In ascending order of status, the ranks of the Guild include clients, assets, footpads, enforcers, operators, and kingpins. A foul-up at any level can lead to disgrace or death for the responsible party.
Clients: People indebted to the Guild are termed clients. These include shopkeepers who haven’t paid their protection fees, gamblers who are in too deep, and everyone for whom the Guild has performed a favor. Clients are not Guild members per se, but the organization often protects them: Clients are investments. Of course, the Guild does occasionally have to cut its losses, sometimes literally, but it’s best for everyone if a client sees the relationship as beneficial in some fashion. To understand the Guild, one must first comprehend the cabal’s relationships with its clients.
In the Upper and Lower cities, clients are typically folk whom the Guild is blackmailing or who owe money or favors to Guild members. In contrast, the entire Outer City depends heavily on the Guild as a governing force, since the area lacks formal law enforcement. An Outer City resident who has a complaint against a neighbor—a charge of theft, fraud, or assault, for example—must confront that neighbor directly, because no police or courts are available to aid him or her. In that situation, if the accused is stronger than the victim, the accused wins. And no one can prevent that neighbor from robbing, beating, or defrauding others at will.
But instead of simply putting up with things, a victim can approach the local Guild kingpin and ask for assistance. If the kingpin chooses to intervene, the victim might receive some sort of compensation from the Guild to offset losses. More likely, the accused will be beaten, have fingers broken, or wake up chained to a millstone—all of which are designed to encourage the accused to make his or her own reparations.
In exchange for this favor, the original victim—the client—now owes a favor to the kingpin, which the area crime boss can call in at any time. The client might be required to cater a party, hide contraband or house a wanted criminal, give up part ownership of his or her business, or arrange for a family member to be wed to a Guild enforcer. People who have little to offer, such as gamblers or sable moonflower addicts, might be asked to undertake some dangerous action, such as distracting a Flaming Fist patrol or taking the fall for someone else’s crime. Becoming indebted to the Guild is a risky move, but the cabal’s interventions have saved many lives, kept businesses operating, and punished innumerable villains who would otherwise have gotten away with their crimes. This same structure of favors operates within the Guild, too. Members seldom work for pay. Instead, they perform favors for each other and pay them off by doing clients’ favors—when they aren’t actively committing crimes for their own enrichment.
Structure
Assets
Anyone the Guild compensates who isn’t a member becomes an asset. Most assets are informants, such as harborhands, beggars, festhall workers, and laborers, who are paid to keep their eyes and ears open and report anything that might interest their handlers. Assets also include people who are powerful in their own right and are paid to keep the Guild’s best interests in mind while doing their jobs. This group includes corrupt city officials, Parliament of Peers members, and Flaming Fist and Watch soldiers.
Assets are indispensable to the Guild, but they get little respect from inside the organization. They aren’t members, have no authority within the Guild, and are told nothing they don’t need to know. The bailiff of the Wide, for example, knows which merchants’ stalls should not be inspected too closely, but not why. The Guild prefers for outsiders to remain in the dark, because bulging purses easily sway their loyalty.
Footpads
Cutpurses, con artists, alley thugs, bookies, and the like rank as footpads. Most want to move up the chain because they know they’re only slightly less expendable than clients. Footpads don’t pay regular dues, but most provide tokens of esteem to their local kingpins to curry favor, secure protection, and demonstrate their usefulness.
Footpads represent the part of the Guild that most resembles a traditional thieves’ guild. Their work isn’t particularly profitable, and their association with the Guild makes the organization less popular among the commoners who are often the footpads’ victims. But footpads serve an important purpose. Their constant thrum of low-level activity keeps the Flaming Fist and the Watch focused on petty street crime instead of on racketeering and smuggling, which are how the Guild makes its real profits. Fist and Watch crackdowns cause high turnover among footpads, which serves to weed out the careless and the stupid.
Enforcers
Guild enforcers are the group’s muscle and backbone. They aren’t trusted with high-profile jobs or delicate assignments, but they’re reliable workhorses for daily chores. Enforcers handle the Guild’s essential rackets in smuggling, protection, and gambling. They work as bouncers at gambling halls, go door-to-door through the Outer City collecting Guild fees, and make a fuss when a client doesn’t pay those fees.
Operators
The Guild calls on its operators when it needs mastery or finesse. For example, an operator steps in when a hard-to-frighten shopkeeper or public official defies the Guild and needs reminding of his or her place, when a burglary requires a master thief, or when the Guild needs to negotiate with a shrewd merchant. Because of their intelligence and skills, operators usually fill vacancies caused by retiring (or expired) kingpins. More often than not, ambitious operators use assassinations or bloodless coups to hurry those above them into retirement.
