The Company
Nine characters have been played in this campaign. Four are still in the field.
| Who | Class | Heritage | Level | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kvothe | Bard — Mountebank | Gnome | 8 | Active. Rider of the Watch |
| Agatha Ironheart | Cleric of Torag — Warpriest | Dwarf | 8 | Active. Bears the Chain Breaker |
| Ubo | Druid — Guardian | Orc | 7 | Active |
| Dravona | Sorcerer — Draconist | Human, Elk Heart | 7 | Active |
| Jocelin | Marshal — Lionheart | Human | 7 | Killed 29th of Autumn |
| Zarah | Adept — Warrior Monk | Orc | 6 | Departed. Master of the Mantis |
| Rindle | Druid — Skinchanger | Gnome | 5 | Departed |
| Vaelin | Rogue — Investigator | Elf | 5 | Departed |
| Ruin, Daughter of Hell | Warlock — Diabolist | Planetouched | 5 | Departed |
Kvothe and Agatha are a level ahead of Ubo and Dravona: they are founding characters, and the other two joined later and are behind on experience.
Kvothe
Gnome bard, Mountebank. Rider of the Watch. Red-haired, charismatic, and the party's most
reliable source of both good ideas and appalling ones. Invisible scouting, Dancing Lights,
trained dogs, and a zombie named Rob.
How he fights. Faerie Fire across a whole enemy formation and then shouting. Invisibility for the approach. Stormcaller Blade for anything that needs to stop existing. Polymorph turned a mind flayer into a frog, and the party shot it while it was one.
Two things he did. He burned the Gulthias Tree and opened the sarcophagus under it, and Gulthias came out. And he destroyed the Derro portal with Stormcaller as it was opening, cutting off the reinforcements coming through it.
He is pragmatic to the point of ruthlessness. At the Sunless Citadel he argued for killing the goblin non-combatants and lost the argument to Agatha.
The lost chronicle. Kvothe took the chronicler's role for the Underdark expedition. On 1 May he critically failed a chronicling check and his ledger and ink fell into a crevice. The party's only written record of its own deeds no longer exists in the world.
He also won a small brass key at a Midsummer storytelling contest. It has never opened anything.
Agatha Ironheart
Dwarf cleric of Torag, Warpriest. The party's healer, its front line, and the one who
wins the moral arguments.
She writes long, careful letters home to Brother Ordrik Ironheart, priest of Torag in the Halls of Hammerfast. Plainspoken, dry, and given to understatement at exactly the wrong moment. Watching Kvothe release something ancient from under a burning tree:
"That's not going to come back and bite us in the butt or anything."
At the Sunless Citadel she refused to let the party kill the goblin non-combatants, citing Torag, and prevailed. She has held that line since — and her god holds her to it. After the party rescued travellers from an Iron Circle ambush, Agatha struck down the enemy officer after he tried to surrender. That night Torag rebuked her in a dream.
What she is afraid of. She says so directly, in writing, more than once: mind flayers. She has stood against orcs, undead, trolls and a vampire lord. Something that plucks thoughts out of your head is a different category of problem, and she is honest that she does not know if she is ready.
She is now walking toward a city full of them, carrying the Chain Breaker.
She carries Revivify now. She did not have it prepared on the 29th of Autumn.
Marked by the enemy. At the Ruined Temple of Gozreh, Varnak the Hollow gave a specific order: keep Agatha alive, kill the rest. No explanation was ever given, and Varnak died before anyone could ask.
Ubo
Orc druid, Guardian. He walked out of the trees during the battle with Araniax, said he
had been following the party through the forest and wanted to help fight evil, and was taken
at his word.
Ubo is the expedition's survival infrastructure, which in the Underdark is not a supporting role.
- Foraging off fungal blooms and subterranean flora
- Scouting via Wild Shape — cat in the Winterbole, eagle over the Spiderfell, giant octopus for an eighty-foot dive into a lightless lake, giant eagle to ferry the whole party five hundred yards to an island
- Control magic — Slow, Charm Monster, Dispel Magic, summoned dire wolves
- Rides a celestial mount
On 1 May, rather than kill the bulette that had just nearly taken Agatha's head off, Ubo hit it with a 4th-level Charm Monster, backed it with a 29 Nature check, and sent it home to its lair in peace.
He went down on 15 May and spent the following rounds unconscious, rolling death saves. He made them.
Dravona
Human sorcerer, Draconist. Elk Heart tribe. She came out of the Winterbole Forest outside
Nenlast and offered to help a party that had just lost a member. She has been with them since.
Her mentor is Mira Ashford, chieftain of the River Crow — a cross-tribal apprenticeship, and the reason Dravona is the party's line into the tribal council.
The woman who didn't fall. Before she had been with the party a full day, the womp womp hit their camp near Nenlast and every other member of the party failed the save. Dravona did not.
She was left alone in a fog full of walking corpses, guarding four catatonic bodies. She dispersed enough mist to confirm the zombies were not attacking, covered the party with debris to hide them, and waited. Four or five hours later Gulthias himself walked out of the fog and asked to parley — specifically because she was still standing.
The entire pact with Gulthias was negotiated through Dravona, alone, as a brand-new character.
In the field. A blaster-and-control caster working 4th-level slots. Scorching Ray killed the chuul dragging Agatha toward a cliff edge on 1 May; a Fire Bolt for exactly its remaining 13 hit points killed the next chuul dragging Agatha toward a cliff edge on 7 August. She handles identification for the party, interprets Undercommon, and is the cook.
