Nick: when wielding two light weapons, make the second attack as part of the Attack action. Vex (Dagger): on hit, gain Advantage on your next attack roll against that target before the end of your next turn.
Once per turn, deal an extra 1d6 damage when you hit with a finesse or ranged weapon and have Advantage on the roll, or when another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it.
Gain proficiency in three skills/tools of your choice (already reflected: Insight, Perception, Forgery Kit).
You have a second persona with its own documentation, history, and acquaintances.
Advantage on saving throws against being Charmed; magic can't put you to sleep.
Double proficiency bonus on two skills: choose Sleight of Hand and Stealth.
You can see in dim light within 60 feet as if it were bright light.
You know Thieves' Cant, a secret mix of dialect, jargon, and code.
Behind the character
Cassian "Shade" Vell is a twenty-year-old halfblood of elven descent who treats life as one long performance and himself as the star. Caramel hair falls in deliberately unkempt waves around a clean-shaven face, and his azure blue eyes seem to sparkle with a joke only he has heard yet. He dresses flamboyantly — an ivory shirt with too many ruffles, left scandalously open at the chest — because a mark who is admiring your collar isn't watching your hands.
Sassy, quick-witted, and endlessly curious, Cassian is easygoing to a fault. He flirts with danger the way other men flirt with barkeeps, and he cannot resist showing off, whether that means balancing a dagger on his knuckles mid-conversation or swiping a noble's signet ring while bowing. His charm is genuine; his stories rarely are. As a practiced charlatan, he carries a false identity, a silver tongue, and a sleight of hand so smooth his own fingers sometimes surprise him.
He is reckless and fun-loving, collecting trinkets from every job — a cracked locket here, a forged seal there — each a souvenir of a night that nearly killed him. Perched on his shoulder is his faithful tamed squirrel, a trained diversion he deploys with theatrical timing. Beneath the swagger lies a darker thread: Cassian has a serious, simmering problem with a Kenku assassin from the Circus of Wonders, and the shadow that name casts over him is the only one he doesn't wear lightly.
A rogue of the finest street schools, he dreams of weaving true magic into his tricks — one day, the cards themselves will obey him.
Before the adventure
Cassian Vell was born in a riverport city where elven traders and human dockhands mingled freely, the son of an elven jeweler and a human stage magician who vanished between one performance and the next. His mother raised him among gemstones and ledgers, but young Cassian was drawn to his father's world — the footlights, the flourishes, the beautiful lie of it all. By ten he could palm a coin so smoothly the coin itself seemed embarrassed. By twelve he had run away with the Circus of Wonders.
The circus taught him everything: sleight of hand, misdirection, the exact angle at which a crowd forgets to blink. It also taught him fear. Among the performers was a Kenku — a mimic-voiced creature who repeated the words of others and killed for the ringmaster's enemies. The Kenku noticed the boy who could steal a watch from a sleeping strongman and decided Cassian's talents were wasted on juggling. He was recruited, coerced, and used as a cutpurse for marks the Kenku had marked for worse.
When Cassian finally refused — when a job turned from theft to murder and his hands shook too hard to help — the Kenku's blade opened a scar along his ribs and a debt along his conscience. He fled that night with nothing but a stolen trinket box, a half-tamed squirrel he'd rescued from the menagerie, and a name he swore to remember.
For eight years he has drifted from city to city under a dozen personas, working as a charlatan: selling fake relics, forging letters of introduction, wooing merchants' widows with borrowed poetry. He collects trinkets from every con — each one a memory, a trophy, a promise that he's still free. He's easygoing and fun-loving because the alternative is looking over his shoulder, and looking over his shoulder is how you get caught.
But the past has a way of repeating itself. Recently, in a portside tavern, a familiar voice echoed his own words back to him — a Kenku's mimicry, unmistakable. The Circus of Wonders has found him again, and the assassin walks in its shadow. Cassian knows he can't run forever. He's decided that this time, he'll be the one doing the hunting — but first he needs to get good enough to survive the attempt.
Word among the thieves' cant whispers that there are those who blend magic and mischief, tricksters whose illusions are real. Cassian means to become one of them. The shadow he takes as his name will not be the one that kills him.
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