Inquisitor Prestige Class

Inquisitors ferret out the truth and find criminals and troublemakers. They are the medieval equivalent of private investigators and police detectives. Their methods are direct, they rely on infiltration, interrogation, fear or even torture more than on physical evidence. Once they think they know who the perpetrator is, they must try to capture him for judgement, preferably alive, so they are experts in disabling combat and surprise knockout attacks.

Inquisitors are not glamorous. This is a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. When working for special interest groups, inquisitors will hunt heretics, witches, spies, and dissidents. Having no mystical abilities or modern forensic technology, inquisitors must rely on observation, interrogation and infiltration. Evil inquisitors choose the easy path of torture and violence to achieve their ends, and even good inquisitors tend to be ruthless in their service of justice.

Common people fear inquisitors and want as little as possible to do with them. Adventurers of other classes may share this outlook, but must sometimes work with inquisitors to compliment skills. Inquisitors love working with spellcasters due to their divination abilities, but many secretly resent them and think using mystical abilities to root out the truth is cheating.

An inquisitor can easily be mislead and become a bigoted persecutor of freedom, but many try to maintain their integrity and only persecute those who have provided just cause. Inquisitors are usually of lawful alignment, but private investigator type inquisitors are more neutral, and a very few chaotics seek the job because of the power it brings or to fulfil some personal goal.

Most inquisitors were rogues or bards. Other classes can become inquisitors, but find the entry requirements cumbersome.

Capture Combat: In addition to normal sneak attack opportunities, you can sneak attack someone who is dazzled, entangled, nauseated or prone. See DMG, p 83, for a summary of these conditions. You can also do subdual damage with a club or quarterstaff and sneak attack with these weapons for subdual damage.
Interrogation: You can retry your intimidation checks when interrogating prisoners. You must wait one day or escalate the threat in some manner and work on the subject for an hour between each attempt. Escalation can either be torture (causes 1d4 temporary constitution damage), offering a good plea bargain, showing some significant new piece of evidence, or by threats against friends, loved ones and so on.
Kill Insubordination: You automatically gain sneak attack bonuses when attacking a supposed comrade. This applies even if the comrade is confused, charmed, suspicious or otherwise unfriendly right now. If done as a ranged attack, you must be within 30 ft. Some inquisitors have gained fame by using this ability to take out unworthy commanders and assuming command of an operation themselves.
Find Stooge: The inquisitor develops an uncanny awareness about people, based on the sense motive skill. To infiltrate someplace, the inquisitor usually needs the aid of a local, and informants and double-agents are invaluble tools to inquisitors. With Find Stooge, you can discern if it is possible to approach a person to use him or her in this way. When you use sense motive to get a hunch about someone, you will understand how involved they are in any cases that you are currently investigating, You can also use the ability to scan a group of people and find the most suitable stooge; the difficulty of this task is 20.
Improved Disarm: You learn the Improved Disarm feat, ignoring the prerequisites. If you already know this feat, you get a +4 modifier to disarm attack rolls.
Memory Training: You can recall anything you have seen or heard up to one week per level in the past. This is a powerful way to retrieve information without leaving any physical evidence.
Evidence Analysis: You are highly skilled at finding clues and analyzing evidence using the search skill. When looking through a location to get an idea of what occurred there recently, you can make a search roll to find clues. A result of 15 gives you a general idea of what happened, such as the number of people involved and the basic type of activity. A result of 20 gives you clues to each persons identity, such as threads of clothing, strands of hair or footprints. A result of 25 discovers more detailed clues as to what was going on and who those involved were, such as imprints left of something that was written down, leftover spell components, dirt from an identifiable locale and so on.