World of Assassination (GLOG Classes: Assassin)

    I'm a big fan of the old Hitman games. I'd count Blood Money among the greatest videogames of all time. I've often idly thought of an all-assassins game, perhaps set in some big high-magic D&D city with lots of thieves' guilds and wealthy merchants and political intrigue, or maybe some kind of near-future cyberpunk hellscape with hunter-killer robots and 8 hour wars — somewhere with very few dungeons. Recently, the GLOG has been writing assassins (see here, here, here, here, here, here and here), and I've had this post sitting in my drafts for some nine months. Perfect timing. I knew I kept it around for a reason.

    Josie was the one who prompted this, and some of the class features here were stolen from her musings in the GLOG server. It's only fair, as she stole some of these features from me (after I in turn stole them from the 5e rogues).

    All assassins have a cipher score equal to their [templates] in any assassin class. Given some unusual tools (1 slot for a case) and a few moments of fiddling, they have a cipher-in-6 chance of succeeding a cipher check, in addition to whatever the normal resolution rules are. The cipher skills of the assassins are, according to tradition, to Climb Sheer Surfaces, Find Or Remove Traps, Hide In Shadows, Move Silently, Pick Locks, Identify Substances and Surprise Target.

    Assassins collect information about their targets before closing in for the kill. For every fact that you know about your target, you have an additional +1 damage and to-hit during surprise rounds, up to a max of +4. These don't have to be major facts, but they cannot be trivial. "Drinks Earl Grey tea", "Commands the fifth cavalry", "Is named Ostruchus Poncelroy" are all good facts. "Is currently inside his tent", "Is a man", "Has two arms" are not. If you could learn it by looking at a snapshot of the current scene, it's trivial (thanks Arnold).

    Unless otherwise mentioned assassins may wear light armor only, may not use shields, and are proficient with hatchets, knives, clubs, slings and any weapon they start with.

Ghost

    When situations call for grace and elegance, you're the one for the job. Some say a perfect assassination leaves no trace of foul play. You know that's not true — a really perfect assassination would leave no trace of death. With each life you take, you get a little closer to that beautiful shining city on the hill.
Starting Equipment: nice suit (+1 to reactions), garotte wire (kills silently in 3 rounds if you beat them in a move check and they didn't know you were there), vial of iocaine powder (odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid, deals 1d6+6 poison damage exactly five rounds after consumption. Expensive to replace), lucky coin, case of unusual tools.
Skills: 1. Surgery 2. Modern languages 3. Ornithology.

• A One of Those Faces, +2 SNEK
• B Catburglary, +2 SNEK
• C Tearaway Pants, immunity to iocaine powder
• D Empty Eyes, +2 SNEK

One of Those Faces
    Something about you is oddly familiar. While wearing a uniform, you are assumed to be the sort of person who wears that uniform. This doesn't let you impersonate specific people (say, by stealing the Duke's fancy dinner jacket), only nameless background characters.

Catburglary
    You don't need to roll to Move Silently, or to Hide In Shadow so long as you're standing still.

Tearaway Pants
    While unobserved, you can change outfits and/or reapply makeup in six seconds.

Empty Eyes
    When you lock eyes with someone and project a killing intent, they can't make a noise until you blink, and must save each round to move or act. You're a dab hand at not blinking.

Sicarius

    You, or your teacher, remember a time when men were free and children weren't raised to fear them (whoever they happen to be, in your corner of the world). They imagine that they are safe. They believe that you are conquered, toothless, too scared from too many beatings to ever rise up again. There is a tendency for confidence to kill.
Starting Equipment: nondescript heavy clothing (as leather), 60' rope with grapnel, ordinary blade (light), case of unusual tools.
Skills: 1. Religious instruction 2. Military bureaucracy 3. Law

• A The Cloak, +1 HP
• B Crowd Work, +1 MOVE
• C Extortion, +1 HP
• D The Dagger, +1 MOVE

The Cloak
    Your preferred technique is "walk up and stick a knife in their throat". If someone in melee range wasn't looking at you, and didn't know they were about to be knifed, you may stab them for 6 damage plus your useful facts with no need for rolls.

