Delving Deeper Assassin and Monk

I originally posted this to the ODD74 forums and was considering making some changes and posting here, but decided to repost this as-is. After reading Tim Kask's blog post about the class level limits for druid, assassin and monk, it occurred to me that you could make a few simple changes to the Delving Deeper thief to turn it into an assassin, for those who need such a class:

• Use Thief hit dice and abilities, but Fighter xp progression;
• Add +1d6 to surprise attack damage;
• Add a disguise ability that works the same as the thief abilities (fools observers on 3+).

You can give assassins the option to learn alignment languages like regular languages, too. The level limit would not be a class feature, but a setting feature: the local guildmaster assassin won't tolerate another assassin of equal level, whatever that is, and neither will the grandfather of assassins, but that's all roleplaying, not a hard limit.

I think you could do a passable monk in a similar way:

• Use Thief hit dice and abilities, but Fighter xp progression;
• Backstab bonus becomes barehand/kick attack bonus;
• Armor class equals armor worn or AC 5 at 5th level, AC 3 at 10th.

Not as fancy as the Blackmoor or AD&D monk, but still in keeping with the David Carradine inspiration. Other monk powers could be added as individual quests instead of class features. ("I heard you know the secret of quivering palm, Master. Will you teach me?" *BOOT TO THE HEAD*)

The reason why I was going to make changes to the classes before posting them here is that they don't quite fit the scheme I was using for class construction and class variants. But swapping the Thief xp for Fighter xp in order to get two extra abilities for the Thief base class seems not too out of place. Perhaps I can expand my scheme? I'll have to think it over...