Been looking for idea's for a campaign where the party is in or running a gang. thinking something almost like songs of anarchy, or the novel 'among thieves (tales of the kin #1), etc
anyone think of any othe prgs that did this well?.
sorry for any typos... on my phone
Somebody I know once did a thing (albeit not with Pathfinder, but with an earlier edition of D&D) with gangs of improperly trained street wizards resembling late 19th century (1870s maybe?) gang life. "Gangs of New Wizard City" or some such, IIRC. In the game, everybody was a magic user of some kind, so the GM let 'em take some modest thief skills (I never got to play in it, only having heard about it).
As they went up in the ranks, they were allowed to start their own gang complete with initiation rituals, some where you had to deliberately subject yourself to various potentially dire mutations in order to join. As I recall hearing, they set up a collective pool of spellbooks and magic items the gang shared.
In order to differentiate the different casters, each one had to develop a motif or theme that governed what spells could be used (one guy was centered around sound, another around plants, etc), and could adopt spells from different spell lists so long as they fit that overall theme.
Had an idea for a campaign that I never got to run, where the PCs were enforcers for the local thieve's guild. The first assignment was to track down someone who'd broken the code of honour, and tried to flee to a part of the city that was run by another thieve's guild, who would allow the PCs 24 hours of free movement in order to see "justice" done before they were no longer welcome in a foreign gang's territory.
A little bit of research on current and Prohibition-era gang structure and turf feuds is a good way to get a lot of ideas for a campaign like this.
One of the important things to remember is that, in societies where there is no law to enforce contracts, a person's reputation for keeping their word is paramount. Which is why the PCs should always be honest with people who have the ability to end their lives, right up until that threat is no longer valid ;)
I've been thinking about doing this. I'd say use the Downtime system to help with the guildmaking. Also look at Council of Thieves. Trying to remember which one had the article about Thieves Guilds.
You could easily adapt all the material in Rite Publishing Way of the Yakuza, designed for use with the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG). Probably most appropriate is the section on creating a yakuza gang, using the City Stat block rules applied to an organization. Using the skills and motives of your gang leader and second in command determine a whole range of modifiers including how much profit it earns, how they treat non-gang members, alignment differences of a gang versus the community it resides.
I've used these rules myself to create Thieves Guilds for more Euro-centric settings, as well as for a sci-fi-esque PF homebrew.
You can see the Yakuza Gang rules on d20pfsrd.com