Crowd Work
    Your preferred technique gets you in hot water sometimes. Upon breaking line of sight with pursuit, you disappear into crowds as perfectly as if you turned invisible.

Extortion
    Sometimes it's best to stab someone after they've given you what you want. If you grab an NPC with [level] or fewer HD and poke a knife into their back, they do whatever you say until an ally with more HD than you appears.

The Dagger
    The perfect technique, "walking up and stabbing them in the throat", has reached its final form. Melee or thrown weapon attacks deal 12 damage (plus useful facts) to targets who weren't looking and didn't know they were about to be knifed.

Metal Man

    When situations call for grace and elegance, other assassins are the better choice. That's all. You're not the talkative sort.
Starting Equipment: nice suit (+1 to reaction), a fucking gun (2d6 at 20', -1 to-hit for each 20' after, 2 slots, takes a minute to reload), three grenadoes (2d6 to uncovered targets within 20', save for half), folding axe (medium, but can be concealed in a sleeve. Expensive to replace), case of unusual tools.
Skills: 1. Dog breeding 2. Mechanical engineering 3. Gambling.

• A Splash Zone, +1 to-hit and damage
• B Lead Foot, Extra attack
• C Evil Aura, +1 to-hit and damage
• D Baba Yaga

Splash Zone
    Your brutality is remarkable, even among murderers. Your damage cleaves.

Lead Foot
    What could be opened by a man with a 16kg hardened steel battering ram, you can open instantly and loudly. You have advantage on saves against booby traps and/or being surprised by ambushes when using this ability.

Evil Aura
    Something is obviously wrong here. Mooks of 1HD check morale to enter combat with you.

Baba Yaga
    Once, ever, you may declare that no one will leave this room alive. Leaving This Room Alive is a cipher skill for you.

Ninja

    As a member of an ancient and storied order, you have a reputation to uphold and superiors to answer to. Each movement you make is judged by unseen eyes. Each decision is weighed on the scales. The rest of these thugs can only lose their lives; you have much more at stake than they know.
Starting Equipment: nondescript clothes, concealed chainmail (+2 to AC, takes up a slot. Expensive to replace), elaborate facemask (unique to you), katana (medium, WIS instead of STR), 60' rope with grapnel, case of unusual tools
Skills: 1. Flower arrangement 2. Cooking 3. Literacy (ninjas who don't have this skill are illiterate).

• A Uncanny Dodge, Kungfu, +1 CD
• B Bounty, +1 CD
• C Red Vision, +1 CD
• D Master Ninja, +1 CD

Uncanny Dodge
    You move like a serpent, or one of those funny little spiders that do the fancy dances. Two empty inventory slots give you a +1 bonus to AC and any saves to avoid damage.
Kungfu
    Kungfu, the ancient physical art taught to mankind by the g_ds. Chi, the primal energy which fuels it. You have a pool of eight-sided Chi Dice which you expend to fuel your Jutsu. Your pool refills with ten minutes of restful and undisturbed meditation. Roll 2d8 on the list below this class to determine your starting Jutsus. If you'd like, you may also roll one CD to deal [sum] damage with a karate chop.

Bounty
    Before allowing you to advance in the art, your brethren need to be confident in your abilities. If you can kill a target they name within a week, they'll teach you an additional Jutsu of your choice. Failing to kill the target is a great shame, but you can try again with a new name next week, if you're still alive.

Red Vision
    Your eyes have begun to reflect red behind your mask. When you stand still and focus for at least a round, you can see HD, CD, illusions, preferred deadly sin, and concealed weapons.

Master Ninja
    The clan has acknowledged your skill, and now you will teach those skills to new ninjas. Other ninjas must refer to you as "master". You may designate an NPC to be killed by a junior ninja; next session, the DM will roll to see if the junior ninja succeeded (the NPC probably has an HD-in-20 chance to survive, +1 if they've got a fortress, +1 if it's a really swell one, +1 if they're personally dangerous, +1 for each cool bodyguard, +1 for being a wizard, +X for other things that the DM might think of which I'm not thinking of right now). If they did, your character is unavailable for a session as they train the junior ninja in a Jutsu. Thanks, Shribe.

