Thief

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This page is for the stealth video game series. If you are looking for the page about the Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder class, please see Rogue.

We weren't kidding, steampunk Mechanicus is in here.

Thief is a classic stealth dark low-fantasy video game series where you play as Garrett, a thief, who gets entangled in supernatural goings-ons, including an Evil Nature God and his Beastman and Druid army, a Steampunk version of the Adeptus Mechanicus who build Art Deco-style hotels, and fanatics obsessed with warhammers. It also has a fanmade tabletop setting for the original setting, from before the series was given a shitty reboot set in a Victorian Era instead of Art-Deco Steampunk Medieval.

Funnily enough, Garret acts like a Ranald cultist, complete with the no kill-no evidence rule.

Setting

The games are set around "The City", a sprawling medieval metropolis so old, it has layers of older cities built below it. The oldest city, presumably the true name of the current one, was known as "Karath-Din", and worshipped a Lovecraftian entity called "Nyalathotep" which, despite sounding like Nyarlathotep, was represented by a statue similar to Cthulhu.

Characters & Creatures

• Garret Master thief, snarky guy who does thievery to pay his rent, overall a pretty relatable character since he was made during a time of badass hero’s. Has a no kill policy, but it’s less about honor and more about leaving no evidence.
• Thi4f Garret A kleptomaniac who does thievery because it’s the only thing he’s good at. (Heavily implied to be a reincarnation of Garret, as the original died hundreds of years ago)
• Erin Thi4f Garret's moody, bitchy, PTSD scarred protégé. Was a friend of Garret's as a kid, later became a prostitute before being handled roughly by a customer; after slitting his throat, she became a more willing to kill type of criminal and petty assassin, something Thi4f Garret disapproved of. Got fused with The Primal for a year and experimented upon by Baron Northcrest and was attempted to be used as a pawn by both the Baron and his estranged half-brother Aldous, who later became the rebel leader Orion.
• Orion/Aldous Northcrest Was the bastard half-brother of Baron Northcrest in Thi4f. Was sent to Moira asylum and tortured before escaping during the Chaos of an outbreak of Freaks, and started The Graven, a rebellion against The Baron to bring worship of The Old Gods back.
• Karras Narcissistic leader of the mechanists with a nasally voice, so narcissistic that he has all his robots look like him and constantly spout how cool he is.
• The Master Builder A stern figure who was said to be the brother of The Trickster, who espoused building cities and pushing back nature so mankind could thrive, he was the God of the Hammers (A cult formed around building and smithing, and who were rather brutal and nasty themselves, torturing and demanding strict obedience. )
• The Trickster AKA the Woodsie Lord, God of the Pagan Peoples and Beastfolk, causes zombie outbreaks and general disarray, he almost gets his plan to destroy The City to work but Garret used a Builder-created rigged-bomb to kill him. Looks like a badass version of an Ungor with a big tail. Is native to a twisted alternate realm called "The Maw of Chaos"
• Viktoria A wood nymph and reluctant ally of Garret (understandable because he kills her boss and she took his eye) who teams up with him to stop Karras secret master plan.
• Basso A fence of Garret's, who requires his help getting his fiance, Genevieve, who is an indentured servant, out of her noblewoman master's home.
• Thi4f Basso A fat grubby dude with a pet bird named Genevieve after original Basso's fiance, and Thi4f Garret's main fence.
• The Hag A skin-stealing cannibal witch who uses human sacrifice to ensure her immortality.
• Chaos Beasts/Manbeasts Humanoid animal and plant people. Definitely not the sexy furry kind, for the most part. Some breeds include Tree Beasts, Ape Beasts, Rat Beasts, Craybeasts & their oceanic Craymen cousins, Bugbeasts, explosive little Frogbeasts, and Wood Nymphs like Viktoria. They're killed on sight by the Hammerites and treated like crap & feared by the common folk of The City, but beloved by the Pagans living in the wilderness surrounding it, as they both venerate The Trickster.
• The Kurshok A race of Menfish who used to worship the Trickster and were once his favored people, even being allowed to have their own city unlike other Beastmen and Humans, until their king got a big ego and refused to return a relic to the Trickster. The Trickster fought the king, but even defeated the king refused to yield. As punishment, The Trickster sunk their city deep below the ground, and now the Kurshok are a shadow of their former selves, with current generations believing there is no surface world, calling those who believe there is "headsick" (insane). They are now a slowly dying people, with Ratmen beastfolk picking off their eggs and young as a delicacy.
• Burricks A species of vaguely dinosauroid critters with a sort of Squig-shaped body with a sort of meaty beak similar to a toothless Fimir. They have a scaly hide and two little forearms, but also have a mane of hair like a horse's down their back, and can belch forth a cloud of acidic gas for carving tunnels underground. Considered pests largely, mainly due to their tunneling destructive effects on the supports of buildings, but one noble keeps some as pets due to their goofy, stupid-cute look.
• Giant Spiders Luckily not Arachnarok sized, these giant spiders are only the size of a medium-size dog. Still pretty deadly, however.
• The Undead Various types of undead exist in the world of Thief. Ghosts, Zombies, Hammer Haunts which are a type of undead Hammerite Warrior skeleton, the Puppets at Shalebridge Cradle...
• The Freaks From Thief 2014, are a type of hideous mutant who look like an emaciated, hairless, pale corpse with skin growing over their eyes, nose, and mouth, with claws growing from their fingers and toes. Created by exposure to the magic of The Primal, the magical life-force of the land The City is built upon, which was corrupted by being fused with Erin, a PTSD ridden thief and Thi4f Garret's protégé. The Freaks are weak to sunlight and fire, and puff away into ash upon being killed by it. Sort of resemble a D&D 4E Bodak.

