Crimson Contracts

On the 22nd of November, 2002, Ambient will be releasing the first production of The Brood, a small sourcebook for fleshing out the Assassian PrC in your campaign.
The book is Crimson Contracts: Assassin's Manifesto. Written by Michael Chapin and Timothy Willard as a first product that The Brood has produced and Ambient Inc. has so generously offered to publish.
The small book, 80+ pages, will run the gamut from underpowered to highpowered, and features the following:

• New Skills and Variant Skill Uses-Including Networking
• Magic Items-Weapons, special armors for a particular guild, potions and more
• New Spells-To make every targets day a happy day!
• New PrC's-(Big Surprise!!) From the Stalker of the Sands to the Brutal Killer to a Paladin assassin PrC and a bunch of other guys
• Assassin Organizations-Nice little drop in groups to make your PC's happy people!!
• Core Classes-Friendly people to flesh out thieves guilds and the slums!
• And even more fun that can stalk your PC's....
• And kill them.

The nice thing, is it's priced nicely for a small book such as this (80+ pages, or was it 90+?) at $6.95 (estimated) for the PDF download.
A handy little GM's sourcebook full of all kinds of nice stuff for GM's to stalk the characters with.
Get it, read it, and make your players absolutely hate it

Sounds promising. How many PrCs? Will it have a focus similiar to the Assassin's Handbook and focus on two types of assassins (merc vs. religious) or a wider range? Will it have rules for making your own guilds and poisons? Gods of assassins?

Here I was thinking I didn't need anything else for assassins and you go and mention "Stalker of the Sands"... I'll definitely check it out when it's released.

There are 15 PrCs.

Will it have a focus similiar to the Assassin's Handbook and focus on two types of assassins (merc vs. religious) or a wider range?

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Our book doesn't focus on any one type of assassin, but merely provides several different organizations for use with the PrCs that you can drop straight into your campaign with a minimum of fuss. We have mercenary groups, religious groups, and groups that are out for themselves - in short, something for everyone. We tried to make it non-campaign-specific so that it would be more useful to a greater number of people.

Will it have rules for making your own guilds and poisons? Gods of assassins?

Click to expand...

We didn't include rules for crafting poisons (actually, we forgot about that one...). We didn't do rules for creating your own guild, because there are already plenty of good products out there that covered guild creation, and we didn't do gods because most campaign worlds already have gods of assassin/slaughter/murder. (And frankly, we didn't have room - we had to cut stuff out!)
For those of you who want a sneak peek of some of the stuff in the book, you can check out our free web enhancement with some NPCs with the various PrCs: www.thebrood-d20.tk.

Final Production report

Crimson Contracts, The Assassin's Manifesto is now in final layout with AMAZING interior art by Micheal Martin (see the mock cover below for an example of the interior artwork in this book).

This is a massive book of material for assassins, with

• new (20 level) NPC and PC classes as well as no less than
• fifteen Prestige classes,
• more than 20 new poisons,
• magical diseases,
• Tools of the trade including weapons and equipment,
• more than 20 new magic weapons, armors and items,
• new psionic items such as the Shard Blade,
• more than 20 new spells,
• creature templates including the ShadowBorn and Poison Child,
• a dozen organizations and guilds of killers, assassins and worse
• variant rules for breaking someone's kneck, torture, handling poison, intimidation, garroting and chokeholds
• sample encounter with a deadly brutal killer

But the book is far more than rules and "crunch". There are chapters without rules entirely... The role of the assassin, types and styles of assassins as well as roleplaying ideas and character concepts, how to go about plying the trade of murder - getting contracts, executing them and even more importantly for many, making sure you get paid. How the guilds and assassin societies interact, how to break into the "market" of pay-for-slay, and the peculiar quirks that some hired killers tend to manifest.

Crimson Contracts, The Assassin's Manifesto, written by Michael Chapin and Timothy Willard of 'the Brood' and illustrated by Micheal Martin goes on sale next week at RPGnow.

(the following is a cover mock-up, NOT the final cover. This is actually one of the interior pieces of art by Micheal Martin.)

Hi Jason and Denise,

The book looks spectacular. The mock-up cover is particularly evocative.

I'm glad the book is not all crunchy bits. As many people will tell you, I'm more of a "story-first" kinda guy, so I look forward to reading narrative chapters.

I hope it does very well for you.


Best,

That mockup cover is awesome! I'm pretty impressed if you have another piece even better that you're saving for the cover.

I'm hoping it flies well too, thanks Henry, Steve.

We've been working on this title for quite some time (well, the writers have been slaving over it, I've just been standing here fidgeting). Unfortunately, we are fighting an uphill battle against timing now as there are two Assassin-specific books that quite recently entered the print market, and a new publisher (as far as I know) has just released one in PDF format.

Assassin Books

HellHound said:

we are fighting an uphill battle against timing now as there are two Assassin-specific books that quite recently entered the print market, and a new publisher (as far as I know) has just released one in PDF format.

Click to expand...

And I'm in the last stages of completing one that will probably be released by Sunday.

Mine appears to have little to no overlap with yours or the new on on RPGNow. Also, mine is much cheaper and shorter (and very focused on one aspect).

I suspect these will all work well together.

Nice art!
Looking forward to this!