This winds up getting away from the idea of the hulking thug rogue/barbarian; the solitary barbarian level is used to grant mobility and agility rather than strength and endurance. That said, this is a very vicious combat build with lots of dirty tricks, very capable of pouncing on opponents unawares and tearing into them in an unholy frenzy.
The Assassin
For a low-optimization, low-magic campaign, where you want to focus on stealth and skills but still be able to deal the hurt, you could do a lot worse than the core assassin prestige class. It gets a number of low-level spells, so it should not be a problem for low-magic, but if there’s little magic available, you definitely want what little you can get.
If alignment is an issue, consider the avenger: it replaces the Evil requirement with a Non-Chaotic requirement, which is often much more amenable to characters.
Spells
Spells are the reason you go this route. The assassin spell list is quite solid, for as small a list as it is, and it will likely fly well in a low-magic game.
This recommendation does assume that you have access, at the least, to Spell Compendium. The core assassin spell list leaves a lot to be desired. If you want to use the avenger, also make sure your DM is OK with adding the Spell Compendium assassin spells to the avenger list. That’s in line with the guidance in that book for non-core spellcasting classes on pg. 3, so it shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s a conversation you should have.
Psionics
The psionic assassin from Secrets of Sarlona also exists, and adds the very interesting option of using Expanded Knowledge for psionic minor creation, which is an excellent way to get poisons. That said, unless your DM allows other assassin spells to be converted into psionic counterparts, it’s not a great option. If you can, then you might as well?
Death Attack
Don’t focus too much on Death Attack; at best you can attempt it during a surprise round after spending three rounds studying your target out of combat. Attempting to hide and wait three rounds mid-combat is always a bad play.
Poison Use
Poison Use is meh; if you want to use poison, you want the Master of Poisons feat from Drow of the Underdark anyway. That said, Master of Poisons is a quite-solid feat, and Craft (poisonmaking) can get you poison at a huge discount (if you have a source of materials, ⅙ market price). Poisons provide a way to apply debilitating effects along with straight damage. See the Arsenic and Old Lace handbook for more details if you’re interested in going for poisons.
Again, if you are avoiding being Evil, you have to clarify something with the DM: poisons, according to Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, are not evil, though usually illegal (and always dishonorable, which is why they are barred to paladins). Book of Exalted Deeds, however, says they are actually Evil – and then gives a definition/explanation of how and why they’re Evil that would include, for example, the natural poison of the couatl, that is, a notably Good creature. Book of Exalted Deeds is not a good book. Just make sure, if you don’t want to be Evil, that your DM agrees that Book of Exalted Deeds is stupid, and poisons aren’t any more inherently evil than swords.
Hide in Plain Sight
It’s a long time coming, but getting Hide in Plain Sight, along with taking the Darkstalker feat from Lords of Madness, will prevent a lot of the major ways to simply shut down your stealth. Highly recommended.
The Black Dog
This prestige class from Dragonmarked stacks with assassin levels for Death Attack DCs, and has a couple of excellent abilities aimed at poison. I’ve decided that poison is a good direction to take this, hence its appearance here.
The black dog requires the Mark of Hospitality feat, which in Eberron is limited to halflings. This is a matter of setting fluff, so if you aren’t playing in Eberron, the Mark of Hospitality might be available to half-orcs. On the other hand, I actually like halfling a great deal more than half-orc here. It does mean a shift from Strength to Dexterity which you may find undesirable, but half-orc is quite weak, and the halfling’s size is basically all to your benefit (average of −1 on damage rolls, but +1 attack, +4 to stealth, and +1 to AC). The existence of the strongheart halfling (Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting) really seals that deal.
Suggested Build
Strongheart Halfling Rogue 3/Barbarian 1/something 1/Black Dog 5/Assassin 10
At Rogue 2, the Penetrating Strike alternate class feature (Dungeonscape) is key, and at Barbarian 1, you really want the Lion Spiritual Totem alternate class feature (Complete Champion) to get Pounce instead of Fast Movement (you’re not a charger per se, but you do want to maintain mobility and full-attacks, and pounce is a really good way to do that).
I’d replace Rage with Ferocity, though I’d also consider Whirling Frenzy.
The something 1 I’m not sure about; barbarian 2 is OK but not great, rogue 4 is fairly mediocre...
