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, lethal poisons, 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 a lethal 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

The Poison Vial looks like an ordinary potion.

• Lace food (looks identical to clean food) or a blade, or apply it straight to a target.
• Runs a victim all the way to death, unlike vanilla poison, and bypasses armour.
• A configurable delay makes a slow "long sleep" that drops them elsewhere, your alibi.
• Death reads "<name> suddenly collapsed" by default; the poisoner is never named.

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, 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.

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

Part of The Warborn Realm, by barunn