It's an entirely modern fixation which absolutely hasn't existed since the beginning of the hobby in various forms, and before that in fiction. Its probably a liberal plot.
>because it's pretty fricking stupid.
dont you mean cool?
a bunch of like-minded individuals who get together to advance their craft and make it easier to sell their craft is a perfectly reasonable set up
also, guilds were widespread in real life
and some of their insane specializations could rival the kinds players come up with
there was a pencil guild who monopolized the creation of pencils at one point
>a bunch of like-minded individuals who get together to advance their craft and make it easier to sell their craft is a perfectly reasonable set up
Might make sense if what you were doing were both legal and in high enough demand to warrant an organisation for it.
To have an assassin's guild make any kind of sense your setting is going to basically need to be fantasy courascant or set in dune or something, or like some big interdimensional setting where you play plane hopping transdimensional assassins and every contract puts you in a different setting for a few sessions. Yeah I could run that.
But personally I think the nerd fascination with assassination is weird. Like it just means murder. But apparently 'assassin' is nerd for like, ninja but not japanese. I've seen threads where the OP wanted a game centred around assassins and all it really boiled down to was cool sneaky ninja guys.
I think a more fun game would be stealing the conspyramid idea from night's black agents and play a cell of committed psychos murdering your way through a large and entrenched hierarchy that gradually begins to respond to your actions (which is what NBA does except the organisation is vampires).
>Might make sense if what you were doing were both legal and in high enough demand to warrant an organisation for it.
legality is probably not going to matter for people who want to murder
and people who want to practice murder are probably going to want a guild to make sure a service as hard to provide or advertise as murder allows demand to meet supply
and assassins who cant just walk up to a school and ask for new ways to silently slit someones throat will be more than happy to have a guild that spreads the latest methods of dispatching targets between its members
If it isn't legal then a medieval guild is not at all a useful comparison. Guilds had a legal monopoly on a trade granted to them by a city/state authority. If legality isn't an issue then what you are describing doesn't at all compare to a guild. If what you have in mind is a group of people working together to cover up their shared crimes you aren't describing a guild, you are describing a conspiracy. See
>Anon doesn't know about the mob
, who apparently also missed the point. The morag tong in morrowind is an assassin's guild, they have legal remit. A guild of assassins would have the legal power to have someone who participated in unlawful assassination punished by the legal system. What you have in mind is basically a gang with only one income stream.
Consider what a setting would have to be like for a gang of professional murderers to just do that and nothing else, and have so much business that the don't feel the need to just murder each other to take the business for themselves.
>and have so much business that the don't feel the need to just murder each other to take the business for themselves.
obviously assassins dont want to look over their own shoulder
so they unionize so that they are free to take targets without being afraid of someone stealing their kill or being killed themselves
2 months ago
Anonymous
idk anon I don't think professional contract killers are prone to being enormous pussies
2 months ago
Anonymous
they are just being professional about it
setting up a system so that everyone has jobs and only their targets die
2 months ago
Anonymous
This works if you're thinking along the lines of real-world crime organizations where most of the members ARE massive pussies, but I think it takes the wind out of the sails of a fantasy group of professional invisible murderers. Really just depends on the tone you're going for I guess.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>but I think it takes the wind out of the sails of a fantasy group of professional invisible murderers.
what good is a reward if you arent around to spend it?
and while you could go around stabbing every other assassin, its probably easier, and more profitable, to instead manage them
so the upstarts arent competing with you, you arent looking over your shoulder, and the craft of killing as a whole is advanced for everyone because everyone can teach everyone else
its a win-win, except for the victims
2 months ago
Anonymous
>train for presumably your entire childhood to be able to fricking murder people and get away with it >so you can be a wagecuck
It just doesn't seem very aspirational >but militaries do that too!
People in the military are for the most part not professional remorseless killers. These aren't comparable professions
2 months ago
Anonymous
>It just doesn't seem very aspirational
murder is a job, just like anything else
if youre gonna do it, then you better "wear a suit to work" so to speak
2 months ago
Anonymous
I'm just saying, I don't think most people play tabletop to "wear a suit to work" or to deal with NPCs and characters that do. YMMV
Mafia are highly factional and regional, to the degree that every single piece of mafia fiction is about mafia infighting and turf wars. Having a big interconnected series of aligned factions with some degree of actual complexity is fine, having "The Assassin's Guild" that operates along one set of codes under one organization throughout the entire fricking world is stupid.
