Well, like with your wizardry mod, it seems to me that you thoroughly break with the conventions of the standard game in this mod too.
I won't be quite as long-winded this time, though, as it's mostly just the assassination attacks that bother me here.
My first thought was – if the standard human assassins of the game get +2 to their weapon die sizes when assassinating (and one attack only) – how come
these assassins get +5, +15 or even two attacks at +25? Are the standard assassins of the game all complete and utter incompetents?
I was going to suggest that you simply drop the idea that these assassins are at all human, and instead make them be perhaps something like the
gray men in the
Wheel of Time story by Robert Jordan – even if not really invisible at all still almost impossible to
register (presumably due to their soullessness somehow) in the perception of most people, and
therefore superhumanly efficient as assassins. (This might also explain why they have difficulties recruiting regular troops – simply because they are shunned by most humans.)
Then I realized that the assassins of this mod only strike
at the front – not rear like ordinary assassins, and not even
anywhere, like the unrefined
Goblin Murderer. Which, of course, makes them weaker than I first thought. But, to be honest, at this point it just became weird to me. Why would these, presumably highly competent, assassins – whether humans or not – charge the enemy heads on at their front (only), when other assassins in the game are able to attack from the rear? Why this – in particular when the background text says that
"these men and women shrouded in the shadow would be used to destroy leaders and spell casters" (which are mostly at the back)?
Of course, it may be that allowing the assassins of this faction to strike rear, like normal assassins, would make them just too powerful for them to really work in the game. So perhaps that's why you made them the way you did?
Adding the
strikes rear attribute to a weapon in this game is less that straightforward, as I realized when looking into this however. So just in case the reason for its absence in the assassination attacks of this faction was that you just didn't want to mess with that – or for the benefit of others who might want to do it – here is how:
To make a dagger attack strike rear, a definition of this attack must first be made:
newweapon "Dagger "
wtrgrank 8 # Strikes rear
wdmgtype 3 # Pierce
wdmg 3
wsound 1 # Spear/Dagger etc.
Note the
space at the end of the name string. This will ensure that the game can separate this rear-striking dagger from the ordinary (front-striking) one. I.e.
"Dagger " (with a space) now means a rear-striking dagger, whereas
"Dagger" (without space) means the ordinary one. (And I'll admit there was some banging of my head against the wall before I figured that one out.)
With this weapon definition in place, you can then make use of rear-striking daggers (with the space) in your assassin definitions.
As for the shortsword, there already is a rear-striking version defined in the standard game. However, in order to get at that definition, you need, in your assassin definitions, to refer to the weapon by number (377) instead of name:
assassinweapon 5 377 # ShortSword that strikes rear
Again, you may already know all this but had your reasons not to give it to your assassins. I just felt I had to post the info anyway.
Apart from my bewilderment regarding the assassination attacks of this faction, I have only minor problems with it:
- The air shields of 15% or 25% are unexplained and non-standard. (The only ones with any innate air shield at all in the standard game are, I believe, air beings and the Great Warlock of Air, and the value is always 50%, except for the Queen of Air, who has an innate air shield of 75%; any air shield from spells or magic items is, by the way, also always at 75%, I believe.)
- Some of the attack bonuses, for non-assassination attacks too, are a bit high, I think. The only human in the standard game able to match the innate +4 of the assassin brute is, as far as I know, the Great Warlock of Earth (who has a strength of 6). And +3 is also very rare to find among humans. (None of which will be a problem if these guys aren't considered human, of course.) Obviously, you could always change the weapon from shortsword to sword and reduce the bonus by one, for a net effect of no change at all.
Finally, I do tactically/game play-wise like the general idea of this hyperaggressive assassin faction, so very different from other classes in the game. I just wish I could make more sense of it, thematically.