The Thieves’ Guild is probably the best-hidden faction in Gothic 2, and quite a lot of players finish Night of the Raven without ever setting foot in it. Nobody in Khorinis will point you to it, its hideout sits in the sewers under the city, and the way in depends on choices you make in three small Chapter 1 quests that do not look connected at all.

This guide will first explain how joining works, which of the two ways in you should pick and what the guild gives you. Further down, I am going to go through the exact XP of both ways, including Rengaru’s +1 Dexterity, for everyone who wants to squeeze every last point out of a run.

How joining works

The short version: you need the key to the sewers, and a man called Attila is going to bring it to you. He only shows up after you have dealt with three small-time criminals in the harbour district and the market. Either you help all three of them, or you report at least one of them to Lord Andre. Both ways end with the key in your hands, and from there you swim to the sewer door, talk to Cassia and steal a ring to become a member.

The three criminals are:

• Rengaru, the thief from Jora’s quests “The Merchant’s Gold” and “A Brazen Thief” on the marketplace.
• Halvor, the fish merchant at the harbour. You will find his note to the bandits in a strange fish in the bandit cave near Akil’s farm, which you clear for Hakon’s “Bandit Raids” quest.
• Nagur, who sits in Kardif’s harbour pub. Ask Kardif about “special” work and he will send you to him. Nagur wants you to pose as Baltram’s new errand boy and bring Akil’s delivery to him instead.

Once you have either helped all three or reported one of them, Kardif will call you over the next time you talk to him and tell you that someone wants to meet you behind Halvor’s fish shop. That someone is Attila.

The peaceful way

For the peaceful way, you have to cover for all three of them. Helping only two is not enough, and Attila will simply never appear.

• Once Rengaru runs away from you, catch him (“Gotcha!”). Then pick “I should turn you in to the militia” and after that “Get lost! And don’t show your face around here again!”. Taking Jora’s gold back is fine, but it is this last answer that counts. If you only grab the gold and leave, the game does not count Rengaru as helped.
• Show Halvor his note, choose “Make me an offer, then” and agree to his deal. He will take the note back and from then on sell you his “special” fish.
• For Nagur, get hired by Baltram, pick up the package from Akil and give it to Nagur instead of Baltram. Come back the next day and collect your share. This fails Baltram’s own delivery quest.

Attila will then greet you as a friend, give you the sewer key and 300 XP and leave. Beware that you should take the key and nothing else. If you ask him “Who are you?” after the handover, he is going to end every later conversation right away, and with it you lose the chance to pickpocket him.

The snitch way

For the snitch way, go to Lord Andre and choose “I’ve come to collect the bounty for a criminal”. With Halvor and Rengaru you first have to tell them to their face that they are going to jail (“Looks like it’s the slammer for you” for Halvor, “I’ll see to it that you are put behind bars” for Rengaru). Nagur only needs his job to be running. Each criminal you report gets you 100 XP and 100 gold. One is enough to make Attila appear. You do not need two, even though you will read that quite often.

This time Attila is not there to welcome you. He has been sent to kill you for betraying a friend of the guild. Beat him and you will find the sewer key on his body. Afterwards, go back to Kardif and complain that the guy tried to kill you for another 50 XP.

Getting into the sewers

The key fits a door in the harbour wall. Jump off the quay into the water, swim to the right along the wall and you will find the door set into it. Inside, Jesper is going to stop you first. Mention the key or Attila and he will send you on to Cassia, the leader of the guild.

Cassia will offer you a place in the guild, no matter which way you came in. Simply say “OK, I’m in”. If you pick “I need to think about this” instead, she gives you two days, and if you come back after that she attacks you. On the snitch way, refusing outright makes her threaten to kill you right there.

Her test is “Constantino’s Ring”: steal the ring from the locked chest in the alchemist Constantino’s house and bring it to her. You will need Lockpicking and some lockpicks for that, and Sneak helps a lot. Once you hand it over, you are a member. Cassia gives you a key to the back door in Hanna’s hotel (so you will not have to swim every time), 100 XP and the thieves’ sign, a little nod that other members recognise.

Which way should you pick?

For most players I would say the snitch way, and specifically by reporting Halvor. It gives you a little more XP in Chapter 1, it opens the guild earlier, and you lose surprisingly little. Rengaru’s bonus, Nagur’s pickpocket and even Halvor’s own pickpocket (he can still be robbed in his cell) all stay available, as long as you report Halvor and not one of the other two first. The exact numbers are further down.

What you give up on the snitch way:

• The thieves’ training costs gold. Pickpocketing, Dexterity training and Sneak cost 100 gold each, and Ramirez wants 300 gold for Lockpicking instead of 150. On the peaceful way, the first three are free.
• Halvor sits in jail, so he will not act as your fence for silver plates and chalices, and his stock of lockpicks is gone.
• Attila’s pickpocket is gone, because you have to fight him.

