When you deal Sneak Attack damage, you can forgo up to 2d6 of it to impose an effect: Poison (1d6 forgone, CON save DC 14 or Poisoned 1 round), Trip (1d6, DEX save or Prone), or Withdraw (1d6, move half Speed without provoking).
Shadowtongue has unrestricted access to the Archive of Sins and knows the location of any record he has previously read. He knows at least one damaging secret about every named NPC and inmate in the Bastion (DM's discretion).
By speaking a victim's secret aloud within earshot, Shadowtongue can force a Wisdom save (DC 14). On a failure, the target has Disadvantage on its next attack roll or ability check as doubt and shame grip it.
Shadowtongue has prearranged escape routes throughout the Archive. When combat begins, he can immediately use his Bonus Action to Hide even while observed, provided he is within 10 feet of shadow or shelving.
Darkvision 60 ft. Resistance to Poison damage; Advantage on saves against Poisoned. Once per Long Rest each, cast False Life (1st level) and Darkness (2nd level, self only) without components.
Once per turn, deal an extra 3d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have Advantage on the roll or if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it.
Your Mage Hand is invisible and can pick locks, disarm traps, and manipulate objects at range (30 ft.).
Add Proficiency Bonus to Initiative; can swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling.
Gain Advantage on your next attack this turn; your Speed drops to 0 until end of turn.
Halve the damage of an attack that hits you (Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing only).
Expertise in Deception and Stealth (double proficiency bonus).
Take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action as a Bonus Action.
Spell save DC = 8 + Prof (3) + INT (2) = 13 for standard AT spells; DC listed as 14 due to Archive attunement focus (custom +1 implement). Attack bonus +5.
Spectral hand performs simple tasks; enhanced by Legerdemain.
Create a sound or an image of an object.
Whispered message to a target you can see.
WIS save (DC 14) or be Charmed for 1 hour; target regards you as a friendly acquaintance.
Alter your appearance for 1 hour.
Create a visual illusion of an object or creature, 15-ft. cube.
Understand any spoken or written language for 1 hour.
Gain 1d4+4 Temporary Hit Points for 1 hour (1/Long Rest).
15-ft. radius sphere of magical darkness centered on a point (self only, 1/Long Rest).
Behind the character
Shadowtongue is a gaunt tiefling of Chthonic lineage, his ashen grey skin seeming to drink the Archive's dim light rather than reflect it. Curling charcoal horns sweep back from his brow like smoke given form, and his eyes glow a faint, patient violet—the color of a lamp left burning over a ledger no one was meant to read. He is soft-spoken to the point of intimacy, leaning close as if every conversation were a confession he is graciously receiving. His politeness is total and unnerving; he apologizes when he threatens, thanks prisoners for their secrets, and mourns sincerely for the misfortunes he himself engineered.
He wears an immaculate black coat over studded leathers, kept pristine despite years in a prison demiplane—a deliberate statement that the Archive is his domain and its rules are his to define. Wisps of shadow cling to his coat tails like loyal hounds, remnants of the sentries he commands and the souls he has quietly catalogued. At his hip rests a slender poisoned dagger he almost never draws; the weapon is a last resort for a man whose true blades are other people's guilt.
Shadowtongue's mind is an archive as vast as the one he guards. He remembers every secret he has ever learned, cross-referenced and indexed, and he deploys them with surgical patience—never to destroy, always to control. He is paranoid in the extreme: three escape routes from every room, contingencies within contingencies, and a face he shows no one twice. Beneath the spymaster's calm is a man who has never once been known, and who both craves and dreads the day someone reads him as thoroughly as he reads others.
Before the adventure
Before the Phantom Zone, Shadowtongue—born Vessik Thane in a Chthonic tiefling enclave beneath a great material-plane city—built the most feared intelligence network on three continents. His gift was not violence but comprehension: he could find the single secret that made any person controllable, and he collected them the way others collect coin. Kings paid him in silence. Guilds paid him in secrets. He told himself he was a neutral instrument, that information itself was blameless, while his brokers sold the locations of refugee safehouses to a warlord who burned three of them to the ground.
One of the dead was Sera Thane, his younger sister, an operative in his own network whom he had never told what his ledgers truly fed. When the trial came—conducted, he would later learn, by agents of the growing Phantom Zone—he did not deny the charges. He simply noted, in his defense, the names of forty-one officials who had bought from him, and watched the courtroom realize that convicting him meant confessing themselves. He was convicted anyway. The Zone does not negotiate.
In the Bastion, Shadowtongue spent his first year doing what he does best: listening. He mapped the factions, the guard rotations, the golems' patrol blind spots. When Malakar came to him—not with threats but with an offer of the Archive—Shadowtongue understood immediately that the Warden feared information more than armies, and that whoever curated the Archive of Sins curated the Warden's own vulnerability. He accepted, and has spent years building his position: the sentry command structure, the favor ledgers, the informant cells, all of it invisible architecture behind the Collaborators' black sashes.
His true project, however, is Malakar himself. He has read every record the Warden's own crimes left in the Archive's margins—supply requisitions, ritual timings, the suspicious silence around Shelf Nine—and he is certain the Warden's power has a seam. He found Malakar's true name scratched inside a cell frame in Block F and has kept it unspoken, a blade he is still choosing the moment to unsheathe. He does not want to kill Malakar; he wants to own him, and through him, the Zone.
