Dungeon Robber
You seek the treasures of empires long vanished. The world’s dungeons are brimming with lost secrets and artifacts of unimaginable power—and they belong in a museum, or at least in your living room. While others call you a tomb robber, you consider yourself an archaeologist, a collector, or an explorer.
Are you associated with a wizards’ college or institute of higher learning, or are you a private collector? Are you an idealist or a profiteer? What is the one relic or piece of knowledge that you’d trade anything to find?
Ability Score Increases: +1 to Intelligence and one other ability score.
Skill Proficiencies: History, and either Investigation or Religion.
Tool Proficiencies: Cartographers’ tools. Languages: Any six (three of them no longer spoken).
Suggested Equipment (Cost 18 gold): Cartographers’ tools, miner’s pick, traveler’s clothes, shovel.
Feature: Unreliable Intelligence. You know conspiracy theorists, armchair historians, disgraced academics, and other people with useful, if unreliable, knowledge. While in a city, once per day you can find an NPC who can make an Intelligence check with a +10 bonus to recall a fact. When you do so, the Narrator secretly rolls a d6. On a 1, your contact’s information is dangerously inaccurate.
Adventures and Advancement: As you build your reputation, shady people approach you with requests to “discover” items of uncertain ownership. After enough successes, a legitimate organization, such as a wizard’s college or esteemed museum, takes an interest in you. They offer you a position, which comes with funding granting a Wealthy lifestyle, access to free spellcasting services, and legal representation when you inevitably run afoul of the law.
Dungeon Robber Connections
- A rival who always tries to steal what you rightfully find.
- A rival who seeks powerful artifacts for evil ends.
- A fence who can find a buyer for anything.
- An underworld figure to whom you owe a staggering debt.
- A master forger who can replicate plausible records of ownership, permissions to restricted areas, and so on.
- An artist who can make perfect copies of artwork and paintings.
- A collector who sends you after valuable curios.
- Authorities who would like to question you about a relic’s mysterious disappearance.
- An admiring urchin who can get you anywhere in their city.
- A rambling sage whose bizarre, shocking theories you half believe.
Dungeon Robber Mementos
- A mysterious idol whose origin you seek.
- A cultural item from Chapter 1: Equipment
- A treasure map with no obvious connection to any known land mass.
- An ancient piece of machinery that is undoubtedly very powerful, although all it currently does is light up.
- A rare book that grants an expertise die on checks related to a specific civilization.
- A gold coin bearing the face of a king who never existed.
- Identification papers from the institution that has kicked you out.
- A tablet carved with indecipherable glyphs.
- A giant-sized key to an unknown door.
- One piece of a seven-part artifact.