Kingpins
Kingpins function as the organization’s crime bosses. Each controls crime in one of the Gate’s districts. Kingpins compete with each other for prey and territory in subtle ways, avoiding bloodshed when possible. They work hard to always be in the know in their districts, and they succeed most of the time. Kingpins who claim territory in the Upper and Lower cities don’t rule in the same ways that Outer City kingpins do, because the Flaming Fist and the Watch reduce those populations’ reliance on the Guild. Without an army of clients to manipulate and milk for favors, kingpins inside the walls must create specialized systems, such as the Fetcher’s army of spies and runners.
Guildmaster
The guildmaster heads the cabal. He or she ties the kingpins together and addresses citywide problems. Many Baldurians, including low-level Guild members, are not convinced that a guildmaster really exists. The kingpins know the truth, however.
The guildmaster’s position and power derive from the same system of favors that fuel the rest of the organization. The figure known as “Nine-Fingers” Keene is currently guildmaster because through favors performed and owed, debts, and blackmail, she has personally broken and tamed most of the Parliament of Peers members, scores of Watch and Fist officers, and more merchants than all the kingpins combined. When a kingpin needs a law amended, a valued operator released from the Seatower of Balduran, or a ship offloaded without anyone noticing what’s inside the crates, Nine-Fingers can make it happen. When she does, that kingpin owes her a favor, and the system continues.
Culture
Protection
Groups of two or three armed enforcers make once-a-tenday calls on all Outer City shops to collect a share of the establishments’ profits. Shopkeepers who fork over this fee also purchase Guild-guaranteed protection. The amount each merchant pays is modest, but when multiplied by the number of shops, merchants, and bookmakers being skimmed, the total amount of cash flowing into the Guild’s coffers quickly becomes impressive.
When someone claims to have had a bad tenday of profit, enforcers check in with their informants to confirm how many customers entered the place of business since their last visit. Enforcers rarely make allowances for anyone. A proprietor who falls behind on payments can seek a loan, legally or from a neighborhood loan shark; accept the Guild as a full business partner; or visit his or her district’s kingpin to ask for more time. Holding out on the Guild might not cost in the short term, but it almost always turns out badly in the long run.
When enforcers finish their day’s collections at five to ten businesses, they return to whatever shop, office, or home is their current front; pool their coin with other enforcers’ takes; pocket their cuts; and then spend the evening gambling, drinking, and making small talk. Most Guild “offices” are in client-owned businesses. Restaurants, taverns, barbershops, bathhouses, pawnshops, moneychangers’ establishments, and funeral parlors are favorite locations.
Groups of three to six operators move the enforcers’ hauls from neighborhood headquarters to safe houses each night. One day’s haul from one collection point might bring in as much as 100 gp. The Outer City alone has nine districts, and each has a dozen or so collection points. Protection is a lucrative racket.
Gambling
Contests and games of chance are rampant in the Outer City, but making a decent profit off gambling in those districts requires grinding through thousands of low-coin bets. The real money in gambling is made in the Upper City, where patriars bet ridiculous sums on formalized games and anything else that catches their fancy, such as which captain’s ship will return from sea first or whose glass of wine a fly will settle on. Races and boxing or wrestling matches are hugely popular, as are dice games, spinning wheels, stick drops, card games, and guessing or bluffing games between professional teams. The Guild rigs these contests whenever it can, both to maximize its profit and to reward clients with payoffs that don’t need to be concealed.
Smuggling
One of the busiest smuggling routes in Baldur’s Gate runs between Rivington and Brampton. Anything moving by land to or from Rivington gets taxed at Wyrm’s Crossing and again at the Basilisk Gate. To avoid paying that double fee, smugglers haul goods by night along the river between Rivington’s and Brampton’s quays, hiding them in weighted nets dragged behind boats. Near the pier, underwater ropes are hooked to the nets. Other Guild members wait in a waterlogged tunnel that connects to a nearby building’s cellar to pull those caches under the pier, through the tunnel, and into the building.
From Brampton, the smuggled cargoes mingle with honest ones and make their way through Baldur’s Gate to the Wide. The Guild’s river smugglers charge less than the toll collectors and the porters combined, making the smuggling route highly desirable for those bringing goods into Baldur’s Gate from the south.
Public Agenda
The Guild keeps the gutters clean
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