I have to blame Bethesda for codifying the "Assassins Guild/Thieves Guild/Fighters Guild/Mages Guild" copy/paste garbage, but even then before Oblivion those factions existed alongside much more granular regional factions, so it wasn't AS moronic.
Very funny self-report that you don't know what the term 'monolithic' means though, I'll give you that.
>implying this isn't how most people treat their "guilds" in modern fantasy >implying Assassins having a more realistic guild would make sense anyways considering guilds operated under the blessing of the King and conducted open air politics and business
Now an actual straight-up mafia organization using a real, legitimate Guild as a front would be kino but that's not what OP's talking about.
>Now an actual straight-up mafia organization using a real, legitimate Guild as a front would be kino
What kind of artisan guild or the like would be best for that?
2 months ago
Anonymous
Figure it out yourself I'm not doing your homework for you
>nerd gets called out for being a surly idiot, writes essay
>four sentences is an "essay" >calling anyone else an idiot
lmao, even
2 months ago
Anonymous
Tailors, Cloth Finishers, and Merchants in Foreign Cloth. For various reasons, including being able to make puns about the tangled web they weave.
2 months ago
Anonymous
>Cloth Finishers
And here I thought the pun would be about the assassins being finishers.
It's a really good cover though. Gathering gossip from wealthy individuals, having private tailoring sessions with clients for info, being skilled at making disguises, and having a good excuse for why you have lots of needles and sharp scissors around.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Figure it out yourself I'm not doing your homework for you
[...] >four sentences is an "essay" >calling anyone else an idiot
lmao, even
I will point out thoughbeitever that real medieval Guilds were not exclusively artisan collectives. That's an oversimplification. Many guilds were just political associations or social clubs, sometimes called "fraternites" or the like but they operated in the same way as guilds and needed royal recognition. That's how you got groups like the Freemasons, they went from being an actual artisan guild to a socio-political guild and developed on from there. The weird rites of passage of groups like the Freemasons were an extension of the Guild rank/promotion system and were really just an elaborate way to prove your identification.
There were also some religious guilds though I don't know much about those personally.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Historically food service has been great for money laundering.
Cheap enough raw materials, that can easily spoil and be written off without anyone batting an eye.
2 months ago
Anonymous
Oh yeah if you just want straight-up medieval mafia it's the Millers. It's always been the goddamn Millers. Filthy goddamn thieving Millers with their rigged fricking scales and their dogshit yeast cut with straw dust or wood shavings. God how I hate them.
So you recognize that it's not just criminal factions, but the entire modern conception of guilds. Your argument was a fricking farce to begin with.
If you had gone that approach we could've actually gotten somewhere, as all guilds being local benefits the world and all guild archetypes (even martial ones). >Verification not required.
Mafia are also involved in lots of kinds of crime. Not just one specific one which they cannot create additional demand for. Assassination is not a viable business model for an entire organisation. How many people in your local medieval city get assassinated every week? Enough to feed, clothe, train, etc a whole platoon of elite deadly ninjas?
>hundreds, if not thousands
See this is why I suggested that if you want a game about an organisation of professional assassins you need fantasy courascant. Otherwise you'll run out of people with enough money to afford the service and find your PCs out on the street with a "will kill for food" sign.
>I have to blame Bethesda for codifying the "Assassins Guild/Thieves Guild/Fighters Guild/Mages Guild" copy/paste garbage
Pratchett did monolithic, organised Thief and Assassin Guilds in fantasy as far back as the 80s and his books were popular as hell. Bethesda neither invented this trope or was the first to include it in popular media
unironically elder scrolls did an okay job with the dark brotherhood. Successful assassins are blessed by a god of death, several metaphysical entities are involved with the process of gaining contracts and enforcing rules. Chapters that break a set of strict tenents are purged to the last person. Etc. Basically really good incentive programs and even better auditors. Also a focus on raising people from birth can help.
Honestly though, the Dark Brotherhood are lawful evil, and I prefer the idea of assassins as true-neutrals. They care very little for murder outside of it's use for making money, or accomplishing some task.
