Halda has spent her life keeping discipline aboard the Sea-Devil's Due. Her voice carries over a gale. She has Advantage on Charisma (Intimidation) checks made against sailors, dockhands, and members of a crew she commands, and she is trained in navigator's tools and vehicles (water).
Halda has survived the loss of four crews under Carl's command. She has Advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks to sense danger, deception, or bad judgment in a captain's or patron's plans.
Halda knows 3 maneuvers: Trip Attack, Menacing Attack, and Riposte. A maneuver expends a Superiority Die and adds its roll to the effect.
When Halda fails an ability check, she can expend a Superiority Die to add it to the check, potentially turning failure into success.
Halda's hit point maximum increases by twice her character level (12 HP at level 6).
When Halda takes the Attack action, she makes two attacks instead of one.
Halda gains proficiency in one skill of her choice (Insight).
Take one additional action on her turn (not a Magic action).
While wearing armor, Halda gains a +1 bonus to Armor Class.
Halda can gain Heroic Inspiration after rolling a d20 Test.
Regain hit points equal to 1d10 + fighter level (6).
Behind the character
Tall, broad-shouldered and permanently unimpressed, Halda Storm is the first mate of the Sea-Devil's Due and the reason the ship has any discipline at all. She is in her forties, grey-streaked and salt-cured, with a jaw like a mooring post and a boatswain's voice that has carried over gales, mutinies, and one very memorable funeral. She keeps the ship's books in a neat, merciless hand, keeps the ship's company in line with a look, and keeps a knife in her boot that belonged to her sister.
She has sailed with Carl of the Seven Seas for six years and has buried four of his crews, and she has done the arithmetic the harbour gossips only whisper about: four crews in nine years is not bad luck, it is a pattern. Halda does not trust the expedition and says so, flatly, to anyone who asks and several people who do not. She has noticed the sabotage in the dry dock cradle and has told no one, because she suspects the order came from inside her own crew and she wants the whole chain, not the knife-hand.
She will back the party without hesitation if they are right, and she will not forgive them if they are wrong — her trust is a mooring line, thrown once, and cut clean if it slips. Beneath the discipline is a woman who signed on with a famous captain for a reason she has never said aloud: to be standing on his quarterdeck, with her sister's knife in her boot, when he finally had to explain why the north keeps eating his people. She is lawful the way ballast is lawful: not because anyone ordered it, but because the ship does not float without it.
Before the adventure
Halda was born in the Lordinium dry docks, the daughter of a caulker and a temple school girl who married down and never regretted it. She was educated at a temple school of the Twelve until fourteen — she can still recite the liturgy and knows when someone misquotes it — and left when her father's hands went and the family needed wages. She went to sea at fifteen as a ship's girl, was a bosun's mate by nineteen, and learned discipline from a first mate named Cora Vane who ran her watches like a drill and her funerals like a coronation.
Halda has commanded deck crews on merchantmen, privateers and one ill-fated Crown survey vessel, and she has a reputation in every port from Lordinium to the ice: the woman you want when the weather turns, the woman you do not want to lie to. She married once, a fisherman named Aldric, whose licence the harbour office revoked by clerical error and restored only after she stood in the office for three days with the ledgers in her hand.
Aldric drowned eight years ago in a boat the harbour office had passed as sound. Halda does not talk about him. She keeps his tally-stick in the same drawer as her sister's sea-chest key, and she has never spent the insurance money. Her sister Ran was the bright one — a navigator, quick and laughing, who signed onto Carl's second voyage because the pay was triple and the chart was real.
Ran did not come back. The official account blamed weather. The tide tables and the wind do not agree with the official account, and neither does the number of bodies the sea gave back. Halda bought a survivor's letter from a widow in the Tarred Keel's back room, read it once, and burned it — but she remembers every word, and the words do not match Carl's story either. She took the first mate's berth on Carl's next expedition for reasons she has told no one: to be close to the man who keeps losing crews, so that when the fifth went into the water she could look him in the eye and ask him why.
She has now sailed with him six years and buried four crews, and she has decided, privately and without drama, that there will not be a fifth. She keeps a private ledger of every sailor she has buried — names, dates, the sea that took them — and she has matched enough names against the shrine registers at Harrowgate to know that some of the dead were not lost but left.
