Sten Harrow, the Try-Works Boss

Level 6 Human Barbarian (Path of the Berserker)

Available with DM subscription

STR

17 (+3)

DEX

12 (+1)

CON

16 (+3)

INT

8 (-1)

WIS

13 (+1)

CHA

Defense

Armor Class 14 (Unarmored Defense (10 + DEX + CON))

Hit Points 65 (6d12 + 18 +3)

Speed 40 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws strength, constitution

Skills Survival +4, Athletics +6, Perception +4

Features

Boss of the Try-Works

custom Level 6

special

Sten Harrow runs the Frostmarch Camp and its whalers know it. If the party offers him a signal and a promise of judgment afterward, he can rally up to twenty whalers to rise against the Ashvane garrison; the whalers act on his initiative count and fight as Commoners with blubber knives and flensing hooks. He also knows the camp's layout, the garrison's watch rotation, and where the strongbox sits. This is a narrative/DM-facing feature, not a combat statistic.

The Ledger in His Head

custom Level 6

special

Sten has kept count of every name he has sold north — one hundred and twenty-one, and he can recite them. He knows the tithe schedule, the garrison's sergeant by face and habit, and that the rendering fire has not gone out in a year because of what the garrison burns in it. This is a roleplay feature granting reliable knowledge of the Frostmarch Camp and the Concord's tithe operation.

Rage

class Level 1

4/day

As a Bonus Action, Sten can Rage for up to 10 minutes. While Raging he gains a +2 bonus to melee damage rolls, resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage, advantage on Strength checks and saving throws, and cannot be cast upon or concentrate. Rage ends early if he takes no damage or takes no other action on his turn, or if he dons armor.

Has Not Slept

custom Level 6

Sten has not slept properly in a year. He is immune to the singing in the fog (treat as advantage on Wisdom saves against the fog's song effects), but he cannot regain hit points from a Long Rest unless he is truly safe and someone stands watch he trusts; otherwise a Long Rest restores no hit points and removes only one level of Exhaustion.

Primal Path: Path of the Berserker

class Level 3

Sten's fury is the slow, exhausted fury of a man who has been feeding his own crew to a schedule for a year. When Raging, he can make one extra melee weapon attack as a Bonus Action on his turn, at the cost of one level of Exhaustion when the Rage ends.

Reckless Attack

class Level 2

at will

When Sten makes his first attack on his turn, he can forgo Advantage on the attack. If he does, his melee weapon attacks have Advantage that turn, and attacks against him have Advantage until his next turn.

Mindless Rage

class Level 6

While Raging, Sten cannot be Charmed or Frightened, and any such condition ends on him when he Rages. The singing in the fog does not reach him when the fire is lit.

Danger Sense

class Level 2

Sten has Advantage on Dexterity saving throws against effects he can see, such as traps and spells, provided he isn't Blinded, Deafened, or Incapacitated.

Unarmored Defense

class Level 1

While not wearing armor, Sten's AC equals 10 + his Dexterity modifier + his Constitution modifier (14).

Extra Attack

class Level 5

Sten attacks twice, instead of once, whenever he takes the Attack action on his turn.

Fast Movement

class Level 5

Sten's speed increases by 10 feet while he isn't wearing heavy armor (40 feet total).

Behind the character

Character Information

Sten Harrow is a big man built by thirty years of whale-work: heavy through the shoulders, slow in the walk, with forearms that are less skin than scar — burn lattices and rope grooves laid over each other like the rings of a tree. He wears a cracked leather apron over grey wool and sea-boots, and a rendering hook hangs at his belt beside a hand-axe, and he has used both on men.

His face is blunt and tired, a working face, with deep shadow under grey eyes that do not blink often enough and a short beard going early white at the chin. He speaks low and slowly, with the pauses of a man who is choosing every word the way he chooses which name goes north, and he never raises his voice, because he learned a year ago that volume attracts crossbows.

He is the boss of the Frostmarch whaling camp, and the camp runs because he runs it: the blubber benches, the watch rotations, the food, the sick-rolls, the fragile peace between forty exhausted whalers and a garrison that shoots stragglers. He is also the man who sells eleven of them a month to the Ashvane Concord to keep the other thirty alive, and he knows exactly what that makes him.

He does not defend it. He does not apologize for it. He keeps count — one hundred and twenty-one names, recitable in order — and he wants two things with a patience that is more frightening than rage: the garrison gone, and judgment afterward. He will fight beside anyone who offers him both, and he will follow them to the island's heart, and he will ask, at the end, to be judged.

He has not slept properly in a year. The singing in the fog does not reach him anymore. He is not sure whether that is strength or damage, and he is too tired to find out.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Sten Harrow was born in Greyharbor, the second son of a cooper, and went to sea at fourteen because there was nothing behind him and something ahead. He whaled the northern ice for twenty-two years — first as a boat-steerer, then as a harpooner, then as the man who ran the try-works, the fires and vats where blubber becomes oil. It is skilled, brutal, endless work, and it made him exactly what he is: patient with suffering, precise with schedules, and unafraid of fire.

