These are the final 8 members of the Guild of Assassins, the deadly buffoons who will be showing up in town to kill your PCs shortly.
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| by yangxueguo |
1 Moonya Greymorning - She is heralded by by the arrival of a flock of death's head moths, which fly into the hair of the condemned person(s), grab on really tight, and then die.
She wears compound eye goggles and has moths tattooed over her whole body. She wears only grey and white, and when she moves quickly, sleep powder sloughs off her (as she is absolutely coated in the stuff). When she takes damage, she turns into a swarm of moths, and automatically reforms at the start of her next turn. She can also use this ability to fit through small holes, etc. She is accompanied at all times by three cat-sized moths (stats as psuedodragons) and rides a moon moth (basically Mothra).
Her default strategy is to put the entire town to sleep by having her moon moth sprinkle sleep dust over the whole place. Then she moves in and starts cutting throats, humming lullabies the whole time.
The moon moth is huge and high HD but it has not attacks except for sleep powder (which it favors). It can be lured by large amounts of milk presented in a circular pool.
2 Immortal Joe - Six feet tall, slabs of muscle and fat. Twitching, sweating, constantly mumbling to himself. Deeply psychotic. His eyes constantly dart and stare at all the bizarre psychofauna that his wizard vision won't let him un-see.
He is shirtless and if he's not covered in his own feces, he coated in someone else's. He wields a sledgehammer. Although he does not know it, he is the son of Mishrut, a forgotten god of iron, and because of that he only takes damage from attacks that deal 3 damage or less.
He is heralded by himself, when he shows up and shouts "Hey assholes! I'm gonna fuckin' kill you something fucking good, ya fucks hear? Fuck!" and then runs off to hide in a ditch somewhere. He is both impatient and bad at tracking time, and so he doesn't even wait the required 12 hours--he just shows up after 1d12.
3 Goma and Goruma - Twin harpy sisters that fight with bows. Is that too simple? I mean, they fly, shoot arrows goodly, sing lure-songs, and shit on you with horrible, magical poops.
They are heralded when they shit on you and shoot a couple of arrows just to show you that they are serious, before flying off to get drunk on stolen brandy.
In combat, they use lots of clever tactics. Nets, false harpy dolls perched on rooftops, lassos. If the party tries to lure the harpies into a building where their flight is useless, the harpies will use their song to lure the party back outside and probably off a cliff or something.
4 Tabby the Cat - This is just a cat with too many rogue levels. She has three similar looking sisters (with 1 rogue level each). Her husband is a lion, but Tabby is too proud to ever ask for his help. He comes along with her on missions 50% of the time, but spends his days eating sheep and slow shepherds. Also naps.
Tabby is assisted by a mouse named Brigadier, who is only loyal because Tabby is holding his entire family hostage. Cats are jerks.
She is heralded by the headless corpse of a dog, which appears in the bed of each condemned person.
5 Red Molivia - She is actually a bagsaint, a lobotomized servant of the Cauteri priesthood whose skin has been entirely replaced with what is basically a wool sock for her entire body. Except in Molivia's case, they forgot to lobotomize her (which oddly seems crueller). Her bodysock is red plaid.
She is a wizard who wields a war pick she calls Brainspike. She has two gimmicks: summon demon (she can't control them, and can barely control what type of demon she gets) and magic jar, both usually cast in conjunction.
She is heralded by a large amount of red string, which the condemned with vomit out, probably over dinner. (This is custom spell of hers.) She is raising money for the reclamation of Cauterus and is desperate for a real relationship (friendship, romance, anything). She is kind to animals. Her spellbook is a piece of red, knotted string; when untied, it can be pulled to reveal a long extradimensional scroll.
6 Dolly Darkly - She is actually a tattoo that has learned to be human sometimes. In tattoo form, she can run around your body and stab you for 1d6 damage each round, usually in the eyes, neck, or groin. You'll have a hard time hitting her unless you take off all your clothes. If you kill her while she's on you, you'll permanently have a tattoo of a dead woman on you, you asshole.
In human form, she's just a normal looking woman with dark hair and green eyes. The only odd things about her are a mildly disconcerting lack of detail in her features (although you have to look close) and a tendency to fall back into cheesecake poses when she isn't paying attention. (All the sailor-approved poses.)
She can slurp herself onto your skin as long as she has even a square inch of skin-to-skin contact. No save. She can jump off just as easily. She bleeds ink. If you kill her in her flesh-and-blood form, you can have her gear (dagger +1, grappling hook + 20' rope) which can be pressed into your skin to form a tattoo, and plucked out of your skin with similar ease.
