designing an assassin's den

[dragsvart]

I'm currently putting together a campaign, part of which includes the players having to acquiring a set of keys owned by the leaders of a cities thieves' guild. I'm currently hitting a bit of a wall trying to design the base/den/dungeon that would be used by the leader of the assassins of the guild. I'm looking for some help with what kind of features might be inside the base of a thieves' guild's assassins and where that base might be in a city.

[Keltest]

If youre looking to make this into a dungeon, full stop. Youll want to re-examine what the thing is being used for, because assassins don't have evil lairs full of pit traps and whatever else hanging around. Those are tedious, expensive and most importantly obtrusive. You just cant have that elaborate a setup in a city without SOMEONE knowing about it. The workers who built it, if nothing else.

A skilled assassin instead would have a network of safe houses and the like which are not immediately obvious as being something out of the ordinary. They would have caches of weapons, money, supplies and potentially blackmail material depending on what all the assassin does. The challenge is in locating such a den. Nobody is going to question the presence of barrels in a warehouse enough to look inside and see theyre full of crossbow bolts or coins instead of wine, for example.

If this is a guild house, on the other hand, youre looking in an entirely different direction. It would be a fairly large manor or similar structure (or possibly structures) equipped with training facilities, bunks, probably a few prison cells, and all the other facilities required for an organization of murderers. From the outside it would appear to be an ordinary building for its locale, but there would be a series of secret entrances (possibly from the sewers) so that the assassins can go in and out without people associating it with crowds. Again, the emphasis is that it doesn't look remotely out of place, so that nobody examines it too closely.