Weekly Waffle # 442 – Queen of the Thieves’ Highway
14th November 2026
The Mojo
For this week’s weekly waffle I’ve mainly been feeling sorry for myself because I’m still full of cold. Or more accurately I’m full of a different cold to last week. I had just about got over last week’s cold and was out on Sunday for the Remembrance Day parade. Which always results in a few post-parade beers. That all went well but I was feeling rough again on Monday and it’s still not quite gone.
So I’ve focused again on a D&D creation because I find that you don’t have to concentrate just as much because they are all one-off pieces. So unlike painting a squad where everything has to be the same you can be a little bit more free-flowing. And when you are feeling sorry for yourself that really helps.
On The Work Bench
I’ve been enjoying working on some D&D miniatures of late because I can be a bit free style. Simply pick a few colours and away you go. And that’s what I have for you this week. An elven rogue assassin who is equally at home out in the woods as they are on the thieves’ highway in a city.
A simple colour scheme of dark greens and browns so that they blend in with the shadows wherever they are. This has been fun to paint although I think I some of the green edge highlights a little wrong. Some of them seem to be a little bit too vibrant but I don’t think they spoil the mini. Just me being extra critical. Which I think is the only way you learn.
But what do you think.
If you like this guy you can find more of my D&D inspired minis in the Gallery.
Tactical deep dive
The Lore Bit – Nerys Vael, the Gutter Wren
Nobody in the lower city looks up, and Nerys has been relying on that for about forty years.
She’s a wood elf, though she hasn’t seen a wood since childhood. Her family came to the city as seasonal traders and went home again, but Nerys stayed. Either she was sold off to pay a debt or she ran away, depending on which version she’s telling that night. Whichever it was, she grew up on the roofs. A wood elf’s long stride and quiet feet are made for forest floors, but slate tiles, chimney stacks and the plank bridges stretched between tenements suit them just as well. By the time a human kid in the guild learned to cross the Cistern Gap without falling, Nerys had been doing it for longer than that kid had been alive.
The guild named her the Gutter Wren because she’s small, brown and noisy right up until she isn’t. These days she runs the highway as one of its quiet enforcers. When someone grasses on the guild, short-changes a fence, or turns out to be a magistrate getting a bit too interested in what goes on above the streets, Nerys has a word with them. The word is usually a knife.
Why the spear?
Spears aren’t the usual assassin’s weapon, and that’s the point. Nerys’s started life as a docker’s boat-hook before she cut it down. It’s her balancing pole on narrow ridge lines and her grapple for swinging across gaps. And when she gets cornered on a two-foot-wide roof, it keeps better-armoured people at the far end of a pointy stick.
Why the throwing knives?
Because once the target reaches a door, the job has already gone wrong. She carries six slim blades in a bandolier, and she’d much rather settle things at twenty feet than at two.
For your DM there are hooks everywhere. She’s outlived three guild masters and knows where their bodies are buried, sometimes literally. Then there’s the family that left her behind. And if the watch ever maps the rooftop routes, Nerys loses her home.
The Build – Turning the Concept Into a Character Sheet
The build below uses the 2024 Player’s Handbook rules (shown as “5.5e” on D&D Beyond).
Treat the numbers here as a snapshot. Double-check current rules against D&D Beyond or your own Player’s Handbook before you build a campaign around them.
Species: Elf (Wood Elf lineage)
The 2024 elf comes with Darkvision, Fey Ancestry (Advantage on saves against being Charmed), Keen Senses (take Perception, since you’ll be the party lookout) and Trance. Each Elven Lineage adds its own extras, and the wood elf’s suit a rooftop killer best:
Speed 35 feet. Five extra feet of movement every turn adds up quickly when you’re hopping between buildings.
Longstrider at 3rd level, so you cover even more ground.
Pass without Trace at 5th level, which is about as good a stealth spell as an assassin could want, and it covers the whole party as well.
A drow lineage would work too, but I like a forest elf who’s made her home among the chimney pots.
Background: Criminal
There’s only one sensible pick here. Criminal raises Dexterity, Constitution and Intelligence, gives proficiency in Sleight of Hand and Stealth along with Thieves’ Tools, and comes with the Alert origin feat. Alert adds your Proficiency Bonus to Initiative, and as you’ll see below, acting first is what makes the Assassin work.
Class: Rogue → Assassin subclass (3rd level)
The base rogue packages up everything Nerys is:
Expertise at 1st level. Double up on Stealth and Acrobatics (or Athletics, if your table makes you roll for big jumps).
Sneak Attack, which adds bonus damage once per turn when you have Advantage or an ally is next to the target.
