Welcome to Meade, recently voted by the annual Archmages Magazine survey as the best town for those seeking to start a career in the up-and-coming arcane industry.
You are a member of the criminal underground, an art thief whose eyes are set on the Museum of History and the Arcane Arts that is slated to open next weekend. More specifically, you've been hired by a past client to steal the crown jewel of the museum and magnum opus of the legendary painter Hel'AvRen von Entray-Yezediah: The Divine Silence. Of course, if you manage to get away with anything in addition to The Divine Silence, your client is happy to take it off your hands as well, but they're after The Divine Silence first and foremost.
Put simply, pull this job off, and you'll be one of the richest people in the country.
Of course, a priceless painting such as The Divine Silence will no doubt have plenty of security around it, even if the museum's yet to open. Naturally, your client has seen that as cause to hire a few other thieves; maybe you know them from past jobs, maybe not, but you're all professionals, so there shouldn't be an issue there. Everyone gets an even cut of the final turnout. Break into the museum, steal the painting, grab what other things you can, get out, and live a life of luxury for the rest of your years.
...granted, there are some weird rumors running around. Nobody's seen the curator of the museum in weeks, and there have been odd rumors of disappearing staff and 'strange figures' in the windows of the museum at night.
Eh, it's probably nothing worth worrying about. Let's rob the place blind, yeah?
This roleplay is a party-style 'adventure', played by a group of thieves attempting to rob an arcane museum. The location is a town known as Meade, a reasonably wealthy city that isn't a major metropolitan area in its own right, but neighbors the nearby Deln metropolis. It's best described as a semi-suburban sort of locale, an upper-crust town with a storied history that most cities of said kind don't generally have.
The world is best described as "modern fantasy". Technological capacity is roughly on par with that of the current day. The most clear departures from the current day we live in are the existences of "magic" and of nonhuman sapients.
Nonhuman sapients include the standard fare such as goblins, trolls, weird-bird-people, and the like. If they're a standard fantasy trope or a playable DnD race, for instance, they're probably fair game.
Some of you might ask "why is this just 'our world but with magic' when magic would have irreparably altered how technology evolved" and things like that. These are perfectly valid questions, but as the theme of the roleplay isn't based around these questions, I'm going to say "don't think too hard about it".
Player characters are thieves, members of the criminal underground, of decent experience. Whether or not specific player characters are acquainted prior to the start of the roleplay is up to the individual players. Player characters can be of nonhuman sapient races, but exercise common sense; something like a goblin or even a troll is fine (if you can justify how a troll is supposed to be a thief, at least). Something like "supreme archdemon" is obviously not. If you want to check a character idea with me before writing up a sheet for it, that's recommended.
Player characters should be mostly mundane. Some magical knowledge is fine, but magic is less of a standard vocation and more like something you'd need a Masters to get a half-decent job for. If you were some sort of genius magic-user, you probably wouldn't be a thief.
The roleplay will begin with the player characters having just finished breaking into the museum, and we'll run from there. The player amount I'm shooting for is 3-4. I do reserve the right to decline people arbitrarily if I think their characters don't mesh with the theme of the roleplay, etc etc, standard stuff.