He was good at it. Crews asked to sail with him. Captains gave him the camp's books because he never lost a barrel and never lost a man he could save.

He came to Frostmarch eleven years ago and never left; the camp was the farthest north a man could work and still be a man, and Sten liked the cold and the quiet and the honest arithmetic of whale-work. He had a younger brother, Joren, who followed him north two years later, and the two of them ran the try-works together through four seasons. Then, eleven months ago, the Ashvane Concord came: nine men in white coats, a banner, and a schedule.

They took Joren in the first week — not as a negotiation, just as a demonstration — and Sten found his brother's boots outside the rendering house, side by side, facing the sea.

What Sten did next is the whole of him. He did not fight. He did not flee. He sat down across a table from Sergeant Halloway and negotiated: eleven names a month, chosen by him, in exchange for rations, no arms in the camp, and the garrison's hands off the rest. He chose men who were sick, or alone, or already fog-touched — and then, as the months went on, he chose men who were troublesome, or strong enough to lead a revolt, and he told himself each time that it was arithmetic.

He kept count. One hundred and twenty-one. He recites them in his sleep, when he sleeps, and Vesna has heard him do it and never mentioned it. The camp does not know the full number. Grell suspects. The whalers follow him anyway, because the alternative to Sten's arithmetic is the garrison's, and because he stands the last watch every night and gives his own rations away on tithe days.

He has not slept properly since Joren's boots. The fog sings at the camp's edge every dusk, and it stopped reaching Sten about four months in — he walks the palisade through the singing untouched, which the whalers think is courage and Sten suspects is the fog deciding he is already spoken for. He has written his confession on treated hide and sewn it into his apron lining, and he checks the stitching every morning the way another man checks a compass.

He wants the garrison gone. He wants to be judged. He has wanted both for so long that they have become the same desire: an ending with a shape to it, a sentence with a number, anything but another month of the schedule. When the party walks into the blubber-yard, he will step out of the smoke and ask, low, the only question that matters to him: whether they have come to kill the garrison, and whether they will remember, afterward, what he did to help them do it.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

One of the one hundred and twenty-one names is a woman from Greyharbor whose sister is Ysolt Fenn's barmaid — and she is not dead. Sten saw her face in the fog off the skerry last month, standing on the water, and she was counting on her fingers.
The garrison's fuel ledger shows the try-works fire has consumed more than the tithe accounts for. Something else has been going into the fire — or coming out of it — and Sten has been too afraid to open the fire-box alone.
Halloway keeps a private count of Sten's debts in a book bound in white leather, and he has begun reading from it at night, loudly, through the partition wall. Sten does not know what is in it beyond his own name.
A whaler named Grell, one-eyed, has been counting the missing independently and has reached a number that does not match Sten's: one hundred and twenty-three. Two names on someone's list are wrong, and Sten cannot sleep until he knows whose.
The fog thickens visibly on the nights after a tithe is delivered, and Sten has charted it against his ledger for a year. The correlation is exact. He has told no one, because the implication — that the fog is fed, that he has been feeding it — is the one thing he cannot carry.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

Sten's younger brother was the first name he sold. The garrison took him in the first month, before any arrangement existed, and Sten agreed to the schedule the next morning. He has never told anyone that the arithmetic began as revenge delayed, not mercy.
Sten can recite all one hundred and twenty-one names in order of delivery, from memory, in under four minutes. He practices them the way a sailor practices knots, and he does not know why he can do this. He suspects the fog taught him.
Sten has already written his own confession, in full, on whale-oil-treated hide, and sewn it into the lining of his apron. It names every name, every date, and the exact words he said to Halloway across the table. He does not expect to survive to deliver it — he expects the party to find it on his body.

What haunts them

Fears

That the count in his head is wrong — that he has sold more than one hundred and twenty-one and simply stopped being able to hold the number, the way a man drowning stops counting the waves.
That the whalers will rise without him, on their own, and be slaughtered — that his control of the camp is the only thing between forty people and the garrison's crossbows, and that if he ever stops being useful, everyone dies at once.
That judgment, when it comes, will be quick — that he will die before he has paid anything back, and the ledger in his head will die with him, and the names will be lost twice.

What drives them

Aspirations

To see the garrison's banner burn in the try-works fire — the same fire, fed the same way, taking the same men — and to stand in the smoke and feel nothing but the heat.
To deliver every name he sold to someone who will say it back to him: a family, a grave, a painted skull on a shelf, any place where a number becomes a person again.
To sleep a full night through, without a watcher, without the singing, and wake up owing nothing that he has not already begun to pay.