Some options that should be no problem:
Fighter. You want Weapon Finesse at this point, so that’s a use for your bonus feat, and the Hit-and-Run Tactics alternate class feature from Drow of the Underdark trades some armor and shield proficiency you probably won’t use for +2 to initiative and Dex-to-damage vs. flat-footed foes, which is awesome.
Ranger. Simple: full BAB and 6+Int skills. Boring, but functional.
Anything that gives Sneak Attack +1d6 at first level. Again, boring, but functional.
Some options that probably aren’t allowed, but could be awesome:
Cleric. Best single-level dip in the game, bar none. Could be worth it even if you get none of its spells. Domain granted powers are awesome, and failing that you can trade them for Devotion feats (Complete Champion), many of which are excellent. Turn/Rebuke Undead is excellent for Divine feats, including the amazing Lolth’s Caress (Drow of the Underdark). While a halfling who worships Lolth is weird, with this build’s interest in poison it’s not a stretch to worship the goddess of spiders. Or if Lolth doesn’t exist in your setting, maybe you can just ignore that requirement.
Ardent or Psion. One level is sufficient to manifest psionic minor creation, which will get you a plant-based poison that lasts an hour. Not a bad deal at all.
Swordsage. Cloak of deception provides instant flat-footing for an enemy, once per encounter, while shadow jaunt provides great mobility. Wolf fang strike and sudden leap allow you to continue to dual-wield effectively even when you’re forced to move and cannot charge. If you later take Martial Stance, you can snag assassin’s stance for +2d6 Sneak Attack damage.
Anyway, you definitely want the Craven (Champions of Ruin), Darkstalker (Lords of Madness), Master of Poisons (Drow of the Underdark), and Weapon Finesse feats. Plus, black dog requires Mark of Hospitality (Eberron Campaign Setting).
The feats Extra Rage (Complete Warrior) and Wild Cohort could be very nice for you, if you can squeeze them in (maybe later, or if you take a Fighter level and have another feat to play with). Note that I don’t recommend Wild Cohort so you have a pet fighting alongside you: I recommend it so you have a reliable, cheap poison dispenser following you around. Unfortunately, both feats are kind of lackluster by the time they fit into the build I am proposing.
Anyway, your feats may look like this:
- Bonus racial feat: Weapon Finesse
- 1st-level feat: Master of Poisons
- 3rd-level feat: Mark of Hospitality
- 6th-level feat: Darkstalker
- 9th-level feat: Craven
- 12th-level feat: Extra Rage?
- 15th-level feat: Wild Cohort?
With this combination, your attacks hit hard, and you are hard to find. You have poisons that you can use selectively, and they are very dangerous. You have a smattering of spells that will make a huge difference in a low-magic world. Seems like a pretty solid approach to me.
Best Answer
Simple, straight-forward third-party psionic ranger
Dreamscarred Press is primarily a third-party publisher for Pathfinder these days, but they started in 3.5e, and they produced a psionic ranger for 3.5e. So that’s a simple, ready-made answer.
Soulbow: official psionic archery, but not so much stealth or nature lore
A more official, but less ranger-y, approach would be the soulbolt prestige class from Complete Psionic. It’s probably one of the best things to come out of that book, and certainly one of the best things you can do with a soulknife, but those are both really low standards (Complete Psionic is one of the worst official books for 3.5e, and soulknives are a really, really weak class).
Backporting DSP Pathfinder material offers some options
Reaching farther, Dreamscarred Press’s Pathfinder material can be readily back-ported to 3.5e, and is often of higher quality. The marksman is pretty good, for example. Their Pathfinder soulknife is also improved over the 3.5e one, and has a soulbolt archetype—though, I should warn you, even with improvements it’s still not a great class unless you’re using one of the newer, higher-power archetypes like war soul, psychic armory, or living legend, which aren’t yet available on d20PFSRD.com (Psionics Augmented: Soulknives and Psionics Augmented: Living Legend or Psionics Augmented: Occult are the places to find those, if you are interested—disclaimer, though: I worked on some of the other content in Psionics Augmented: Occult, so I have a vested interest in that book).
