Rogues in fantasy TTRPGs that aren’t Dungeons & Dragons
How to Rogue: a D&D 5e Masterpost
D&D 5e: Roguish Archetypes Masterpost Part I & Part II
Building a Rogue in 3.5 and Pathfinder: Collected Resources
Rogues in Fantasy Literature Masterpost
Dagger Fighting Masterpost
Thieves’ Cant Masterpost
Lock Picking Masterpost
Traps Masterpost
Tags and Credits
Basic Tags
How to Rogue: Exploring the Rogue class in D&D and assorted roleplaying games. Includes #fluff (roleplaying tips, character concepts, #backstories), #crunch (optimisation tips, guides, #magic items, #homebrew), and memes.
Rogues in Fiction: Exploring the Rogue archetype in literature, folklore, poetry, comics, games, etc, and #analysis thereof. Also relevant art.
Rogues in Theory: Exploring the Rogue archetype in history and society, and relevant subjects. Also #words of the trade (#etymology, synonyms, #thieves’ cant, linguistics).
Rogues in Practice: Tips on #how to stab and #how to steal (or, ahem, how to write/roleplay about stabbing and stealing), #exemplars of the trade (real life rogues and their exploits), and some less exemplary exploits. See also our esteemed colleagues in the #animal kingdom.
Art - Rogues Gallery: Rogue character portraits.
Art - Scene: Landscapes, fight scenes, #bar brawls, #heists, dungeon-crawling, etc. For urban landscapes, see #the city speaks.
Thieves’ Tools: Lockpicks! And assorted tools for breaking and entering where you’re not supposed to.
Tools of the Trade: Weapons! Mostly knives and daggers from all over the world (see the Dagger Fighting Masterpost for all the relevant tags), and some pretty swords and crossbows and the like.
Prison Ballads: The soundtrack.
…There is some overlap.
Quirky Thematic Tags
The ecstasy of gold: For loot, treasure, gold, and the deadly sin of greed.
The city speaks: For the hidden splendour of the city, from the gutters to the rooftops.
Heroes and villains: For good and evil and that grey waste in between which Rogues so often populate.
The phantom of liberty: For freedom, and storming the gates of heaven.
No tears for the creatures of the night: For the deadly sin of lust and its professionals.
The gambler’s face cracks into a grin: For gamblers and card cheats.
Dishonour on your cow: For honour among thieves, criminal codes, omertà, and blood feuds. File under the deadly sin of pride.
Fearlessly fleeing: For craven rogues and clever rogues. Wait, there’s a difference?
The ramblin’ rover: For vagrants and vagabonds and for the long-winding road.
The right to be lazy: For the deadly sin of sloth.
The hired man: For (mostly against tbh) the Rogue’s nemesis, the cop. See also #prison.
Swinging from the gallows tree: For the ignominious end that awaits us.
The quirk is strong with this one: See also #the potatoes of defiance, #big thief little thief, #the thrill of the heist, #the rich remember, #daring escape, #be the chaos you want to see in this world, #carnival, #stabbity, #only knives left, #dubito ergo sum, #fuck the king, #profanity makes everything better, #information wants to be free, #a begging I will go, #forbidden fruit, #the groaning rogue, #I fought the law, #the deserter. (#Tag namer explains some of the quirkiness.)
More Tags
Tabletop tales: It happened in somebody’s game.
D&D history: The conceptual and mechanical evolution of the Thief Rogue class in D&D, and other interesting stuff from the history of #roleplaying.
TRS: The Rogue speaks. Not to be confused with TSR.
Self explanatory: #D&D, #3.0, #3.5, #5e, #Pathfinder, #Pathfinder 2e, #AD&D, #roguish archetype, #feat, #skill trick, various #skills (#deception, #sleight of hand, #stealth, etc), #rogue fashion, #correspondence, #long post.
For anything else, try the search function and hope, but don’t get your hopes up because tumblr’s search function is appalling. Googling with the parametre site:theoutcastrogue.tumblr.com might actually be better.
Credits
All original work published here (i.e. the words and the occasional photograph of @theoutcastrogue aka @we-are-rogue, 2016–2026) is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.