Thieves’ Cant, so Nerys can read the chalk marks along the highway.
Weapon Mastery with two weapons. More on that below.
Cunning Action at 2nd level, which lets you Dash, Disengage or Hide as a Bonus Action. On a rooftop that means running, vanishing or doing both in the same turn.
Steady Aim at 3rd level, which gives you Advantage on your next attack as long as you haven’t moved.
The Assassin subclass then builds a whole style of play around the opening round of a fight:
Assassinate (3rd). You roll Initiative with Advantage. During the first round of combat you also get Advantage on attacks against any creature that hasn’t taken a turn yet, and if your Sneak Attack hits in that round, it deals extra damage equal to your Rogue level.
Assassin’s Tools (3rd). You get a Disguise Kit and a Poisoner’s Kit, plus proficiency with both.
Infiltration Expertise (9th). Masterful Mimicry lets you copy someone’s voice or handwriting after watching them for an hour. Roving Aim means Steady Aim no longer drops your Speed to 0, so you can take your shot and then keep moving.
Envenom Weapons (13th). When you use the Poison option of Cunning Strike, the target also takes extra poison damage that ignores Resistance.
Death Strike (17th). If your Sneak Attack hits during the first round, the target has to pass a Constitution save or take double damage.
The Spear Problem (Read This Before You Build)
This is the snag I promised. In the 2024 rules a spear is a Simple weapon, so rogues are proficient with it. It has the Thrown and Versatile properties and the Sap mastery. What it doesn’t have is Finesse. Sneak Attack only works with Finesse or Ranged weapons, so the spear can’t deliver it, and because it’s a Strength weapon, Nerys won’t hit as reliably with it as she does with her blades.
That sounds like a big problem, but it’s mostly a question of what you use each weapon for:
The daggers carry the damage. A dagger has Finesse, Light and Thrown (20/60 ft). Throw it and you get Dexterity to hit and Sneak Attack. Its mastery, Nick, lets you make the extra Light-weapon attack as part of the Attack action, which leaves your Bonus Action free for Cunning Action. In practice you throw two knives and still get to Hide, every single turn.
The spear is for control. Take Sap as your second mastery. When you’re cornered on a ridgeline and have to jab at someone, a hit gives them Disadvantage on their next attack, which keeps you alive long enough to Disengage and drop off the edge.
The spear is for climbing, holding ground and looking cool. The knives do the killing.
The Role – What She Does for the Party
In a fight: open strong, then disappear
Here’s how the ideal round goes. Nerys is already Hidden on the roof opposite. Between Assassinate’s Advantage and Alert, she almost always acts first, and her two thrown daggers have Advantage against foes who haven’t moved yet. That’s Sneak Attack plus the Assassinate bonus, and then she uses Cunning Action to vanish behind a chimney stack.
From then on she’s a regular skirmisher, using Steady Aim for Advantage and, from 5th level, spending Sneak Attack dice on Cunning Strike. Trip is lovely when the floor is a pitched roof. She’s a d8 striker and no tank, though, so if she’s soaking hits in round two, something has gone wrong.
Out of a fight: the advance party
This is where the Assassin really earns her place. With Darkvision, expert Stealth and Pass without Trace, she’s the obvious scout. The Disguise Kit, and Masterful Mimicry later on, let her forge the guildmaster’s note or get into the ball as somebody else. Thieves’ Tools and expert Acrobatics get the party in through a skylight, well away from the guards on the front gate. And thanks to Thieves’ Cant and her criminal background, she always knows a fence or a contact who owes her one.
Party pairings
Her best friends are melee bruisers, and yes, that includes the dwarf barbarian. An enemy standing next to the barbarian is a free Sneak Attack, and anyone busy charging the barbarian isn’t climbing up after her.
The Verdict
The elven rogue assassin is a high-concept character that holds up under the rules, as long as you accept that the knives do the damage and the spear is mostly flavour. Wood elf speed, Alert and the Assassin’s first-round burst all pull in the same direction. She picks the battlefield, wins Initiative and is long gone before anyone works out where the knives came from.
For city, heist or political campaigns, she’s hard to beat. Just don’t ask her to tank, because that’s what the dwarf is for.
So, would you give her the spear, or would you swap it for a rapier and go full knife-fighter? And has anyone actually run a thieves’-highway campaign? Let me know in the comments.
The Wrap Up
That’s it for this week and I’m hoping to have a better week this week than I did last week. At least I hope I don’t feel as poorly. I’ve got lots of things to be working on but I think I’m going to stick with D&D for a bit longer just because I’m having fun with these builds.
So until next week I hope you all keep safe and pop back soon see what is happing in my hobby world.