The peaceful way makes more sense if you are short on gold early on, plan to learn several thief skills from the guild anyway, or simply want to play a character who does not rat people out. Both are perfectly fine for a normal playthrough. The XP difference between them is small. Really small.

Can you join as Militia, Paladin, Mercenary or Fire Mage?

Yes, but the peaceful way closes if you join the wrong guild before you have Nagur’s job. Nagur refuses to give his job to anyone from the Militia, the Paladins or the Monastery (“There ARE no jobs for the King’s soldiers down here at the harbor”), and changing your clothes does not help. Without his job, you cannot help all three, so Attila never comes as a friend. If you took the job while you were still guildless, you can finish it later in any guild.

The snitch way still works in every guild. If you already let Rengaru and Halvor go and joined the Militia, you are not locked out completely: as long as you have Nagur’s quest from before, you can still report him. If you never got it, you will have to reload. Mercenaries can do either way at any time.

The guild itself does not count as a guild in the game’s sense, so your status stays “guildless” and joining it never blocks the Militia, the Mercenaries or the Monastery. Cassia will comment on your Militia or Fire Mage robes, but she still treats you as one of hers. The safe order is to pick up all three criminals’ quests while you are still guildless, and join a real guild afterwards.

What the guild gives you

The most important thing is Pickpocketing. Cassia teaches it for 10 LP, and in Night of the Raven the only other teacher is Bill in the pirate camp in Jharkendar (also 10 LP, and he wants you to have at least 40 Dexterity). Since you will not reach Jharkendar before Chapter 2 or 3, the guild is your only early source. Cassia also trains Dexterity, Jesper teaches Sneak and Ramirez teaches Lockpicking.

Pickpocketing is not luck-based in Gothic 2. That’s right. Every target has a Dexterity requirement, and if you meet it, the theft always works. Each successful pickpocket also gives XP, and the amount rises the more people you have robbed. For reference, the guild members themselves need:

If you are planning a Dexterity character, the Gothic 2 Night of the Raven build calculator will show you when you are going to reach values like these, and the permanent bonus checklist lists every free Dexterity point, Rengaru’s included.

Additionally, showing the thieves’ sign to the right people pays off:

• Rengaru gives you a permanent +1 Dexterity (more on the conditions below).
• Halvor buys silver plates and chalices for a better price than anyone else and sells lockpicks, if he is not in jail.
• Joe hands you a few lockpicks once you have freed him from the tower next to Thorben’s house.

Thieves’ Guild quests

The guild does not have a long questline, but each job is worth doing, and some of them are a little bit tricky:

• For “Bosper’s Bow”, ask Jesper about it. The bow is in a locked chest in the first sewer room, together with Coragon’s stolen silver, and three giant rats will spawn there once you ask. Bosper gives you 150 XP for the bow, and Coragon thanks you with one of his special beers.
• In “The Blood Chalices”, Cassia wants the six Blood Chalices, which are spread over the houses of the rich, mostly in the upper quarter, for 300 XP. You can choose 400 gold, four Elixirs of Healing or a Ring of Life Force (+20 HP) as the reward. She will not give you the job while you are wanted for theft in town, so pay your fine first. Ramirez knows that the guard Wambo can be bribed to look the other way at night.
• From Chapter 2 onwards, Ramirez asks you for a sextant (“A Sextant”). Bring him one for 200 XP.
• From Chapter 3, Jesper hands you the key to the locked room in the sewers. Inside is the chest of Fingers, the master lockpicker from the first game. It holds an Elixir of Dexterity, an Amulet of Strength, gold and some silver. Tell Jesper you opened it for 150 XP. If you want the combination, TeD lists it as RRR-L-RRR-L-R-L-R-L-RR-LLL-RR-L.

Attila does not show up?

This is by far the most common problem, and it is almost always one of these:

• You helped only two of the three. On the peaceful way, it has to be all three.
• You took Rengaru’s gold but never told him to get lost. Talk to him again, pick “I should turn you in to the militia” and then “Get lost!”.
• You gave Nagur the package but never came back for your share. He only counts it as done once he pays you the day after.
• You gave Akil’s package to Baltram. That fails Nagur’s quest for good, so the only way left is to report Rengaru or Halvor.
• You are in the Militia, a Paladin or a Novice and Nagur will not talk to you. See the section on guilds above.
• You have not talked to Kardif yet. He is the one who passes on the message, and Attila only appears after that.

Mind that all of this is for the unmodded game. Big mods like New Balance or L’Hiver change parts of this questline.

