Halvard's Blessing From Below: Acolyte of the harbor shrine and of the Depths that give as they take. He carries a holy symbol of a rope-and-anchor knot and a small brass hand-bell he inherited from Father Cadoc's predecessor.
As a Bonus Action, you can expend one use of Channel Divinity to regain one expended spell slot of level 2 or lower (level 1 slot at this level). You have one use of Channel Divinity per Long Rest.
As a Bonus Action, you can expend one use of Channel Divinity to unleash a flood of healing energy in a 30-foot Emanation, restoring 2d6 + Wisdom modifier Hit Points to yourself and allies.
He is literate in Common and the trade-tongue of the Ashen Reach, and can perform simple rites of the harbor shrine — blessing a hull, burying a sailor, sealing a ledger with holy ash.
Whenever you use a spell of 1st level or higher to restore Hit Points to a creature, that creature regains additional Hit Points equal to 2 + the spell's level.
Choose one option from the Magic, Powered, or Study order; Halvard is a Protector, gaining proficiency with Martial weapons and training in Heavy Armor.
You always have the Bless and Cure Wounds spells prepared, and they don't count against your number of Cleric spells prepared.
Prepared spells: 3 from the Cleric spell list + Bless and Cure Wounds always prepared from the Life Domain (domain spells don't count against the prepared limit). Cantrips: Guidance, Sacred Flame, Thaumaturgy.
Halvard channels the harbor shrine's quiet authority. Until the end of your next turn, the target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw at the start of its turn or waste its action, unable to act until the start of its next turn.
A creature you touch regains Hit Points equal to 1d8 + Wisdom modifier (1d8 + 3), plus 1 more from Disciple of Life for a total of 1d8 + 4. As a Bonus Action, this spell can get a fallen militia man back on his feet mid-assault. It can also be cast at range as a Bonus Action to heal an ally within 30 feet.
For the duration, the target gains a +2 bonus to AC and saving throws against all spells, and can't be Charmed, Frightened, or Possessed.
Choose up to three creatures within range. Each target gains a +1d4 bonus to one attack roll, saving throw, or ability check of its choice before the spell ends, blessed by Halvard's steady word.
A creature you touch regains Hit Points equal to 1d8 + Spellcasting ability modifier (1d8 + 3), plus 2 from Disciple of Life for a total of 1d8 + 5.
Until the spell ends, the target is protected against attacks by any creature that isn't an Aberration, Celestial, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, or Undead — attacks against it have disadvantage, and it can't be Charmed, Frightened, or Possessed by them.
You touch one willing creature. Once before the spell ends, the target can roll a d4 and add the number rolled to one ability check of its choice.
Radiant damage: 1d8. Make a ranged spell attack against the target (+5 to hit). On a hit, the target takes 1d8 Radiant damage. This damage increases by 1d8 at levels 5, 11, and 17.
You manifest a minor wonder — a sign of supernatural power — within range. You create a harmless sensory effect (a flicker of light, a sound, a warmth, a whisper of the harbor tide), and it lasts for 1 minute.
Behind the character
Halvard Keen is a weathered, stocky human man in his late thirties, built like someone who has hauled anchor lines for eleven years — broad shoulders, thick forearms, a heavy seaman's beard going grey at the chin. He wears scale mail over a salt-stained white tabard, a round steel shield slung on his back painted with a rope-and-anchor knot, and a mace at his belt that has clearly seen real work. A small brass hand-bell hangs from a cord at his wrist, and he touches it the way other men touch a wound.
His face is quiet and steady, eyes the pale grey of a winter sea, and he has a habit of looking slightly past people as though counting hulls on a quay at night — because that is exactly what he is doing. He prays the way other men swear: briefly, often, and under his breath. After the second cup he is unexpectedly funny, with a dry harbor humor that surprises people who took an hour to get past his silence.
He carries guilt like a coiled rope and only puts it down when his hands are busy helping someone else; give him a wounded man, a burial rite or a frightened child and the coiled rope vanishes entirely.
