Need a party of assassins to sneak up on your PCs while they camp? Or perhaps they have angered a powerful noble who has hired assassins to jump them just as they retire for the night in the inn. Or perhaps the PCs learn of a plot against the king and must prepare for the assassins’ attempt on his life.
Here’s a free assassin generator for 5e Dungeons & Dragons and for the Low Fantasy Gaming system to make the creation of a customizable party of assassins easy and fun!
Customize Your Assassins
It’s easy just to grab a stat block out of the Monster Manual. But if you want your assassins to come to life at the table, it helps to fill in the little details that make each group of assassins unique. What is their mission? How determined are they to carry it out? How do they treat innocents along the way? Can they be bought?
- Backstory: The Maker’s Forge Foe Generator will create a backstory for your assassins that you can tweak as needed to fit into the PC’s current situation. Who is the assassins’ target? What special equipment did they bring along for the job? What do they want? And most importantly: how does what the assassins want conflict with what the PCs want?
- A name and vivid description: each assassin has a name that might be revealed during negotiation, threats, or capture. And every assassin should be unique when you describe him to the player that encounters them. Vivid description is the lifeblood of the roleplaying game. Man or woman? Distinguishing marks? What is she hiding from her allies? How loyal is he to the mission? What does this assassin want? And what is he prepared to do to get it?
- Weapons and hit points: assassins will use light weapons, often poisoned, and they tend to be very deadly, launching their attacks from the shadows and then fading away. And some assassins are a lot tougher than others.
- A master assassin to lead them: most assassins are led by a veteran of the dark trade, a shadowy master of the art of death. What personal stake does she have in the mission’s outcome? What is his motivation for a life of dealing death? How does he treat those assassins that do his bidding? And what does she do if the mission fails?
- Specialists: veteran assassins often assist in difficult missions, more skilled and more deadly than their less experienced partners. Other groups of assassins turn to dark magic and bind fell spirits to aid them in their nefarious work. Still others serve a guild, and sometimes that guild sends along specially trained sorcerers to bring down particularly tough targets.
- Loot: should the PCs defeat the assassins, what gear, valuables, or secret information might they recover? What hints of further adventure might be lurking among the assassins’ possessions?
Foe Generator for 5e D&D and Low Fantasy Gaming
So what are you waiting for? Go use the Maker’s Forge Wizard Generator to get a jump-start on a party of assassins.
It does all the grunt work for you: stats, names, short descriptions, poisons, weapons, and HP for each bandit, and loot from slain foes.
All that’s left for you to do is to bring the assassins’ goals into sharp conflict with the PCs and let the sparks fly!