Every corp thinks you work for someone else's corp. That's the job going well.
Nobody builds a Scavenger-Spy on purpose. You get built by circumstance — a smuggling run that went well enough to repeat, a corp that paid better for information than for labor, a talent for being somewhere you technically weren't. Every faction in Cinderfall needs people who can move product, move secrets, or move themselves out of a room before the walls remember they're supposed to be locked. You do all three, for whoever's paying this week, and you keep a very short list of people who actually know your real name.
Your subclass, chosen at 1st level. Grants a feature again at 7th and a capstone at 15th.
Product moves through your hands and nobody at either end quite remembers what it looked like. Finesse weapons, faster fingers, a talent for making things not be where they used to be.
Sometimes the job needs someone the room takes seriously the moment they walk in. You're not subtle. You're just always the person the client actually wanted in the room.
Whoever you need to be to get through that door, you were already being it before you arrived. Corporate mole, cult initiate, long-lost cousin — pick the lie the room wants.
You don't run the job. You ran it three days ago, on paper, and everyone else is just catching up to the plan. Contacts, contingencies, and information as a weapon.
Overreach lets you attempt something genuinely past your training — the lock that shouldn't open, the lie that shouldn't hold, the shot that shouldn't land. Pull it off and it's the stuff of house legend. Fail, and the consequences rarely stay in the room.
| d8 | Result |
|---|---|
| 1 | Tail Picked Up — a faction patrol or NPC starts tracking you from this point on. |
| 2 | Contact Burned — a fence or contact refuses to work with you again without steep amends. |
| 3 | Fumbled Signal — a nearby ally is caught off guard by the fallout of your attempt. |
| 4 | Marked Face — a lingering social penalty in this settlement or with this faction until you lay low or fix it. |
| 5 | Wrong Door — you stumble into unintended trouble; the tunnel was someone else's turf. |
| 6 | Short Fuse — your composure cracks; you lose your next reaction. |
| 7 | Loud Exit — your position is revealed to everyone nearby, allies included. |
| 8 | Made — GM's call. A corporate security detail or rival fixer now has your face, your name, or both. |
| Lv | Class Features |
|---|---|
| 1 | Angle, The Opening, First Move, Overreach, wide initial skill training, initial proficiencies |
| 2 | Skill feat, Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 3 | General feat, skill increase, expert Angle key skill |
| 4 | Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 5 | Ability boosts, ancestry feat, skill increase, expert Reflex, expert weapon proficiency |
| 6 | Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 7 | General feat, skill increase, master Perception, Angle feature II, Overreach Mastery |
| 8 | Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 9 | Ancestry feat, skill increase, Blown Cover Control (reroll one/day), expert Class DC |
| 10 | Ability boosts, Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 11 | General feat, skill increase, master weapon proficiency, The Opening improves |
| 12 | Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 13 | Ancestry feat, skill increase, master Will |
| 14 | Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 15 | Ability boosts, skill increase, Angle capstone, master Reflex, legendary Perception |
| 16 | Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 17 | General feat, skill increase, legendary weapon proficiency, The Opening improves further |
| 18 | Scavenger-Spy feat |
| 19 | Skill increase, Nobody's Face |
| 20 | Ability boosts, Scavenger-Spy feat, The Perfect Job |
A representative loadout, not an exhaustive list. Blue bar = general access. Rust bar = Angle-flavored but open to all.
Choose one, permanently: you can never be reliably identified or tracked by mundane or divinatory means — or you always have one more trick, rerolling any single skill check once per day at no Overreach risk.
Once per session, declare the crucial moment of a plan — the lock, the lie, the shot, the exit — and treat that one skill check as an automatic critical success. No roll. This is the job that becomes house legend, told wrong in three different bars within a month.
New to Cinderfall: not gods, but institutions — the infrastructure that makes a Scavenger-Spy's whole trade possible, usable by any GM running a heist, a smuggling run, or a faction double-cross.
Not a person and not a place — a decentralized network of fences, brokers, and dead-drop points operating in every Free Haven and gray zone in the wasteland, held together by a shared sigil system and a cant that changes just often enough to keep outsiders from learning it twice. Nobody runs the Underledger. Everybody in it just agrees to keep running it.
An unspoken truce among rival corporate spies, freelance operators, and career criminals: don't blow another professional's cover unless you're being paid specifically to do it. Nobody signed anything. Everybody who's still working knows the rule anyway, because the ones who broke it stopped being anybody's problem shortly after.
Breaking the Concordance doesn't bring the law down on you. It brings every other person like you down on you instead, which is worse.