Ket Varn, the Wrecker

Level 6 Human Rogue (Thief)

Available with DM subscription

STR

DEX

16 (+3)

CON

14 (+2)

INT

12 (+1)

WIS

14 (+2)

CHA

8 (-1)

Defense

Armor Class 14 (Leather armor (+3 DEX))

Hit Points 45 (6d8 + 18 (Constitution) +2)

Speed 30 ft., swim 30 ft., climb 30 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws Dexterity, Intelligence

Skills Stealth +6, Survival +5, Acrobatics +6

Features

The Firth's Teeth (False Beacon)

Custom — wrecker trade Level 1

1/Long Rest (setup takes 10 minutes)

Ket Varn rigs a false light — a lantern on a tripod of mast timber, or a lamp hung from a trip-line — that reads as a safe harbour light to an observer more than 300 feet away. Any vessel or creature navigating by it must make a Wisdom (Perception) DC 15 check to notice the deception; on a failure it steers toward the reef line. He also knows every trip-line and pit trap on a mile of the Weeping Firth's shingle, and can reset a pit trap in 10 minutes.

Evasion

Rogue 7 (granted at Rogue 7; Ket Varn has it as a 6th level Thief variant only if house ruled — see note) Level 6

NOTE FOR THE DM: Standard 5. 5e Rogues gain Evasion at 7th level. If running strict SRD 5. 2, remove this feature. If using the module's house allowance (Thief subclass early access), read: when you make a Dexterity save to take half damage, take none on a success and half on a failure.

Salvage Appraiser

Custom — wrecker's eye Level 1

Ket Varn can estimate the Greyharbor market value of any wrecked goods, cargo, or salvage within 1 minute of handling it (Intelligence check DC 12; on a success the DM tells him the true resale value). He does not, however, know what a logbook of tithes is worth — that is beyond coin.

Shingle-Walker

Custom — eleven years on the Firth Level 1

Ket Varn ignores difficult terrain caused by shingle, loose stone, kelp drifts and wreck-debris, and does not trigger his own trip-lines or pit traps. He has Advantage on Dexterity (Stealth) and Wisdom (Survival) checks made along a shoreline.

Cunning Strike: Poison

Rogue 5 Level 5

When you use Sneak Attack, expend 1d6 of it

Coat the blade with wreck-crawler venom (SRD poison rules): on a hit, the target makes a Constitution save (DC 14) or has Disadvantage on attack rolls and ability checks until the end of its next turn.

Steady Aim

Rogue 1 Level 1

Bonus Action; once per Short Rest

If you haven't moved this turn, gain Advantage on the next attack roll this turn. Your speed is 0 until the end of the turn.

Cunning Strike: Trip

Rogue 5 Level 5

When you use Sneak Attack, expend 1d6 of it

Sweep a target's legs on shingle: if the Sneak Attack hits, the target makes a Dexterity save (DC 14) or falls prone.

Alert (Origin Feat)

Criminal background Level 1

Add your Proficiency Bonus to Initiative rolls; you may swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling.

Uncanny Dodge

Rogue 5 Level 5

Reaction

When an attacker you can see hits you, use your Reaction to halve the attack's damage against you.

Sneak Attack (3d6)

Rogue 1 Level 1

Once per turn, when you have Advantage on an attack roll using a finesse or ranged weapon, or when an enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it and you don't have Disadvantage. Once per turn, deal an extra 3d6 damage.

Ket Varn prefers to strike from ambush among the wreck-ribs, aiming for the hamstrings.

Thieves' Cant

Rogue 1 Level 1

Know Thieves' Cant, and can read a message written in it as though you were literate.

Cunning Action

Rogue 2 Level 2

Bonus Action

Take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action as a Bonus Action on each of your turns.

Expertise

Rogue 1 Level 1

Expertise in Stealth and Sleight of Hand.

