Campaign Mastery

“Legacies (n., plural of Legacy): Gifts left by Will, objects or circumstances handed down, or inherited, from a predecessor.”

Assassin’s Amulet

Assassins are a key part of fantasy. Done right, they bring mystery, danger, depth, excitement and drama. Mention the word assassin and your players’ hearts should skip a beat. And then your group should lean forward, all eyes on you, hanging on your every word because your game just got serious.

That’s the effect you want every single time. Unfortunately, it never seems to work out that way. At their core, assassins are unfair. Who enjoys being on the wrong end of a One Shot Kill? And these NPCs then become your worst nightmare when a promising encounter you’ve designed breaks down into arguments and upset players. Assassins do not live up to their promise for exciting gameplay, and your game just never plays out the same as it does in books and movies.

Assassin’s Amulet solves your GMing problems. This thick book teaches you how to run amazing assassin encounters because it is packed with detailed how-to GM information and a ton of new gaming options.
 

		Click to download the free preview of Assassin’s Amulet				Click to purchase Assassin’s Amulet or learn more about the contents.
		A special 73-page preview. Usable content & a sample of the full Supplement.				Includes the 300-page Game Supplement and all the published extras.

The Untold Secret of Running Amazing Assassins

Assassin’s Amulet reveals, for the first time, the secrets of GMing assassins successfully. The authors of Assassin’s Amulet – Mike Bourke (campaignmastery.com), Michael K. Tumey (gamer-printshop.com) and Johnn Four (roleplayingtips.com, Dragon Magazine, GM Mastery) – had to discover that secret from years of trial and error.

We took our lumps, but we learned the secret nobody else seems to know or want to tell you, and we put it at the core of Assassin’s Amulet to ensure you can quickly bring the full power of this plot device to your table.

What You Get in Assassin’s Amulet

Our massive 300-page book is a broad campaign setting with original adventuring locations, rules, feats, magic items and character classes. With something for everyone, players and GMs alike, you’ll never look at Assassins the same way again. AA takes a campaign toolbook approach, with assassins as a common nexus, that helps you with your GMing needs.

Assassins are smart. They will use every resource to create a secret base where they can rest, plan, train and run their operation from. Do not settle for some scattered rooms in the sewers or a vulnerable abandoned location on the wrong side of town. We give you a home base of cunning design that you can drag and drop into your world or use as a launching point for your own design, plus variations on the design to enable you to customize it to fit the profile of the local assassins.

The home base that we have designed ties story and setting together to create powerful encounters – with a cool plot twist. The Gold Standard of location concepts contains:

• An Overview of the Assassins’ Lair
• Map, Map Key and Details of the Assassins’ Lair
• How to Defend the Lair
• Background Considerations When Designing Your Own Variations
• Lair Operations Manual
• Story and Encounter Drivers

You can select from the huge list of 126 plot hooks to design NPCs and plots at the same time. Plus, embedded throughout the book is a secret organization we can’t mention here (because of plot spoilers) you can use right away as a backbone for:

• Campaign design
• Town and city design
• Adventure design
• Encounter design

How to Run Amazing Assassins

The extensive GM advice chapter covers all facets of running assassins as NPCs for thrilling encounters:

• 14 Assassination Targets
• 5 Effective Combat Tactics for Assassins
• Give Assassins a Worthy Opponent
• How to Contact and Hire an Assassin
• The Price of Murder
• How to Equip an Assassin
• How to Roleplay an Assassins
• Five Unexpected Uses for Assassins
• How to Run and Manage an Assassins’ Guild
• How to Terrify Your Opponents with Assassins
• Using Poisons in Assassin’s Amulet
• How to Set Up an Assassination Attempt without Upsetting Your Players
• Six Ways to Defend an Assassins’ Guild
• Using Assassins in Your Games
• Plug & Play Content

Epic Scale GMing

This product offers you a ready-made epic mythos and institution to drop into your game setting to add new levels of detail to your world.
There is a lengthy chapter on how to make epic legacy magic items that transcend history just like the One Ring.

These items are what your assassins and PCs can wield, protect, fight for and quest for. This immediately scales up your campaign’s scope to epic. Put your players in the middle and tell tall tales together. This section melds magic item creation, storytelling and character gameplay into a single elegant and seamless system. The word epic gets bandied about too often, but this section brings the true meaning of the word to your game table through gameplay.