Elder Scrolls also: Morag Tong? They're a bit more neutral... In operation? They do worship Mephala, but they also have entered into a legal framework in Vvardenfel where they carry out legal executions and must ID themselves to the authorities after carrying it out.
Of course having said that, there's a reason you don't see 'assassins guilds' throughout history. Closest are the historical Hashishan obviously, but they were more of a religious order that specialized in murder, and the Ninja.
Assassination is when you kill someone for political reasons. I'm not sure how you have an organisation for that short of them just being professional murderers for hire, an extremist political movement, or some sort of religious organisation.
Ok listen, I know this is going to sound crazy, but here's a thought.
People in this line of work actually cooperate with one another. People help eachanother, with information, fences, reliable contacts, trainers, smiths, artisans and more. Even if you don't have any ideology, or gods, or creed, or anything of the like, having a strike team increases your chances of survival massively, a planner or a good smuggler get you shit on the inside and make sure everything's good for a long while. Corruption is inevitable but also incredibly practical to be solved, it just needs to inconvenience its investors enough to get culled. Ideals for murderers and assasins are usually too pragmatic to be betrayed, and higher ideological stances should be reserved for leadership guidance or circumstancial shit.
If your chief sucks, murder him. If the guild is going to hell, just leave. If everyone agrees this shit sucks, it'll sort itself out.
>How do you write an organization of assassins without it becoming corrupt or betraying its ideals?
They're religious assassins with a spiritual connection to their deity. Go full Hassan I Sabbah
New member's initiation is assassinating a long standing member, and long standing members are obligated to assassinate new members whenever it's convenient. This keeps everyone on their toes, and those unable to follow the code outside the guild, or dead.
>I'm going to artificially increase staff turnover and also paint a target on my own back
Nice myth but an organisation like that wouldn't last more than a month and it did only by becoming a Sith style Rule of Two
To reiterate from the last time we had this thread >Cell-based or individuals >Given loose orders from a far-removed figurehead (most likely in power within the community) >Also take on their own jobs at their own discretion >Portion of profits are given to figurehead to fund safehouses, equipment, and bribes. >Bonus points for targeting members outside their community while giving back to their own neighborhoods
Same as every other criminal organization.
>oh, there's a "thieves' guild"? >and they all report to leaders in their hierarchy and everyone pays TAXES on things they STEAL? >and everyone in town knows the thieves' guild exists, but nobody does anything about it? >what a load of baloney!
>let me guess, there's an "adventurer's guild" too, and they sell MILITARY SERVICE for MONEY, as if someone would do that outside of a video game. Awful worldbuilding, bro
>How do you write an organization of assassins without it becoming corrupt or betraying its ideals?
You keep it a family affair and even then it would still likely fail.
Middle Eastern assassins were on some insane religious zealotry shit. The point of them killing people in broad daylight was to strike fear of reprisal into the population, literally just terrorism. And hell, the israelites were on that same bullshit around the time of the Judaean Revolt.
How come nobody talks about the personal assassins?
As if any nobleman or merchant lord wouldn't have their own private team of spec-ops, to go along with their private military.
Make it a religious society similar to the Morag Tong. Writs can be sanctioned under the right circumstances, but ultimately the bonds are spiritual in essence.
In my game the BBEG is a fairy dragon named Burthrak that created the first thief and the half Ling race. The thief stole the world from the gods and gave it to the BBC to create the first humans which were half lings mixed with fairy dragons. In a few millennia the thieves began to shatter and after the BBEG enacted the Primacy Pact which forbade half lings from existing they went underground queue the protagonists who are fighting the BBEG to restore theft
I liked their autistic obsession with feathers in the first game, so maybe dial up the whole autistic fixations on [object] which may or may not be tied to lore/checks. Hard to corrupt if an outside force doesn't understand why they're, say, obsessed with lamps for example.
>organized assassins >corruption >betrayal >ideals
Huh... well, I dunno 'bout y'all, but in *my* Assassins' Guild, betrayal & corruption are the watchwords of the day, and the only ideal at play is striving to be the ideal assassin... or taking over the entire Assassins' Guild through politics, trickery & violence.
Think of it as built-in error correctiveness: only the most ruthless pragmatists survive, let alone advance in their careers; any coddling would render the Assassins' Guild too weak to survive, and it would rightfully be removed & replaced with a much more practically-minded syndicate.
