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
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Otto Einfasen: "Write a note of apology to Lord Tachonis. We acted rashly. All smiles from now on, while we gather our strength in secret. [...] I do not think the time is right now. But when the time is right, we crush the skull."
AKA, Otto Einfasen: I have considered, and I have consulted, and I have decided. That goth bitch gonna die.
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I absolutely blame Facebook for this shift. Words cannot describe how freaking WEIRD it was in the mid-00s when there was suddenly this popular website where you were required to use your real, brickspace name and encouraged to post photos of yourself. Every single bit of Standard Internet Safety prior to then said that you should never ever ever do either of those.
sorry didn't realize the bridge has to be plain beige concrete. that was a load bearing plain beige concrete if anyone tags it the whole bridge collapses
I always feel so cheated in stories when characters are walking around with this Big Guilt and then...you find out that the thing wasn't their fault at all. And not in a "they thought they did it but it turns out they were set up" way, or even a "accepting that just because they did A which caused B which caused C it doesn't mean C was their fault", way but where they finally lay out the sequence of events and it's clear that any thinking person would not connect them. Like, fucking commit!!! The character isn't LESS compelling if they actually did the thing! You can't have the haunted brooding meow meow who is...also completely blameless
It's funny how there is (well, was? the pop culture moment's definitely passed for both atp) pop culture dichotomy of vampires versus werewolves. But also like a solid third of vampire portrayals in horror stories could be redone as werewolves with basically no changes but adding some fur and a bit of chewing.
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We need more women characters who are Male Protagonists. You know. Slightly haggard. She's splashing cold water on her face and gripping the edge of the sink staring in the mirror for a minute. She's coping badly with her deadwife
Let me teach you to wonder and worry
Permit me to tell you how to wage war
A creature's reach should exceed its grasp
Or what's a heaven for?
I'll show you the way to take thought for tomorrow
To struggle for dreams and to hunger for more
A creature's sight should outrun its might
Or what are the heavens for?
Taste of the fruit of the tree that is knowledge
Of good and of evil and all the world's lore
A creature's thought must exceed what it's taught
Or who is heaven for?
So come here and learn to become as the gods are
For I've got a wonderful secret to tell:
A creature's reach should exceed its grasp
What else is heaven? Or hell?
Gemini is better than search because Google enshittified search
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:
Write a critical AI book, and you become everyone's confessor for their AI sins. People in my life keep telling me about their guilty AI pleasures, in search of an explanation, absolution or7 condemnation:
Their most common confession: "I only ever use Google's A7I-generated search summaries these days. I no longer click those blue links beneath it, not even to verify the summary." People know that the summaries are full of "hallucinations" (that is, "defects" or "errors") but the summaries are right often enough that many people have come to rely on them, to the exclusion of actual websites, made by actual people, on the actual internet.
Everyone knows this isn't good. The reason there's a web for Google's Gemini AI to summarize is that Google – the thrice-convicted monopoly search company with a 90% market share – directs people to websites, and when you visit a website, you generate revenue for the site, which pays for its maintenance. Most commonly, you generate an "ad impression," but you might also buy a subscription, or generate an "affiliate fee" by purchasing a recommended product.
When Google strips all this away by harvesting an "answer" and displaying it at the top of the page, the bargain between Google and the open web breaks down. Google is extracting 100% of the value from the websites it summarizes, and giving nothing back in return.
This is a marked reversal from Google's founding ethos. In the old days, Google measured its success by how little time you spent on its site. The ideal Google outcome was for you to visit its page (or even better, just a search-box in your browser), type a few words, and get "ten blue links" back, the top one of which was the correct link to locate the information or resource you were seeking. The point of Google was to serve as a conduit, a trusted intermediary that neutrally adjudicated the relevance of every web page for every web user from moment to moment.
Everyone dunks on Google for its high-minded motto, "Don't be evil," but over the years, the company's mission was far more important: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." That was the pole star that googlers followed for the first couple decades of the company's history…until, that is, the company saturated its market and its growth stalled out.
That was when Google started to panic over its plateauing search revenue, this being an inescapable consequence of 90%+ market-share. The ensuing power struggle pitted googlers who were committed to technical excellence against the company's most ardent enshittifiers, who pointed out that by making search worse, they could increase revenues. After all, if you need to search two or three times to get the answers to your questions, that means the company can show you two or three times as many ads:
Where once Google measured its success by how quickly it could send you away from its site and out into the open internet, today's Google is a sticky-trap full of ways to keep you inside its walled garden.
A decade ago, tech had three major approaches:
I. Google's: let you do anything you want, but spy on you while you do it;
II. Apple's: strictly control what you can do, but leave you alone to do it in private; and
III. Facebook's: control everything you do, spy on you from asshole to appetite.
Today, tech is undergoing a form of carcinization, in which every company is turning into a Facebook-crab: maximally surveillant and maximally controlling.
Apple has added surveillance to its walled garden:
While Google has turned its free-range, internet-wide surveillance system into a walled garden that tries to keep you away from the open internet as much as possible.
