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For Brandon and JulieA broom is drearily sweeping

Up the broken pieces of yesterday’s life Somewhere a queen is weeping Somewhere a king has no wife

And the wind, it cries JulieSample file

BREAK ENTERLead Design: Todd Crapper

Editing: Vincent HarperCover Art: Shaman’s Stockart

Interior Art: Thomas Floyd, Andy Hepworth, Jonathan Hodgson, Kieron O’Gorman, Shaman’s Stockart

Cartography: Todd Crapper (using Dundjinni)www.dundjinni.com

PlaytestersAlan Bainbridge, Martin Gagne, Nathan Lauber,

Jason LeRoy, Brandon Neff, Trent Neff, Kieron O’Gorman, Patrick Palmer, Parker Wright

TABLE OF CONTENTS:Introduction page 4 Xpanded: Defining the Rules page 7 The Role of Stealth page 7 Pieces of the Puzzle page 8Stealth Encounters page 9 The Purpose of a Stealth Encounter page 11 In Play: An Example of a Stealth Encounter page 12 A Step-by-Step Guide to Stealth Encounters page 14 Stealth Checks: Keeping All Characters Involved page 15 Attack Powers: Considerations and Limitations page 16 Running a Stealth Encounter page 17 Trials page 20 Boosts page 22 Building a Stealth Encounter page 23Appendix I: Trials page 27 Alarms page 28 Barriers page 29 Guardians page 31 Snares page 37 Encounter 1: The Ruined Tower page 40 Encounter 2: A Bridge of Orcs page 44 Encounter 3: Kyton’s Laboratory page 48 Encounter 4: Gearshift Hall page 52Appendix II: Quick Conversions page 55Appendix III: Index page 57

All original text copyright 2011 Todd Crapper.This publication complies with the Game System License as

provided by Wizards of the Coast.

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agnus stood in the tree’s shadow and gazed at the clouds in the night sky. Patiently he waited, as he had for nearly an hour, occasionally trying to catch sight of the others across the wooded outline of the

road. Nowhere to be seen, he had to trust they were there – they had as much invested in this operation as he did and had never let him down before. Satisfied his back-up would be in place, Magnus turned back to the sky and waited for the clouds to swell. “C’mon, you damned clouds,” he cursed to himself. “Get moving!” Furlin had told him it would be a cloudy night tonight, and that the brilliance of the full moon would be completely draped over, but Magnus was never one to trust magic. Half an hour of chanting and sprinkling crumbs over a map of the area seemed like such a waste of energy and incantation when there was a much easier way to predict the weather; His bones. Years of combat and injury left him susceptible to crazy knee pain on cloudy, rainy nights. And since they weren’t hurting, there wasn’t going to be rain or clouds. Magic was no replacement for common sense, yet the rest of the party heeded the ritual’s prediction nonetheless. Outnumbered, Magnus watched the sky for further proof of just how unnecessary magic was. To pass the time, the burly fighter triple-checked his gear. The chainmail had been laid aside, leaving him with an old vest of studded leather to avoid clinking his way around the keep; the shaft of a shortbow ran along his back, the bowstring angled down his chest with two small quivers of arrows hooked to either side of his waist; daggers replaced his beloved bastard sword and a pair of katars sat in special scabbards attached to his armored breast; his boots were padded and his clothing was dark. Everything was in place and he was ready to go, still, as he had been for the past hour.

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When the faint blue hues of moonlight suddenly faded to darkness, Magnus was amazingly unprepared. Damn spellcaster had been right all along. Thick clouds enveloped the moon like a cupped pair of hands, and the open road before him was cloaked in darkness. That was the cue; time to move. Crouching low to the ground, Magnus sped towards the edge of the road fronting the keep’s main gate. Stopping at the base of the road sign, he looked back to make out any of the others coming up behind him. “Curse that damn wizard,” he hissed. It was incredibly dark tonight. The others were more adept at stealth than he, so it was no surprise he couldn’t see them. He could only trust that they were there. Magnus proceeded forward, keeping his attention on nothing but the flickering torchlight to either side of the iron gate. Drawing a katar from the scabbard, Magnus made a slow, steady approach, peering through the darkness for the first sentry. Where was that bastard? Damn, it was dark. Then he was there – the tall guard stepping out into full view and moving toward the trees. Right towards him, reaching down to undo his breaches and take a piss on his foot. There was no time to act, no time to give the signal. Magnus had to take him down. Now. Lunging out of the covering ditch, Magnus grabbed hold of the guard by the back of his head and shoved the katar’s blade up under his chin and into his brain. There was gurgling, but no scream. Using the dying guard as cover, Magnus looked around for the second one and quickly caught him standing in the illuminated doorway of the shack beside the gate. Almost fifty feet away, Magnus would never make it there in time to kill him in melee. He slipped a dagger from his belt and made ready to throw it... but there was no need.

