Schemes & Assassins - Secret Orders & Societies

Source & full guide: github.com/teamdemivfxfish-dev/schemes-and-assassins-wiki

Everything wears a vanilla skin.

Schemes & Assassins arms a secret order with the tools of intrigue: a Hood that erases your identity while no one is watching, mundane-looking gear that hides its purpose in plain sight, a slow poison that only an antidote can stop, a concealed blade for the ambush, and the machinery of a real society: ranks, missions, ciphered notes, dead drops, forgery and sabotage.

No hard dependencies. Built for SMP servers and roleplay, where a knife in the dark should leave a mystery, not a name in the death log. An agent's belt reads as junk at a glance; the truth shows only in the tooltip, in your own hand.

Two ideas run through everything:

• Mundane Disguise: every tool parents a vanilla model, so nothing looks out of the ordinary until you hold it.
• Conditional Anonymity: the Hood hides who you are, but only while no one has truly seen you. A held, unbroken stare peels the shadow back, and a surviving witness who has made you learns your true name.

The Hood

Worn like a helmet (no armour value of its own), the Hood turns you into a shadow.

• Your name reads "a hooded figure" in chat and in death messages, so your kills are unattributed.
• Your floating nameplate vanishes; your head renders as a solid black box, never your face or skin.
• The tab list still shows your real name, so no one can unmask you by elimination; anonymity lives in the moment, not the roster.
• Conceals you even in full armour by default; a server can flip hoodRequiresNoArmor for the strict, assassin-only rule.

The Gaze and the Witnesses

Recognition is a continuous stare system, not a coin flip.

• Hold your view on a disguised figure and a hidden Suspicion meter fills above their hotbar; look away and it snaps back down.
• A glance leaks nothing; only a deliberate, unbroken stare of several seconds cracks the disguise. The gauge turns red exactly when your cover begins to break.
• A stare reveals your silhouette, never your face or name, so an enemy must catch you to know you.
• A kill is only witnessed if someone fully recognised you and is present; a clean kill with no witness stays anonymous.
• Every threshold is configurable: range, time to unmask, reveal point, and how long a recognition lingers.

The Concealed Blade

An iron sword in your inventory that turns invisible the moment it is in your hand; you appear empty-handed, and it flickers into view only for an instant after it strikes.

• Enchants exactly like an iron sword (Sharpness, Fire Aspect, Looting and the rest at a table or anvil).
• A steady stare can spot the blade too, revealing the weapon but never who holds it.
• A strike from behind an unaware target lands for heavy ambush damage.
• Lace it with a Poison Vial for the Deadly Trifecta: hooded, an ambush from behind, and no witnesses land the poison; miss a condition and the charge stays for next time.
• With Ethical Kidnapping installed, a Non-lethal blade downs the target for capture instead, holding back its poison so you never kill the prisoner you just took.

Poison

It waits. Then it doesn't stop.

The Poison Vial looks like an ordinary potion. Lace food with it (the food looks identical to clean food), lace a blade, or apply it straight to a target.

• Nothing happens at first. For three minutes there is no damage, no effect icon and no message. The victim has no reason to suspect anything, and you have time to be somewhere else.
• Then it takes hold and never wears off. A heart every two seconds, until the victim dies or drinks an Antidote. There is no timer to wait out.
• Nothing else saves them. It goes straight through armour, Protection enchantments and the Resistance effect, and while it bites the victim can't heal at all: no regeneration, no healing potions, no golden apples. Milk does nothing either.
• Logging out doesn't help. The poison is carried by the victim, so it survives a relog or a server restart.
• Death reads "<name> suddenly collapsed" by default; the poisoner is never named.

The Antidote

The only cure. A drinkable bottle that clears the poison at any stage, before or after it takes hold.

• The trick is knowing when to drink it. Hearts that keep falling and won't come back are the only symptom, and by then the clock is already running.
• Drink one when you aren't poisoned and it's wasted, so a careful agent carries one and a paranoid one carries three.
• Also clears ordinary vanilla Poison.

Found an Order

Place an Oathstone (looks like chiseled stone bricks) and right-click it for a three-tab control terminal: Members, Order and Access.

• Rank-gated secrecy: you only ever see members below your own rank, so lower tiers never learn who runs the order.
• Recruit, promote, demote and kick, delegated to whichever ranks the leader authorises.
• Sworn members share the order's cipher key: order notes read plain to members and scrambled ciphertext to outsiders.

The Society Toolkit

• Bulletin Board (a bookshelf): a rank-gated mission board plus image decrees; drag a PNG or JPG onto it to pin it. Target a mission at one rank and, if it leaks, your mole is in that rank.
• Caches & Dead Drops (a barrel): camouflage it as any block, open only for your order, seal an encrypted note inside, or arm burn-after-pickup so it self-destructs the moment another hand opens it.
• Forgery & Faces: press a Wax Impression to a living player for their likeness (no kill needed), then wear a Forged Signet to frame a scapegoat with their name, or a Visage to fully pass for them, skin and all.
• Saboteur's Charge (looks like stone bricks): a breach explosive that hides as ordinary wall; light it with flint and steel or wire it to redstone.

Key Recipes

Every recipe uses ordinary vanilla ingredients, and all are shapeless except the Hood and the Oathstone.

Requirements & Compatibility

Built for Minecraft 1.21.1 on NeoForge. No keybinds and no commands; everything is driven by ordinary interactions, tuned server-side through config/sos-common.toml.

Support the Mods

These mods are free and they stay free. If one of them runs on your server, you can back the next version, the next port, and the next mod at patreon.com/epicwarborn. Patrons get their name in the credits, a direct line to me for bugs, early builds, and a vote on what gets built next.

Swear the oath. Trust no one. Leave no name.

Part of The Warborn Realm, by barunn