Jutsus:

1. Clone. Make [sum] duplicates of yourself for [dice] minutes. Clones die when they would take damage. You all share one mind; coordinated action is easy, multitasking is very very hard.
   
2. Transformation. Turn into an object you've seen, smaller than a cart, for [sum] rounds. If [dice] is 3 or more, you may turn into a living creature.
   
3. Smoke Bomb. Produce a cloud of smoke big enough to cover a crowd of [sum] people. Other than yourself, everyone inside must save or be surprised. You may choose to be somewhere else when the smoke clears next round.
   
4. Scroll Seal. Conceal an object the size of (one [die]) a loaf of bread, (two [dice]) a man, (three [dice]) a horse or (four [dice]) a cart as a written word on a large piece of paper. Living subjects must be either willing or restrained. Your CD are invested until the paper is destroyed, which releases the targets on nearby safe, solid ground.
   
5. Earth Swim. Soil is like saltwater to you for [sum] rounds.
   
6. Summoning. Call up a talking animal of [best] or fewer HD. They are under no obligations; clans of wise animals will expect you to sign a contract before they'll take orders or fight for you.
   
7. Acrobatics. Leap [dice]*10' from standstill, or wallrun [dice]*4'.
   
8. Bullshit. Replace With Logs is a cipher skill for you.

(and thanks Josie for the jutsus)

Essay: Firearms in Dungeon Crawls

    Hello. I have many names, but most of you know me as G. R. Michael. I come before you, the fantasy roleplaying community, with a brief plea. Once again I am begging you to include early firearms in your games. I am feeling very alone in this world... as if I am the only person who has black-powder pistols in their D&D games...

    "But Michael," I hear you croon, venom and phlegm dripping from the thousand-thousand teeth of your thousand mouths, "fantasy games shouldn't have guns in them. After all, it would be unrealistic, and ahistorical". False I name thee; Deceiver I name thee. Dueling pistols are older than dueling rapiers. Europeans had cannons before they had "plate armor". Shields were still in use when the first grenades were thrown from city ramparts upon besieging armies (I've been challenged on this point, and have softened my original claim of "shields were used against grenades" because of a lack of historical sources thereupon. Please see this painting for a depiction of the British Grenadiers fighting Highlanders equipped with targes, though sadly it doesn't depict the Highlanders being grenaded. If anyone has a source for a man with a shield getting blowed up with a grenade, I would be grateful if you left that in a comment). There could be nothing more historical than a Fighting-Man with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.

    "But Michael," I hear you rasp, tomb-voice emerging from somewhere in your eyeless face, "guns are inappropriate for my fantasy D&D-alike because they are too lethal and overpowered". Counterfeiter! Liar! I know for a fact you aren't doing a Dwarf Fortress-style modeling of nerves and arteries and internal organs. I know you're rolling 1d6 for the damage of a one-handed sword. That a ball from a .70 caliber musket might cause a more terrible wound than a blow from a saber I'll grant you, but I deny that there's such a magnitude of difference that they can't be modeled in the same system. If you've got a troll that swings a 2d6 big-ass club, you can handle a handgonne.

    "But Michael, but Michael..." you hiss, dying, melting in the light of my logic like that little monster dude at the end of that Christmas horror movie from the eighties, "I can't think of another objection. I'm so weak..." That's right. Weak and pitiable. Go back beyond the leaden gates, dissembler.

Source: Historically Accurate Gaston by Wickfield

    The one-handed firearm (a pistol, par exemple) is like a one-handed sword, except it deals double damage. If your one-handed sword deals 1d6, your pistol deals 2d6. A two-handed firearm (a musket, if you'll allow) is like a two-handed sword, except it deals double damage. If your &c deals 1d8, your &c &c 2d8. Muzzle-loaders cannot reasonably be reloaded during the close-quarters skirmishes common in D&D-alikes — for argument's sake, let's say it takes one minute (or ten 6-second rounds) to reload such a gun. A Fighting-Man with multiple attacks will need to wear a brace of pistols (which is a good idea for anyone, really). Most firearm-wielders have a bayonet to stick in their musket for the 2nd round of combat onwards, converting the weapon into a short spear.