An ardent might be able to cobble together a PhD in rangering
Finally, if you want to frankenstein a build together out of official 3.5e parts, you’re almost-certainly going to be looking at ardent (Complete Psionic again, and probably the only thing in it that I’ll say is, without reservation, quality material—well, almost without reservation, the magic mantle is a mess).
The ardent is a psionic philosopher to the cleric’s magic priest, and gains powers by tapping psionic “mantles,” which are fairly similar to a cleric’s domains. Unlike a cleric, an ardent gains several such mantles, and can even take opposing mantles (e.g. an ardent with both good and evil mantles could specifically be interested in the interplay of good and evil, rather than necessarily espousing either alignment on a personal level). An ardent takes on several mantles as he levels.
The reason you’ll want ardent are two-fold: one, there’s a natural world mantle, and it’s just about the only reference to nature in official psionic material. And other mantles like conflict, elements, life, or physical power, are available to fill up the rest of your choices. Two, the ardent has a unique, multiclassing-friendly system of powers known, since the ardent has no max power level known. Instead, you just can learn a power of any level you have high enough manifester level to afford the power points for, which means any bonus to manifester level—like Practiced Manifester (the third and final quality material in Complete Psionic)—can allow you to learn higher-level powers. That makes multiclassing (at least, so long as you don’t take more than four non-progressing levels) far less painful than it is for other manifesters.
That means ardent can be a useful means for improving your “ranger-ness” with some judicious multiclassing, when otherwise psionics struggles to offer very much of that. One of your four non-progression levels should probably be slayer 1st, since slayer is a great, full-BAB psionic-progressing class. For the other three levels, you could be a 3rd-level ranger just for favored enemy, Track, wild empathy, the initial combat style feat, and Endurance. If lawful good, or otherwise in an alignment-flexible game, a couple levels of paladin—with the Serenity feat from Dragon Compendium—could be even better, since you can get favored enemy through this Unearthed Arcana variant or the holy judge variant in Champions of Valor, and divine grace is so good. Barbarian is on a similar narrative level to ranger, and though any kind of rage is problematic for psionic powers, one level can get you pounce (Complete Champion, lion spiritual totem) as well as ferocity or whirling frenzy, which are fantastic for ranger combat styles.
Off the top of my head, I would probably look at something like this:
Holy judge variant from Champions of Valor, officially requires worship of Tyr.
Technically, you choose your feats as the last step of leveling up, so for the first level of ardent you still have manifester level 1st when you choose your powers, so you have to choose 1st-level powers even though you end up with manifester level 3rd by the end of the level.
Unearthed Arcana variant, “may only select aberrations, dragons, giants, monstrous humanoids, evil outsiders, or undead.”
Whether, and how, slayer favored enemy stacks with ranger favored enemy is really unclear. Unlike most sources of favored enemy, the slayer version makes no mention of offering a +2 bonus on some existing type of favored enemy. The improvements to it also seem mandatory, rather than being applicable to other favored enemies. But the issue is murky. Stems from the fact that originally the class was the illithid slayer, in Expanded Psionics Handbook, and only became the slayer in the SRD where illithids aren’t allowed because they’re product identity.
Complete Warrior feat, use Wisdom for ranged weapon attacks.
Officially, holy judge requires worshiping Tyr and thus LG alignment. If not playing in Faerûn, though, that requirement could easily be waived, and alternate paladins for each alignment are readily available. But ditching holy judge is no major loss anyway; Unearthed Arcana paladin with Serenity remains an excellent choice.
If paladin really is too problematic, though, you could go with another level of ranger—and you could consider the moon-warded ranger from Dragon vol. 340 for Wis-to-AC even in light armor, since we’re already getting critical archery feats. The other level is kind of wide-open, as long as you are using fractional BAB (if not, you need something with BAB +1 at 1st, but seriously, you should use fractional BAB). The aforementioned barbarian could work, or if you don’t mind being strongly neutral good, you could try to sneak a couple levels of stalker of Kharash into the build for the astoundingly good favored enemy—evil.
Otherwise, this build is pretty flexbile. Kalashtar from Eberron Campaign Setting are a particularly good choice of race for their extra power points (1 per level, rather than the flat +2 most psionic races get), and lesser aasimar might be an overly-good choice of race (thanks to +2 Wis with no drawbacks), but any race can work (a penalty to Wisdom would hurt a lot though, since this build adds Wisdom to so many things).