D&D Mechanics Inspired by Assassin's Creed: Syndicate

Let's keep this Assassin's Creed D&D-content train a-rollin'! (No pun intended, given the nature of the base in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate). I didn't think I'd enjoy Syndicate as much as the others, since for me, the less modern the genre, the better; however, I was pleasantly surprised with how fun it was to grappling-spring-hook my way across Victorian England, free children from child labor factories, and build up a fighting-for-freedom gang to help move along my objectives. And despite the combat being a little cartoony and the carriage chases being more comic relief than anything else, I enjoyed the storyline and, as you'll see below, got even more D&D ideas from playing it:

Meaningful Factions

Nothing helped me understand how important factions are for conflict in a setting like starting one and working on building its influence. The Rooks gang is a gang that Jacob Frye starts in London to battle the existing gang that has taken over London, the Blighters. Rooting out the Blighters, killing their leaders, destroying their sources of income, and taking over their territory makes the streets of London safer for you and gives you more resources when you're working on quests.

By this point in the franchise, Assassin's Creed games are starting to gain a ton of RP elements in them, so there is a skill tree that the assassins get; however, there's also a technology tree of sorts you use for the Rooks gang as well, which you upgrade through using money instead of experience: things like bribing arms dealers to favor your gang over the Blighters, hiring more Rooks to keep stage coaches on the streets in case you need a getaway car, and securing business contracts throughout the city that increase your income. I think there's a ton of potential here for D&D, both as a gold sink and as a way to help players get more invested in their factions.

Adding more concrete benefits to being in a faction could be great for a D&D campaign, especially one with a clear home base that the players would return to and gain those benefits from. These are directly inspired by the criminal syndicate in the game, but they could be tweaked to fit other factions too. Here are some examples I can think of:

• With a high enough level of renown in a specific city, guards will turn the other way when crimes are committed, and you are much less likely to be mugged, pickpocketed, or assaulted in a shady alleyway. This could also apply to a bandit-infested road, or even an area with non-human enemies that the faction keeps in check.
• Paying a one-time lump sum of gold could secure a discount on armor, weapons, spell components, lifestyle expenses, travel fees, potions, or anything else related to the guild, for the rest of the campaign. You could also unlock the easier purchase of harder-to-find items.
• Sidekicks, hirelings, and helpful NPCs could be easily available for affordable hire, or could even just show up in random locations as they recognize your achievements in the same faction they belong to. Other favors, like causing a distraction or providing shortcuts to locations are also possibilities, and the CR of the NPCs could be upgraded as equipment was procured for them.
• With enough influence and money, your faction could give you an advantage on your next quest: they could sabotage an enemy's guards, or steal maps and plans and blueprints.

NPC Loyalty-Focused Quests

I was immediately invested in the NPCs in Syndicate, and I think the main thing that helped that come about was the focus on the NPCs giving you particular types of quests based on their role. The more quests you complete, the higher your "loyalty" is with them, and raising this loyalty unlocks better and better rewards. You gain loyalty with Henry Green the more templars you kill and the more gang hideouts you clear out, and he rewards you with better weapons. Ned Wynert rewards you with crafting ingredients if you participate in boat raids, smuggling, and cargo hijacking. Loyalty with Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline, gained by arresting criminals, lands you new firearms and bullet magazines.

Having actual quests that the NPCs give you that are unique to the NPC's objectives and whose rewards make sense for them to give you is what made them so much more memorable than normal. I found myself more interested in the NPCs' backgrounds and why they wanted me to do these quests, and it was fun to try and hunt down every last templar and win each fight club match just to make sure and get every last reward out of them.

I love the idea of doing this, especially with NPCs that are in the same guild as the players or who are otherwise easily accessible. It would be fun to have an alchemist who asks you to collect rare herbs as you find them, and have a shelf full of interesting potions and formulas that he can show you. He may mention that he doesn't have time to figure out how to make these potions, but if you do the fieldwork for him in finding rare plants more quickly, he would be able to get around to them faster and offer the potions for cheap. Perhaps a cleric who rewards you the more undead you kill or the more chances you find to spread the word of his deity. This system could work very similar to the Piety system in Mythic Odysseys of Theros, but with loyalty or individual renown instead.