The Legacy Magic Items section helps you build more than just magic items. It shows you how to build history, integrated setting details, and huge scale consequences to having the item exist in your world. If you are familiar with Relics from 1st Edition D&D, when artifacts were actually impressive items, then you have some understanding of what this content delivers – but built to a modern standard of game balance with campaign and character integration. These items aren’t just there, they have made a difference to the history of the world in the past, and will do so again.

Mythos and World-Building elements

We end Assassin’s Amulet with a lot of crunch. Use this to inform your world and campaign designs or just use it right away at the game table to save you prep time. These include:

• A new god, presented in depth
• 5 new character classes for PCs and NPCs
• Pre-made NPCs for each new class at a variety of character levels
• New magic items
• New non-magic items

Campaign in a Box

This is the most comprehensive guide to Assassins ever in an RPG. Assassin’s Amulet gives you everything you need to run assassins immediately. The tome guides you through all the design steps needed to build something amazing your players will talk about for years to come. Brought to you by veteran game writers and designers, Assassin’s Amulet is a toolbook designed to help make you an awesome GM.

Extras

Assassin’s Amulet comes with a bundle of no less than 14 extras including maps optimized to make the GM’s life easier (you can find the list elsewhere on this page). The focus of most of the extras is on extracting the elements of value to the player into a standalone document that doesn’t reveal secrets that the character shouldn’t possess.

Philosophy & Guarantees

Through long experience, the authors have evolved a design philosophy for RPG supplements aimed at avoiding the mistakes that they have seen other publishers make. The goal was to provide value for money for every GM who purchased the product; to ensure that the product was completely standalone, requiring only the core rules of the game system to bring it to life; and to be able to accommodate every standard of campaign power level, from low-fantasy through to the most epic of high-fantasy options. The ambition was to have the product excel in every category, to establish a new baseline of best practice in every element put before the reader.

When you purchase Assassin’s Amulet you receive an instant download link.

We stand behind our work. You also receive our 60 day no questions asked Money Back Guarantee. If you are not 100% satisfied with Assassin’s Amulet, we will refund your money immediately without hoops or hassle.

The Legacies Series Mythos

As vast in scale as Assassin’s Amulet is, it is only the foundation for a series of products connected by multiple common threads. One of those threads are a Celestial Mythos that delivers deities of unparalleled scope and depth. Each new addition to the Legacy Series is a family of related products that over time will expand on the beginning made in AA and explore this mythos piece by piece.

Legacy Items

Legacy Items are the other major conceptual plank in the infrastructure of the Legacies series. Each part of the series will delve further into this treasure trove. The Legacy Items chapter of Assassin’s Amulet contains:

• Campaign planning and legacy item creation
• How Does a Character Acquire a Legacy Item?
• Binding a character to the Legacy
• Designing Legacy Item Powers (this is about deep characterization, not +1s)
• Bonding and Unlocking Powers (here’s your plot design!)
• The Effects of a Legacy (and here’s your world design)
• Eight Legacy Items for immediate use

The Assassin’s Amulet Extras

To date, there have been 14 free extras added to the Assassin’s Amulet family, with five more to come.

Published

• LG1021: the Assassin’s lair as a single page
• LG1022: 600dpi Map – a higher resolution version of LG021
• LG1023: 300dpi Dark – the Assassin’s lair with everything the players can’t immediately see on arrival concealed by darkness, as a single page
• LG1024: A4 map – the Assassin’s lair reformatted to print correctly on individual A4 pages at 300dpi
• LG1025: A Player’s Guide To Legacy Items – Everything a player needs to know about Legacy Items
• LG1026: The Expanded GM’s Companion Guide To Legacy Items – Everything a GM needs to know to run a campaign with Legacy Items, revised, expanded, and annotated (33% new content!)
• LG1027: Assassin’s Amulet Special Preview – Free to all!
• LG1028: Legacy Item: The Shield Of Madrassias – a standalone expanded and clarified workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge
• LG1029: Legacy Item: The Mask Of Serephides – a standalone expanded and clarified workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge
• LG1030: Legacy Item: The Throne Of Thorns – a standalone expanded and clarified workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge
• LG1031: Legacy Item: The Spiked Gauntlet Of B’rrastis – a standalone expanded and clarified workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge
• LG1032: Legacy Item: The Cup Of Dewarr – a standalone expanded and clarified workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge
• LG1033: Legacy Item: The Armor Of Attrisses – a standalone expanded and clarified workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge
• LG1034: Legacy Item: The Lantern Of Tevariers – a standalone expanded and clarified workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge
• LG1035: Legacy Item: The Shortsword of the Shahd’rah – a completely revised standalone workup of the Legacy Item from AA, separating what a possessor (player) knows from GM knowledge