Behind the character

Character Information

Ket Varn is a thin man in his fifties with a face like a folded knife — lean, closed, and hard to read at any distance. Grey stubble covers a jaw that rarely moves except to name a price, and his eyes are the colour of the fog that lies on the Weeping Firth like a lid on a pot. He wears a long coat of dark otter fur, salt-stiff at the hem, over layers of salvaged wool, and he moves across shingle the way other men move across a wooden floor: without sound, without looking down, without once tripping a line he strung himself.

He is not unfriendly. He is simply pricing you. Within a minute of meeting anyone he has estimated what they are worth — in coin, in trouble, in information — and every conversation afterward is conducted against that private ledger. He speaks little and precisely, with a coastal drawl that flattens into nothing when he is being careful, which is most of the time. He does not lie, exactly; he prices the truth and sells the portion you can afford.

Eleven years alone on a wreck-strewn beach have made him self-sufficient to the point of strangeness. His hut is built from mast timber, its door hung with net and rope, and inside it every object has a place and a purpose and a history he can recite. He talks to the tide charts more readily than to people. He has a system for everything — traps, tides, salvage, visitors — and the system is the closest thing he has to a philosophy: nothing on the Firth is wasted, nothing is free, and everything that washes up belongs to whoever is clever enough and patient enough to claim it.

But there is a crack in the system, and the crack is the fog. Since the night he watched the Ashvane pass with a lantern at the masthead and no lights below, Ket Varn has been afraid — genuinely, specifically afraid — in a way that eleven years of drowned sailors and stripped hulls never made him. He does not name the fear. He prices around it. And he keeps the Sable Queen's logbook buried under four feet of shingle because he cannot read what is written in its margin, and suspects that if he could, the price of knowing it would be more than he has ever charged for anything.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Ket Varn came to the Weeping Firth eleven years ago, walking north along the Crown Coast with a purse of silver he has never explained and a name that is not the one he was born with. He chose the Firth the way a knife chooses a sheath: it was the last stretch of coast before the fog, too poor for farmers, too dangerous for fishermen, and perfectly suited to a man whose trade requires that no one ask what he is doing on the beach at two in the morning with a lantern on a tripod.

The wrecker's trade is simple and old. You rig a false light where a safe harbour light should be, you let the tide and the reef do the killing, and you salvage what the Firth keeps. Ket is very good at it. He has a false beacon he can rig in ten minutes from mast timber and a lamp, trip-lines of tarred cord crossing a mile of shingle, and a pit trap for every hundred yards of beach — some of them his own work, some of them inherited from wreckers before him, all of them maintained with the devotion of a man who has made his bed in a trapfield and intends to die of old age in it.

He knows the Firth's tide-runs better than the harbour charts do, knows which wrecks are worth stripping and which are watched, and sells his salvage in Greyharbor through a fence who asks no questions because Ket pays in goods rather than gossip.

What the fence does not know — what no one on the coast knows — is that Ket's trade has a shadow side he has never reconciled. Nine ships on the teeth in eleven years. Most were fat merchantmen, insured, crewed by men who knew the risk. One was a fishing smack with a family aboard, wrecked in weather he did not cause but did not warn, and he has kept that entry separate on his tally-board ever since, scratched smaller than the others, as though smaller letters could make it a smaller thing. He tells himself the Firth kills, not him. The tally-board does not argue. It just lists.

His isolation is nearly total and largely chosen. The one exception is Sister Ivane, a missionary of the Twelve he pulled half-drowned from the surf five weeks ago after Kestrel Rook's wreckers put her ship ashore. She has prayed in his hut every evening since, and he has let her, and has noticed — with something between irritation and relief — that the nights she is awake, he does not rig the false light. He tells himself this is because a witness is bad for trade. He is aware, in the closed-off way of a man who does not examine his own motives, that this is not entirely why.

The shadow over everything is the fog. Ket has lived his whole Firth life under it, worked in it, profited from the ships it swallows, and never feared it — until eleven months ago, when he watched the Ashvane Concord's ship pass the Firth with a lantern burning at the masthead and no lights anywhere below decks, a ship full of ninety-odd souls sailing into the white wall like a man walking into a locked room on purpose.

