Knows three maneuvers: Riposte (reaction attack when missed, +1d8 damage), Menacing Attack (+1d8 damage, Frightened), Commanding Presence (advantage on Charisma checks to command or inspire).
Vey has authority over Ash Watch checkpoints and guards. She can requisition patrols, grant writs of passage, and call Watch squads to her side within the city walls.
After using Second Wind, move up to half your speed without provoking opportunity attacks.
When you fail an ability check, expend Second Wind to add 1d10 to the roll.
Proficiency with Smith's Tools; learns one artisan tool language of war.
While wearing armor, you gain a +1 bonus to Armor Class.
Attack twice when you take the Attack action.
Take one additional action on your turn.
Regain 1d10 + 6 hit points.
Behind the character
Captain Vey is a tall, broad-shouldered woman in her forties, built by two decades of wall duty and harbor weather into something more monument than person. Her dark hair has gone grey at the temples and is pulled back in a knot so tight it looks like armor for the skull. Her hazel eyes are ringed with sleepless shadows, and they have a particular quality that veterans recognize: the flat, forward-facing stare of someone who has stopped letting herself look at the things she cannot fix.
She wears dented half-plate beneath the ash-grey cloak of the Watch, a longsword at her hip, and a shield bearing Nostramus's harbor sigil—paint chipped, wood scarred, never replaced, because she considers a perfect shield an insult to the ones who died behind it. Ash dusts her pauldrons permanently; she has stopped brushing it off. She is stern but scrupulously fair, remembers every guard's name and every family she has failed, and speaks in short, level sentences that carry further than shouting.
She prays in the keep chapel every dawn, not out of certainty but habit, the way a sailor bails water. Beneath the discipline is a woman quietly grieving: for her city, for the family her own order killed at the north wall, and most of all for her son Tam, sick with plague and hidden in temple row where she cannot go without exposing him to the Inquisitor's spies. She suspects the plague is unnatural but lacks proof, and proof is the only currency she trusts. She is torn between the law she swore to and the city she loves, and every day the quarantine tightens, that tear widens.
Before the adventure
Vey was born in the Ratwharf tenements, the daughter of Captain Edran Vey, a harbor watch officer beloved by the dockworkers, and Maren, a net-mender who died of lung-rot when Vey was eleven. Her childhood was the smell of tar and fish offal, the sound of the chain tower's bell, and her father's voice teaching her the names of every ship in the harbor. When she was sixteen, Edran Vey led what the crown called a mutiny and the dockworkers called a strike: he refused an order to break a harbor workers' protest, and the king's magistrate hanged him from the chain tower's gantry on a wet morning Vey stood in the crowd to watch.
She joined the Ash Watch that same season under her mother's maiden name, Saltmere, partly to escape the stain and partly, she has since admitted to no one, to understand the machine that killed her father. She rose the slow way: wall sentry in winter, dock patrol, sergeant after the Tallow Yard fire, captain at thirty-eight when her predecessor died of something the physicians couldn't name. She has commanded the Watch through two bread riots and the flood of the lower temple row, and she earned her reputation the unglamorous way—by standing where the fighting was worst and never once ordering a soldier to go where she would not.
Nine years ago she signed the Weeping Sister out of harbor on a manifest she never checked, vouched for by the harbormaster's nephew, and that single unchecked signature is the hinge of her private guilt: the reliquaries in that cargo were the cult's first foothold in Nostramus. She has a son, Tam, twelve years old, born late in her life to a temple archivist named Dovan who died in the flood six years back.
She raised Tam alone in the keep, teaching him knots and ship names the way her father taught her, and when the plague took him she broke her own quarantine law—she had Holt carry him to temple row under a corpse tarp, and she has been stealing medicine from Watch stores to keep him alive ever since. The order to kill the family at the north wall broke something in her that has not mended; she gave it because the law required it, and she has not slept a full night since.
She suspects the plague is unnatural—rats that do not fear people, a sickness that resists every prayer Brother Aldous knows—but suspicion is not proof, and the Inquisitor's spies sit in her own keep counting her doubts. She prays at dawn in the keep chapel, keeps her father's knife wrapped in oil at the bottom of her footlocker, and has begun, quietly and half-shamefully, to wonder whether he was right.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Vey's son Tam is hidden among the plague cots of the Temple of Mercy, infected and worsening. She cannot go to him without exposing him to the Inquisitor's spies, who count every sick face in temple row. She quietly asks the party to check on him, deliver a locket she has carried for two weeks, and find any sign that a cure is possible. The quest forces Vey to admit what she has been hiding and to place her son's fate in strangers' hands.
If the party saves Tam with a partial cure from Fesk's notes, Vey's resolve hardens into something unbreakable; if he dies, she becomes colder, harsher, and dangerously willing to burn the cult out at any cost.
Locate Tam among the plague cots without being followed by Quill's spies.
Personal quest · 2
When Sister Neris's ledger and Fesk's coded notes arrive at the keep, Vey finally holds proof the plague is deliberate. But presenting it means defying Inquisitor Sera Quill, whose spies sit in Vey's own keep. This quest is Vey's campaign to turn evidence into authority: she must identify the spies among her guards, quietly neutralize them, and stage a confrontation with Quill that she can win. The party acts as her hands—rooting out the traitor (Corporal Munt, bribed with food and fear), securing witnesses, and choosing whether Vey confronts Quill publicly, privately, or through blackmail. Success transforms Vey from a chained officer into the true military power in Nostramus; failure sees her arrested and the Watch scattered.