The Old Man has not been seen outside of the Mountain in some time, and has been largely silent.
That said, there are rumors that the Old Man has slipped into dementia, doting over his pets & children like a sweet grandfather, apparently ripe for a knife in the back and an usurper to take his place...
...but there are just as many rumors that the clever Old Man is merely pretending to be incompetent, using himself as bait, in the hopes of goading the most eager aspirants to his throne into showing their hands so that he can wipe them out and clean house before appointing his ultimate successor.
Let real life inspire you. Give it a leadership claiming to interpret prophecy and the literal word of their tribal god, which also works hard to ensure that its members are hated by all outgroups so as never to be able to seek refuge outside of the organization.
Oh, and dont forget to have them mutilate their kids' genitals and diddle them for extra bonding-through-trauma points.
By having it being entirely merchantile. Someone posts a bounty, the Assassin's kill the mark, the guild takes a cut and hands the rest off to the Assassin. Simple, efficient, self regulating.
Make them ninjas raised from childhood to do the job and just the job, you CANNOT kill anyone else, only the target, but you HAVE to kill anyone who sees your face while on the job.
Don't make it woke
-1 for lack of originality.
Someone's going to have to explain to me this obsession with making monolithic "guilds" of player types, because it's pretty fricking stupid.
It's an entirely modern fixation which absolutely hasn't existed since the beginning of the hobby in various forms, and before that in fiction. Its probably a liberal plot.
Frickinggg moron go read Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser.
Mysterious shadowy organizations of cmpetent murderers is more of a npc thing than a player thing.
Thieves Guilds existed in the ottoman empire, it was just organized crime racket where people stole you're shit and then sold it back to you.
>because it's pretty fricking stupid.
dont you mean cool?
a bunch of like-minded individuals who get together to advance their craft and make it easier to sell their craft is a perfectly reasonable set up
also, guilds were widespread in real life
and some of their insane specializations could rival the kinds players come up with
there was a pencil guild who monopolized the creation of pencils at one point
>a bunch of like-minded individuals who get together to advance their craft and make it easier to sell their craft is a perfectly reasonable set up
Might make sense if what you were doing were both legal and in high enough demand to warrant an organisation for it.
To have an assassin's guild make any kind of sense your setting is going to basically need to be fantasy courascant or set in dune or something, or like some big interdimensional setting where you play plane hopping transdimensional assassins and every contract puts you in a different setting for a few sessions. Yeah I could run that.
But personally I think the nerd fascination with assassination is weird. Like it just means murder. But apparently 'assassin' is nerd for like, ninja but not japanese. I've seen threads where the OP wanted a game centred around assassins and all it really boiled down to was cool sneaky ninja guys.
I think a more fun game would be stealing the conspyramid idea from night's black agents and play a cell of committed psychos murdering your way through a large and entrenched hierarchy that gradually begins to respond to your actions (which is what NBA does except the organisation is vampires).
>Anon doesn't know about the mob
>Might make sense if what you were doing were both legal and in high enough demand to warrant an organisation for it.
legality is probably not going to matter for people who want to murder
and people who want to practice murder are probably going to want a guild to make sure a service as hard to provide or advertise as murder allows demand to meet supply
and assassins who cant just walk up to a school and ask for new ways to silently slit someones throat will be more than happy to have a guild that spreads the latest methods of dispatching targets between its members
If it isn't legal then a medieval guild is not at all a useful comparison. Guilds had a legal monopoly on a trade granted to them by a city/state authority. If legality isn't an issue then what you are describing doesn't at all compare to a guild. If what you have in mind is a group of people working together to cover up their shared crimes you aren't describing a guild, you are describing a conspiracy. See
, who apparently also missed the point. The morag tong in morrowind is an assassin's guild, they have legal remit. A guild of assassins would have the legal power to have someone who participated in unlawful assassination punished by the legal system. What you have in mind is basically a gang with only one income stream.
Consider what a setting would have to be like for a gang of professional murderers to just do that and nothing else, and have so much business that the don't feel the need to just murder each other to take the business for themselves.