Something about it — the discipline of it, the silence, the count of faces he made from the shingle and could not make add up — broke something in his certainty that the fog was just weather. Since then he has been afraid at dusk, afraid at low tide when the singing starts, and afraid most of all of the logbook he pulled from the buried ship's boat of the Sable Queen: a Concord supply vessel that came apart on the Firth's teeth three weeks ago with a crew that had been bled before it ever struck the reef.

He has the logbook. He cannot read the phonetic chant scrawled in its margin. He has buried it under the shingle rather than keep it in the hut, which tells anyone who knows him everything: Ket Varn prices everything, and this is the first thing he has ever been afraid to value.

Into this careful, trapped, arithmetic life come the party — hired hands on Peg Leg Carl's expedition, needing a heading through the fog and willing to pay for one. Ket will price them within a minute. What he cannot price, yet, is what they will ask him to become: not a wrecker, not a hermit, but a witness — the only man on the Crown Coast who has seen the fog's customer sail into it with his eyes open, and who might, if pushed, be persuaded to sail in after them.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

Someone copied Ket's tally-board and sold his trap-maps to Kestrel Rook — the handwriting is Greyharbor, the ink is fresh, and Ket suspects the fence who bought his last salvage cargo. Finding the traitor is a matter of survival, not pride: whoever did it once will do it again, and next time it might be the party's route they sell.
The Ashvane passed the Firth eleven months ago with a lantern at the masthead and no lights below, and Ket has counted the crew he could see from the shingle: ninety-one souls where the manifest said ninety. The extra person was never accounted for, and Ket has been afraid of the fog ever since in a way he cannot explain even to himself.
Ket's hut is built from mast timber that he has never been able to identify — the grain is wrong for any wood that grows on the Crown Coast, and on damp nights the timbers sweat a faint sweetness that Ivane says smells like the fruit in the scriptures. He does not know where the timber came from, and the answer is worse than shipwreck.
Nine ships on the teeth in eleven years, and Ket has salvaged eight of them. The ninth — a black-hulled coaster with no name on her bow — sank beyond the reef in water too deep to work, and her crew walked out of the surf three nights later and stood on his beach in a line until dawn, saying nothing. He has never told anyone, and he has not been past the third trip-line after dark since.
Marda Kell's weregild demand is only the surface: the Greyharbor watch has an old warrant for a wrecker called 'the Firth's Tooth' going back fifteen years, before Ket's time, and the description matches a man who taught Ket everything he knows about false lights — his mentor, who disappeared rather than hanged, and whose trail leads somewhere Ket does not want to follow.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

Ket Varn is not his born name. He came to the Firth eleven years ago with a purse of stolen Concord silver and a warrant behind him, and he has built a life on the assumption that no one from his old life will ever walk a mile of shingle to find a wrecker. The name on the warrant is connected to the Ashvane Concord's founding families, which means Rook's agents may recognize it before the party does.
He has been paid twice by the Hollow Choir without knowing who was paying: a woman with a coral bell met him in Greyharbor two years ago and bought, at triple value, the cargo manifest of a wrecked Cathedral supply boat — a boat that was carrying uncorrected scripture north for burning. He kept one page he did not sell, out of habit, and it is sewn into the lining of his otter coat.
The singing at low tide has been answering him. For the past three weeks, when Ket stands alone at the tide-line at dusk, the hum pauses — a held breath, a listening — and then resumes in a rhythm that matches his own breathing. He has told no one, not even Ivane, and he has begun to suspect that the fog is not singing at the Firth. It is singing at him.

What haunts them

Fears

The fog itself — not as weather but as a presence with attention, something that noticed him the night the Ashvane passed and has not stopped noticing since. His fear is specific: that the fog is keeping accounts too, and that eleven years of drowned men are entries in a ledger he cannot read.
Being priced. Ket prices everything because he cannot bear being priced himself — reduced to a value, a salvage weight, a number in someone else's tally. Marda Kell's demand for weregild terrifies him less than the way she looked at him when she made it: like a woman doing arithmetic.
The water. For all his life on the shore, Ket cannot swim well and has never been past the second sandbar. Every wreck he has worked, he has worked from the shingle at low tide. The drowned he has seen walking out of the surf are, to him, his own death arriving early — men who went where he cannot and came back wrong.