The Weaver is a Winterbole tribal spirit and the source of the blessing on her cooking. A successful meal carries the Weaver's grace and a mechanical benefit. An unsuccessful one is just food.
Jocelin
Human Marshal, Lionheart. Rider of the Watch and Silver Raven. Killed in action, 29th of
Autumn, on the road to Nenlast — drained to zero maximum hit points by a wraith, with no
Revivify prepared.
The campaign's only player character death.
A stalwart marshal with a strong sense of duty, who led the party in negotiation as often as in combat. She kept a journal at Agatha's suggestion, opened it by saying she was not much for writing, and then wrote a great deal.
"I'm a knight, and knights don't run from a fight. So, I guess we're doing this. Torag help us."
She and Kvothe co-wrote their reports to Banner, with Jocelin adding sceptical marginalia to Kvothe's self-aggrandisement and Kvothe answering in kind. Her standing instruction, bolded and underlined: NEVER LEAVE THE HORSES UNGUARDED.
The armour. She bought enchanted plate from Thistle at a discount. It permanently changed her gender to female. She took it entirely in stride:
"The others were surprised, but honestly, it hasn't been that big of a deal. Armor fits fine, sword swings the same, so what's there to fuss about?"
The Silver Ravens. Approached at Midsummer by Elias, she followed him to the standing stones, met the cell, and joined — the only party member ever to do so. She was also the one who broke the cipher on the courier's letter, which produced the campaign's first hard proof of the Iron Circle–Gulthias pact.
With her gone, the party has no working contact with the Silver Ravens. Oleanne is the surviving thread.
Loose ends. Her plate and sword are still cached on a trail outside Nenlast and nobody has been back for them. Her family signet ring was never identified to a house. There is no record of anyone telling her family, or the Riders, that she is dead.
The departed
Four characters left because their players did. No in-fiction departure was ever written for any of them, which means, strictly, that all four are still out there.
Zarah · Orc adept, Warrior Monk. Trained at the Azure Leaf Monastery under Master Senzan. She killed a Derro Master of the Mantis in single combat and his tattoos moved onto her skin the instant he fell. She described them as "a second voice that is not quite my own." She walked off with the title. If she is ever defeated, whoever beats her becomes Master of the Mantis.
Rindle · Gnome druid, Skinchanger. Rescued from a griffin. Turned into a rhinoceros so the party could shelter under him while trolls dropped rocks on their Tiny Hut. He planted a length of rope in the mind flayers' tribute chest with the matching piece left with Voren, so the Septarch could scry it and find their base. Rindle left. Voren was taken. Nobody knows whether the trap is still live.
Vaelin · Elf rogue, Investigator. Rescued on the road with Ruin after the Iron Circle
chased them out of Fastormel. Walked off with the Mindblade and the Starlit Compass.
Ruin, Daughter of Hell · Planetouched warlock, Diabolist, sworn to "the Dominator,
Arch-Binder of Avernus." She and Vaelin retrieved stone tablets from Ioun's temple in
Fastormel, which is what the Iron Circle was chasing them for. She still has them.
Nobody has established what is on them.
Travelling with the party, and not ours
Two people are in the marching order who are not player characters.
Caldris
Wight. Gulthias's officer. Raised from a former Iron Circle officer who died fighting the Riders of the Watch two years ago. He commanded the siege of Nenlast from the old mill north of the village, and he is the voice Kvothe heard under the lake saying "Arise."
He is in the party because Gulthias loaned him to them as a term of the truce, openly, in front of everyone — and told the party that when the time came, Caldris would know how to make contact. He did not say how.
He is, uncomfortably, very good to have along. He needs no food and stood watch through the starvation stretch without touching the rations. He needs no air and walked the floor of a subterranean lake rather than be ferried across it. Necrotic Burst cleared the surviving infantry at Outpost Crystal. He woke to the tremors of a burrowing predator before anyone else did — twice — and when Kvothe reached to raise the alarm, Caldris stopped him, correctly judging the thing could not hear well and would move on.
How far the party trust him: not at all. Agatha asked him to be blindfolded to walk through Broken Spire Keep. He refused. She refused him entry and sent him round through Goblintown. Sylvara shadows him. Written orders recovered from two fire giants showed the enemy knew he was travelling with the party, and carried a warning about trusting him inside the keep.
He also watched the Keeper and the Way very closely at the Sanctuary, with an odd look on his face, and said nothing. Nobody asked him about it.
Sylvara Whisperwind
Elf scout. Found bound and gagged in an Underdark passage during the long expedition — wounded, but alive. Silver-blonde hair, green eyes. She said she was part of an adventuring group out of Konigsberg investigating disappearances; they were ambushed, some killed, two sold to the kuo-toa, and the Bloody Six were taking her to something called "a maw." Jocelin lent her an elven spear and she stayed.
She is now the party's point scout and opener, and she is very good at it. She opened the siege of Outpost Crystal with a lethal Assassinate, followed it with 39 damage on the mind flayer commander, picked the lock on a hundred-pound kuo-toa strongbox, and hit a kuo-toa leader for 41 with the Oathbow.
She carries the Oathbow. It shocked Kvothe unconscious and injured Ubo when they tried to pick it up. It accepted Jocelin, who heard "death to our enemies" when she took it up mid-battle. It came off Jocelin's body, and it has not objected to Sylvara.