Rogues in D&D

1. Building Odysseus in D&D 3.5
2. Hermes, god of thieves
3. A Very Biased History of Alignment, Part I
4. D&D 3.5: How to Stealth
5. A Dance Guide to the Classes, Part I
6. The Stealth Handbook Part I: Abilities and Races [D&D 3.5]
7. Robin Hood: not Lawful Good, sorry
8. Why do Rogues steal?
9. Rogues: skillset, attitude, and purpose
10. A Rogue by any other name…: the translations of D&D’s “Rogue” in other languages
11. “Fans of Dungeons & Dragons seem to have a masochistic relationship with alignment…”
12. Gary Gygax: it’s complicated
13. Halflings through the ages and D&D Editions
14. Roleplayers Vs. wargamers: questioning the premise
15. A low-tech pirate trick: ambushing a big ship with two tiny fishing boats
16. How to Rogue: a D&D 5e Quick Guide
17. D&D Tactical Combat: How to Flank
18. The Thief’s Dungeon
19. Playing a smuggler in D&D
20. I solved D&D
21. The unholy mess of D&D 3rd Edition’s exotic weapons rules
22. Playing D&D vs playing online. Is it “vs” though?
23. Matthew Colville: On Being An Evil Character
24. Building a Rogue in 3.5 and Pathfinder: Collected Resources
25. D&D 5e: Roguish Archetypes Masterpost
26. How to Rogue: a 5e Masterpost
27. Traps Masterpost
28. Rogue deities
29. How to run the original Tomb of Horrors
30. The Wish spell: anything your heart desires
31. Parallels: Olidammara the Laughing Rogue / The Cynics Diogenes and Menippus
32. What’s a Thieves’ Guild and where did it come from?
33. [D&D 3.5] Open Lock optimisation
34. Rule Zero: A Timeline
35. The “Dumb Fighter” D&D Trope
36. Regional Thieves’ Cants in D&D
37. Deviating from the rules, or how (and why) to sneak attack with crowbars and glaives
38. Cold Iron in folklore, fiction, and RPGs
39. Thieves’ Guilds in History, according to Pathfinder
40. [D&D 5.5 / 2024 PHB] Rogue tweaks
41. [D&D 5.5 / 2024 PHB] The Sneak Attacker’s cheat sheet: ways to attack with advantage
42. Rogues in fantasy TTRPGs that aren’t Dungeons & Dragons

Rogues in Fiction

1. Thief-Hero #1: Prometheus
2. Epitaph (Ballad in Which Macheath Begs All Men For Forgiveness), and The Threepenny Opera censored
3. Non Serviam
4. Pirate Jenny
5. Start of Darkness: The Order of the Stick, and fantasy beyond escapism
6. Seven Samurai: Drama Though Action
7. The theft of Apollo’s cattle
8. Nasreddin Hodja plays the Judge
9. On The Importance of Being Scared
10. The thief in the shadows
11. Percival Fredrickstein Von Musel Klossowski de Rolo III: Origins
12. Top 10 Prison Dramas
13. Cardsharps in Genre Painting
14. Moulin Rogue
15. Outlaw Ballads
16. Review: Robin Hood (Ridley Scott, 2010)
17. Black Sails, Levellers, and monsters
18. Robin Hood (2018): an involved review
19. A Caveat for Cut-purses
20. Hades in popular culture
21. The one who strays
22. The cutthroat Robin Hood and his “inexplicable” appeal
23. Between heaven and hell
24. The amazing Guillermo de la Cruz, or why vampire hunters should be Rogues
25. The Whipping Cheer
26. “The Song of the Young Prig”, a broadside ballad in thieves’ cant
27. La casa de papel / Money Heist (2017-2021)
28. The Great Silence
29. A Sermon in Praise of Thieves and Thievery
30. Exandria Unlimited: Calamity – The Eyes of Avalir
31. Robin Hood’s Last Arrow
32. Why knights jousted with snails in medieval manuscripts
33. The Anger and Sorrow of John Clare
34. Spanish bandits on French stages
35. Robin Hood and Maid Marian
36. Robin Hood: now in meme
37. The daring escapes of Jack Sheppard on stage
38. How Tolkien invented dwarves (it used to be “dwarfs”)
39. As The Order of the Stick nears its end
40. Rogue-phonics