    Powder itself is a bit pricy, and not available in huge amounts in rural areas. Cities and markets where one can buy healing potions, lamp oil, mirrors and other high-quality goods are where you go to buy powder. You can also buy lead shot there, or you can buy a little mold and a bar of lead and simply cast your own balls over the campfire each night, which is practical and adventuresome. Don't need any complicated rules for it either. It's lead. You heat it up and it melts, it's not rocket science. "Hey DM, while the cleric is propitiating his god and the wizard is examining that goblin spellbook, I'll tend to my gear and prepare some more bullets."

    A gun will blow open the lock of a chest or door, though this (obviously) makes a loud BANG! and will provoke a roll on the Wandering Monster Table. Firing guns in combat may provoke morale checks from wild animals, or attract intelligent creatures' allies from neighboring rooms, depending on the nature of the current dungeon. Normal people can't reload a gun while at a dead sprint away from 30–300 kobolds.

    Smoothbore muzzle-loaders aren't as accurate as modern rifles, obviously, but they aren't totally hopeless. You can hit a man-sized target at twenty or thirty yards with a little training. Whatever rules you use for the ranges of your "shortbow" or other common, non-insane-specialist ranged weapons (not warbows or arbalests) will be fine.

    And there you have it, my friends. That was every rule you need to add basic firearms to your game. To those of you for whom that satisfies: go with G_d. The post is now over.





    But... what if, like me, you're a pervert? What if you want more rules? I've written down every Gygax-style rule I could think of in a few hours. Feel free to use or ignore as many of these as you want.

Fouling

    Before the advent of modern propellants, guns were a messy business. The residue from early gunpowder (mostly soot and unburned powder) is called "fouling". The thick, chalky layers of this mildly corrosive fouling renders a gun less accurate, and if left on the metal will quickly (as in, over the course of hours in a humid environment, and no longer than a few days in any human-breathable environment) draw water which will permanently damage the barrel.
    It's essential to clean and maintain your firearms. Properly cleaning a muzzle-loader might take as long as an hour, so most adventurers will want to leave that  chore until they make camp at night. Every time a gun is fired between cleanings, it suffers a -1 penalty to further attacks made with it that day.
    Lubrication or grease (this gentleman recommends two part lamb's tallow to one part beeswax, or if you're too cheap or lazy for that one part beeswax to one part olive oil, but absolutely never Crisco) keeps the fouling more "sludge and slime", less "carbonized substance on a grill", so it can more easily be swabbed out. Gunmen who take a little extra time in the loading can thus reduce or ignore the accuracy penalty.

Projectile

    For most of history there wasn't really a distinct category of "shotgun". If you don't want to put one big lead ball in your muzzle-loader, you could put in a couple of smaller ones, or a lot of tiny ones in a little wad of paper, or some goodly rocks. A real, cast lead bullet, which the shooter has filed the lumps off of so it's almost round, is a piece of masterwork ammunition. Most people are assumed to be loading their guns with sand and twigs and bits of birdsnest.
    In modern firearms, silver bullets are entirely the wrong density, and will tumble and keyhole badly. This isn't a concern with a round ball fired out of a smooth bore. Go ham with the silver bullets, I won't stop you. They cost about 2sp each (which is to say, if you melt down two silver coins you'll have one silver musket ball).

Propellant

    Most historical firearms use a "black powder" (not called so at the time, I think, it was just "gunpowder" because it was the only one that was around) made out of six parts saltpeter, one part fine charcoal, and one part sulfur, or thereabouts. But this is a fantasy game, not historical fiction. We can use other propellants if we want. The most common alternative in my games is "red powder", a gritty crystalline alchemical substance which can ignite when wet, produces brilliant red light but no sound or visible smoke, and (being slightly less powerful) imposes a -2 penalty to damage. "How can it fire when wet? The ignition system of the gun is the same, so unless it's a dangerously reactive substance the water is still going to put out the spark or match. And how can an explosive be silent? And if red powder is less powerful, why don't people just load their guns with slightly more of it?" Shut the Hell up. Shut your fucking mouth.

