Ah, Menzoberranzan. One of the deadliest places in the Forgotten Realms. Center of Lolth-worship among the Drow and basically a place where deadly intrigue rules over all. A fitting place for a Rogue.
The House Agent is meant to represent the kind of fixer/problem-solver for one of the houses of Menzoberranzan that is called in when something needs to be taken care of brutally and discretely.
As with the Unlight Barbarian, there's a flavor table to roll on or pick from describing how you passed your loyalty test to your House. There's a lot of fun flavor here. How are the mechanics?
Thematically, this is a Rogue with some spellcasting, but not in the traditional sense like an Arcane Trickster. It's mainly spells that can be cast once a day, and some alternate Cunning Strikes.
Level 3:
House Insignia:
You have a magical token with the insignia of your sponsor house. Using it, you can cast certain spells (Charisma is your spellcasting ability). If you lose the Insignia, your house will get you a replacement when you finish a long rest, whether by courier or magical teleportation or whatever.
You know the Friends cantrip, and you can cast Find Familiar only as a Ritual, and can only choose the Spider form for it. You get a few other spells, each of which you can cast once per long rest using your insignia, gaining new spells as you hit higher levels.
At 3rd level, you have Charm Person. At 5th level, you have Suggestion. At 9th level, you have Hypnotic Pattern (essentially half-caster progression).
So, on one hand, this is a lot of cool stuff to get. On the other hand, however, you could get this stuff and more as an Arcane Trickster. Sure, you get Suggestion two levels earlier and Hypnotic Pattern four levels earlier, but the flexibility of an Arcane Trickster, to me, would almost certainly be preferable.
Charming Presence:
You can take the Influence action as a bonus action, and you also gain proficiency in your choice of Deception, Intimidation, Performance, or Persuasion.
This depends, I think, a lot on how strict your DM is about what kinds of ability checks you can make in combat. Generally the way my best friend/DM and I do it is that if you want to significantly affect a creature's behavior, like talking a foe out of fighting or just taunting them to go after you, you need to commit your full action to this, and so this feature would be pretty useful. But DMs who are less strict with the rules might make this feature, at least the bonus action Influence part, useless.
Level 9:
Backstab:
You have advantage on attack rolls against creatures that are within 5 feet of you and are Friendly or Charmed (interestingly it doesn't say they have to be charmed by you.). You also get a new Cunning Strike option:
Stunning Betrayal (costs 4d6): If your target was Friendly to you or had the Charmed condition when you hit them, they have the Stunned condition until the start of your next turn.
I love Cunning Strike in theory, even if I think sacrificing damage on a class that already does less damage than it feels like it should is a little problematic. I will also say that the fact that they become un-stunned at the start, rather than end of your next turn, makes this a little less powerful. It's sort of a no-save stun, except you have to have gotten them into a good state to make use of it.
One thing that might be a problem here is that DMs might not always think in terms of the Friendly/Indifferent/Hostile attitudes that are part of the rules, but might be overlooked by more intuitive roleplayers. It's something where you should talk to a DM about making sure that the meaning of these terms is clear. Flavor-wise, I think this is really fun for transitioning a social encounter to a combat encounter. But when you're sacrificing most of your Sneak Attack damage at this level, I don't know that it'll make for the kind of assassination vignette that it wants to evoke.
Level 13:
Infiltration Partner:
Your familiar through Find Familiar now has Darkvision out to 120 feet and Truesight to 30 feet.
Additionally, when you cast Find Familiar or finish a short or long rest while you have a familiar, you can grant Temp HP to the familiar equal to your Rogue level.
30 feet of always-on Truesight for your Spider buddy is actually not too bad. Also, that Spider might actually be able to take a hit now and then if they're cushioned with double-digit Temp HP. What I'd love is if we could also give the Spider scaling Stealth bonuses - A Spider has a +4 by default, but by this level we might have as much as a +15.
Silver Tongue:
A creature's Hostile attitude does not impose Disadvantage on Charisma checks to influence them.
Again, I imagine a lot of DMs might not even know what that means, so talk to your DM to make sure this subclass feature is actually coming into play.
Level 17:
Subtle Manipulator:
You gain an additional Cunning Strike option:
Confound (5d6): The target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw (using your spellcasting DC, which is Charisma-based) or be Charmed for 1 minute. They can repeat the save when they take any damage to end it early.
Additionally, you can cast Friends as a bonus action, and the target no longer automatically succeeds on the save if you're fighting it or they're not a humanoid.
Finally, when a spell you cast gives a target the Charmed condition, they don't know they were charged by you.
I mean, the benefit here is that you never run out of Cunning Strikes. And unlike Charm Person, Confound isn't going to give them advantage on the save because you just hit them.
Here's what I'll say: in the right campaign, this could be very fun. But also, by high levels like this, a massive number of monsters are immune to the charmed condition.
Overall Thoughts:
I really like the flavor of this subclass. But I just think, not unlike the Unlight Barbarian, that while there are some cool ideas at play here, it's A: underpowered and B: will only work in a very specific kind of campaign.
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