>and have so much business that the don't feel the need to just murder each other to take the business for themselves.
obviously assassins dont want to look over their own shoulder
so they unionize so that they are free to take targets without being afraid of someone stealing their kill or being killed themselves
idk anon I don't think professional contract killers are prone to being enormous pussies
they are just being professional about it
setting up a system so that everyone has jobs and only their targets die
This works if you're thinking along the lines of real-world crime organizations where most of the members ARE massive pussies, but I think it takes the wind out of the sails of a fantasy group of professional invisible murderers. Really just depends on the tone you're going for I guess.
>but I think it takes the wind out of the sails of a fantasy group of professional invisible murderers.
what good is a reward if you arent around to spend it?
and while you could go around stabbing every other assassin, its probably easier, and more profitable, to instead manage them
so the upstarts arent competing with you, you arent looking over your shoulder, and the craft of killing as a whole is advanced for everyone because everyone can teach everyone else
its a win-win, except for the victims
>train for presumably your entire childhood to be able to fricking murder people and get away with it
>so you can be a wagecuck
It just doesn't seem very aspirational
>but militaries do that too!
People in the military are for the most part not professional remorseless killers. These aren't comparable professions
>It just doesn't seem very aspirational
murder is a job, just like anything else
if youre gonna do it, then you better "wear a suit to work" so to speak
I'm just saying, I don't think most people play tabletop to "wear a suit to work" or to deal with NPCs and characters that do. YMMV
yeah! an "organization" of criminals? what kind of idiot would write a story about such a thing?
Mafia are highly factional and regional, to the degree that every single piece of mafia fiction is about mafia infighting and turf wars. Having a big interconnected series of aligned factions with some degree of actual complexity is fine, having "The Assassin's Guild" that operates along one set of codes under one organization throughout the entire fricking world is stupid.
I have to blame Bethesda for codifying the "Assassins Guild/Thieves Guild/Fighters Guild/Mages Guild" copy/paste garbage, but even then before Oblivion those factions existed alongside much more granular regional factions, so it wasn't AS moronic.
Very funny self-report that you don't know what the term 'monolithic' means though, I'll give you that.
>Guild
>Entire fricking world
Anon I...
>implying this isn't how most people treat their "guilds" in modern fantasy
>implying Assassins having a more realistic guild would make sense anyways considering guilds operated under the blessing of the King and conducted open air politics and business
Now an actual straight-up mafia organization using a real, legitimate Guild as a front would be kino but that's not what OP's talking about.
>Now an actual straight-up mafia organization using a real, legitimate Guild as a front would be kino
What kind of artisan guild or the like would be best for that?
Figure it out yourself I'm not doing your homework for you
>four sentences is an "essay"
>calling anyone else an idiot
lmao, even
Tailors, Cloth Finishers, and Merchants in Foreign Cloth. For various reasons, including being able to make puns about the tangled web they weave.
>Cloth Finishers
And here I thought the pun would be about the assassins being finishers.
It's a really good cover though. Gathering gossip from wealthy individuals, having private tailoring sessions with clients for info, being skilled at making disguises, and having a good excuse for why you have lots of needles and sharp scissors around.
I will point out thoughbeitever that real medieval Guilds were not exclusively artisan collectives. That's an oversimplification. Many guilds were just political associations or social clubs, sometimes called "fraternites" or the like but they operated in the same way as guilds and needed royal recognition. That's how you got groups like the Freemasons, they went from being an actual artisan guild to a socio-political guild and developed on from there. The weird rites of passage of groups like the Freemasons were an extension of the Guild rank/promotion system and were really just an elaborate way to prove your identification.
There were also some religious guilds though I don't know much about those personally.
Historically food service has been great for money laundering.
Cheap enough raw materials, that can easily spoil and be written off without anyone batting an eye.
Oh yeah if you just want straight-up medieval mafia it's the Millers. It's always been the goddamn Millers. Filthy goddamn thieving Millers with their rigged fricking scales and their dogshit yeast cut with straw dust or wood shavings. God how I hate them.
So you recognize that it's not just criminal factions, but the entire modern conception of guilds. Your argument was a fricking farce to begin with.
If you had gone that approach we could've actually gotten somewhere, as all guilds being local benefits the world and all guild archetypes (even martial ones).
>Verification not required.
>nerd gets called out for being a surly idiot, writes essay
Mafia are also involved in lots of kinds of crime. Not just one specific one which they cannot create additional demand for. Assassination is not a viable business model for an entire organisation. How many people in your local medieval city get assassinated every week? Enough to feed, clothe, train, etc a whole platoon of elite deadly ninjas?