Mechanism

    So far, everything I have described has been assuming guns that use what is called a "flintlock" ignition mechanism. In such a mechanism, a spring-loaded hammer holds a piece of flint over a pan which contains a small amount of powder and has a tiny hole into the back of the barrel where the propellant and projectile sit. The pan has a steel cover, called a "frizzen", which keeps the priming charge from just... blowing away. When the trigger is pulled, the hammer falls, which strikes the flint against the frizzen, which both lifts the frizzen off the pan and strikes sparks, which ignite the small priming charge, which in turn ignites the propellant. Wikipedia has some cool gifs of this.
    An immediate precursor to this is the "matchlock", where instead of all that complicated (and difficult to manufacture with hand-tools in a blacksmith's shop) business with a frizzen and a flint and what-have-you, your ignition system is a piece of slow-burning fuse. When the trigger is pulled, the spring-loaded hammer falls, which touches the "match" to the priming charge, which in turn ignites the propellant. This system is vulnerable to rain, or fog, or wind, or being jostled, or the gun coming into contact with the ground or someone's hand or a wall or something, or bad luck. Slow matches burn about an inch a minute, so you also have to worry about lighting it before the fighting starts, but not so long before the fighting starts that you burn all your fuse without a chance to fire your gun. Also, the ignition of the priming charge will sometimes blow out your match, so you need to keep both ends lit to re-light the business end, which doubles your burn rate... really, if guns weren't so effective, they'd be too much of a pain in the ass to use. The matchlock was more-or-less the default for about five hundred years of firearm development in most of the world. For a simple rule: keeping your matchlock combat-ready has a direct monetary cost. Let's say that an hour of slow match costs as much as an hour of lamp oil, just to have a number. More importantly, slow matches are immediately doused by any amount of water, and go out on a 2-in-6 when in the presence of strong wind, heavy mist, and any sort of magical blast of ghost bullshit. Real pain in the neck. And don't forget that, obviously, you cannot conceal a matchlock underneath your coat or in a boot.
    The immediate successor to the flintlock was the "caplock", in which the touch-hole juts out of the gun and is capped with a little metal hat that contains some fulminant (a material that explodes when jostled), and the spring-loaded hammer strikes the cap, which &c &c &c. This has two enormous advantages: you don't need to worry about your stupid pan (if you've heard of "flash in the pan", that comes from pre-cap firearms when it would be possible for the priming charge to go off but not set the actual propellant off. Big disappointment. Also you're going to die now), and you... actually, every second reason I was going to give basically stems directly from that first one. Pans and ignition systems are so terrible, and caps are so much better. So much more reliable. So much faster to load. You can carry a caplock derringer in your purse, and the powder won't spill everywhere, and the match won't go out, and the stupid flint won't fall out. It's superior in every way. Buy yourself a capgun, my adventuresome friend.

Smoke

    Go watch this video. It's less than seven minutes long, you attentionspanless zoomer fuck. Do you notice that, before a gun goes off, you can see the gun, and then after a gun goes off there's a giant impenetrable cloud of white smoke? Do you notice that by the end of the battle you can't see dogshit because the whole field is covered in a giant impenetrable cloud of white smoke? And all of this is happening in an open field in broad daylight Have you ever set off a firework in a 10' wide, 10' high stone corridor? How's the air circulation on Level 4 of Egregorius' Pit of Despair? "Not excellent," you say. I see. How about the lighting? "I've gone and set a stick on fire and am now holding it around the height of my belly-button in my wavering off-hand as I run," you say. Maybe you shouldn't have brought that firearm to this dungeon crawl.




    Well, that's about all I have to say. Go read the gunman class, and check out G24 in the sidebar, and hit "like" and "subscribe", and wash your vegetables before you cook with them. You don't know where they've been. Goodnight.