Second Bill of Lading: Crime, and how it pays

I hope you'll all pardon that this post is shorter than last night's.

Graham said... There are a few pages on the subject of Crime in City & Gild.One of the book requests on the Berklist was for a Mediaeval Underworld sourcebook.Can you expand on this topic?

This is an excellent question. I know that at least three of the Ars authors have, at one stage or another, commented favourably on a particular book about medieval crime and said"Hey, we should use this for something." When I can find my copy of the book again I'll edit this post to put the title in. I'm not saying we are working on a book on crime: I'm saying there's a really good historical work already around that several of us have praised.

In City and Guild crime is something you do at one remove, with hirelings. Their skill is a representation of your skill at finding people willing to do illegal things, which is covered by your Intrigue Ability. So, to have a minion commit a crime, you give him orders and then roll on your Intrigue. There are exceptional cases: men hired by your father, for example, if you are new to business, may use his Intrigue score.

Crime, though, is having its golden age in the game period. It is the very best time, since the fall of Rome, for you to be virtually any type of criminal. This is an effect of monetarisation. We consider the process of monetarisation in the book, but we do not really consider this particular effect. A cash economy makes crime a lot easier.

Consider burgulary in the modern day. You steal something and hope to sell it or use it yourself. Now, its unlikely you'll steal for personal use, because you can only carry so much. You are much more likely to steal the most valuable things you can find, and sell them, then buy whatever you wanted to use yourself. So, you steal, and then someone who is British slang is called a "fence" changes your stolen goods into money for you, and then sells your goods on.

Now, in a barter economy, this doesn't work. If you steal, say, eight barrels of ale, what exactly do you do with them? You barter them, one at a time, for other goods. You can't just shift them for cash. Everyone you try to barter with knows you have them. Everyone who might buy them in bulk is unlikely to have bulk amounts of a service you want in exchange. Theft for personal consumption works better in barter economies.

Sale of goods in many small batches works really well in barter economies. If you kill a deer in a cash economy, you just find the right guy in the city to buy it. In a barter economy, you need to sell bits of it, which takes a lot more time, and involves you telling a lot more people. Many will be your accomplices, but what if one is an informant?

Dubious services also need money. You want to pay a guy to kill for you? A bag of cash is great! What else could you give him? Gemstones? Silks? Barter goods? And how do you get enough of these stockpiled without arousing suspiscion? All other illict services work better if you aren't haggling with oxen and chickens and can just drop a bag of utterly anonymous cash.

Also, the trade networks, and the large number of commercial travellers, give criminals a means to sell on stolen goods, and a ready excuse to flee if suspected. Two hundred years ago, a poor merchant would have a lot more explaining to do for why he wasn't at home tending crops.

So, I can't give you a great deal of information concerning the underworld in Mythic Europe, because it is just now getting itself going. Organised crime is far more likely in the large, wealthy, monetarised, cities. Large scale crime, run like a business, is very new. It follows the trends in business development, and this is in its earliest stages.