>How many people in your local medieval city get assassinated every week?
hundreds, if not thousands
>enough to feed, clothe, train, etc a whole platoon of elite deadly ninjas?
and buy them sickass penthouses too
>hundreds, if not thousands
See this is why I suggested that if you want a game about an organisation of professional assassins you need fantasy courascant. Otherwise you'll run out of people with enough money to afford the service and find your PCs out on the street with a "will kill for food" sign.
>I have to blame Bethesda for codifying the "Assassins Guild/Thieves Guild/Fighters Guild/Mages Guild" copy/paste garbage
Pratchett did monolithic, organised Thief and Assassin Guilds in fantasy as far back as the 80s and his books were popular as hell. Bethesda neither invented this trope or was the first to include it in popular media
Restricted to a single city
Assassin's Guild had a branch in Genua.
isekai weebs bringing vidyabrain into the hobby
unironically elder scrolls did an okay job with the dark brotherhood. Successful assassins are blessed by a god of death, several metaphysical entities are involved with the process of gaining contracts and enforcing rules. Chapters that break a set of strict tenents are purged to the last person. Etc. Basically really good incentive programs and even better auditors. Also a focus on raising people from birth can help.
Honestly though, the Dark Brotherhood are lawful evil, and I prefer the idea of assassins as true-neutrals. They care very little for murder outside of it's use for making money, or accomplishing some task.
There's nothing neutral about murder.
Murder for money doesn't seem morally neutral to me.
I mean it's not good, but it's a step above 'muahaha more souls to be fed upon by the void this pleases Sithis!'
I know zoomies are absolutely and completely morally bankrupt but killing for money isn't neutral friendo
Elder Scrolls also: Morag Tong? They're a bit more neutral... In operation? They do worship Mephala, but they also have entered into a legal framework in Vvardenfel where they carry out legal executions and must ID themselves to the authorities after carrying it out.
Yeah, but I feel them being able to openly assassinate people defeats the whole fun of it.
Ok then you want just a criminal enterprise. Don't make them as a thing that focuses on murder, but organized crime overall.
Yeah, but just more specialized.
Of course having said that, there's a reason you don't see 'assassins guilds' throughout history. Closest are the historical Hashishan obviously, but they were more of a religious order that specialized in murder, and the Ninja.
>They do worship Mephala
Funnily enough, so do the Dark Brotherhood, they're just too stupid to realize that.
Assassination is when you kill someone for political reasons. I'm not sure how you have an organisation for that short of them just being professional murderers for hire, an extremist political movement, or some sort of religious organisation.
"Assassin" has become fantasy patois for "hitman".
Ok listen, I know this is going to sound crazy, but here's a thought.
People in this line of work actually cooperate with one another. People help eachanother, with information, fences, reliable contacts, trainers, smiths, artisans and more. Even if you don't have any ideology, or gods, or creed, or anything of the like, having a strike team increases your chances of survival massively, a planner or a good smuggler get you shit on the inside and make sure everything's good for a long while. Corruption is inevitable but also incredibly practical to be solved, it just needs to inconvenience its investors enough to get culled. Ideals for murderers and assasins are usually too pragmatic to be betrayed, and higher ideological stances should be reserved for leadership guidance or circumstancial shit.
If your chief sucks, murder him. If the guild is going to hell, just leave. If everyone agrees this shit sucks, it'll sort itself out.
>How do you write an organization of assassins without it becoming corrupt or betraying its ideals?
They're religious assassins with a spiritual connection to their deity. Go full Hassan I Sabbah
New member's initiation is assassinating a long standing member, and long standing members are obligated to assassinate new members whenever it's convenient. This keeps everyone on their toes, and those unable to follow the code outside the guild, or dead.
>I'm going to artificially increase staff turnover and also paint a target on my own back
Nice myth but an organisation like that wouldn't last more than a month and it did only by becoming a Sith style Rule of Two
To reiterate from the last time we had this thread
>Cell-based or individuals
>Given loose orders from a far-removed figurehead (most likely in power within the community)
>Also take on their own jobs at their own discretion
>Portion of profits are given to figurehead to fund safehouses, equipment, and bribes.
>Bonus points for targeting members outside their community while giving back to their own neighborhoods
Same as every other criminal organization.