Unpublished

• LG1036: Player’s Guide: Membership In The Hands Of Cyrene – A general introduction to this organization detailing the things that a member should know (and should believe) – requires LG1043
• LG1040: Player’s Guide: The Eyes Of Cyrene Class – an extract and reformatting of this class, by level, ready for use by a player (and sanitized to hide things the player does not Need-To-Know. Should be coupled with LG1036.
• LG1041: Player’s Guide: The Temple Guardsman Class – an extract and reformatting of this class, by level, ready for use by a player (and sanitized to hide things the player does not Need-To-Know. Should be coupled with LG1036.
• LG1042: Player’s Guide: The Grim Huntsman Class – an extract and reformatting of this class, by level, ready for use by a player (and sanitized to hide things the player does not Need-To-Know. Should be coupled with LG1036.
• LG1043: Everyman’s Knowledge Of Cyrene – a general introduction to the (purported) Deity, some of the myths and legends that surround her, etc, for presentation to players

Legacies #2: The Order Of Light [working title]

The plotline/adventure part of #2 will concern the impact of a single legacy item on an order of Paladins – which will afford a window into everything that makes Paladins what they are, and how to extend the character class to focus on different aspects of that central theme. Fundamental questions and assumptions of morality and chivalric behavior and alignment will be squarely at the forefront. Central will be the answer to the question, at its core, what is a Paladin? Included will be procedures for creating customized Paladin variant classes that are automatically and inherently game-balanced – why should the Paladins of one deity be exactly the same as those of a different deity?

Legacies #3: The Druid’s Grove

The world of nature will take a central spotlight in this tome. The personality and philosophy of the Druid should form a throughline connecting that individual to the nature and residents of his grove, his relationship with his peers and with society at large, his ambitions, capabilities, and the threats that he has to face. Key elements of this supplement will be a vastly increased repertoire of Druidic spells to distinguish the uniqueness of the character class, how to integrate the class into a campaign, and how to make them work as PCs within a more traditional adventuring group.

Legacies #4: The Divine Mission

The goal for The Divine Mission is to do for Clerics what Assassin’s Amulet did for professional killers while building on content from Legacies #2 and #3.

Legacies #5: Stalking The Wilds

Only a distant gleam on the horizon, Legacies #5 will focus on Rangers.

The Realities Of Publishing

The Legacies campaign setting has experienced a few setbacks that have delayed the publishing schedule. These have included everything from real-life problems assaulting the authors, ongoing health problems, computer crashes, and Mike taking over as sole operator of Campaign Mastery. It’s gone from a collaborative project to a one-man-band – and a one-man who is physically incapable of putting in as many hours as needed to do everything on his plate.

Here’s the state of play:

The additional free products for AA will be released one by one as free standalone products as part of the lead-up to publishing Legacies #2. The logistics of getting copies to everyone who has bought a copy make any other solution impractical. As they are released, they will be added to the bundled extras new customers get.

Legacies #2 is about 1/3 written, and about half the rest of the content has been drafted – but it has been in that condition for almost two years. There just hasn’t been enough time to even look at the manuscript in that time. Additional material will be solicited when the core of the product has been completed, and first offers of participation will be extended to the co-authors of Assassin’s Amulet.

Legacies #3 is about 90% written, but needs supplementary articles and a lot of effort put into the crunch.

Legacies #4 and #5 are vague notions (or, perhaps, grand visions) at the current time.

ON SALE NOW:

		Click to download the free preview of Assassin’s Amulet				Click to purchase Assassin’s Amulet or learn more about the contents.
		A special 73-page preview. Usable content & a sample of the full Supplement.				Includes the 300-page Game Supplement and all the published extras.