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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nameless" data-source="post: 1751258" data-attributes="member: 1543">I imagine that the name information is easy to get - for most people. Unfortunately, it's exactly the people who are hard to find that are commonly bad guys and criminals. Finding someone's name is easy, and it provides the least powerful effect.Finding someone's birthplace or birthdate is tougher. His family might know, if you can find them. A legend lore spell might know, but it would be a whole adventure in and of itself to decipher the cryptic answer, most likely. Unless you go out of your way to track this down, or unless the person is careless about his personal facts, it's going to require time and money to learn.Finding someone's alignment or allegiance (loosely defined in the same way as in d20 modern) is somewhat tough (I would only allow one guess until the guess is tested in combat), maybe not as tough as birthplace. But if you've got the allegiance figured out, you really know the most important stuff. A couple messages later, your entire house knows.I made name power as kind of a metaphysical to physical bridge. All of the maneuvering that might take place to continue the chase is put on the battlefield instead of across the countryside. If House Phiarlan knows your name, your origin, and your goals, it's going to be pretty hard to hide from them and pretty hard to sleep at night. Once your death is a foregone conclusion anyways, the name power just makes it immediate.It's probably a poor justification for a powerful ability, but that was my rationale when I wrote it up. Besides that, the only combat ability of the class is in the name power, and it's got a medium attack bonus.Also, the class is available at 9th level if you made a beeline for dragonmarked heir and then a beeline for umbral master, but it's still a high level PrC. Dragonmarked heir provides the sense motive, and another class can provide the hide. The first character to take the class is probably going to be the Ranger 4/Dragonmarked Heir 3 in the party, as soon as he gets his greater mark next level.</blockquote>

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