Assassin's Creed Campaign

[Threadnaught]

Hey all, I asked about a Gestalt and a Tristalt game earlier and do plan on running both, but. As it turns out I'm going to be running a RL game soon. I will obviously enough, be basing the entire campaign on the wonderful series of games made by Ubisoft. I just want to know if there's anything I'm missing or if there's anything I should include.


I'm going to be using the Honor Variant, using the tables for gaining/losing Honor and the Benefits. Each Player Character begins with 0 Honor.

Player Character Classes available are Aristocrat, Commoner, Expert, Fighter, Rogue and Warrior. Anything without any form of Magic really.
Yes I realise Barbarians fall into the requirements of allowed PC Classes, I just have no idea how to balance them against the other Classes without nerfing them.
Artificer is available for Precursors, who are NPCs only.

Player Race is Human, encounters will be mostly Humans and Animals, with the odd low powered Construct and Undead, nothing too Magical.

Speaking of Magic, the only source of Magic would be from Permanent Magic Items. No Charged or Single Use Items, only stuff with a Continuous Effect or Daily Charges. Rare enough to make 3/day CLW something people are willing to kill for.


Okay, so first of all, am I missing something that could be added?


Secondly, I'm in need of a location to set the campaign in/around. Any idea on what locations should be used?
I don't want to mess around with guns btw, I reckon the most advanced non Magical/Artifact Weapon should be something like the crossbow.

[Emperor Tippy]

Lot's of other potential base classes.

Swashbuckler is quite good at replicating the feel of Assassin's Creed.

Monk as well.

Rogue 1/ Swashbuckler 3/ Decisive Strike Martial Monk 1/ Factotum 1 is a very good, no magic, E6, Assassin's Creed Assassin build.

Take Craven, Kung Fu Genius, and Weapon Supremacy.

[Gemini476]

I would suggest that you use a different system than Dungeons and Dragons 3.X. 3.X is notoriously bad at running low-to-no magic campaigns, although I suppose it's a bit better if you disallow all spellcasters and make all enemies human.
I'm not entirely sure what system would be better, however. What tech-level were you thinking about?

Then again, you could just try to shoehorn it into D&D 3.X. I just have a creeping suspicion that it won't work out very well.

However, as for what you have written up so far? The only classes on that list of allowed classes that are remotely useful are the Expert, the Fighter, and the Rogue. And the Expert is only good if you have the right skills, which in a core-only game is not the case.
So all PCs are going to be Fighters and Rogues, perhaps with some PrCs stacked on.
I can see that you might run into some trouble with differentiating characters if you run it below level six, but then again this kind of game should really be E6 so that you don't get the ridiculous HP bloat that comes in at higher levels.

If I were in your position (which I am not), I would also allow Warblades [Tome of Battle], Barbarians, and the non-caster versions of the Paladin and Ranger that are in the Complete Champion book. Maybe also include some gutted version of the Swordsage [Tome of Battle], but at that point it might be better to just grab some homebrew Initiator class. I know that there was some cool Wuxia project going on before.
Oh, and including the Scout [Complete Adventurer] and Swashbuckler [Complete Warrior] seems like a good idea.

Although, again, this is your project and not mine.

It's just that restricting the class list to two decent-ish classes (and the Fighter is almost not even that) seems like a bad idea.

Have you considered running it using Pathfinder classes? It might work if you're just restricting classes to those few due to a lack of books, although Pathfinder did mess around a bit with the melee classes. At least CMD and CMB will work properly in a human-only game.