Non-Linear Quest Progression

The aforementioned NPC quests serve as the side quests of Syndicate, and they pair alongside the main storyline perfectly. Raising the NPCs' loyalty and gaining their rewards helps make the gameplay easier, but I love how there's always a choice of what to focus on next. I think DMs can learn from that when designing campaigns.

Even the main quest line has some variety to it and has multiple objectives woven together. Syndicate has two protagonists: twin siblings Evie and Jacob Frye. They each want the end boss, Starrick, dead, but they have their own agendas as well that are related to accomplishing this. Jacob wants to hunt down Starrick's main lieutenants and sabotage the templars, and Evie wants to find an artifact that Starrick is seeking out to gain power over London. The storyline staggers between these two viewpoints in the way the quests work, ultimately—as other Assassin's Creed games do—coming together at the end for a big finish.

This sort of nonlinear progressive approach to advancing the plot of a campaign could work really well for DMs who want to get their players more involved in the storyline. With some planning, the story could focus on each player's goals in succession, with each path ending with a lock to that path's progression and a key to starting the next player's path. Thus, each player would get some time to get closer to their own resolution, no one player would steal all the limelight, and a player who just finished their arc can have time to ponder the implications of the discoveries they just made and look forward to getting them resolved when it's their turn next. For D&D groups in particular (especially large ones), it could be a good idea to make paths overlap so that multiple players feel like their goals are progressing at the same time.

And eventually, all the paths would converge on the climax of the campaign in the end, with all of the players invested in their own ways, each having contributed to the progress of the group in their own unique ways.

Cathartic and Risky Mini-Games

There's one particularly unique NPC you can gain loyalty with in the game named Robert Topping. Rather than having some kind of agenda to help the people or keep the templars in line, Topping simply wants to organize underground fight clubs and street carriage races. This is a welcome diversion to the heavier underlying storyline full of corrupt politicians and child labor, and it's another source of rewards.

Other Assassin's Creed games have similar opportunities for games like board games you can gamble on, which could be fun in D&D as well (that proficiency with dragon chess should come into use somehow!), but Syndicate's fight club system seems particularly suited to D&D's combat system. You begin by discarding your weapons and armor and fighting two or three low-level thugs. In each succeeding round, the power and number of the thugs increases, as does the reward money. Your health does not regenerate between rounds and you cannot use healing items until the match as a whole is over, but after each round, you can choose to keep fighting or to bow out and keep the money you have. If ever you're knocked unconscious, you lose all the money in the pot and have to start over.

This is a simple system, but I think it could work excellently in D&D, both as a group activity or as a one-on-many fight while the other player characters watch and cheer them on. There could be generic thugs (you could even use the thug stat block) that attack as a group, solitary named NPCs, and combinations of the two depending on the power level, possibly culminating in a champion. The key to the fun of these matches for me was the lack of a rest. Managing your health and Action Surge as a resource and having to gauge whether or not you can survive another round to double your winnings could be exciting, especially if the DM carefully designs the encounters to test the limits of their endurance.

The carriage races aren't as fun in Syndicate, mainly because they're prohibitively difficult (think MarioKart but without any items to get ahead if someone pulls in front of you), but I do like the idea of having one in D&D someday (that proficiency with land vehicles should come into use somehow!). It could be done with a set of ability checks, the total of which could add up to a target number to reach the finish line; or it could be an elaborate Chase, which I still need to figure out how to run sometime.

Long-Term Collections

This has been a staple in all of the Assassin's Creed games that I've played so far: finding a vault that can only be opened by collecting all of the keys to it, which are scattered across the playable game area. I haven't tried anything like this yet for fear of it being too video-gamey, but I wonder if it would be a fun aspect of a D&D campaign to have a chest that required several keys to unlock, with the reward being a magic item of high rarity within it.

I think the key to making it feel more realistic and less like a video game is giving the players clues or other means to find the keys, and make their acquisition based more on skill—nothing would ruin this faster than having the keys pop up in random, unrelated places that just happen to be wherever they're going along on the main questline; it would only make them constantly check every corner of every area they come upon. No, a system like this would need to be an actual, defined set of quests. But if done right, I think this could be a fun way to incentivize the players to branch off the main questline and take some risks in hopes of unlocking something really worthwhile. It could also be the source of some great adventure seeds; for example, if the villain stole one of the keys before they could get to it, or if a friendly NPC has the key but doesn't want to give it up. And of course, care would have to be taken to make sure that the final reward, whatever it was, was worth the long wait to obtain.