The Silver Web

The Silver Web is the largest thieves’ guild in Haudh-Gwenn, and by some distance the quietest. It works out of the old Mól ruins at the center of the city and prefers blackmail, smuggling, forgery and quiet theft to anything that would put a name in the street. Twenty-seven official members is the whole of it, with auxiliaries, fences and informants past counting.

It does not rule the streets so much as thread through them. Businesses pay for protection, guards look elsewhere, and what the guild actually trades in is what it knows.

Vaerlyn the Pale

The leader, and rarely seen. Vaerlyn commands from beneath the ruins and surfaces masked when there is no avoiding it, dressed as a member of the Chantry of Tranquility, which is either an insult or a convenience and has never been explained. The reputation is for patience and precision rather than violence.

The name is a Taal word. It means unseen, or clever knot, depending on who is asked. Vaerlyn is said to send instructions in letters stitched with silver thread.

The Three Lieutenants

Serra does the guild’s talking. An information-broker, quick and exact, she runs the spies, cutpurses and messengers, and is rarely seen unless she means to be. She commands only four of the twenty-seven, and dozens of contacts across the city who are not counted at all.

Tony is the muscle: a half-orc who handles collections, threats, and the making of problems into no problem. He leads eighteen, the bulk of the guild, and believes in fists over finesse.

Dresk is a scribe turned forger, elderly and soft-spoken, who keeps the records, the blackmail ledgers and the bribes to officials. He has one man under him and arguably the most important work in the guild, because he is the one who knows who owes what to whom.

The Loom

The guild’s lair, a fortified stretch of ruin beneath the ruins. Entering the Mól ruins at all requires a token, which is most of why they are worth holding; those who use them call the place the Den of Thieves.

Campaign Updates

The Web and the Ten Lashes were never the same outfit, though both worked Haudh-Gwenn at the same time and were loosely enough allied that outsiders confused them constantly. The Lashes are gone. The Web is not.

The party got into the ruins anyway, in disguise, during the S3E27–E28 heist, with a guard named Foren on the inside.

By S4E46 the guild had settled into that shape, and it came to the party’s door. Tony sent watchers to size them up and, if they proved a problem, to solve them; the party took one alive, and the dawn ambush that followed ended in a standoff neither side wanted to finish. The party had too many enemies already and no strength to spare for this one, and the Web had reasons of its own: Beltran Grayeras’s heavy-handed extortion of the city had begun cutting into the guild’s profits, and Serra pitched a change of the guard as a goal the two sides shared. What they reached was a non-aggression understanding, a grace period and the loose promise of a downtown hideout. It holds because both sides currently find it cheaper than the alternative, which is the only kind of peace either party negotiates.

Then the guild put itself in Beltran’s way. The Silver Web was in on the plot to take his sword, through a member of its own, and Beltran answered it by strapping seven of the conspirators into rat-boxes in the town-hall square. The city rioted over what it heard had been done to them (S6E67–E69).

Haudh-Gwenn keeps other crews besides. The Broken Daggers are Casper’s. The Crimson Shroud take the dirtier work, run by Dusk with Cricket under her; they were hired to make the Sarro family disappear. Blackened Coin is a gambling ring of about a dozen under Ros, with Mira enforcing, and it has hooks in Freya Materai. The Silent Veil is a name the party has heard and nothing more.