She is heralded by a tattoo of a skull that appears on your left palm overnight. It is both painful and itchy.
7 Sangelise the Dragon Eater - She's in a band called the Dragon Eaters. Her and four bards. She is heralded by a concert that she puts on, in which the last song is always a custom-written song that is explicitly about killing you.
She is accompanied at all times by Goldenbrown, her pet dragon eater (dire mongoose). They also have a band wagon painted in psychedelic mandalas and chromatic noise.
The wagon is actually part of the whole gimmick. She plays her guitar atop it, and the whole thing is rigged with booby traps: flamethrowers, snake shooters, mancatchers, walls that will fall on you, etc. Woe to anyone who tries climbing it.
Also, inside the wagon is a zombie dragon, because Sangelise belongs to that rarest of breeds: she is a necrobard. She is only doing this assassin thing ironically, and has been quietly killing other guild assassins over the years. Is actually an elf (with mutilated ears) and will probably need to end this assassination gig soon before someone notices how slow she's been aging.
8 Iron Marjack - He was once a wizard until they cut his tongue out, and then he was a monk until they cut his arms off. Both times, his only crime was pissing off the people in charge of a powerful, conservative institution.
So now he talks through a silver tongue. It's tones are dulcet, except when it clicks against his teeth. Spikes fountain from the stumps of his shoulders, part of the breastplate he wears. And he controls two enormous brick hands, each the size of a park bench.
Treat him as a multiclass wizard/monk who only uses kicks and who favors evocation spells. Treat the giant, flying hands as multiclass clay golem/Bigby's crushing hand. He can fly by surfing on one of the hands. He likes playing tricks, like getting you to stand on what you thought was a park bench but is actually a giant crushing hand made of bricks. But he also likes sharp tactics, like getting one of the hands to fly above the party and crush open a coffin full of weighted flechettes.
Remember that if Marjack can't see, neither can his hands.
He is heralded by a monkey paw, which is delivered to each of the condemned. He is perfectly, horribly in love with Sangelise, who despises him. His hobby is the construction of doll furniture, which he conducts with a second set of tiny hands, made from tiny bricks.
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| by yangxueguo |
Here's a few from my reject list. Do with them what you will.
Flongus Tentooth - His gimmick is summon fish, but a special weaponized version that always summons big, horrible things. Like summoning sharks into the stream, the kraken into the well.
Yeshak the Unspeakable - Fetal wizard. Knows teleport into womb, magic missile, and lightning bolt. Will probably be teleporting around into all the ladies and casting spells out of their vaginas. Can teleport into dudes, too, but they get a bonus to the save and this hurts both Yeshak and the dude.
FLYING SHARK RIDER!!!!
Lolth - Is not actually Lolth no matter how many times she calls herself that. Basically just evil spiderman who throws spider bombs on your face.
Simon the Mole - drill gloves, digs trap holes, regrets not finishing college
Gandreyla - Is a 2" high pixie who knows a spell that will shrink you to her size.
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| by yangxueguo |
That would be Maddening Sebastian.
He dresses like a lion tamer and owns a private menagerie. It is him that the House of Glass and Gossamer belongs to, and has for generations.
Most of his animals are naturally poisonous. The ones that are not poisonous have been made to be.
His gimmick is illusions. Once per round, he can cast either mirror image, disguise self, or phantasmal force. He usually fills an area with crazy shit before stepping into the scene himself, probably disguised as your favorite barkeep or something.
His animals will probably start attacking before he does, but his beasts are so ridiculous looking that the players will probably have a hard time distinguishing them from the illusions. Pigs wearing nightgowns, giraffes with knives on their feet, bears wearing spiked armor. And the animals behave erratically, too, probably from all the viper venom seeping into their brain from their prosthetic fangs.
This all sounds like the work of a crazy person but its actually all the work of a dry and calculating mind that is just really good at engineering a situation to be as bewildering as possible.
He is a master swordsman and duelist. He gets +2 AC when defending against other swords. His sword is coated in blinding poison (which he uses to blind anyone who seems to be seeing through his illusions) and the darts in his hand crossbow are coated with reverse gravity 1d6 rounds poison.
You'll only ever see him after killing a few of his guild assassins, and he says "If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself!" before swirling his cape around him and ninja-leaping out the nearest window.
He may also want to hire you.
these murderers should be the NPC's funnier than anyone could face.
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