D&D 5th Character cards - Verity, Level 3 Warlock

Rounding up the Highcliffe City Guard, I decided to add an infiltrator-type character, the kind of that can walk amongst the underworld with ease and disappear without a trace if needs be. And these things come easy for a certain flavour of Warlock.

As the concept was a character with a shady past trying to redeem herself, giving Verity a Criminal background was almost compulsory, and it rounded up her skillset nicely. And with the Pact of the Tome, she has access to a wide variety of spells to expand the utility.

But what really makes the character shine in an intrigue and investigation type campaign are her Warlock powers and invocations. With Mask of Many Faces, she can blend in or disappear in a crowd, Gaze of Two Minds allows her to mentally track a willing collaborator, and Awakened Mind lets her to communicate telepathically with anyone. In a way, these abilities could be seen as OP in this type of campaign, as they can be used to sidestep quite a bit of legwork. but then again that can be said of almost any kind of magic. And as the character still has to do things to get results, getting herself deliberately into harm's way, I feel that this kind of character would give more to this kind of campaign rather than making things trivial. And the fact that one can create this kind of character straight out of the core set of rules -without any clunky multiclassing, to boot- is a good indicator of the versatility of the 5th edition D&D.

Besides, since Verity is a NPC, I can use her to deliver information for the PCs to act upon, and not to worry overtly how she could have acquired such information, as I have decent abilities to fall back on.

'Roguish with a dash of magic' is probably my most favourite character archetype, and I could see myself playing a character like Verity. And although she's built a bit like a one-trick pony, there's still breadth in her abilities to be of use in multiple situations.