Quintessential Rogue II, The - Advanced Tactics

For rogues at the bottom end of the pecking order, the greatest reward is to survive to the end of another hand-to-mouth day with a pocket full of pilfered silvers and a bottle of sour wine. Life on the streets is nasty, brutish and short, with many fish and not enough pond to go round. Few of these ragamuffins and tatterdemalions give much thought to achievement as rogues. For them, the issue is one of survival, not of possible eventual attainment. They live on the edge, taking ever greater risks until one day the net closes and they are left wriggling on the end of a hempen rope.

There are those who disdain this kind of short-sighted thinking. For some, the path of the rogue is not just a way to make easy money by taking what is not yours, or a path to the respect of your peers, who learn not to turn their back on you for fear of what you might do. Those who take a pride in their work, who determine to make more of themselves than just another corpse in cheap leather armor who overlooked one trap too many, can achieve heights of prestige to which no other class can reach.

For the rogues, too, have their legends.

These are not necessarily those who have advanced in experience until they have achieved epic heights, though their names are indeed remembered and commemorated in whispers. No, the true master rogue can be low in level and poor in his pocket; what matters is that he has the imagination, the determination and the information to succeed. Choosing his fields of study and practice carefully, making sure that his abilities complement one another, he is far from being just another jack-of-all-trades with a nasty sneak attack.

The Collector’s Series II takes an advanced look at the whole range of class and racial sourcebooks from Mongoose Publishing, all designed to greatly widen a player’s options for his character within the d20 games system. More than simple continuations, the second series of Quintessential books slot seamlessly into any fantasy-based campaign, giving advanced alternatives for characters of one class or race within the game, allowing both players and Games Masters the chance to give mid- and high-level characters new options without overpowering or unbalancing the game as a whole. The Collector’s Series II will not necessarily allow players to make their characters even better, but they will be able to do a lot more than they ever thought possible before.

With the help of this sourcebook, any character choosing the rogue class will find many alternatives and options expanding his range of abilities. With career paths, fighters can customize their advancement and gain special benefits from their chosen branch of training; legendary classes offer a subset and expansion of their skills and character features that may take them to epic levels and beyond. Multiclassing offers a rogue a complement to his abilities, giving advice as to how best to integrate two classes, while superior tools and accessories ensure that his performance is enhanced to the optimum degree. Tricks of the trade provides a collection of useful information relating to the rogue’s craft, while sections on locks and the means of bypassing them bring additional challenge and complexity to this aspect of roguery.

A chapter dedicated to the use of magic gives insights into the use of easily overlooked low-level spells and provides additional magical items for the rogue’s use, while the Gizmo is introduced in a later chapter as the last word in rogue equipment. Rackets and confidence tricks are explained and a whole chapter is given over to detailing the role of the bank in a fantasy game world, in case a group of rogues feels up to the ultimate challenge of robbing one.

Ironically for a character class that includes so much versatility, rogues are all too often pigeonholed into very narrow set roles. This book opens up the field, giving a multitude of different ways to pursue the rogue’s path, each one enriched by new class combinations and character concepts.