He is lawful good in the specific, stubborn way of a man who believes in ledgers: names written down, debts recorded, accounts closed. He is not naive about institutions — he has seen what the Salt Ledger's books hide — but he believes a record kept honestly is the closest thing to justice a hard coast will allow. He is a priest of the Depths that give as they take, and he serves a god of harbors, tides and the drowned: a faith of rope, bell and blessing, not incense and thunder. He will bury any dead with full rites, friend or enemy, and he considers that duty the center of his calling.
In a fight he is a wall: scale mail, shield, mace, planted between danger and whoever is behind him. He heals with the same steadiness he does everything else, and his blessings are short, salty and sincere.
Before the adventure
Halvard Keen was born in Saltmarch Landing, the second son of a salt-widow and a harbor watchman, and the sea took the first son before Halvard could walk. He grew up on the long stone quay between the gulls and the crates, and at fourteen he signed aboard his first coaster out of the salt flats. For eleven years he shipped out of Saltmarch — coastal runs, salt and iron and timber — and he was good at it: strong, steady, a man the mates trusted with the anchor watch.
He learned to read from a second mate's stolen primer, learned the trade-tongue of the Ashen Reach from caravan men drinking at the Wet Rope, and learned to pray from Father Cadoc, the round red-faced old priest who blessed every hull that left the quay.
Then came the night that made him. A routine run down the Verdigris Coast, a clear evening, a light burning on Wrecker's Cay exactly where a light should burn — and the ship went onto the rocks with all sails set, because the light that guides you safe and the light that lures you dead are the same light, moved two degrees. Nine men drowned in the black water. Halvard swam.
He does not remember deciding to swim. He remembers the cold, the rope in his fist, and the shingle under his knees, and then the long walk down the coast to Saltmarch to tell Father Cadoc that the book would need a new page.
The old priest buried nine men on a grey morning and never once asked Halvard why he lived. That silence has shaped everything since. Halvard spent two years working the quay in a fog, unable to stand on it at night without counting the hulls — counting, always, one short. He drank too much for a year, stopped drinking after he nearly went into the harbor to check whether the count could be made right from underneath.
Then, on the second anniversary of the wreck, he walked into the harbor shrine with a leaking roof and took Father Cadoc's vows. Cadoc handed him his predecessor's brass hand-bell and said only: 'It is heavier than it looks. So is the job.'
He has served the harbor shrine for seven years now — blessing hulls, burying sailors, sealing ledgers with holy ash, keeping the Book of the Drowned's ink fresh. He serves the Depths that give as they take: a harbor faith with no grand cathedrals, just rope, bell, salt and the steady work of naming the dead so they cannot be forgotten. His calligraphy is practiced and plain; his rites are exact. The dockhands trust him, the caravan men respect him, and the gulls, he maintains, are personal enemies.
He is in Ironjaw Hold for two reasons, and he will give different answers depending on who asks and how many cups he has had. The honest one: Warden Gruma Ashfang is paying, and the road that feeds Saltmarch is burning. The truer one: the trail of stolen iron runs east from Ironjaw and then, eventually, down to the salt and across the water — and every road he follows bends, in the end, toward Wrecker's Cay, where a light went dark one night twenty years ago and nine men drowned.
He wants every drowned sailor's name written down. He wants the light to answer for what it did. And he wants, though he would die before saying it, to watch Father Cadoc write the tenth name in the book — and finally sleep through a low tide.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Father Cadoc keeps a book of every ship that has left Saltmarch Landing and every one that has not come back, and the page for Halvard's ship has nine names and a blank space where the tenth should be. Cadoc will not write Halvard's name in it while he is alive to object, and Halvard cannot ask him to. What he can do is prove what the book is for: the Salt Ledger's midnight loadings, the darkened light on the cay, and the nineteen wrecks the keeper has been forced to cause.
Halvard must gather the proof at the quay and the nameless warehouse, carry it to the Council in Moonharbor, and then come back to the harbor shrine and let the old priest close the page.