What drives them

Aspirations

To settle the Firth's accounts — to pay Marda Kell, burn or repurpose the false light, and leave the beach owing nothing to anyone, so that when the fog finally takes its interest there is nothing left to collect.
To see the other side of the fog. Not to conquer it or chart it, but simply to know what is behind the lid that has defined his entire adult life from the seaward side. He would never volunteer for the voyage; he would go if asked, and the asking would change him.
To be worth more than his trade. Ket's deepest, most unadmitted want is for someone — Ivane, the party, anyone — to value him for something other than what he can strip, trap, or sell: to be a man whose knowledge is given rather than priced, and who is remembered as more than a wrecker with a tally-board.

Personal quest · 1

The Ledger He Cannot Read

Ket Varn has kept the Sable Queen's logbook for three weeks, buried under four feet of shingle because something in it frightens him. He cannot read the phonetic chant in its margin, but Sister Ivane can, and her translation will tell him that the hymn he heard sung from the fog at dusk is a hymn of the Twelve — struck from the liturgy, and older than any church on the coast.

Ket must decide whether the book leaves his beach at all, and to whom. If he sells it, he profits; if he gives it, he buys a debt he cannot name yet. Completing this quest forces Ket to confront that the fog which has frightened him since the Ashvane passed is not weather but a lid, and that his eleven years of wrecking have been happening underneath it.

Current Stage

Ket agrees to let the party dig the boat out at low tide, on condition they share what the logbook says.

Choice

Trade the logbook for coin, for the party's spare boat, or give it freely.

Trading for coin leaves Ket unchanged and suspicious; giving it freely begins his arc from wrecker to witness.

Mechanical Rewards

Fog-Reader trait (advantage on saves vs. fog-charm and the singing)
The Sable Queen's tide-chart, copied in Ket's own hand

Narrative Rewards

Ket's transformation from wrecker to reluctant witness
Sister Ivane's trust, and with it the identity of the struck hymn

Personal quest · 2

Eleven Years of Teeth

Ket Varn's false light has put at least nine ships on the Firth's teeth, and he has kept a tally scratched into the mast-timber of his hut: hulls, dates, and what he sold each cargo for. One entry, seven years old, is different — a fishing smack out of Greyharbor with a family aboard, wrecked in a storm he did not cause but did not warn. The widow, Marda Kell, has finally traced the false light to him and has come up the coast with the harbour watch's tacit blessing and a demand for weregild.

Ket must account for eleven years of drowning men: pay, lie, or confess. The quest forces him to separate the wrecks he caused from the ones the Firth caused, and to learn that the difference matters to someone other than himself.

Current Stage

Marda Kell arrives at the hut with Ket's tally in hand, copied from a Greyharbor informant.

Choice

Pay weregild (200 gp), deny everything, or confess the trade outright.

Confession spares him the watch but makes him a marked man in Greyharbor; denial risks Kestrel Rook learning his methods and copying them.

Mechanical Rewards

Either loss of The Firth's Teeth (burned) or the Concord-Bane variant (advantage vs. Ashvane ships)
Marda Kell as a Greyharbor contact and safehouse

Narrative Rewards

Ket's tally read aloud by someone he wronged — the first time the numbers have had faces
A settled debt that lets him leave the Firth without looking over his shoulder

Personal quest · 3

The Boat Under the Shingle

Ket has known for three weeks that the Sable Queen's ship's boat is buried on his beach, and for three weeks he has not dug it up, because the night he found it he heard singing come from under the shingle — not the fog's singing, something smaller and closer, like a man humming in a locked room. Digging it out means digging toward whatever is still in it. The excavation unearths the logbook's chest and, wedged beneath the thwarts, a drowned man in a Concord white coat who has not rotted but bloomed — the first tithe Ket has ever seen, and proof that the Ashvane's business has washed up on his own tide-line. Ket must help destroy, bury, or study the body, and in doing so learn what salt-pearls are and what they grow in.