Rogues in Real Life

1. Mafia Lore: Honour and Blood
2. Thieves’ Guild on the march: The Procession of the Guilds, Istanbul, 1638
3. The bandit/irregular/soldier loop
4. Two short Mafia stories, from the point of view of foreign students in Italy
5. The gambler’s face cracks into a grin: ramblings about gambling
6. The Good King™
7. A slice of life of crime
8. Trespassing
9. Stealing back the commons
10. Damn those jacks of all trades!
11. “What is honour? a word.”
12. No rest for the wicked: Anti-vagrancy laws in Tudor England, 1495-1604
13. Pious pirates: sharing the booty with the saints
14. Historical Lockpicking
15. Two short stories of defiance
16. Corsairs, Pirates, Privateers
17. Bulla Felix, Rome’s noble bandit: myth and mythbusting
18. How the conception of banditry changed over time in Greece (spoiler: not much)
19. Despised executioners
20. Articles of the Fraternity of Rogues and Vagabonds
21. Shanghaiing
22. The last shall be first, and the first shall be aghast: in which the Plague upends the social order
23. Shipwreckers, or pirates lite
24. The dreaded pirates of Barbary
25. Brigantesse
26. Police is a modern invention. Is that because previously “the army did that job”?
27. A plague of rats and other misguided bounties
28. Housebreakers and Burglars of Victorian London
29. Rogues, Vagabonds, and Beggars in Elizabethan England
30. Knights and/or Robbers in the Holy Roman Empire
31. Picking Pockets in Elizabethan London
32. The Paris prison that was more terrible than Bastille
33. Outlaws and escaped serfs in 14th century England
34. In defence of crime, by Karl Marx
35. Dick Turpin and the English obsession with highwaymen, from the point of view of a French traveller
36. Sheriffs and prisons of Medieval London
37. Anglo-Saxon Law: Theft
38. Pickpockets and Shoplifters in Victorian London
39. Jonathan Wild vs Jack Sheppard
40. Piracy and hegemony in ancient Greece
41. Prosper Mérimée: The Robbers (from “Letters from Spain”)
42. Breaking Stupid Ancient Laws
43. The Garrotting Panics
44. Pirate Communes
45. Elizabethan rogues and vagabonds: Origins
46. The Clever “Sofa Game”
47. Thirty-Six Stratagems: The Roguish Parts
48. How the thief was the only person who suffered nothing
49. The Pirates of Monaco: A fable in three parts and four pictures
50. Tattoos and brandings
51. The Fast and Loose street con
52. On the criminalisation of poverty
53. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
54. Admiring and/or vilifying pickpockets
55. Swindlers of Victorian London
56. The Port & the City

Thieves’ Tools

1. Lock Picking Masterpost
2. Historical Lockpicking
3. Lockpicking in The Canterbury Tales
4. Lockpicking in a medieval German epic
5. Housebreakers and Burglars of Victorian London
6. On Burglars’ Tools
7. An overlooked thieves’ tool: the dark lantern
8. Another overlooked thieves’ tool: the rope ladder
9. [D&D 3.5] Open Lock optimisation

Knives and Daggers

1. Dagger Fighting Masterpost
2. Medieval daggers Vs armour
3. The “Draw Sword, Draw Blood” trope: Fact and Fiction
4. The little silver knife
5. The ‘coup de Jarnac’ and the insidious dagger
6. On knives and daggers strapped to the thigh or back
7. The Sfondagiaco dagger
8. The Corsican Vendetta Knife
9. Killing Eve: Villanelle’s knives
10. Fancy daggers in the hands of real Rogues
11. Toledo damascene knives
12. Genre paintings, Spanish navajas, and Italian love knives
13. The dagger prevails
14. Knives for Commoners

Thieves’ Cant, Slang, and Language Gone Rogue

1. Thieves’ Cant Masterpost
2. Regional Thieves’ Cants in D&D
3. Historical Thieves’ Cant: A Selection
4. The Twenty-Seven Ranks of The Canting Crew
5. Thieves’ Cant: Coney-catchers
6. Thieves’ Cant: Whipjack
7. Polari, gay and thieves’ cants, speaking in cant as an act of defiance and assorted musings
8. Back slang and a Barbie pun
9. When “philosophy” was code for banned books
10. A Rogue by any other name…: the translations of D&D’s “Rogue” in other languages
11. Roguish things in “The Devil’s Dictionary”
12. Schrödinger’s Honour Among Thieves
13. How Tolkien invented dwarves (it used to be “dwarfs”)