The complication he never planned for is Ash. The sentry who was once his agent Ashvale is the only creature in the Zone Shadowtongue treats as a person rather than an asset, and the unspoken promise to restore him haunts the spymaster's calculations. The second complication is time: his own poison-laced bloodline is killing him slowly, and he knows it. The third is the party of prisoners now picking at the Archive's locks—people who, for the first time in his life, might read him before he reads them.
Shadowtongue tells himself every alliance is a transaction. But a man who has never been known is dangerously susceptible to the first hand extended in genuine trust, and both his redemption and his most dangerous betrayal grow from that same root.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Shadowtongue has spent years cataloging every secret in the Archive, but one record eludes him: the black crystal containing Malakar's own guilt. He offers a devil's bargain to anyone who can retrieve it for him—access to the Archive's full intelligence network. Completing this quest grants Shadowtongue leverage over the Warden himself, and he will reward the party with the location of any record they seek, plus a custom feat: 'Archivist's Eye' (advantage on Investigation checks within the Archive and knowledge of one secret per named NPC encountered).
Learn of the black crystal from a whispered rumor or Aethel's Echo.
Shadowtongue discovers a record proving he betrayed his own network to save his skin, and that his informant—his sister—died because of it.
Destroying it grants permanent advantage on Deception (self-deception perfected) but locks out redemption paths; keeping it lets him learn 'Name of the Guilty,' a 1/Long Rest ability to force a creature to reveal one true secret, but he suffers Disadvantage on saves against psychic damage for a day after each use.
Malakar orders Shadowtongue to poison the Archive's records, permanently erasing the guilt of three Collaborators to bind them as mindless servants.
Complying grants 'Warden's Word' (once per day, command a Collaborator as if under Suggestion) but permanently loses access to three valuable informant secrets. Sabotaging it creates three unstable free-willed allies who owe him their minds—and gives the party an opening during the Archive infiltration.
Cornered by the party in the Archive stacks, Shadowtongue holds Malakar's true name in his hand and a poisoned dagger at his belt.
Surrendering removes him as an enemy and adds his Voice of Whispers and Always an Exit abilities to the party's toolkit for the Core confrontation. Fighting triggers a full CR 10 encounter with the Archive Sentinel as reinforcement. Blackmailing makes him a rival claimant to the Warden's throne, splitting the Act 3 ending options.
Reading his sister's death record in the Archive
His polite mask fractures; he begins hoarding records about her, neglecting his sentry patrols—creating exploitable gaps in the Archive's defenses.
Hearing Aethel's Echo speak his real name—the one no record contains
He realizes some truths exist beyond paper, and that his power over others has never once freed himself.
Being offered genuine partnership by the party
He must choose between the safety of manipulation and the terror of trust; either path permanently reshapes his tactics in Act 3.
Ally
Ash is not a summoned creature but the remnant of a spy named Ashvale, one of Shadowtongue's own agents, whose soul was absorbed into the Zone when he died protecting a dead drop. Shadowtongue found him in the Archive's shadows during his first year of imprisonment and recognized the way Ash moved—checking corners, pausing at thresholds. He never told Ash what he was, and Ash never asked. In life, Ashvale was the only operative Shadowtongue ever trusted with his true face; in death, that trust persisted into shadow.
Shadowtongue quietly funnels magical energy into Ash, keeping him coherent where other sentries dissolve. He has promised himself—and never spoken aloud—that if he ever learns Malakar's true name and gains the leverage to walk out of the Zone, he will find a way to restore Ashvale to flesh. This promise is the single unselfish thread in his web, and the party may discover it is the one lever that moves him.
Enemy
Ironjaw and Shadowtongue are rival lieutenants locked in a cold war over Malakar's favor. Ironjaw once broke into the Archive without authorization, hunting for the key to the Core, and destroyed forty crystal records in the process—records Shadowtongue had spent two years cultivating, including the only account of how Malakar selects his framed victims. Shadowtongue retaliated not with violence but with information: he fed Ironjaw's own lieutenants proof that Ironjaw skimmed contraband from Warden shipments, causing two of his enforcers to defect.
Ironjaw responded by having one of Shadowtongue's Collaborator informants beaten within an inch of his life in the mess hall, in full view of the yard. Since then, each has been waiting for the other to slip. Ironjaw despises Shadowtongue's 'rat's methods' and Shadowtongue considers Ironjaw a blunt instrument who will eventually ruin them both. Their feud gives the party a critical opening: Ironjaw wears the Archive key around his neck, and Shadowtongue would quietly celebrate—and assist—anyone who took it from him.
Faction
Shadowtongue is the Collaborators' unseen architect. Malakar created the faction as his eyes and ears among the inmates, but it was Shadowtongue who built its structure: the black sash hierarchy, the favor-trading ledgers, the system of informant cells that report upward through cutouts so no single Collaborator knows more than their layer. He recruited Vex, trained the mess-hall watchers, and designed the toll system in Collaborator territory that generates both intelligence and loyalty.
His influence is absolute in method but deliberately invisible in name—most Collaborators below the lieutenant rank have never heard him speak, only received his instructions through intermediaries. This anonymity is armor: if the faction ever turns, they will not know whom to turn against. However, his grip is fraying. Ironjaw's brute faction-within-a-faction grows, and the Penitents' quiet refusal to fear Collaborator informants has made several of his networks go dark. Shadowtongue treats the faction as his masterpiece and his insurance policy; he would burn it down himself before letting anyone else hold it.
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