Current Stage

The dig at low tide; the trip-lines must be walked blind because Ket's own maps have gone wrong near the boat.

Choice

Ket may abort the dig when the singing starts, or press on.

Aborting leaves the body and the pearls for Kestrel Rook's next sweep of the Firth.

Mechanical Rewards

150 gp in salt-pearls or the Salt-Cleanse trait
The drowned man's Concord identity tag — evidence for the tithe ledger

Narrative Rewards

Ket's first sight of what the tithe makes of a body
A working relationship with Doctor Vesna Orl

Major Decision

Context

At the tide-line, with the logbook's chest half out of the shingle and the fog singing at dusk, Ket Varn must decide whether the Sable Queen's log leaves his beach — and whether he goes with it. He has spent eleven years as the Firth's only permanent resident, pricing everything that washes up, and the logbook is the first thing that has ever priced him.

Choice Made

Sell the logbook to the party for a hundred gold, trade it for their spare boat, give it freely, or refuse to give it up and fight for it.

Impact

Selling keeps Ket a wrecker and gives the party the heading at cost. Trading gives the party a boat and Ket a debt to the sea he has robbed for a decade. Giving it freely transforms him: he abandons the false light, offers to pilot the party's boat to the Harrow Light, and gains the Fog-Reader trait — advantage on saves against the singing and fog-charm — as the island's hold on him breaks.

Refusing triggers the Singing on the Shingle encounter with Ket fighting alongside the fog singers, and if he survives he is thereafter bound to the fog: he loses Shingle-Walker and gains the ability to call fog singers once per long rest, at the cost of hearing the singing every night for the rest of his life.

Major Decision

Context

Kestrel Rook's wreckers work the northern half of the Firth with chains and false lights of their own, and Rook has offered Ket a partnership: her salt-pearl money, his traps, and the Ashvane's protection. She has also made it clear that if he refuses, his hut burns and his pit traps get walked by men who know where every one of them is — because someone on the Firth has already sold her his maps.

Choice Made

Accept Rook's partnership, refuse and defend the Firth alone, or counter-offer: pretend to accept and feed her false charts.

Impact

Accepting makes Ket a Concord asset: he gains 300 gp of salt-pearls and Rook's protection, but becomes hostile to the party in Act II and permanently loses Sister Ivane's trust. Refusing triggers a night assault on his hut — a siege the party can join — and if Ket survives he gains the Firth's loyalty: the drowned leave his stretch of beach alone. The counter-offer is the dangerous middle path: if the deception holds, Ket gains Rook's schedule of tithe shipments (key evidence for the Frostmarch quest) and keeps his soul; if it fails, Rook breaks both his hands so he can never rig a light again, permanently removing The Firth's Teeth feature.

Major Decision

Context

When the expedition's ship needs a pilot through the reef to the Harrow Light, Ket Varn is the only man on the coast who knows the Firth's teeth from the inside. But piloting means leaving the Firth for the first time in eleven years, sailing into the fog he has feared since the Ashvane passed with a lantern at the masthead and no lights below, and standing on the deck of a ship that could just as easily be his next salvage.

Choice Made

Pilot the ship north, sell the party a chart of the reef and stay behind, or pilot only as far as the Harrow Light and refuse to enter the fog proper.

Impact

Full piloting gives the party advantage on all reef navigation checks and Ket the Wreck-Turned-Pilot feature: he may use The Firth's Teeth in reverse, rigging true lights that guide rather than lure, once per long rest. Staying behind keeps Ket safe but the party navigates at disadvantage, and the Harrow Light quest becomes harder by one degree. The partial pilot is the compromise: Ket goes as far as the Light, and there — standing on black rock above a reef full of drowned men he helped make — he must make a DC 13 Wisdom save or spend the rest of the campaign haunted, taking 1d4 psychic damage at each dusk. Success frees him entirely and grants him the Keeper's friendship.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Hearing the struck hymn sung correctly for the first time

Transformation

Ket's fear of the fog becomes understanding of it, and he stops charging for knowledge.

