Scavenger

The door had three locks, two obvious traps, and one thing nobody saw until the Scavenger threw a pebble at it and the pebble became smoke. She smiled, not because it was funny, but because the room had finally admitted where the interesting part was. Ten minutes later she had the door open, the trap asleep, and the old-world case under one arm. She left the pebble-smoke machine running. Said it suited the place.

-- recovered fragment, ruin-company account, Blue Service Hall

What a Scavenger is

A Scavenger survives by leverage: the loose hinge, the frightened guard, the overloaded circuit, the enemy looking the wrong way, the miasma signature flickering when a body is off-balance. They do not need the best position. They need the position no one protected.

The Scavenger's strike is not simply hidden violence. It is exploitation of instability. When a target is distracted, flanked, surprised, or forced out of rhythm, its local signature opens for a moment. The Scavenger lives in that moment.

Settlements distrust Scavengers until they need one. Then they remember which locked room has medicine, which rival has a hostage, which machine needs someone small enough and foolish enough to crawl inside. Scavengers make a poor society nervous because they know society has seams.

Scavengers who travel share an argot built from necessity, not from secrecy. It is not a secret language and it carries no ritual weight. It is a working pidgin that emerged from the overlap between ruin-runners, caravan guards, lockrats, and road couriers: a compact way to say this cache has been touched, that guard pattern has a gap at changeover, the marks on this door are genuine, the ones on that door are not. Two Scavengers who have never met will find each other's shorthand within a sentence.

They also tend to be competent with old-world artifacts in a way that is not quite trained and not quite lucky. The handling accumulates. A Scavenger who has retrieved two hundred old-world cases has learned, without formal instruction, which mechanisms are decoration and which are live. Which floors hold weight and which are hollow below. Which seals indicate danger and which indicate nothing more than age. The competence is real; the credentials are absent.

Chassis

Class features

The Scavenger's class features are the load-bearing skeleton of every Scavenger, regardless of subclass. They are the accumulated competence of someone who has survived by knowing more than the room expects them to know. The Resonance-strike is a Substrate interaction -- the target's miasma signature destabilizes when off-balance, and the Scavenger exploits the moment. The mobility, the tool-work, the depth of skill, and the late-career resilience are not. They are training. They function in dead zones. They cannot be Dispelled.

Feature ladder

Major class features

• Expertise (L1, L6). At L1 choose two of your skill proficiencies, or one skill and your thieves' tools proficiency. Your proficiency bonus is doubled for ability checks using either chosen proficiency. At L6, choose two more proficiencies to gain the same benefit. Where a Fighter's strength is breadth of training, the Scavenger's strength is depth: two skills known so thoroughly that they run at a level others do not reach.
• Resonance-strike (L1, scales). Once per turn, when you hit with an attack using a finesse or ranged weapon, you may deal an additional 1d6 damage if you have advantage on the attack roll, or if another enemy of the target is within 5 ft of it, that enemy is not incapacitated, and you do not have disadvantage. The extra damage scales by 1d6 at each odd level: 1d6 at L1, 2d6 at L3, up to 10d6 at L19. The target's miasma signature destabilizes when off-balance -- flanked, surprised, distracted, off-rhythm. The Scavenger reads that moment and arrives inside it. This is a Substrate interaction; it does not function in a dead zone and can be Dispelled.
• Scavenger's Cant (L1). The road-language of freebooters, salvagers, and black-market traders, built from necessity across generations of ruin-running and caravan work. You can encode hidden messages inside ordinary conversation; only another Cant speaker understands them, though encoding takes four times longer than plain speech. You also know a vocabulary of marks, notches, and shorthand signs left on surfaces: territory, danger, cache, movement, safe house. Two Scavengers who have never met will find each other's shorthand within a sentence. The Cant is not a ritual. It is a survival tool that became a culture.
• Cunning Action (L2). As a bonus action on each of your turns in combat, you may take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action. The Scavenger who cannot fight their way out can run faster, disengage cleaner, or disappear from the encounter while the others are still deciding what happened.
• Uncanny Dodge (L5). When an attacker you can see hits you with an attack, you may use your reaction to halve the attack's damage against you. The body reads the blow coming and drops into the angle that takes the least of it. This is reflex trained, not foresight channeled.
• Evasion (L7). When you are subjected to an effect that allows a Dexterity saving throw for half damage, you take no damage on a success and only half damage on a failure. The Scavenger has spent years finding the gap in the blast radius.
• Reliable Talent (L11). Whenever you make an ability check using a proficiency you hold, treat any d20 roll of 9 or lower as a 10. Certain skills, applied long enough, approach a floor below which the practitioner simply does not fall.
• Auditory Read (L14). Provided you can hear, you are aware of the location of any hidden or invisible creature within 10 ft of you, even if you cannot see it. Sound tells you where the room is occupied. A Scavenger learns early to listen to what the room is not saying.
• Slippery Mind (L15). You gain proficiency in Wisdom saving throws. The mind that has navigated caches, contracts, bluffs, and three-faction negotiations for fifteen levels has learned to maintain its read of the room even when the room is trying to rewrite it.
• Elusive (L18). While you are not incapacitated, no attack roll has advantage against you. The Scavenger at this depth of experience has closed off the angles. There is nowhere left to flank them from.
• Stroke of Luck (L20). Once per short rest, you may turn a miss into a hit, or treat a failed ability check's d20 roll as a 20. The Scavenger who has survived twenty levels of knowing exactly how close they were has learned to recognize the moment before it closes and push it one inch in the right direction.

