Gary Gygax’s Canting Crew is SOLD OUT. This book is being reprinted as “Gary Gygax’s Canting Crew Revisited” with new Castles & Crusades content to compliment the Lejendary Adventure material already supplied. A release date has not been determined but should be in 2008.

Benar darkmans Rogues. Plant and stam flash! I've a rum rig to weed on some green culls and I'm stagging two rum Wild Rogues to sweeten my weed. If you're trap, meet me at the Barley Sheaf it maybe three bowshots down nabway. Pass the cribbey, and they you'll lamp a spoil-iron, next a drag cobbler's swag, then a canary-keeper, and last tinshirt's case to land at the Sheaf.

~Aldor Three Fingers, two days before he met the Gallows

The ranks and the jargon of the underclass are the meat and drink of most fantasy role-playing game campaigns. Thus Gary Gygax has undertaken to put together a little handbook for Game Masters and players in such games, something to use to both develop more detailed rogues, thieves, beggars and masterless folk and to complete the environment of the fantasy campaign in richer manner with regard to the criminal underclass. It is drawn from the actual cant of the late Renaissance period, augmented with various archaic, vulgar, and obsolete words, and then garnished with imaginary additions to round it out so as to be more complete and useful. Not only should this work facilitate any effort to bring verisimilitude to the criminal underclass in a fantasy game setting, but by learning some of the language of the "Cant" and adding whatever else seems appropriate, all concerned will certainly be able to enhance the color of and their immersion in the game, play their underclass characters more "realistically," and have more fun while so doing.

While the basis of the "Canting Crew" society is late medieval English culture, much of the material is grounded in the later Renaissance, and this model is one that serves the role-playing game buff well. Most fantasy game campaigns are centered around vaguely Anglo-Saxon communities because of the influence of the media treating the subject in film, television, and literature. The material herein is thus meant to embellish that base. Mr. Gygax has taken historical material and adapted it to the medium at hand, the RPG. In so doing, he has attempted to keep the whole as generic as possible so that the work can be used in any campaign regardless of the rules system.

This work assumes there is criminal organization, indeed a vast "conspiracy" if you will. The structure is one Mr. Gygax has imagined for the devious fantasy game milieux in play. It is complex and convoluted, and detailed so as to be both believable and suitable in game use, yet not so rigid as to prevent addition or deletion as is desired.