Drawing on yesterday’s post about simplifying warhammer, here are the outlines for a high fantasy character class, akin to the Rogue class from Rolemaster.

Introduction

The rogue is a criminal and a thug, the kind of knave who hires themselves out to do nasty jobs in the bad parts of dirty towns. Rogues fight and kill for a living, but they don’t do so fairly: a rogue who finds themselves in a fair fight has made a tactical error, and given their natural tendencies towards cowardice and thuggery, the kind of rogue who regularly gets caught in open combat is likely to die. Rogues get ahead by a combination of bastardry and skullduggery. They don’t resort to “honourable” crimes like thieves, and they don’t resort to honourable combat as do Champions or warriors. They ambush, trick and run.

Class skills

Stealth, Weapon Skill OR Ballistic Skill, Coordination, Guile, Intuition

Abilities

Primary abilities: Agility, Fellowship

Wound threshold: +0

Strain: +0

Starting talents

  • Agile defender: if the rogue is not attacking, he or she can make a 1D coordination check. Every success on this check adds 1 misfortune die to the enemy’s attack; every bane causes one point of strain
  • Surprise attack: The rogue gains two fortune dice to initiative when attacking from stealth, and two fortune dice on melee attacks against those who have not acted in the first round of such an attack
  • Fluster: make a Guile vs. Discipline challenged check, with +2 misfortune dice. All allies add 1 fortune dice per success for their next action against the targeted enemy

Talent tree

Rogues develop talents according to figure 1.

Figure 1: Rogue Talents

Figure 1: Rogue Talents