Now, in Google's defense, the "open internet" kind of sucks these days. Any piece of useful information you seek out on the open internet is liable to be buried under half a dozen pop-ups, pop-unders, and dickovers:
Even after you clear these away, the actual information you're seeking is further buried in word-salads that anticipated insipid AI prose by half a decade. Think of all those omelet recipes that appear beneath 2,500 words of cod-Proustian remembrances of "the first time I ate an egg."
The major advantage of AI search summaries is in shielding you from all this nonsense. But where did all that nonsense come from in the first place?
It turns out that this is largely Google's fault.
Google and Facebook monopolized the display advertising market, entering into an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig the bidding so that advertisers paid more and publishers received less:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue
The Google/Meta duopoly suck up 51% of display advertising revenue – more than triple the historic take for advertising intermediaries (buyers, brokers, agencies, etc). As ad revenues for web publishers cratered, the "ad load" on web pages went up. This set up a vicious cycle: increasing the number of ads decreases the number of readers, driving publishers to increase the ad-load even more to make up for the losses.
The major brake on this is ad-blocking. In a world with ad-blockers in it, publishers contemplating an increase in ad-load have to confront the possibility that they will induce ad-overload in their readers, who will install a blocker that stops them from seeing any ads:
Google has been looking to kill ad-blocking for a decade, and now they're on the verge of making it happen in Chrome, the dominant web browser they use to reinforce their search monopoly:
Google long ago did away with ad-blocking on mobile devices (reverse engineering an app is a felony, which means an app is just a web-page skinned with the right kind of IP to make it a crime to protect your privacy while you use it). Part of Google's argument for killing ad-blocking for the web is that this puts the web on an even footing with apps – which is a very weird way to describe a race to the absolute bottom:
To top it all off, this decade has seen Google make a series of changes to its search prioritization that favored low-value shovelware sites over carefully researched, reliable alternatives. Search for product reviews and you're apt to get a "site reputation abuse" result from a once-reliable outlet like Forbes filled with useless and even dangerous reviews, which are ranked far above independently maintained, rigorous competitors:
This has only gotten worse with AI search, which preferentially draws from spam sites to produce decontextualized, highly confident recommendations for substandard, overpriced junk, at the expense of recommendations for good products:
It's not like Google doesn't have the ability to sort the good from the bad. Kagi.com is a $10/month paid search engine whose results are vastly superior to Google's. But Kagi doesn't have its own search index: instead, they rent access to Google's index, but apply their own (much smaller and less resourced) team's algorithm to rank the results for your queries. In other words, Google could deliver good search results, they just choose not to:
Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good." It refers to a counterfeit coin crisis in Tudor England, where people preferentially spent counterfeit money in order to make it someone else's problem; meanwhile, everyone hoarded their good coins. Soon, virtually all the money in circulation was bogus.
By downranking quality material in favor of low-effort spam, Google set up a web-wide version of Gresham's Law, where bad webpages drive out good ones, and since so many of those webpages contain product recommendations, they're greshaming the world of real products, too, so the bad is driving out the good there, too.
This is the problem that Gemini search summaries solve: in its role as the web's most important gatekeeper, Google remade them as an ad-festooned cesspit of garbage text and cynical shovelware sites. Now Google proposes to wipe out the publishers whose content they stripmined by breaking the web's bargain: that search engines are symbiotic with publishers. Google has turned fully parasitic, sucking the last drops of juice out of the open web before discarding its husk.
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I now have a VISION for Campaign 4's endgame. Modestly, I'm not calling it a prediction yet.
One thing that surprised me in the play/ritual was that the orc afterlife was restored (well, rebuilt with a new blueprint, because the previous one fucking sucked), but for now, not all orcs can get to it. Only the renegades – KoTher'ai. The specific people in that specific failed rebellion that the play was about. So only those invoked by the ritual. Called by name, if you will, though not individually – I don't suppose history managed to record the name of every single rebel and priest, and there were a lot more souls than cast members in the Hallowed Round.
And now we know it's not because the ritual was less successful or less expansive than planned, on the contrary it was more! The idea was to build a small escape tunnel for the souls, as proof of concept more than anything, and that incredibly powerful play created a whole-ass King's Highway. Still, not all orcs are passing through.
So what will it take? Now that the full plan is revealed – repeat 6 times, for 7 afterlives in total – what will it take for ALL trapped souls to pass through, orcs and halflings and humans and the rest of them?
And my vision is, once all 7 bridges are built and all the afterlives are technically accessible, they stage a second play. A play so epic in scope that it will make KoTher'ai look like a kindergarten sketch, a play that manages to invoke all mortals who have ever died, all species, in all of Aramán, in all of time. Wrapped in a ritual that connects all the bridges, scattered as they are across the land (hey, remember that Tachonis fuckery of long distance rituals?), and with a story so powerful, so symbolic, and so universal, that it effectively calls by name every single trapped soul, and liberates them all.
It would be the greatest show on Aramán. Fuck final battles and BBEGs, now that's a fucking ending. Do you see my vision?
