Table of Contents
Thick as Thieves RP - Setting : The City's Criminal Groupings
Melza's criminal underworld is a real microcosm that overlaps with the “proper” society of the city at nearly every turn. A colourful collection of a wide range of different people, the criminal underworld forms what is basically a parallel society to the “proper” one. But just like that mainstream society, the society of the criminals and criminal organisations doesn't form a uniform or united organism. If anything, they are actually far more fractured, by goals as well as beliefs. And that's not even getting into the divides that exist within the major branchings of Melza's criminals, or the fact that some criminals prefer to work alone, while some prefer the company of others. Competition, friction, and even the occassional gang war are a simple fact of life in the criminal underworld of The City.
Professional thieves
They aren't the only criminal organisations in town. In fact, their brand of crime is effectively a minority group. The real dominance is by the various local mafias and criminal gangs, with the most powerful mafias being the undisputed rulers of the city's entire crime scene. The thieves' guilds existence is tolerated by most of these other organised criminals, but it's an uneasy truce and the big guys expect the guilds to tow the accepted line and not poach on what they consider their preserves. This mutual resentment is caused by a bit of an ideological disconnect between the criminals and other groups.
The guild members perceive what they do as not only their livelihood, but as a lifestyle that offers them freedom and bounds them with a degree of responsibility. This responsibility is enshrined in their codes of honour. Each guild has the same basic rules, and every guild has varying additional codexes of rules. A particularly upheld notion is one that, while they are thieves, they try to avoid harming or killing people, or causing disproportionate damage to public and private property.
Criminal gangs
In contrast, most of the regular criminal scene - from the small fry to the big cheeses - hold no such codes at all, outside of the occassional omerta-like code of “you don't upset or dupe the boss/the boss's family, or he'll have your head”. Effectively, these two different worldviews of crime is what separates the professional thieves from the rest of the criminals in the city. And given the ideological/ethical gulf between them, reconcilliation and willing cooperation between the two groups is effectively improbable. Some rare exceptions have happened from time to time, but these often result in the guild or professional thief getting disowned by its/his pals and allies, for daring to get too chummy with the mafiosos they silently despise.
The view the mafias have of the guilds is equally unflattering, considering the guildsmen to be dumb romantics and idealists, as well as needlessly covert and nuanced in their operations. On the plus side, they mostly don't bother plotting a silent war of extermination against the thieves, so the guilds can sleep easy most of the time.