She has noticed the four cuts in the Sea-Devil's Due's new copper, made with a caulker's knife from inside the cradle by someone who knew the tide schedule, and she has told no one, because she suspects the order came from someone with access to the crew list and she wants the whole chain of command, not the hand that held the knife. She has a particular suspicion of Sedge, the caulker with a grey cord under his apron, and a certainty she cannot yet prove that the sabotage is meant to open the hull in heavy weather — to kill the crew in the north, not the ship at dock.
She keeps the ship's discipline with a voice and a look and, when necessary, a boatswain's justice that the crew respects and the Chorus fears. She keeps the ship's books in double entry, which the crew believes she learned from a clerk. She keeps a knife in her boot that belonged to Ran, and she has promised it, in her own mind, to the day she gets an answer. She has watched the party sign on with the flat grey eyes of a woman taking the measure of ballast, and she has concluded — provisionally, and she is never wrong about ballast — that they might be worth the berth next to hers.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Halda keeps a private ledger of every sailor she has buried from Carl's four lost crews — names, dates, and the sea that took them. She asks the party to help her match those names against the lost lists in Harrowgate shrine and the Penitent Star's logbook, to find out whether any of the dead were left behind rather than lost. If one name comes back as 'left at the gate', Halda will have proof that the fog takes people deliberately, and she will use it to force Carl to answer questions he has avoided for six years.
Copy Halda's ledger and compare it against the shrine register at Harrowgate, finding three names that appear on both lists with different dates of death.
Personal quest · 2
Halda has survived four crews and has quietly decided she will not survive a fifth. Before the ship clears Harrowgate, she asks the party to help her identify the saboteur's paymaster — not Jory, who cut the hull, but the person in Lordinium who gave the order. She suspects Sedge the caulker is the Chorus agent, but she needs proof that would stand up in front of the crew, because accusing the wrong person aboard a ship is how mutinies start. The trail runs through the Tarred Keel, Obb's warehouse, and the grey-robed collectors on the harbour front.
Watch Sedge without being seen, trace the ash-grey wax seals, and identify the Chorus courier who carries messages between the docks and the collectors on the quay.
Personal quest · 3
The knife Halda carries in her boot belonged to her sister Ran, who sailed on Carl's second voyage and did not come back. Halda has never told anyone that the knife is why she signed on with Carl at all — she took the first mate's berth to be close to the man who keeps losing crews, so that when he loses another she can look him in the eye and ask him why.
She asks the party to help her find out what really happened on the second voyage, because Carl's official account does not match the tide tables, the wind, or the number of bodies the sea gave back.
Reconstruct the second voyage from three sources: Carl's public account, the harbour captain's licence records in Lordinium, and a survivor's letter that reached a widow in the Tarred Keel's back room before it was bought and burned.
At the Fogwall Gate, Cassian names the price: one life, chosen by the fog, unless a true name is freely given. Halda has four crews' worth of true names in her ledger — the dead cannot be taken twice — and she knows it.
Giving a dead name frees the gate at no cost but binds Halda to the fog's service in a small way — she hears the fog whisper at night and suffers disadvantage on Perception checks in fog thereafter, though she gains the ability to sense the fog's intentions once per day. Giving her own name means Halda is taken: the party loses their first mate, the ship loses its discipline, and Halda becomes a figure on the arch. Refusing costs a living crew member and Halda's trust in the party's judgment, permanently reducing her support.
When the King's sealed orders are recovered from the Penitent Star and the blood price is named as an acceptable cost in the King's own hand, Halda has the proof she has sailed six years for.
Turning back ends the campaign's northern acts but saves the crew and makes Halda a hero in Lordinium — she gains a Crown commendation, a pension, and the harbour captaincy of Gullclaw Cay, but the party loses the ship, the crew, and access to Borealis. Sailing on means Halda commits her crew to a price she has read in the King's own hand; her Four Crews Buried feature becomes a permanent +2 to all her Insight and Perception checks, as she now watches everything, always, and the crew's morale becomes a resource the party must actively maintain.
At the Heart of Borealis, the Thirteenth offers Halda the one thing she wants most: her sister Ran, alive, standing on the strand, for a single drop of blood freely given.
