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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Messageboard Golem" data-source="post: 2010163" data-attributes="member: 18387">By Glenn Dean, Staff Reviewer d20 Magazine RackSizing Up the TargetCrimson Contracts: The Assassin’s Manifesto is a 129-page PDF product written by Michael Chapin and Timothy Willard, and published by Ambient, Inc. The full-color product includes a black-and-white version and is available as an $11.95 download.First BloodCrimson Contracts: The Assassin’s Manifesto is a guide to professional killers of all types. Whether your campaign needs a traditional guild assassin, a free-lance contract killer, an officially sanctioned court assassin, a lone vigilante, or something in between, Crimson Contracts has everything you need to know about the personalities, roles, skills, classes, tools, and organizations that will fill that niche.The first of seven chapters, the Role of the Assassin, provides a myriad of possible assassin types for the campaign. The assassin need not be some black-clad shadow skulking figure; in fact, he might fill any range of roles and have a number of personalities from the wild Bloodluster to the reluctant killer. The roles chapter discusses how assassins get into the killing profession, what sorts of personality quirks and traits they possess, and the methods by which an assassin plans, prepares, and executes his intended victim.The second chapter is devoted to new skills and feats. Appropriate to a book on assassins is a series of new knowledge skills like Anatomy, plus skills use in the handling and production of poison. Craft (Origami) can provide a unique calling card for a different breed of professional killer. Ten feats allow for different and more effective modes of killing – though some, like Exude Venom or Run-by-Attack are extremely powerful in the context of the current d20 feat set.Chapter three provides a host of new core and prestige classes appropriate to killers of all sorts. Crimson Contracts does state that the majority of them are designed for NPCs and could be unbalancing in the campaign, and this is a fair warning. While new core classes like Brawler, Hit Man, and Thief are essentially NPC rogue variants, the prestige classes range from the “purposefully weak to the overbalanced.” The Brutal Killer, for example, is a horribly powerful prestige class that makes the barbarian seem tame and would cause any spellcaster to shiver in his boots. There is a great range of ideas – the Dancer of the Scarves and Femme Fatale prestige classes, for example, make great roles for female assassins. There are two Lawful Good assassins, the Fist of Righteousness and Hunter of the Damned – a concept that seems strange but makes sense once you read the class description. Psionics and magic are embraced, as well – the Arcane Assassin is what WOTC’s Arcane Trickster should have been, and the Phantasmal Killer is a neat all-around idea.Chapter four provides a host of new tools of the trade for the assassin. The centerpiece of these are 20 new poisons and some magical diseases, some of which – like nymph dust – have quite an unusual and interesting flavor. Antitoxins make an appearance; this is an idea that has been sorely lacking from any previous treatment of poisons. There are 14 new exotic weapons, from blade boots to varieties of garrotes, plus a number of special tools that would made a non-assassin archer character quite happy. New magic and psionic items appropriate to the professional killer also grace this chapter – an entire range from potions to arms and armor to miscellaneous magic.Chapter five presents a host of new spells, most of which enhance abilities to hide, conceal weapons, deliver poisons, and the like. Interestingly, for a product that focuses on assassins, only one of the 33 spells is designated for the assassin prestige class; the remainder are bard, sorcerer/wizard, or cleric spells. The spells have fewer balance issues than the prestige classes, and in fact I found that some, like Polymorph Weapon seemed too high a spell level for their power.Chapter six provides a host of creature templates to turn monsters into even more effective killers. Players will quake in their boots when facing the undead “Death’s Assassin”, while others like the “Demon Driven” and “Poison Child” are almost equally twisted and terrifying.The last chapter provides the history, organization, goals, and prices for a range of professional killing organizations. There’s a wide enough range that you’ll likely find something to fit your campaign if you’re looking for an assassin’s guild; the lot would make an interesting basis for an assassin-based campaign. No NPCs are statted, here, though, though this chapter does include a fully prepared encounter with a Brutal assassin character, as well as a number of useful variant rules for torture, neck breaking, strngling, and garrote use.Critical HitsCrimson Contracts provides a wonderfully disturbing range of killing machines. After finishing reading about so many killers, I was tempted to recommend a “Mature Audiences” sticker for it, given the sheer level of cold, calculating violence. Ambient could have defaulted to the tame “black-clad ninja killer” assassin approach, but I’m glad they didn’t. While your run-of-the-mill ninja assassin will find plenty of use in Crimson Contracts, there are a lot more thought-provoking concepts inside. The strength of the supplement is that it creates a consistent framework for this set of creative ideas, so that assassins like the Femme Fatale and Fist of Righteousness fit in nicely amongst an entire palette of assassin choices.There’s a framing story about a death knight looking for a paid killer that runs the length of the book, introducing each section and class. It was great reading by itself and complements the material well, plus it had a nice twist at the end – a wonderful bit of flavor to enhance the game mechanics.Critical MissesThe authors are honest in admitting that there are elements of Crimson Contracts that could provide some difficulty in the campaign. Most of the classes, skills, and feats seem to be geared for GM use rather than player use – the GM might consider well before allowing a player to use elements from Crimson Contracts in the campaign. It would have been nice to include a few more examples of the classes and other mechanics prepared as examples, particularly in the organization chapter. A sample assassin of each guild might put the new skills and feats into an appropriate context. As it stands the prestige classes seem divorced from the sorts of organizations that would spawn them.Crimson Contracts does contain a couple of errors, as well, the most glaring of which is the missing Psionic Assassin class. It is mentioned in the text, and in the table of contents, but the class itself is missing. The table of contents also lacks page references, which makes it a little difficult to simply look up a single item.Coup de GraceThe key game mechanics in this product are open content (feats, spells, prestige class mechanics, and the like), though the remainder of the product is product identity. Most of the d20 mechanics fit the system quite well, though a selection of each even the publisher finds unbalancing, so use them with caution. Still, there are enough different assassin varieties to make any player or GM happy. If murder, intrigue, and assassination play a bit part in your game, you’ll likely find a lot of good ideas in Crimson Contracts.To see the graded evaluation of this product and to leave comments that the reviewer will respond to, go to The Critic's Corner at <a href="http://www.d20zines.com/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index&catid=&topic=3" target="_blank">www.d20zines.com.</a></blockquote>

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