Irena's Guide to Intrigue and Illusion

Irena’s Guide to Intrigue and Illusion is a 'zine-size 5e sourcebook about social interaction, high society, and trolling the Wizard class. With the guidance of Irena Evenhell, your charismatic characters will make friends and discover secrets at galas and parties, use charm and perhaps domination to manipulate the aristocracy’s identity and motivations to your advantage, and ultimately cement your place as part of the aristocracy yourselves - for better or for worse.

New subclasses for the Bard and Sorcerer make use of nasty counter-caster tricks like Mind Static, which allows you to interrupt a caster within range as a reaction, Paranoid Energy, which causes the enemy healer to harm their own allies instead, and my personal favorite, Detonate Mana, which blows up an ongoing spell, causing damage to whoever had previously benefited from it.

You can also play as an enigmatic grey or a many-eyed watcher, in the latter case anywhere from the relatively weak but absolutely adorable five-eyed watcher quintus all the way up to the terrifyingly powerful nine-eyed watcher nonus - and perhaps even beyond, to the legendary thirteen-eyed watcher ultima. More powerful watchers can attune fewer magic items, but have more inherent power from their many eye rays, firing rays of paralysis, charm, fear, confusion, or good old disintegration.

Irena’s is also overflowing with new toys for the GM, with several new action-oriented bosses from the Astral Sea, including the shapeshifting chaos frog, a trio of deadly psi-knights, and a watcher nonus, plus answering a few questions that have long been annoyances. How do you let players use their skills to persuade NPCs without having them come across like Evangelical Harry Potter fanfiction, y’know, the ones where Harry has somehow never heard of Jesus before and immediately renounces magic upon hearing about him from the Evangelical protagonist? By giving NPCs multiple motivations and an identity, you give the party Bard multiple motives to encourage or sidestep, allowing them to select which of several options would be most beneficial without totally rewriting an NPC’s personality with a skill check. That, after all, is what Dominate Person is for.

How can you run illusions without making them either so easily seen through as to be useless or else so convincing as to be unstoppable? Illusions are made from a substance from the shadow plane called figment, and its unique properties allow a clever illusionist to use its flexible nature to cover for its brittle weakness, encouraging creativity and discouraging reuse of the same illusion over and over and over again in every situation because you’ve found one illusion that solves all problems.

Irena’s Guide to Illusion and Intrigue is the ultimate guide to running or playing in a campaign that revolves around social subterfuge and clever politicking, or if you want to have a dozen magic eye powers.