Their ideal is getting frickin paid
>oh, there's a "thieves' guild"?
>and they all report to leaders in their hierarchy and everyone pays TAXES on things they STEAL?
>and everyone in town knows the thieves' guild exists, but nobody does anything about it?
>what a load of baloney!
>let me guess, there's an "adventurer's guild" too, and they sell MILITARY SERVICE for MONEY, as if someone would do that outside of a video game. Awful worldbuilding, bro
I don't know why you assume that the guild is a public place.
>How do you write an organization of assassins without it becoming corrupt or betraying its ideals?
You keep it a family affair and even then it would still likely fail.
Don't have any ideals to betray to begin with.
The original hassassins were
>get high
>stab b***hes
>get riches
In various order.
Middle Eastern assassins were on some insane religious zealotry shit. The point of them killing people in broad daylight was to strike fear of reprisal into the population, literally just terrorism. And hell, the israelites were on that same bullshit around the time of the Judaean Revolt.
They're just violent buttholes, like most organized crime. There are no ideals just whatever's convenient for their current interests.
How come nobody talks about the personal assassins?
As if any nobleman or merchant lord wouldn't have their own private team of spec-ops, to go along with their private military.
I mean for most of them that'd just be a group of thugs out to break legs.
>Assassins guild doesn't become corrupt or betray its ideals
Just like that, also can add
>these ideals never change over time even if society in which the guild operates changes because they are timeless and universally applicable ideals
Have another organization of assassins watch over it and kill anyone who becomes corrupt
But if that organization also becomes corrupt?
Make it a religious society similar to the Morag Tong. Writs can be sanctioned under the right circumstances, but ultimately the bonds are spiritual in essence.
Make them out like Real Life Ninjas. They're Loyal to their lords and always keep their word.
In my game the BBEG is a fairy dragon named Burthrak that created the first thief and the half Ling race. The thief stole the world from the gods and gave it to the BBC to create the first humans which were half lings mixed with fairy dragons. In a few millennia the thieves began to shatter and after the BBEG enacted the Primacy Pact which forbade half lings from existing they went underground queue the protagonists who are fighting the BBEG to restore theft
all great organizations are destined to become corrupt.
>without it becoming corrupt or betraying its ideals?
Make them the corruptors insted of the corrupted, like CIA or Mossad.
High standards of conduct on which they pride themselves but no actual morals.
I liked their autistic obsession with feathers in the first game, so maybe dial up the whole autistic fixations on [object] which may or may not be tied to lore/checks. Hard to corrupt if an outside force doesn't understand why they're, say, obsessed with lamps for example.
>organized assassins
>corruption
>betrayal
>ideals
Huh... well, I dunno 'bout y'all, but in *my* Assassins' Guild, betrayal & corruption are the watchwords of the day, and the only ideal at play is striving to be the ideal assassin... or taking over the entire Assassins' Guild through politics, trickery & violence.
Think of it as built-in error correctiveness: only the most ruthless pragmatists survive, let alone advance in their careers; any coddling would render the Assassins' Guild too weak to survive, and it would rightfully be removed & replaced with a much more practically-minded syndicate.
The Old Man has not been seen outside of the Mountain in some time, and has been largely silent.
That said, there are rumors that the Old Man has slipped into dementia, doting over his pets & children like a sweet grandfather, apparently ripe for a knife in the back and an usurper to take his place...
...but there are just as many rumors that the clever Old Man is merely pretending to be incompetent, using himself as bait, in the hopes of goading the most eager aspirants to his throne into showing their hands so that he can wipe them out and clean house before appointing his ultimate successor.
Assuming he can even die.
Let real life inspire you. Give it a leadership claiming to interpret prophecy and the literal word of their tribal god, which also works hard to ensure that its members are hated by all outgroups so as never to be able to seek refuge outside of the organization.
Oh, and dont forget to have them mutilate their kids' genitals and diddle them for extra bonding-through-trauma points.
By having it being entirely merchantile. Someone posts a bounty, the Assassin's kill the mark, the guild takes a cut and hands the rest off to the Assassin. Simple, efficient, self regulating.
Make them ninjas raised from childhood to do the job and just the job, you CANNOT kill anyone else, only the target, but you HAVE to kill anyone who sees your face while on the job.