Subclasses

At L3 a Scavenger's exploitation becomes a craft: the Quick who wins by motion and first-strike tempo, the Lockrat who reads Lattice and lock and trap, the Breaker who hunts the technological and disables the dangerous, or the Lattice Ghost who moves unseen by every sensor and system.

Quick

He was there when the first shot sounded and gone when the second did. The purse was missing, the gate-key was missing, and the man who had drawn the pistol was trying to understand why his belt had tied itself to the chair.

-- recovered fragment, tavern complaint, Lowmarket

Identity

The Quick is the purest Scavenger expression: speed, hands, angle, escape. They reach first, act first, leave first, and make everyone else spend the scene reacting to something already finished.

A Quick character is not necessarily a thief, though many are accused of it. Their gift is tempo. In ruins, fights, chases, and crowded markets, tempo is often the whole problem.

The Quick's training has three practical limbs: extraordinary manual dexterity applied through the Cunning Action window; a physical adaptability to vertical and aerial movement that most combatants never develop; and, in the late career, a complete mastery of infiltration timing and an intuitive command of old-world relics that strips away the usual barriers between tool and wielder. They do not rely on anything beyond training and accumulated competence. The Quick's entire feature set functions in a dead zone.

Subclass features

L3: Fast Hands. You may use the bonus action granted by Cunning Action to make a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check, use thieves' tools to disarm a trap or open a lock, or take the Use an Object action. Where an ordinary Scavenger uses the Cunning Action window for movement and concealment, the Quick also uses it to do something with their hands: pick the lock, pocket the item, activate the device -- all in the same breath as the disengage or the vanish.

L3: Second-Story Work. Your climbing speed equals your normal walking speed. When you make a running jump, the distance covered increases by a number of feet equal to your Dexterity modifier. Vertical terrain is not an obstacle for the Quick; it is a route the pursuit cannot follow. They have trained on surfaces most people think of as barriers and on distances most people think of as falls.

L9: Supreme Sneak. When you move no more than half your speed on a turn, you have advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) checks made on that turn. The Quick has learned that the difference between being heard and not heard is often a question of pace. Moving slowly and moving silently are the same exercise practiced until they are one.

L13: Use Relic Device. You may ignore class, origin, and level requirements on the use of Lattice devices and psionic relics. The Quick's accumulated handling of old-world objects has developed into something that formal instruction rarely produces: an intuitive read of a mechanism's intention. They do not know how it works. They know what it is trying to do, and that is enough to make it do it. A specialist might call this dangerous. The Quick would agree.

L17: Quick's Reflexes. You can take two turns during the first round of any combat. You take your first turn at your normal initiative and your second turn at your initiative minus 10. You cannot use this feature when surprised. The Quick at this depth of tempo has learned to be, effectively, two moves ahead before the engagement has registered for everyone else. The second turn is not a gift; it is the consequence of spending seventeen levels getting to every opening first.

Lockrat

The Lockrat pressed her ear to the hatch and asked it how long it had been lonely. The Fighter told her not to flirt with doors. She told him not to insult witnesses. The hatch opened for her on the eighth tool and tried to kill the Fighter on the ninth step.

-- recovered fragment, salvage-room joke ledger, Nine Teeth cache

Identity

The Lockrat specializes in closures: locks, traps, service ducts, sealed cases, cache etiquette, hidden releases, false floors, and the tiny engineering decisions left behind by people who expected intruders to be dead.

Good Lockrats are patient enough to let a mechanism tell them what it wants. Bad Lockrats become cautionary stains. The class attracts humor because without humor nobody would keep putting their hands into unknown holes.

Breaker

The Android came through the breach like something that remembered it was supposed to be unstoppable. The Breaker stepped in sideways, and for three seconds the Android appeared to have seven simultaneous opinions about how to move. By the fourth second it had only three. By the fifth, it was very politely asking someone who was no longer there what it was supposed to want. The Breaker was already through the corridor.

-- recovered fragment, vault-breach witness account, Black Sector

Identity

The Breaker is the Scavenger who specializes in the technological and the animate-but-not-alive. Androids, cyborgs, turrets, hostile drones, and the weaponized machines left behind by the old world all speak a language the Breaker has learned. They do not fear the technological. They read it, exploit it, disable it, and sometimes disassemble it for parts.

A Breaker is a hunter of machines. Some are mercenaries hired to recover rogue androids. Some are salvagers pulling value from dead tech. Some simply cannot tolerate something built to be a weapon still walking around with purpose-code in its stride. But all of them see the machine-thing not as alien, but as a system waiting to be understood.

Lattice Ghost

The cache had every warning: motion-bells, heat-flares, pressure-lines strung tight enough to sing. The guards watched the read-outs like prayer. An hour passed. The read-outs never flickered. Later, when they went in to check inventory, they found the Ghost's boot-print on the lock and everything it had wanted already gone. The guards swore nothing had moved. The read-outs agreed.

-- recovered fragment, security audit, Northwall Lodge

Identity

The Lattice Ghost is invisible to what the machines can see. Sensors pass over them. Automated defenses do not recognize them as present. They move through spaces the system insists are empty. This is not invisibility to the eye. This is invisibility to the infrastructure itself.

A Ghost can walk through a guarded room while every alarm stays dark. They can move through a ruin's automated traps without triggering them. They can retrieve a stolen thing from a locked cache and leave the system convinced it was never there. The settlement that finds out one of their vaults has been visited by a Ghost does not know whether to be furious or impressed. Usually both.