The Lia-Kavair controls a host of illicit activities such as purse cutting (anything carried on a person is considered fair game), protection (especially of secular beggars and people who are not part of a guild), drug running, smuggling and burglary (mostly from the middle class, not the nobility). The Lia-Kavair does receive tacit support from many powerful groups because it tends to keep crime under control and will provide the services of skilled assassins (for a stiff fee) with few questions asked. | ||
The Lia-Kavair is hardly revolutionary. It is as much in their interest to maintain the status-quo as it is for any other guild or government. Strict, but unwritten rules, prevent any segment of society from being over-victimized. Quite often an individual will be robbed of only a few items even though circumstances would allow them to be picked clean. The Lia-Kavair will rarely intervene to free or defend a member who has been caught, nor would such intervention be effective in most governments. The cardinal rule is simply to never get caught. Troublesome criminals will either quietly disappear, or be betrayed to the authorities for an appropriate punishment. The organization always operates covertly; the general public will never be aware of the location of its “guildhalls”, nor the names of the individuals who run it. Each guild tends to operate independently and there can be rivalries between guilds in different towns and cities. As a general rule each guild has a territory that they operate in and they try to avoid conflicts with other guilds. On occasion local authorities will try to wipe out a local Lia-Kavair guild. Even when a guild is eliminated from an area it tends to reform after a period of time. Also guilds in the surrounding areas will band together to eliminate the authorities who wiped out a brother guild. There was a period of time when there was an open war between the Lia-Kavair and local authorities in The Realm of Quintus that lasted five years. In the end most of the guilds members were dead and almost half of the nobility was dead. The economy was ruined for almost 20 years. |