Taking the bargain returns Ran — but Ran comes back as something the fog made, and Halda must live with what she bought; she gains Ran as a companion of dubious loyalty and loses her resistance to the Thirteenth's whispers permanently. Refusing hardens Halda: she gains permanent resistance to necrotic damage and advantage on all saves against the Thirteenth's offers. Offering the ritual in Ran's name means Halda stands beside Nesa as a witness to the binding and gains the High Priestess's blessing — once per long rest, she can lay a creature of the fog to rest with a touch, destroying it if it has fewer than 20 hit points.
Completing The Ledger of the Dead
Halda stops being the keeper of a book of the dead and becomes a keeper of the dead's memory; she takes up the burial rites and her voice changes in crew scenes from command to something the crew actually wants to follow.
Learning the truth of the second voyage
Halda's six years of unexamined loyalty to Carl becomes a deliberate, examined choice, and her relationship to authority changes from obedience to accountability.
The fog wall's price being paid
Whatever the party chooses at the gate, Halda has seen the price paid in person, and her Four Crews Buried instinct becomes certainty; she stops warning about the danger and starts planning around it.
The King's orders surfacing
Halda's quarrel stops being with Carl and becomes with the Crown that licensed him; she becomes a political actor, not just a sailor, and her decisions start to carry weight in Lordinium.
The Thirteenth's offer at the Heart
Halda's grief, which she has carried in her boot for six years, is finally either answered, refused, or spent — and whichever it is, she is a different woman on the deck of the ship going home.
Ally
Nine years ago, when the third voyage's ship went down in the harbour mouth and the whole dock blamed the seventeen-year-old deckhand who survived it, Halda Storm was the only officer in Lordinium who read the tide tables and the board of inquiry's findings and said aloud that the wreck was not Sella's fault. She did it in the Tarred Keel, in front of forty dockhands, and it cost her a season of work, because Carl did not want his crews' survivors saying inconvenient things.
Sella has never forgotten it. Halda has never mentioned it since. When Sella signed onto the fifth expedition, Halda checked the manifest twice to be sure, then said nothing, because the best thing she could give the girl was a berth on a ship where the first mate would not let history repeat itself. They do not speak of the third voyage. They speak of everything else: hull lines, tide tables, which dock guards can be bribed and which cannot.
Halda has been quietly teaching Sella navigation on the sly, and Sella has been quietly checking Halda's hull inspections for the marks Halda's eyes are too proud to admit are getting harder to see.
Enemy
Sedge has caulked three of Halda's hulls and eaten at her mess table for two years, and Halda liked him — which is the part that makes it personal. When she found the cuts in the copper and traced the knife-work to a caulker's hand, she spent a week telling herself it was a stranger, a dock thief, anyone but one of her own. Then she saw the grey cord under his apron at the cooperage, and she understood that the person who cut her ship had learned the ship's lines from her.
Halda has not reported him because she wants to catch him in the act with someone above him in the chain, and because a boatswain who cannot keep her own crew loyal has no business keeping discipline. Sedge, for his part, is frightened of Halda more than of the Chorus: he has seen her handle a mutinous deckhand, and he knows that if she proves the cuts are his, he will go over the side at Gullclaw Cay with a boatswain's courtesy and no jury. Their conflict is a slow, silent siege across the deck of a ship that both of them love, and only one of them is honest about it.
Faction
Halda has a long and unfriendly history with the Crown's harbour office. Her first husband's fishing licence was revoked by a clerk's error and restored only after she stood in the office for three days; her sister Ran's second-voyage records were sealed by the same office within a month of the loss, and every request Halda has made to see them in six years has been refused with increasing politeness.
She knows the Crown licensed Carl's hulls knowing the loss record, and she knows the Crown sealed the second voyage's papers, and she has concluded — correctly — that the harbour office is either hiding incompetence or hiding orders. She has no loyalty to the Crown and no hatred of it either; she treats it the way a sailor treats a dangerous shoal, charted and avoided. Her value to the party is that she knows which clerks can be bought, which harbour guards look the other way for coin, and exactly what the licence records will show if someone with standing demands them. If the party exposes the harbour office's corruption, Halda will give them everything she has charted about it for six years, and it is a great deal.
Join thousands of players and create rich, detailed character backgrounds with Fable Fiesta!
Register to unlock personal quests, relationships, and narrative hooks!
Sign Up Now - It's Free!No credit card required. Start creating in minutes!