Personal quest · 1

The Hundred and Twenty-Second Name

Sten's ledger in his head holds one hundred and twenty-one names, but the garrison's next tithe is due in nine days and the sergeant has already marked the bench. Sten must choose the eleven himself one last time — or find a way to stall the schedule without the Concord noticing. If the party helps him delay the tithe by faking salt-sickness among the chosen, the whalers see for the first time that the boss is not simply the garrison's hand. The quest ends when Sten either delivers the names or burns the schedule, and whichever he does, the camp's trust in him is remade or destroyed.

Current Stage

Learn the sergeant's tithe routine from the roof-walk rotation and the rendering house ledger.

Mechanical Rewards

Sten gains the feature 'Keeper of Names' — once per day, he can name any person he has met and learn whether they still live (a supernatural sense born of his ledger).
The whalers' loyalty: in the camp revolt, the whalers fight as guards rather than commoners.

Narrative Rewards

Sten stops reciting names in his sleep — the first sign he has begun to forgive himself.

Personal quest · 2

The Fire That Has Not Gone Out

The rendering fire at Frostmarch has burned for a year because the garrison feeds it the tithed. Sten is the only man who tends it, and he has begun to hear names in the crackle — the fog's singing, carried up the flue. He asks the party to help him open the fire-box at low tide, when the singing is weakest, and recover what is inside: a ring of salt-pearls fused into a lump of bone, and a painted skull the garrison missed.

The skull bears a name Sten recognizes — one of the first eleven he sold. Returning it to the Ossuary's shelves, or to a family in Sevenfold Hollow, becomes Sten's first act of restitution.

Current Stage

Time the fire-box opening to the tide and hold the try-works against a Blubber Hound patrol.

Mechanical Rewards

Sten gains resistance to necrotic damage — the fire no longer reaches him.
A salt-pearl worth 100 gp, or the whalers' escape fund (which buys three boats in the epilogue).

Narrative Rewards

Sten sleeps for the first time in a year if someone he trusts stands watch.
The painted name becomes evidence in the tithe ledger.

Personal quest · 3

Judgment at the Gate

Sten has one condition for going south with the party: he will stand before judgment for the one hundred and twenty-one. He wants it at the Gate of the Twelve, before the thirteenth plinth, witnessed by Brother Cassian — because a gate that takes blood freely might also take a confession. The party must escort him to the skerry, get his confession spoken plainly, and decide what judgment means: Cassian's blessing, the gate's pull, a trial before the Crown, or the whalers' own verdict back at the camp. What Sten carries out of that hour — absolution, a sentence, or nothing — changes what he is willing to do at the Tide-Heart.

Current Stage

Get Sten to say the names aloud, all of them, without interruption — a Wisdom trial for the listeners as much as for him.

Mechanical Rewards

Sten's Rage no longer costs Exhaustion when used — the fury has somewhere to go.
Advantage on the breaking rite if Sten's confession is offered at the Tide-Heart as freely given blood refused.

Narrative Rewards

Sten can finally sleep without a watcher.
The whalers accept him back as boss — or exile him, depending on the chosen judgment.

Major Decision

Context

At the Frostmarch revolt, the sergeant is captured alive along with four garrison men. The whalers want blood on the blubber-yard stones. Sten, who has fed men to a schedule for a year, must decide what justice looks like when he has no right to administer it.

Choice Made

Give the garrison to the whalers' knives, put them in a boat with no oars, or hold them for the Crown's judgment.

Impact

If the whalers take blood, Sten loses 'Mindless Rage' permanently — his fury is no longer clean — but gains the whalers' absolute loyalty and +2 to camp morale checks. If he spares them, he keeps his rage but half the whalers refuse to follow him, and the spared sergeant becomes a recurring informant or saboteur. If he holds them for the Crown, the party gains Crown favor but the tithe ledger must survive the journey south.

Major Decision

Context

Vesna's tithe ledger names two of Carl's own crew among the tithed. Sten knows what it means to sell names to survive, and he knows what publishing it will do to the expedition's patron.

Choice Made

Publish the ledger to the whole crew, give it only to the party, or burn it to keep the expedition together.

Impact

Publishing splits the crew — some desert at the Gate of the Twelve, but the party gains the crew's hard trust and Sten gains the feature 'Witness' (advantage on Insight against anyone who has signed a false ledger). Burning it keeps the Saltspray whole but costs Sten his sleep again: Long Rests restore no hit points for him until the ledger's truth is spoken aloud at least once. Giving it only to the party makes Sten complicit a second time, and he knows it.

Major Decision

Context

At the Gate of the Twelve, the gate wants a life. Sten steps forward. He has been keeping count of what he owes, and one hundred and twenty-one names weigh more than one.