Games

Thief: The Dark Project

Garret learned other things during his time with the keepers

The original, packed with horror elements and some forced combat sections since the devs didn’t expect a stealth game to work (Thief is the grandpappy to all stealth games so they never really expected it’s success) Thief ended up getting rereleased in Thief: Gold, it had new levels, but most popular of them was the Thieves Guild, due to it being extremely long and dragging.

Originally a sword and sorcery RPG inspired by Doom and Quake called Dark Camelot, whoch would have been about Mordred trying to stop his mad father Arthur from brutalizing Camelot with a dark steampunk dystopia, it eventually grew into a stealth game when the devs realized that their engine handled stealth better than actual combat.

Thief 2: The Metal Age

Now knowing that stealth DOES work, the devs went on to make a more burglary based game, Mechanically similar to the first but wildly considered the superior game stealthwise (not horror wise, the horror levels are gone with the exception of Trail of Blood) Garret is back but instead of beating monkeys to death with a blackjack hes now stealing from the rich to get by, problem is the cities gone on an industrial revolution, medieval CCTV which only appeared once in the first game is now extremely common, alongside robots with double donk launchers and an actual submarine level. There's also an Art-Deco-style hotel skyscraper.

There was supposed to be a Thief 2 Gold, which would have added new enemies and a full blown necromancer level, sadly Looking Glass studios went bankrupt before this could happen.

Thief: Deadly Shadows

To make the game run and appeal to console players, it was watered down quite a bit, generally a good game it’s just low standards, glitchy and floaty for a Thief game. Despite its flaws, it holds the distinction of having one of the most famous and memorable levels not just in the Thief franchise, but in the entirety of video game history, that being the horrifyingly spooky Shalebridge Cradle, for context on how fucking spooky this level is, Thief 3 was consistently on lists with other horror games as scariest games of all time, solely because of this level. The plot of the game boils down to Garrett looking for the location of a murderous, shape-shifting witch known as The Hag.