Identify the Inquisitor's spies in the keep (Investigation DC 13; Munt can be flipped or exposed).
Personal quest · 3
Vey was the harbor watch officer on duty the night the Weeping Sister originally sailed from Nostramus a year ago—a merchant crew she waved through with a forged manifest she never checked, because the harbormaster's nephew vouched for it. Every one of those sailors is now dead or enslaved by the cult, and Odessa Marr's ship's log names the man who signed that manifest: Vey herself. Haunted and furious, Vey needs the party to recover the log, learn what bargain was struck aboard, and decide with her whether she confesses her negligence publicly or carries it silently into the final battle. This quest binds her guilt to the campaign's climax and gives her a personal stake in boarding the ship.
Recover the Ship's Log of the Weeping Sister from Odessa Marr aboard the ghost ship.
When the party brings Fesk's ledger to the keep, Vey must choose: deliver it to Inquisitor Quill and trust the king's law, or suppress it, defy the quarantine's letter, and act on it herself.
If Vey submits the ledger, Quill burns the temple row to contain the outbreak—Neris, Aldous, and Vey's son die, and Vey gains the 'Iron Regret' trait (+2 to all saving throws against fear but she can never again gain inspiration from hope-based roleplay). If Vey suppresses it, she becomes a de facto rebel: the Watch splits, half her guards mutiny under Quill's influence, but Vey gains 'Command Authority'—she may spend her Action Surge to grant an allied squad an immediate free attack, and the party keeps their temple-row allies alive for the endgame.
Vey's son Tam is dying in temple row. A partial cure exists, but only one dose can be brewed in time—and Sister Neris has a second candidate: a child whose blood carries the plague's resistance.
If Vey takes the dose for Tam, she gains 'Father's Fury' (once per long rest, when an ally drops to 0 HP within 30 feet, she may use her reaction to give them 1 HP instead), but Neris refuses to ever help the Watch again and the resistant child's bloodline secret is lost to the cult. If Vey gives the dose to the resistant child, Tam dies, but the child's blood becomes the key to a true cure—granting the entire party permanent resistance to poison and disease saves (advantage), and Vey gains the 'Ash Oath': her Second Wind die increases to a d12 as she stops holding anything back.
Before the final assault on the Weeping Sister, Vey can order the harbor chain raised behind the ship—trapping it, the cult, and any party members aboard, guaranteeing no escape for Corvane but also no retreat for the assault force.
If Vey raises the chain, the final battle is fought with no retreat: all party members gain a one-time 'No Way Out' bonus (+1d4 to every attack roll and saving throw during the finale), and Corvane cannot flee via the sea cave—but any character who drops to 0 HP makes death saves at disadvantage, and if the party wipes, the campaign ends in total failure. If Vey leaves the chain lowered, the fight is standard, but Corvane may escape with the staff, triggering a chase epilogue across the harbor at dawn.
Tam's fate is decided
Vey's grief crystallizes into either mercy or ruthlessness, permanently altering her quest-giving tone and the Watch's discipline.
Confrontation with Quill resolves
Vey either becomes the military authority of Nostramus or a fugitive from her own keep.
The Weeping Sister falls
Vey finally weeps at the harbor rail—the first time anyone has seen her cry—and either retires into rebuilding the city or takes the harbor watch as her life's penance.
Ally
Holt served under Vey's father during the harbor mutiny trials and was one of only three guardsmen who testified that the executed captain had been following orders. When Vey was commissioned years later, she requested Holt specifically, and the two have built the Ash Watch's discipline together through two riots, a flood, and now the plague. He is the only person in the keep who knows about Tam, having personally carried the boy to temple row under a corpse tarp on the third night of the sickness—an act of quiet treason that binds them absolutely.
Holt follows orders he hates because he trusts Vey to give the right ones, and her decision to suppress or submit Fesk's ledger will be his decision too. If Vey is arrested, Holt is the spark of any mutiny; if she falls in battle, he carries her shield.
Enemy
Quill and Vey have crossed swords before the plague ever came: three years ago, Quill's predecessor tried to hang a Watch guardsman for tipping off a smuggler's family, and Vey physically stood between the gallows and the rope until the king's magistrate intervened. Quill inherited that grudge with her office and her files. She considers Vey a competent soldier corrupted by local sentiment, and she has spent the quarantine quietly building a case to replace her with a more obedient officer.
Vey, in turn, blames Quill's seal-the-gates doctrine for trapping the plague's victims inside with the rats—every death at the north wall is a death Quill ordered and Vey enforced, and she knows it. Their rivalry is not hatred but two irreconcilable theories of duty, and both women know the city cannot survive both of them giving orders.
Faction
Vey has worn the ash-grey cloak for nineteen years, joining at sixteen the same season her father was hanged for the harbor mutiny—a fact she has hidden from every recruit she has ever trained. She rose from wall sentry to sergeant to captain on merit and stubbornness, and the rank-and-file love her with the fierce, worried loyalty soldiers reserve for commanders who share their rations. But the plague has corroded that bond: her order to kill the family at the north wall broke something in the Watch, and deserters like Halvard Sten are symptoms of a rot she cannot flog out.
She commands roughly ninety effectives, down from two hundred, and knows the Watch will follow her into the undercity or onto the ghost ship exactly once. Her authority is the party's shield and her burden both—every favor she grants them is a favor she must answer for to Quill's spies and to her own exhausted guards.
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