Avatar image: “Tymora’s Luck” (detail) by Ryan Pancost, from Dragon Magazine #388 | Wizards of the Coast 2010
Header image: “The Thief” (detail) by capprotti, for the game Exile Gods | Distant Orbit 2009
he's fighting a beautiful buff lady. her shirt gets ripped and she's left in her slutty little tank top. "come on," you think. "why is the woman always wearing sexier things than her male counterparts." but fear not. now HE takes off his shirt and he's left in HIS slutty little tank top. equality. and then they kiss
[Gif ID: This exact scene happening in an episode of Leverage, where hitter Eliot Spencer takes off his jacked mid-fight with a buff lady in a strap-sleeved shirt to also reveal he is in a tank top. End ID]
If I were a murderer, and I'd meticulously planned a murder, and then I turned up at the place to do the murder and found that world-famous-murder-solver Hercule Poirot was also there, I would simply not do the murder.
Redditor "Mags_Smash" recently complained about seeing McAfee pop-up ads on his PC despite never having installed the antivirus suite. He ev
Redditor "Mags_Smash" recently complained about seeing McAfee pop-up ads on his PC despite never having installed the antivirus suite. He eventually traced the ads back to another app that his new LG monitor had installed without his knowledge.
After connecting one LG UltraGear 27GP83B monitor and two 27GN800s, Mags_Smash found that at least one of the panels had installed an "LG Monitor App Installer" via the Microsoft Store and Windows Update.
LG monitors are now installing unwanted ad-driven software via Microsoft Store & Microsoft Update. Basically, Windows auto-recognizes the new device then 'helpfully' installs drivers to make the thing work.
But the manufacturer is building ads into their stuff, which Microsoft blindly passes along. I bet if you read the LG TOS you "agree" to this behavior when you buy the monitor.
Note that it's not the monitor phoning home, it's a byproduct of how Windows self-updates its drivers. The monitor itself has no wifi or internet connection. There is nothing to block. It's also not Microsoft explicitly being dicks, as they're simply installing the manufacturer's recommended software.
Everyone knows "House of the Rising Sun," which is one of the most over-recorded and over-exposed songs in American folk music even if we ignore the Animals' recording of the song, which is so ubiquitous that many people think they wrote it. The Animals got their version from Bob Dylan, who recorded it on his first album after learning the song from Dave Van Ronk, who always said that he learned it from a recording by folklorist Hally Wood, who got it from Alan Lomax, who also taught the song to Lead Belly and Josh White.
Lomax was convinced the song came from Black tradition, which is why he taught it to Lead Belly and White, though he recorded three versions of the song in 1937 in eastern Kentucky, all from white singers, and the only earlier recording was one by Tom Ashley in 1933, also a white musician, although he was from Tennessee. Lomax confirmed his suspicions about the song's origins to his own satisfaction by asking older New Orleans jazz players about it, though this confirmation seems to have consisted of a few people saying they thought it sounded familiar. But the song very well could have white origins, since New Orleans was seen as the "sin capital" of the entire south and considering the provenance of the early versions.
There were also unprintable and unrecordable versions of the song circulating throughout the south, with verses like
There is a house in New Orleans
They call the Rising Sun
And when you want your pecker spoilt
That's where you get it done
They drink all day and fuck all night
And when your money's gone
They throw your ass out on the street
When the second shift comes on
Which seems to give the lie to the idea that the song is actually about a jail, not a brothel, something that even Dave Van Ronk himself came to believe.
Internet source for these fascinating verses: Mudcat Cafe my beloved.
And their source is the book Roll me in your arms: Unprintable Ozark folksongs and folklore, Volume I, by Vance Randolph, edited with an introduction by G. Legman (University of Arkansas Press, 1992). It says:
C. In all three following Ozark versions of this song, the protagonist is a wayward boy who has been "lead to hell's eternal brink," meaning infected with a venereal disease […] The final warning is also therefore to the brother, not the sister. Manuscript text from a lady in Benton County, Arkansas, November 6, 1949. She heard it sung by her brothers, about 1920, with several "nasty" verses which she could not remember:
There is a house in New Orleans,
They call it the Rising Sun,
Has been the ruin of many a boy,
Good God, an' I am one.
Beware the red light out in front
An' the pictures on the wall,
An' yellow gals dressed in purple shoes
Without no clothes at all.
Shun the red light an' flowin' bowl,
Beware of too much drink,
Them whores will take an' lead you on
To hell's eternal brink.
Tell brother Jim at home alone
Bad company to shun,
Or it will surely lead him on
To do as I have done.
There is a house in New Orleans,
They call it the Rising Sun,
Has been the ruin of many a boy,
Good God, an' I am one.