A dark figure pulled the second guard from the doorway into the shadows and the muffled sound of a struggle was quickly extinguished. Magnus turned to his own victim and saw the life drain from the guard’s eyes, felt the life pour over his hand. The fighter dragged the lifeless body to the woods, wrenched out the katar, and left him behind a bush. “You were supposed to wait for the signal,” Remus hissed. The thief dragged his own guard towards the bushes on the other side of the road. “Shut it, he was coming right at me,” Magnus answered fiercely, cleaning the katar’s blood on his pant leg. When Remus returned from the bush, he could see the grin on his face and remembered how much he hated dealing with thieves. “S’okay, I saw.” Remus patted him on the back and placed a thin reed to his lips. The sound of a loud cricket called out and two more figures approached from beyond the road; Furlin the wizard and Jamas the warden. Everyone was in place. As they had practiced time and time before, Furlin knelt before the gate while the others readied their bows. Banging on the gate – a mammoth structure of thick wood reinforced with iron bars – Furlin waited for the slit in the gate to slide open. When it did, Furlin loosened one of his most basic spells and assumed the voice of one of the dead guards. “Three to enter,” the wizard spoke, his voice suddenly gruff and worn. The slit slammed shut and locks on the other side of the gate clanged open, followed by the creaking hinges of the gate opening. In the time it took for the gate to open, the four intruders fell back out of sight. They waited for the curious guards to come to them. When they did, five arrows felled the two guards before they were aware of the attack and the foursome advanced quickly inside the keep, closing the gate behind them without a sound to announce their arrival.

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Jamas waved his hands and extinguished the torches nearby, encasing them in darkness once again. Unable to see any other threats nearby, Remus took the lead as they raced under the stairs leading to the heights of the outer walls, ducking between various crates and barrels towards a side door of the main structure. At any opening along the path, Remus passed first and signaled for the others to follow. His elven eyes were best suited for the darkness, and his incredible skills of infiltration, couple with years of experience in such matters, made him the best candidate for getting them inside the keep alive. And to their prize. Within five minutes of entering the central courtyard, they stood no more than ten feet from their next destination – a plain wooden door. Past that were stairs leading to every level of the keep. If their intelligence was correct, this door was locked. “How much longer do we have?” Furlin whispered. Remus flashed the five fingers of his hands three times. Fifteen minutes. The wizard nodded and they settled in their hiding places while Jamas held his gaze on the door. Time crawled to a halt and the intruders could not tell how long they waited. Without the moon overhead, they had nothing to gauge the minutes and could only guess. When the latch of the door clicked open, they sprang into position and watched a dozen relief guards pour out and walk to their posts. As the last guard passed through the doorway, Jamas pointed his fingers at the door and thick vines sprouted from the packed soil, growing fast enough to keep the it propped open. Seizing the moment, all of them rushed through and made their way up the dimly lit stairs. Jamas touched the vines as he passed, and they receded back into the ground, allowing the door to close and lock once more.

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Shuffling up the curving, stone steps, Magnus and Jamas hung their shortbows back over their shoulders and prepared their katars and hammers. At each approaching floor, Remus took point and carefully poked his head around the open doorway, giving the all clear for the others to pass on ahead. When they reached the fourth floor, Remus waved them through and they made their way down the hall towards the master bedroom. In these private chambers, there were no guards to stand watch, only those who called the keep home; and they were all fast asleep. They altered speed for precision and cautiously made their way across the floor by memory. Furlin counted doors on the right and signaled the party to stop at the seventh door, at which they paired up on either side and made ready. This was what they came here for. The time was now!

ur world is filled with legends of deadly warriors who struck without being seen and incapacitated their enemy before they could sound an alarm. For thousands of years, stealth has been an integral

part of war, politics, and the underworld. Whether it is the ninja’s uncanny ability to eliminate a target, a spy rifling through documents to uncover truth behind the lies, or the grave robber pinching gold from the tomb of a pharaoh, these figures are renowned for their accomplishments while remaining in near-total obscurity.