Mechanical Changes

Alignment

Neutral → Neutral Good

The first time he gives something away.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The bloomed body under the shingle

Transformation

Ket's wrecking trade becomes unbearable; he can no longer strip a dead ship without seeing what the dead became.

Mechanical Changes

Feature

Salvage Appraiser gains a second clause: he can now identify tithed remains on sight (automatic, no check).

He has seen the bloom up close.

Ally

Sister Ivane, the Stranded

Relationship Ally — reluctant lodger

Influence 3/10

Loyalty 2/10

Shared History

Ket Varn pulled Sister Ivane out of the surf five weeks ago, half-drowned, sputtering hymns, and would have stripped her wreck by morning if her ship had been worth stripping. It wasn't — Rook's wreckers had already taken everything of value, which is how Ket learned that a rival was working his coast and how Ivane learned that the man who saved her life had a pit trap for every hundred yards of his beach.

They have circled each other since with the wary courtesy of two people who owe each other everything and trust each other with nothing. She has prayed in his hut every evening since, and he has let her, and has quietly stopped rigging the false light on the nights she is awake to see it. She is the only person who has ever asked him a question about himself that wasn't a price negotiation, and it unsettles him more than the singing does. He has begun, without admitting it, to keep her hymnals dry.

Potential Breaking Points

If Ket accepts Rook's partnership, Ivane learns of it and her trust collapses; she will attempt to leave the Firth alone and likely drown.

Enemy

Kestrel Rook, the Red Tide

Threat Level 4/10

Conflict Type Rival wrecker and territorial predator

Personal Stakes

Rook worked the Firth's northern teeth for two years before Ket even knew she was there, and when he found her chain-lines strung across his channel she laughed in his face and told him the Firth was big enough for both of them — which they both knew was a lie. Since then they have fought a quiet, vicious, mostly bloodless war of sabotage: she has burned two of his salvage caches, he has cut her chain-lines three times, and each of them has sold the other's positions to Greyharbor fences at a discount purely out of spite.

What makes it personal is that Rook is everything Ket might have been with more nerve and less conscience, and she knows it, and says so. Now she has the Ashvane's salt-pearls behind her and has offered him partnership on terms that are an insult dressed as generosity. Ket knows that refusing means his hut burns; he also knows that accepting means becoming the thing he has spent eleven years being smarter than. The maps someone sold Rook came from his own tally-board, and he has a suspicion about who copied them that he cannot yet prove.

Possible Resolutions

Buy her off with salt-pearls and a Crown pardon
Break her fleet at the Red Tide on the Ice
The counter-offer deception, with its terrible downside

Faction

The Borealis Expedition

Standing 0/10

Influence

Ket Varn has no formal place in Peg Leg Carl's company and has never met Carl, but the expedition's route runs through his beach and its survival may run through his hands. He first heard of the charter from a Greyharbor fence who bought Sable Queen salvage and mentioned that the king's brother was hiring men to sail into the fog — news Ket received with the particular dread of a man who has seen the fog's customer up close.

His relationship with the party begins as pure commerce: he prices them within a minute of meeting them, decides what they are worth, and deals accordingly. But the logbook, the chant, and the bloomed body under the shingle are pulling him toward something he has never been — a participant rather than a scavenger. If the party deals fairly with him, he will pilot their boat north; if they deal with him as the Firth's other customers have been dealt with, he will sell their route to Rook within the hour. The expedition is, for Ket, the first choice in eleven years that isn't about shingle and salvage, and he is frightened of it in a way he cannot name.

Obligations

The logbook, which he holds and cannot read
Sister Ivane, whom the expedition may carry south
His knowledge of the reef, which is worth more than he has ever charged

Benefits

Pilotage to the Harrow Light
The Firth's Teeth rigged against Ashvane ships
Knowledge of every trip-line and pit on a mile of beach

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