Destroying the guild for Lord Andre

If you ask Lord Andre about a faster way into the Militia while you are still guildless, he will ask you to find and wipe out the thieves’ guild. You can take that quest even if you never join the Militia, and you can finish it later in any guild.

To finish it, Cassia, Jesper and Ramirez have to die, and then you tell Andre “I hunted them all down!” for 500 XP and 300 gold. You can be a member, finish their quests and learn everything from them first. The game does not mind. Before the fight, save your game, because when the three of them chase you up into Hanna’s hotel, Hanna and other townsfolk may join in against you.

There is also a lazy option, and I would not take it. If you only tell Andre where the hideout is, his men will clear out the sewers a little later (the game does it the next time Khorinis is loaded, for example when you come back from the Valley of Mines). You get no XP for that, the quest simply closes, and any guild quests you still have open (Blood Chalices, Sextant) are gone with it.

XP comparison and the best order

This part is for everyone who plays for the maximum. The numbers below come from shaboo’s “Tagebuch eines Drachenjägers” (TeD), a save-by-save German walkthrough of a full Mercenary and Dragonhunter run that tracks every single XP point, cross-checked against the game’s dialogue scripts.

That is a lead of at least 30 XP for the snitch way, and there is a second, less obvious difference. On the peaceful way you have to fetch Akil’s package early, and that pushes two other things forward that give more XP later in the game. In TeD’s run, those cost exactly 200 XP. Some players take the key peacefully, rob Attila and then beat him up anyway for another 200 XP, and this loss cancels exactly that out. Delivering the package to Baltram on the snitch way also completes “Baltram’s Delivery”, which gets you ten extra apples from Baltram later on. Delivering Akil’s package gives the same 100 XP whether it goes to Baltram or to Nagur.

The snitch way also gets you into the guild and to Cassia’s Pickpocketing in Chapter 1. On the peaceful way, an XP-focused player would wait with Akil’s quest and only reach the guild in Chapter 2.

Rengaru’s +1 Dexterity

Rengaru gives you +1 Dexterity when you show him the thieves’ sign, but only if you have caught him before and have not told him that he is going to jail. The moment you pick “I’ll see to it that you are put behind bars”, the bonus is gone for good, even before Andre locks him up. You can still rob him in his cell, but the Dexterity point cannot be recovered.

That is the main reason to report Halvor and not Rengaru. On the snitch way, you need a member’s sign before you report Rengaru, and you only get the sign after you have joined. So the order is: report Halvor first, join the guild, then catch Rengaru, show him the sign, pick his pocket and only then tell him he is going to jail and report him too. On the peaceful way you let him go anyway, so the bonus is simply waiting for you once you are a member.

Nagur is the other trap. In jail he refuses to talk to you (“You betrayed me!”), so you cannot pickpocket him there. Either rob him before you report him, which needs 75 Dexterity, or knock him out in his cell first, because then he will talk to you again.

The order TeD uses

1. While still guildless, ask Lord Andre about a faster way into the Militia and take his thieves’ guild job. Pick up Jora’s two quests and Nagur’s job via Kardif as well.
2. Clear the bandit cave near Akil’s farm for Hakon, threaten Halvor with his note and report him to Andre.
3. Talk to Kardif, beat Attila behind the fish shop and take the key. Complain to Kardif afterwards.
4. Swim into the sewers, tell Cassia you are in and learn Pickpocketing.
5. Steal Constantino’s ring and become a member. Pick up Bosper’s bow and Coragon’s silver in the same trip.
6. Catch Rengaru, show him the sign for +1 Dexterity, rob him, then threaten him with jail and report him.
7. Once you have 75 Dexterity, rob Nagur and report him. Take Akil’s package to Baltram.
8. In Chapter 2 bring Ramirez his sextant, in Chapter 3 open Fingers’ chest, and do the Blood Chalices whenever you have the upper quarter covered.
9. Later, rob Jesper, Ramirez and Cassia (80, 90 and 100 Dexterity), then kill the three of them and report to Andre.

One last deadline: make sure you have Pickpocketing by the end of Chapter 2 at the latest. Otherwise you will miss the Chapter 2 pickpockets on Lothar, Milten and Diego, which TeD puts at around 800 XP. Diego is the hardest one, since he needs 120 Dexterity, rings and amulets included.

Conclusion

Joining the Thieves’ Guild is mostly about the order of three small quests. If you want the guild early and a little more XP, report Halvor, beat Attila and keep Rengaru out of jail until you know the sign. If you would rather keep the training free and not betray anyone, help all three and simply never ask Attila who he is. Either way, the guild is well worth the detour for Pickpocketing alone, and you can still hand Cassia and her friends to Lord Andre once you are done with them.