Assassin: Rehired | What if the assassin didn't focus on dress-up?
PDFs of this and more can be found over on at my Patreon here!
I release everything for free, so your support makes this possible.
I've also started making a new system based off of 5e, 6th Dawn! Become a patron and join the playtest.
This week, as part of a theme most foul, I decided to go upon a foul task and revise our hired killer.
The assassin archetype never really appealed to me as a player, and not as a theme either. First off, just over half of its features are based on disguise. Which is fine, but one of them is literally the charlatan background feature for a price. But also, you may have realised this about me, the guy that keeps making playable monsters, I don't play humans and human-likes very often, so being the only gnoll in this city of mostly humans, there is no disguise in hell that will conceal my identity without magic. So while the disguise kit has its uses, the more exotic a creature you play, the less they are outside of the arts.
Secondly, it's primary feature is very strong, auto crit on any creature that has yet to act in combat. Great vibes, see what they're going for. Because that window is variable (and not always there) and at most a round, you don't actually get that feature most of the time. So, I opted to go for a different approach.
The assassin, in addition to disguise, has poisoner's kit proficiency, why not expand on that instead? In this instance I discard disguise as a proficiency you can go out of your way for. Instead, give the assassin a limited use set of debilitating poisons. Ones that impart vulnerability to weapons (what I intend to get the most use), knock out a target (for sneaky sneaks) and one that inflicts sneak attack damage (for convoluted assassination plots).
Bringing more general versatility to the previous poisons, but not quite wanting to ape the cloudkill spell, just gaseous poison. Sneak attacking a whole room at once sounds pretty sweet to me.
Possibly the least exciting option, but kind of how I intend to get around the lack of disguise issue for getting close to a target. Do it the old fashioned way! Not being seen.
I suspect that this feature name exists somewhere in the D&D's history for something similar, but I didn't really check. This is based on the old capstone feature of the rogue, where you just straight up murder people with a single con save. I mean, you're playing an assassin, of course the capstone was going to be the murder button
And now to plug my stuff. I release homebrews weekly over on my Patreon.
Anyone who pledges $1 or more per post don't have to wait a month to see them, and also help fund my being alive habit.
At the moment, they have exclusive access to the following:
I also have four classes, and two splatbooks over on DriveThruRPG to check out:
The Rift Binder. A class specialising in summoning monsters and controlling the battlefield.
The Witch Knight. A class that combines swords and sorcery in the most literal way.
The Werebeast. A class that turns you into a half beast to destroy your foes.
The Beguiler. A spellcaster dedicated to illusions, enchantments, and general fuckery.
d'Artagnan's Adventurer Almanac. A compendium of races, subclasses, feats, spells, monsters and more!
d'Artagnan's Lycanthrope Survival Guide. A book of lore, stats, and werebeast subclasses for lycanthropes.
