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

1. A rival who always tries to steal what you rightfully find.
2. A rival who seeks powerful artifacts for evil ends.
3. A fence who can find a buyer for anything.
4. An underworld figure to whom you owe a staggering debt.
5. A master forger who can replicate plausible records of ownership, permissions to restricted areas, and so on.
6. An artist who can make perfect copies of artwork and paintings.
7. A collector who sends you after valuable curios.
8. Authorities who would like to question you about a relic’s mysterious disappearance.
9. An admiring urchin who can get you anywhere in their city.
10. A rambling sage whose bizarre, shocking theories you half believe.

Dungeon Robber Mementos

1. A mysterious idol whose origin you seek.
2. A cultural item from Chapter 1: Equipment
3. A treasure map with no obvious connection to any known land mass.
4. An ancient piece of machinery that is undoubtedly very powerful, although all it currently does is light up.
5. A rare book that grants an expertise die on checks related to a specific civilization.
6. A gold coin bearing the face of a king who never existed.
7. Identification papers from the institution that has kicked you out.
8. A tablet carved with indecipherable glyphs.
9. A giant-sized key to an unknown door.
10. One piece of a seven-part artifact.