Thief

The reboot, while the story was quite butchered, it was kind of a good game, not as a Thief game as it neutered the mechanics but as a Dishonored inspired game in an interesting setting (that was more interesting in the last games) Interestingly, it was supposed to be called Thief: Dagger of ways, where it would have taken place during modern day with Garret using silenced machine guns, which goes against Garrets entire philosophy of killing no one to leave no evidence behind. Instead, it takes place in a timeskip ahead a few hundred years, in a Victorian style period instead of a Medieval period. Karras' Art Deco steampunk technology must not have been rediscovered entirely, yet, although the current Baron is trying to create his own Steampunk bordering on Dieselpunk dystopia, with Clockwork Automatons lining rows of desks within his Keep, and Steam Pipes originally meant to transfer Primal Energy flowing from the Keep across The City.

Interestingly, the Hammers and Pagans are gone and this is a new reincarnated version of Garret, hence why he acts extremely different, old Garret was implied to have been put in an asylum where he eventually either died or escaped, no one knows but you can find his mechanical eye.

The Dark Mod

A spiritual successor, The Dark Mod is an open-source engine that anyone can use to create their own fan missions. Originally utilizing the Doom 3 engine, it became standalone and still has a thriving community, much like the custom mission community for the original Thief 1 and 2 engine.

Gloomwood

Whilst not made by the same folks as the original Thief games or the reboot, Gloomwood is a game marketing itself as the spiritual successor to the original Thief games, having the balls to have their website be called "Thief-with-Guns". It is developed by New Blood Interactive, the creators of Dusk, a game which successfully tried to recapture the essence of Boomer Shooters like Doom and Quake. The early access demo has released, and whilst more violence-oriented than Thief was, it has the textures, gameplay, and physics down pat. Also features the voice actress of Viktoria from the original two Thief games (and SHODAN from System Shock!) as the main villainess' voice actor.

The game has more of a Bloodborne/Gothic Horror feel to it than the original Thief games did.

What Makes It So Good

Thief aged so well because it’s just darn fun, it’s great to jump from a balcony onto some moss that you shot from an arrow so you can beat 2 cops unconscious, combine this with the fun setting (Bear pits anyone?) made an enjoyable experience.

Another thing Thief was known for was how you are just a Thief, a master thief but not a swordsman, you keep a sword but you're rarely going to use it, enemies can fuck your shit up if you engage them in regular combat (unless you do the double charged attack followed up by 2 quick swings, but it will just end up alerting nearby enemies) the game encourages you to not even fight at all, usually ghosting and with a quick blackjack to the head of anyone who happens to be too close for comfort. All that being said, you still have viable lethal fighting options, exploding fire arrows, landmines, shooting moss to choke them (only in Deadly Shadows) and the exploding suicide frog, for a while this was the only game where you could summon a suicide frog to explode in front of some poor sod. Well, before the Witch Doctor from Diablo 3.

Last of the reasons why Thief is such a well beloved classic is the sound, the sound design while a little old sounding is still really effective and can rival most modern games, combine this with enemies voice lines it lets you accurately pinpoint the locations of enemies. Indeed, a hallmark of older games and indeed many newer indie games has often been the use of impeccable sound design, both atmospheric and mechanics based, to heighten the experience and compensate for other shortcomings in presentation, and Thief is a franchise well versed in such audio mastery.

Role Playing Game

https://thief.fandom.com/wiki/Thief:_the_Role_Playing_Game

A group of fans actually took the time to convert Thief into a Tabletop Roleplaying Game. Sticking heavily to the lore of the original trilogy, it utilizes Fictive Hack, adapted from Old School Hack.

References in other Popular Culture

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim actually has a lot of references to the Thief series. The Dragon word for Thief is "Tafiir", a reference to the term "Taffer" used for thieves throughout the series. Mercer Frey, leader of the Skyrim Thieves Guild, is voiced by Original Garret's voice actor. And one of the Thuum Word-Walls tells the story of a Necromancer named Azaran the Cruel, who was the owner of the Necromancer's spire in Dayport within Thief 2: The Metal Age.

Gallery

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