Gather proof of the wrecks: cross-reference Father Cadoc's shipping book with the Salt Ledger's true ledgers in the nameless warehouse's flooded undercroft, and recover Neddy Lamp's list of nineteen darkened lights.
Personal quest · 2
Halvard can name eight of the nine men who drowned the night his ship went onto the rocks. The ninth — a young deckhand called Tam Wicke — was never recovered, and Father Cadoc buried an empty box. Rumor among the Saltmarch dockhands says a man matching Tam's description was seen alive on the shingle of Wrecker's Cay two years ago, taken inland by men in red sashes. Halvard must follow the rumor through the Redstone Draw's raider camp tally-sticks and the deep works' slave pens to learn whether Tam lives, died in the mine, or — the thought Halvard cannot say aloud — was the one who arranged the light and swam away while nine men drowned.
Find the tally-stick in the Redstone Draw cave camp that counts prisoners taken for 'the deep works', and search it for Tam Wicke's name or description.
Personal quest · 3
The brass hand-bell Halvard inherited from Father Cadoc's predecessor is older than the shrine itself, and it does something no harbor bell should: on certain nights, when rung over black water, something answers. Old sailors mutter that the bell was cast from the chain of a ship that was wrecked on purpose, and that the drowned remember the sound. Halvard must learn the bell's history — through the shrine's oldest records, a retired Moonharbor bell-founder, and finally the flooded lower mouth of the Wreckers' Cay sea cave — and decide whether the thing that answers is a haunting to be laid to rest, a witness to be questioned, or a god of the harbor that has been waiting for a priest who would listen.
Research the bell's casting in the shrine's oldest records and the Moonharbor bell-founders' guild registry.
At the Salt Ledger undercroft, Halvard finds the drowned dead of the quay rising in the flooded tunnels — salt husks wearing the faces of men he may have sailed with. The party needs to cross the flooded half of the cellar to reach the true ledgers, and the Salt-Crusted Lantern in the strongbox makes the dead hesitate but does not stop them.
Laying them to rest earns Halvard the 'Tide-Turned' blessing: the drowned of Saltmarch harbor will never rise against him or his companions again, and he gains a permanent +1 to his Wisdom score at the next level-up. Fighting through them keeps his resources intact but marks him in the harbor's memory; the dead remember being treated as things, and any future attempt to question or bless the drowned in Saltmarch is made at disadvantage.
When the party reaches Wrecker's Cay, Halvard comes face to face with the lighthouse keeper — the man whose darkened light wrecked his ship and killed nine of his crewmates. The keeper is a broken, guilt-sick old man who has been coerced by the Redband under threat, and he holds the list of every ship he has lost.
The testimony route strengthens the Council case and grants advantage on all social checks in Moonharbor for the campaign, but the keeper may be murdered before trial. The penance route gives the party a loyal guide on the cay and Neddy's chart (advantage on all coastal navigation), and if the keeper survives to the campaign's end, Halvard gains the 'Lightkeeper's Vow' feature: once per long rest, he may cast Beacon of Hope without expending a spell slot. Halvard's choice also defines his faith: law administered by institutions, or mercy administered by hand.
In the Deadvein Deep, with the seam about to collapse, Kael Dross reveals that the fourth support will bring the refining floor down — but the slave pens on the eastern wall are between the party and the exit, and the collapse timer runs three rounds after the fourth charge is lit. Halvard is the party's healer and the only one who can keep a crowd of weakened prisoners moving.
Spending everything grants Halvard the 'Deepline' boon — a permanent +2 hit points per Cleric level and the Free Miners' absolute loyalty — but he may die in the dark if the party is slow. Triage keeps him alive and effective but costs him: the miners who lose family in the collapse remember it, and Halvard carries a new blank page in a new book he starts keeping himself, one he swears will never have a blank space in it again. Mechanically, triage grants him the 'Triage Discipline' feature: healing spells cast at reduced dice (1d4 instead of 1d8) may target two creatures instead of one.
