Ciphermaster

Ciphermaster is a homebrew renown feat, granted to Gootcha on reaching Harpers Rank 3.

At the third rank the Harpers stop treating an agent as an asset and start treating her as a handler. Gootcha is given a cell — a cipher clerk posted permanently to Nuts Deep to watch her notebook, and a standing complement of field agents placed across the Sword Coast at her direction. What the rank grants is not sight. It is access: the Harper intelligence apparatus, already gathering across the coast, becomes something she can ask.

Benefit

The Notebook

Gootcha writes a query in her notebook. Her handler at Nuts Deep reads it and answers.

• Answers come back in as little as ten minutes or as long as ten days, depending on what was asked and on who is near enough to know it.
• Asking after a creature's strengths and weaknesses returns quickly for common things. The rarest and mightiest come back slowly — and come back as much legend as fact.
• One query at a time. The notebook holds a single open question. The slot frees the moment an answer arrives.
• She may cancel an open query at any time to ask something else instead. The abandoned question is dropped, and asking it again later begins from nothing.
• Reports her agents send on their own initiative do not occupy the slot.

The Field

Gootcha directs a number of field agents equal to her proficiency bonus. Each is stationed somewhere, and where they stand determines what she can learn.

• An agent on site makes anything about that place far faster to learn — and turns up what no archive holds.
• An agent in transit answers nothing and gathers nothing.
• Relocation runs hours within a settlement, three to five days within a region, and ten days or more across the Sword Coast.
• A stationed agent gathers on their own account, and will send word unprompted when they see something worth the parchment.

The Files

The network is only as good as what has been put into it. Intelligence the company delivers — a captured ledger, an interrogation, a location mapped, a name confirmed — is filed, and thereafter that subject comes back faster and fuller every time it is asked after. Filing also earns standing with the Harpers, who reward exactly this.

What the network is not

• It is not divination. It does not scry, does not see the future, and does not read minds.
• It knows only what some Harper learned — saw, overheard, filed, or was told.
• It thins to nothing beyond the Sword Coast.
• Answers arrive as the network believes them. They can be stale, partial, or secondhand, and the network is sometimes wrong.
• The agents are people. They can be followed, caught, bought, or killed.

Nightingale

Harper cells name themselves. This one is Nightingale — for the bird that sings after dark, and for the older Harper sense of the word: the one who talks.

Merrivet Ashcombe — gnome cipher clerk, resident at Nuts Deep. She does not leave and she does not fight. She reads the notebook every waking hour and a fair number of the sleeping ones, answers in dry marginalia, and is openly smug about her turnaround time. She is the one who does the actual deciphering; the rank is named for the work she does.

Will — Gootcha's squire, a Harper placement out of Baldur's Gate. Courier and liaison. He does not count against her field complement, and most deliveries arrive in his hands — which means most requests put him on a road.

Standing postings

Updated as Gootcha redeploys the cell.

Agent	Specialty	Currently posted
Tam Ossley	Watcher. Eleven years on the docks and noticed by no one. Reports in flat, unhelpful detail until something matters.	Waterdeep — on the Council
Hollis Renn	Fixer. Finds things, forges papers, and mentions what it cost. Keeps a running tally he expects settled eventually.	Baldur's Gate
Sera Dunwick	Face. Drinks with the right people and remembers all of it.	Luskan — working the Arcane Brotherhood connection
Corvin Ashe	Field scholar. Walks sites and reads what is left of them.	Travelling — The Grove Burnings

Renown

Granted at Harpers Rank 3. Standings are tracked on the Renown Tracker.