Thieves' Guild

The Thieves’ Guild was formed around the turn of the century by six super-crooks united by a mutual love of money, particularly of the “stolen in large quantities” variety. Combining their signature exotic gadgetry to commit spectacular robberies, the Guild members managed to prosper despite a nearly complete lack of mutual trust and regard.
Recently, the Guild members have all more or less settled in Freedom City and made at least a show of going straight. They are all returning to their old larcenous ways, however, committing smaller individual thefts and pulling off bigger robberies in various groupings. The members have run afoul of most of Freedom’s superheroes in the process, but have developed a particular rivalry with their most frequent opponent, Johnny Rocket.
Rocket has put the Thieves’ Guild behind bars multiple times, but the members never seem to stay there. Whether because of The Huckster's gift of gab, their own ingenuity, or jailbreaks perpetrated by the other members (in exchange for sizable fees), no prison cell holds the Thieves’ Guild for long.

Structure

THE HUCKSTER

Johnny Goff is a born salesman, maybe the best who ever lived. Selling ice to Eskimos was just another day’s work for a man of his abilities. Johnny might have made a respectable fortune selling quality wares, but the high margin of profit for slipshod work called to him. It wasn’t long before arrogance and greed seduced him into hawking dangerously defective products. Someone was bound to get hurt, and eventually a sales trip through southwest Virginia peddling home-brewed “low-calorie beer” left a lot of blind hillbillies in its wake. One class-action lawsuit later, Goff was left with nothing but a warehouse full of fatally faulty merchandise.
Goff was always on the edge of criminality, and poverty more than pushed him over it. Determined to rebuild his lost fortune at any cost, he modified his hazardously defective gadgets into even more deadly devices. He dubbed himself “the Huckster” after the traveling charlatans of old, adopting the title pinned upon him as a badge of honor. Like them, the Huckster is all about the sales pitch, but his spellbinding blarney is always a prelude to much more blatant thefts.
The other Guild members have a classic love/hate relationship with the Huckster. A dozen times or more he’s talked them into some job they later regretted taking, often because the Huckster sold them out for his own benefit. Despite this, they realize how many more times his silver tongue saved them all from a long stay in Blackstone. Despite his occasional treachery, it’s the Huckster’s focus on making the big scores and his gift of gab that brings the Guild back together again and again.

THE BOLA

Eduardo Guerrero’s father raised him to follow in his footsteps and become one of Argentina’s hardworking native cowboys, the gauchos. Outside of his natural skill with a bola (a gaucho’s traditional weapon), Eddie proved himself a poor cowpoke. This was due mainly to his overriding interest in the village ladies, whom the charming, handsome young man loved and abandoned on a whim. Eventually, a legion of angry fathers and husbands forced him to take flight from his village. Seeing no more appealing alternative, Eddie turned to crime.
He did so in the most flamboyant manner possible (to impress the mamacitas, of course) as the costumed bandito known as Las Boleadoras. After a successful crime spree in Argentina, Las Boleadoras headed for the U.S. in search of bigger heists and more lovely ladies. Now based in Freedom City, the Bola’s roguish charm and skill with his array of trick weapons make him a supervillain to be reckoned with.

THE FIREBUG

An only child, Shawn Hensley was indulged by his wealthy parents and considered a bright, promising child—until the day he started a fire just to watch the pretty flames. The Hensleys spared no expense to rid little Shawn of his pyromania, and in time the lad was seemingly cured. In truth, Hensley sublimated his condition. Every aspect of his life—including his advanced technological studies— disguised an obsessive search for new ways of creating infernos. Later, his mother and father perished in just such a blaze, secretly set by their “cured” son.
His parents’ deaths made him rich, but Shawn wanted more. Inspired by other costumed villains, he spent his inheritance becoming the arsonist crook known as the Firebug.

LOOKING GLASS

Since her early childhood, people have said Marguerite Frey is the most beautiful girl in the world. She heard it so often it wasn’t long before she believed it, too. Thereafter Marguerite was never far from a mirror, admiring her own beauty even more than anyone else ever did.
She was vain to be sure, but Marguerite’s devotion to her looking glass went far beyond mere narcissism. With a passion bordering on mania, she learned everything she could about mirrors: how they worked, how they were made, and their history. In time she unlocked the deepest secrets of the reflecting pane, including previously undiscovered scientific applications bordering on sorcery.
Patenting her discoveries would have made her fabulously wealthy, but Marguerite is accustomed to having everything handed to her. There was nothing left for her admirers to bring her, so she decided to steal whatever was left, putting her discoveries to use as the costumed thief known as Looking Glass, the Mistress of Mirrors.

THE MAD MAPLE

Early on, Adam Jury was a typical Canadian: polite, well educated, and proud of his native land. It was not until he fell in with a bad crowd—an extremist group convinced Canada is being kept from its greater destiny by the U.S.— that his tendencies towards political radicalism and sociopathy emerged. Jury’s obsession with avenging America’s slights against Canada (both real and imagined) grew.
When he discovered the late supervillain Dr. Zero’s lost laboratory in Alberta, he used it to design ever more fantastic weaponry as a way to seek restitution. To that end, Jury debuted as the costumed “political activist” known as the Maple Leaf. However, his long-winded rants on the countless virtues of Canada and endless flaws of America sounded so insane to most listeners the media quickly re-dubbed him “the Mad Maple.” Despite this unflattering appellation (which angers him to no end), Jury continues his “economic redresses” (read: armed robberies) against American businesses undeterred.

THE TEMPESTRESS

The neglected sister of Courtney Cline, the Weather Mistress. Envious of her big sister’s glamorous villain career and equally brilliant, Tanith constructed her own Lightning Rod from Cortney’s designs, becoming the Tempestress!

Type

Illicit, Gang

Location

Freedom City