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Stealth has long been an element in the fantasy roleplay-ing game as well, though commonly relegated to the thief (or rogue, as he later came to call himself). The sneak attack is their greatest weapon and only by attacking their opponent while unprepared or unaware can they inflict as much damage as they can. Some rogues are deadlier with a dagger than a barbarian with a maul. Yet the core components of 4e remains focused on open combat... Until now. Break & Enter is a series of 4e supplements designed exclusively to highlight stealth for all characters in your campaign through a combination of various creations. While the initial goal of this series was to create rules that incorpo-rate stealth as a new form of encounter, it has expanded into a series of guides for diversifying the skills and powers of all classes for challenges beyond attack rolls and weapon damage. With this book, your players will be able to equally participate in a variety of skill challenges while those with training can boost their allies in new directions; bulky fighters can sneak up on a target and dispatch them quickly and quietly. And you will be able to confound them with incred-ible traps capable of wiping out the entire party unless they all work together and survive. The key ingredient to all these provisions is that no one will have to revise their powers or skill selection: everything in Break & Enter (or B&E, as we like to call it) works with existing characters. Be forewarned. What you are about to read provides optional and variant rules that may redefine how you run your campaign. Players may feel a renewed sense of power and versatility upon partaking of its secrets and your encoun-ters may soon swell into outright moments of slaughter and mayhem. Use with caution.

XPANDED: DEFINING THE RULESBreak & Enter is the first in a series of releases from Emerald Press PDF Publishing focusing on increasing the challenges of the 4e game through new and updated rules. The key to such concepts is versatility: each supplement in the Xpanded line provides numerous options with which GMs and players can experiment until they find a match that best suits their campaign. Many of these optional and variant rules can be combined or used separately to achieve the desired effect, such as better infiltration and stealth rules, increased skill uses, or both. More importantly, these new rules are designed to work with the existing ones, avoiding any major overhauls of the game you’ve enjoyed over the years.

THE ROLE OF STEALTHPerhaps the first question anyone asks about this book is: “Why should I use stealth when I can simply run in and bash some skulls open?” There are two answers to that question. First, bashing skulls is loads of fun but there are times when bashing skulls is not feasible and this brings us to our second answer. Sometimes, the odds are stacked against you. If bashing in a guard’s skull in full view of the entire castle brings out the entire regiment, it could lead to any number of difficulties in your quest. Sometimes, just sometimes, you need to achieve your objective before you starting crushing skulls. That is where stealth comes in. To better explain the role of stealth in your game and how is can be an aid to your players, their characters, and more importantly, your story, let’s take a look at a previous adventure released by Emerald Press. The Key of the Fey is a heroic tier adventure for 1st to 3rd level characters and

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involves an encounter where the PCs must steal a holy symbol from a paladin in the midst of an encampment of followers. All told, there are forty people in the encampment with more than half of them armed. Rather than simply run this encoun-ter as combat, we provided numerous options for the PCs to achieve their goal, one of which was stealth; sneak into the encampment and take it before anyone spots you. Using the rules as presented in its original form turned out to be incred-ibly tricky and basically meant only the rogues and anyone else trained in Stealth could go... slowly. During playtesting, most players who tried stealth ran into numerous problems that resulted in open combat. The only way to dispatch a guard was to run him down to 0 hit points or engage in a risky skill challenge where failure resulted in an alarm. It dawned on us that stealth seemed limited in the 4e rules, relegated as a specialty to a select few. So B&E was born. By using stealth in a format that identifies and corrects the flaws of those not specially suited for the task, you create new options for players to consider. If you knew that a warlord donning plate mail armor could still make the trek across a darkened hallway without alerting the guards, you would take that option. If you knew you could eliminate a threat without sending notice to another target on the other side of the bridge, you would take it. By using stealth as an option, you provide your players with a level of control over their adventure and expand their roleplaying opportunities. Since one of the core pleasures of roleplaying games is their versatility, making stealth accessible to all characters builds on that fundamental.

PIECES OF THE PUZZLEB&E is divided into three sections, each one designed to work alone or alongside the others. While you may not find this entire series useful, you can easily pick and choose your own combinations to provide options for your players. Book I: Stealth Encounters provides complete rules and creation guidelines for creating stealth encounters. Included in this book are sample trials, new conditions, and ready-to-roll stealth encounters for your campaign. This supplement is written for both players and GMs, with most material designed primarily for GMs. Book II: The Art of Stealth offers a comprehensive list of new skill uses, including expanded aid options for trained and untrained skill checks; feats and feat trees to augment existing skill uses; and a specialty class called the Collector suited to blend with many core classes for a new direction in charac-ter advancement. This supplement is designed primarily for players. Finally, Book III: Master Traps provides a selection of master traps (also known as solo traps) designed to challenge the entire party. Only by working together can your charac-ters hope to survive these powerful traps and live to tell the tale. This supplement is designed for GMs only.Sample fil

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