Choice Made

Let Sten give himself, refuse him and find another price, or accept his offer and then perform the breaking rite on his spilled blood.

Impact

If Sten gives himself freely and the party refuses the gift at the last moment (the breaking rite's logic), the gate opens clean and Sten gains 'Refused' — immunity to fear and a permanent +1 to Constitution as the island's arithmetic releases him. If he is actually taken, the party loses their strongest ally but the gate opens without marking anyone. If the party forces the gate with Concord prisoners instead, Sten refuses to Rage for the party for the rest of the campaign — a permanent loss of his Berserker bonus action attack.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The fire-box is opened and the names speak.

Transformation

Sten stops being the garrison's administrator and becomes the camp's avenger; his Rage description changes from exhausted to purposeful.

Mechanical Changes

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Judgment is rendered at the Gate.

Transformation

Sten's alignment shifts from Lawful Neutral toward Lawful Good or remains Neutral depending on the judgment chosen — mercy moves him, vengeance hardens him.

Mechanical Changes

Ally

Doctor Vesna Orl, the Sawbones

Relationship ally

Influence 8/10

Loyalty 9/10

Shared History

Vesna came ashore eleven months ago with a surgeon's roll and a question she should not have asked: what the buckets on the Sable Queen's deck were for. Vane sent her to Frostmarch within the month, and Sten was the man who met her at the slipway with a bucket of hot water and the only honest sentence spoken in the camp that winter: 'You'll want to know what we render here.

Don't ask yet. Ask me in a month, when you can't leave.' She stayed. She stitched the whalers the garrison maimed, she signed the sick-rolls Sten needed signed, and she never once asked him to explain the eleven names a month — she read the schedule herself, in the garrison's own hand, and said only, 'You keep the count. I'll keep them alive as long as you let me.' They have an arrangement of silence that is closer than most marriages: she knows what he is, he knows what she signed, and neither has ever used it against the other.

When the tithe ledger was confiscated, it was Vesna who told Sten which page mattered and which names were Carl's. She is the one person Sten would wake, and the only one who has seen him sleep.

Potential Breaking Points

If the party burns the tithe ledger, Vesna breaks with Sten — she needs that proof more than she needs him.

Enemy

Garrison Sergeant Dremm Halloway

Threat Level 7/10

Conflict Type moral and personal

Personal Stakes

Halloway was a Greyharbor debt-collector before the Concord bought his crossbow, and he understood the tithe instantly as a collection schedule — which is why Vane made him sergeant. He and Sten negotiated the first eleven names across a table in the rendering house, and Halloway made Sten say 'yes' out loud, on the record, in front of two witnesses, because Halloway believes paper is the only thing that outlives a man.

Since then he has refined the arrangement: he lets Sten choose, lets Sten warn the chosen the night before, and in exchange he never takes more than the schedule says. He considers this mercy. He told Sten once, over the try-works fire, that they are the same man, and Sten broke a rendering hook on the wall an inch from his face. Halloway wears a shard of the stolen lens on a cord because it stops him dreaming of the singing, and he has begun to hear the names Sten recites in his sleep through the partition wall.

He keeps his own count now — not of the tithed, but of Sten's debts — and he intends to read it aloud at Sten's trial, if Sten ever gets one. He is the mirror Sten cannot put down.

Possible Resolutions

Kill him and the garrison breaks early.
Spare him and he becomes the Crown's best witness against Vane — or Sten's executioner.

Faction

The Ashvane Concord

Standing -6/10

Influence

Sten's relationship with the Concord is the most complicated thing about him: he is simultaneously its most useful asset and its most dangerous liability. Eleven months ago the Concord took the camp with nine men and a banner, and Sten — who had watched the previous winter kill forty whalers to scurvy and mutiny — made the calculation that has defined him since. He negotiated. He organized. He delivered eleven names a month, on schedule, chosen to hurt the camp least, and in exchange the Concord fed the rest, armed no one, and left him nominally in charge.

The Concord's rank and file call him 'the Boss' without irony; the garrison calls him 'the Factor's man'; Vane, who has never met him, refers to him in correspondence as 'the local arrangement' and considers him proof that any population can be governed by its own fear. But the Concord has begun to suspect him. Halloway's reports note that Sten knows the watch rotations too well, that the whalers' work slows on tithe days in a pattern too neat to be grief, and that the rendering fire's fuel ledger does not add up.

If the party's revolt succeeds, the Concord's response is not a raid — it is a polite letter to Mother Sable listing the camp's every name, which is why Sten insists the ledger and the schedule both go south before anything else happens. He hates the Concord with the specific hatred of a man who has read its paperwork.

Obligations

Sten owes the Concord one more tithe delivery — nine days out — unless the schedule is broken first.

Benefits

If the Concord is broken at Frostmarch, Sten's knowledge of its supply routes gives the party advantage on all ice-crossing travel checks.

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