Thief's Candles

Thief’s Candle

Cost: 150 gold
Description: A small candle of yellow wax. Inside the wax is a preserved finger, wrapped with the candle’s wick. When lit, the candle’s flame is a blue-ish black color.

Effect: When lit and held by a Thief, the candle produces just enough illumination for that person to see in. Nobody else can see the light produced by the candle, except the Thief holding it. The candle can be extinguished and relit many times, just like a normal candle. Otherwise it burns out in 6 turns of continual use.

Background: Thief Guilds are usually seen as little more than crude attempts at organized crime, and they like it when it stays that way. However, they have tricks and secrets of their own that only members know of. One of those are the Thief’s Candles.

The punishment for theft (or association with the Thieves’ Guild) is chopping off the offender’s left hand. The Guild goes to great lengths to collect those, and uses the fingers to produce these artifacts, allowing the fallen member to continue helping the Guild even past death.

Thief’s Candles are seen as a very precious resource for a guild, and the secrets of how to make them rests with the highest leadership of the organisation. Anyone found sharing the secrets of their manufacturing with anyone who isn’t supposed to already know gets put on the Guild’s highest To Do list.

Precious as they are, the Candles are usually sold internally to members at a steep price, or handed out for important Guild business. They allow a thief to freely traverse in (what appears to outsiders) as utter darkness. The item is only a minor magical trinket, so it doesn’t really make the wielder invisible or anything, and creatures or spells that allow one to see in darkness can still show the Thief holding the candle (though still not the candle’s light).