README:

This awesome program takes virtually the entirety of the Thieves
Guild section from The Complete Book of Thieves and subtly adapts it
to the whims of Visual Basic.  If you're like most DMs, you've
probably never, ever actually churned through all the charts to
prepare a guild.  Now you'll never have to.  This program does it
all.

DMs are the only ones who will appreciate how priceless this program
is, and for them little explanation is necessary.  No one else could
possibly have any need of this, but I encourage people to use it to
their hearts' content.  For my own campaign I have adapted this to
include greater ethnicity (different groups of humans and elves, for
example).  This is more plain vanilla, but immensely useful
nonetheless.  For names, there's one group per race.  Naturally,
there should be different cultures for each race which would differ
in name spelling and type, but it didn't seem like adding 100K worth
of name/name-roots files would have added much value to most DMs.

The alignment thing's always tough, and some might disagree with my
examples.  For example, some might be inclined to put the FDA in the
L/E category, since it can argued most persuasively that it uses
laws and regulations primarily to aggrandize its own bureaucratic
plutocrats, with its head lording it over the others like Asmodeus
over the Nine Pits.  But I am generous by nature, and gave the
benefit of the doubt.

I also considered other alignments, like Chaotic/Clueless (think of
Jocelyn Elders), and Achieving Dubiously Good Ends through Way Evil
Means (like Castro, Pol Pot, Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung, not to mention
Jim Wright).  But this is a DM aid, not a forum for philosophy.

I've followed the charts in The Complete Book of Thieves as much as
possible.  This means that there just aren't all that many thieves
for even a city with 10,000 people.  While I assume the book's
authors know more about the population/thieves ratio than I do, I've
also allowed the option of simply generating a guild with any number
of thieves you want.  After all, when you look at Washington, D.C.,
you realize just how high the thieves/population ratio can rise with
a little luck.

With the exception of humans, all multiclassed thieves have the same
level in each class, so you have something like an elven MU6/F6/Th6. 
Some purists would argue that it would be difficult to have the xps
work out that way, and so the levels would be off be one or two. 
And then, exceptional stats (intelligence for MUs, for example),
would add to the xps.  This is all true, to reflect this, instead of
just generating levels (rolling a simple die!) I would have needed
code to generate individual xps for each thief, the figure out what
levels this would allow, then adjust it for each class for any
exceptional stat, and then perhaps to change the level.  All that,
just for a background thief!  Only your own PC ever gets that much
attention!  So I refrained from following this path to perfection. 
Forgive me.  Life got in the way.

One thing that always happens with randomly-generated campaign
material is that you occasionally get unusual, apparently
incongruous results.  Think of these as satori-like bolts from the
blue, generated to challenge your creativity to reach new levels. 
Keep them!  This will help stun your players, and keep them
guessing.  For example, what if you pick an evil social alignment
for a community of elves?  It might be that they are refugees and
former allies of the Drow.  Or they might be under the domination of
an evil temple or military leader.  Or they might be enslaved or
ensorcelled or cursed.  Similarly, what if you have a good community
of orcs?  Play the orcs as a religious community, or a hippie
commune or Star Trek's "This Side of Paradise", and watch your
players freak out!  The key is to take apparently anomalous results,
and work as the DM to make sense from them.

I have more stuff I'm working on, including a sage-generator (ready
in early summer of 1995), a potion-property generator, a
lich-generator, an alchemist-generator, a dragon-generator, and
others that I've already written in Turbo Basic, and am now
laboriously converting over.  Others include ones for generating
communities of dwarves, drow, elves, gnomes, hobbits, etc.

Suggestions, praise, cool tables, and other forms of encouragement
are welcome, and may be sent to me here in Taiwan:

Denrandrien
darkstar@c2.hinet.net
P.O. Box 81-691
Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

May you enjoy this program and find it enriches your campaign.