Completing The Book of the Drowned
Halvard's guilt becomes purpose. He sleeps through low tides, his prayers stop being brief and desperate, and he begins keeping his own book of names — of everyone the party saves and everyone they fail to.
+1 permanent increase (max 20)
Gains proficiency in Insight (already trained; instead gains Expertise in Medicine)
Learning the truth of the ninth name
Whether Tam Wicke is found alive, dead or guilty, Halvard stops asking why he lived. His faith becomes his own rather than borrowed from Father Cadoc, and his Channel Divinity takes on the harbor's character: water, rope, and the weight of names.
Preserve Life's emanation gains 10 additional feet of radius when Halvard is standing in or adjacent to water
Ringing the bell over the flooded eastern mouth and receiving an answer
Halvard's inherited hand-bell becomes a true relic of the harbor dead, and he becomes something more than an acolyte: the first priest in forty years whom the drowned acknowledge.
Gains Speak with Dead (drowned dead only) once per long rest without expending a spell slot
Ally
Father Cadoc buried nine men from Halvard's ship on a grey morning twenty years ago, and he did it with a book open on the shrine's lectern, writing each name as the box went into the ground. He has never once asked Halvard why he lived, and Halvard has never once dared to ask him why he never asked. When Halvard took the vows two years after the wreck, Cadoc did not celebrate; he simply handed the boy his predecessor's brass hand-bell and said, 'It is heavier than it looks.
So is the job.' Since then, the two men have kept the harbor shrine together through storms, burials and the slow rot of Saltmarch's honest trade, and the silence between them has become a kind of language. Cadoc's book — the Book of the Drowned — is the most complete record of the coast's wrecks in existence, and its page for Halvard's ship has nine names and a blank space where the tenth should be.
Cadoc will not write Halvard's name while he is alive to object. Halvard cannot ask him to. Everything Halvard does in this campaign is, at some level, an attempt to earn the right to stand at that lectern and watch the old man close the page.
Enemy
Nessa Crowe's privateer, the Salt Wraith, is the ship that has been loading stolen iron at the Salt Ledger's midnight warehouse — but she is also, the harbor rumor says, the woman who has been running the Redband's coastal relay past Wrecker's Cay, where the light goes dark and ships die. Halvard's ship was one of them. He has spent eleven years not knowing who darkened the light or why, and every trail he follows in this campaign bends, eventually, toward her deck.
She is not the hand that killed his crew — that hand belongs to whoever paid for the wrecks — but she is the wheel that steered them onto the rocks, and Halvard cannot pass her on a quay without counting the hulls. What makes her dangerous to him is not her forty cutthroats but her reasonableness: she will offer him coin, passage, even partnership, and she is genuinely indifferent to the drowned.
Halvard must decide whether she is an enemy to be brought before Father Cadoc's book, or a wheel he can turn toward the true hand. She will negotiate like she fights — fast, dirty, always with an exit — and she respects anyone who gets the better of her. Halvard has never gotten the better of anyone. Yet.
Faction
Captain Ilsa Ren's harbor watch is nine people and two boats, and Halvard is one of the nine — or was, before he took the vows; the watch still counts him. He grew up on this quay, shipped out of this port for eleven years, and every watchman older than forty remembers the boy who swam when nine men drowned. They do not speak of it, but they feed him at their fire and give him the dry corner of the boat.
Ilsa Ren has been watching the nameless warehouse take midnight loadings for a season and cannot act without proof, and she knows Halvard's book-learning and his quay-sense make him the best pair of eyes she has. She hates the Redband because they sank her brother's boat; Halvard hates them because they darkened his light. The two griefs fit together like tide and moon. If Halvard brings her the proof she needs — the Salt Ledger's true books, the consignee letters, the keeper's list — she will lend the party a harbor boat, two guards, and a letter of introduction to Magistra Selene Dorn that opens Moonharbor's doors. If Halvard fails her, the watch's protection becomes a memory, and Saltmarch's quay becomes a place where he counts hulls alone.
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