D. This fragment seems to consist of the "nasty" verses the lady offering version C "could not remember". Sung by Mr. R. S., Joplin, Missouri, March 19, 1950. He says that similar verses were sung by miners around Joplin as long ago as 1905:
[the pecker verses from above]
That said, it's folk. Nothing's ever definitive. Maybe the people interviewed were misremembering (the lyrics, the dates, or both), and maybe (probably!) there are even earlier versions that we simply don't know about, because no one wrote them down until the last person who remembered them died. It's the nature of the beast.
And there's already a discrepancy here. Randolph assumes that the censored version he got in Arkansas is neatly complemented by the bawdy uncensored verses he got in Missouri. But they both start with "there is a house", and the tone is very different, so my guess would be they are two distinct, if related, versions.
The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.
As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.
This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.
This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.
This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:
In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.
It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.
I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:
The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:
The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:
Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:
The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:
One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.
One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:
But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):
Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).
A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:
The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:
In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:
EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:
a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.
The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.
The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.
Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:
tragic failure state where someone gets sufficiently enthused researching the elite culture and literature of some historical period (which, in fairness, is very often the only kind we can easily access) that they start actually believing the legitimizing mythologies disseminated through it.
For treatment I recommend paleopathological analysis of commoner graves and skeletons vs. elites and a bit of light reading on famines and/or execution methods.
The PCs find themselves investigating a string of murders, all old sailors who gave up the sea years ago. They all knew each other (so you may spend time suspecting One-Eyed Yolanda before she ends up as the next body). It seems that the victims took precautions against supernatural attack, but it also seems to have no effect - the murderer brushes aside garlic wreaths and walks through pentagrams.
The murderer has been dead for 30 years. His old shipmates stole his money and left him on a desert island, far from trade routes, where he perished and swore revenge with his final breath. Five years ago, another sailor (let's make this one a friend of the PCs, for dramatic purposes) washed up there in a shipwreck. This poor fellow had the ghost for company, and it helped him survive... in exchange for a ride off the island. Good luck allowed this sailor to be rescued a few months ago, and he returned to his family. But the vengeful spirit calls on him. From time to time, it takes control and goes after one of the marooners, executing plans that have been thought out for decades. After the first murder, the possessed sailor knew he was doomed - if he turns himself in, the law won't believe he's not responsible for these deaths!
Can you catch the hapless murderer? Exorcize the nasty ghost and stop its spree? How about the poor family, will they be left behind when the sailor faces grim justice?
I come, old friend, from Hell tonight
Across the rotting sea
Nor the nails of the cross nor the blood of Christ
Can bring you help this eve
The dead have come to claim a debt from thee
They stand outside your door four score and three
Did you keep a watch for the dead man's wind?
Did you see the woman with the comb in her hand
Wailing away on the wall on the strand
As you danced to the Turkish song of the damned?
You remember when the ship went down
You left me on the deck
The captain's corpse jumped up
And threw his arms around my neck
For all these years I've had him on my back
This debt cannot be paid with all your jack
And as I sit and talk to you
I see your face go white
This shadow hanging over me
Is no trick of the light
The spectre on my back will soon be free
The dead have come to claim a debt from thee
Whenever I see some anon asking an artist if it's "okay to take inspiration" from their art it makes me want to make some kind of manifesto or billboard or PSA or skywriting campaign to undo whatever damage strange litigious illustrator types inflicted upon the most basic foundations of the creative process. We can't let them get away with this
I have one of these and I keep it in my IT toolkit because that teeny little screwdriver is the right side for laptop casings, but because it lives inside a large object it’s harder to misplace than a standard tiny screwdriver. Also because the look on a client’s face when you bring out a brass hammer to fix their laptop is absolutely wild.
Ex-libris by the Catalan artist Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920), made around the year 1900. These ones are some of the examples preserved in the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC).
An ex-libris, also called bookplate, is a kind of printed stamp at the beginning or end of a book that says who owns it (think of the stamp you surely have seen in the books owned by a library). Though ex-libris have been used since ancient times, their "golden age" in Catalonia was during the Modernist movement (the Catalan equivalent of Art Nouveau), where many bookworm people commissioned artists to have a beautiful personal ex-libris that they could use to stamp all their collection.
The text in the 1st one, written in the Catalan language, says "no matter how much you know, there's always much more that you don't know" (per molt que sapies es molt mes lo que ignores).
