What better for a lawful good rogue than a subclass based around stealing from demons?
Here it is, my personal favorite: the Pact-Thief!
Pact Thief
The pact-thief is a rogue who’s taken “thievery” to a whole new level. Forget lords, ladies, kings and queens… and try stealing from a Demon Lord on for size! Or a Fey Lord, or even a horrific undulating horror from beyond the farthest reaches of sanity!
FEATURES:
- Utilize a one-third caster Pact Magic feature, which allows for short-rest based warlock magic!
- Bring your own artifact! Each Pact-Thief has something that they stole to earn the power (and ire) of their “Patron” whether that be a sword, a tome, or even the service of a familiar.
- New to this version, your choice of pact no longer determines your choice of Patron! Steal from a demonic scholar, a fey warrior, or even a gibbering mouther! (Just don’t think too hard about where that blob of a “familiar” came from…)
- Eldritch Blast! And Invocations! More eldritch than you may be able to handle! And some quirks to explain what happens when you find out you can’t handle it.
- And, in the end, what could be better than sticking a “I did it!” sign on some poor sap before calling out the name of an extraplanar being who hates your guts? Eh, they probably deserved it.
DESIGN NOTES:
- The biggest potential problem here is my slapdash “one-third Pact Magic caster” system. Turns out the weirdness that is Pact Magic is harder to divide into thirds than the relatively straight-forward Spellcasting feature. I think I did well, but it’s a complex concept so who knows.
- Another issue is flavor – this subclass is both very open in terms of flavor and also very limited. On the one hand, you can be nearly any type of character you want, as long as they like stealing or “borrowing” things. On the other hand… well, they have to have an artifact and a Patron. But Warlocks always have that issue, so…
- Lastly are the Eldritch Invocations. Allowing the Pact-Thief access to every Eldritch Invocation in the PHB was far too much power, but limiting them to too few options feels bad. My compromise was to make new Eldritch Invocations, but that’s a whole world of its own ultimately.
So, let me know your thoughts and questions, and happy pact-thieving!