Nessa knows the Mage Hand and Prestidigitation cantrips and the Comprehend Languages spell (cast once per Long Rest without a spell slot), using Intelligence as her spellcasting ability. These are folded into her Wizard spell list below.
Once per day during a Short Rest, Nessa can expend spell slots to recover a combined level of spell slots equal to half her Wizard level (rounded up, minimum 1) — currently 1 level.
Nessa can cast any spell in her spellbook with the Ritual tag as a ritual, without expending a spell slot, provided the spell's casting time is at least 1 minute.
Nessa's spellbook contains six level-1 spells (listed in spellcasting.spellbook_spells). She can copy new spells into it as allowed by the Wizard class.
Nessa has Advantage on saving throws to avoid or end the Charmed condition, and magic can't put her to sleep.
Common, Elvish, Draconic, plus Orc (learned as a war-tablet translator for the Accord Remnant).
Nessa doesn't need to sleep; she meditates for 4 hours to gain the benefits of a Long Rest.
Nessa has proficiency in the Perception skill.
Prepared spells (4 = level + INT modifier): Fire Bolt, Minor Illusion, Detect Magic, Shield are always ready; Mage Hand, Prestidigitation, Identify, and Comprehend Languages are known and castable via slots or ritual as noted. Spellbook also contains Magic Missile and Sleep (unprepared, castable from slots if prepared later).
Ranged spell attack, +5 to hit, 1d10 fire damage on hit.
Create a sound or an image of an object within range that lasts 1 minute. A creature that uses its action to examine it can determine it is an illusion with an Intelligence (Investigation) check against Nessa's spell save DC.
A spectral hand appears and lasts 1 minute; it can manipulate objects, open doors, and retrieve items but cannot attack or carry more than 10 pounds.
Minor magical tricks: create tiny sensory effects, light or snuff candles, clean or soil objects, and similar harmless flourishes.
For 10 minutes, Nessa senses the presence of magic within 30 feet and sees faint auras, learning the school of magic of any visible spell or magic item.
Learn the properties of a magic item, whether a spell is affecting a creature or object, and what that spell is.
For 1 hour, Nessa understands the literal meaning of any spoken or written language she perceives. Cast once per Long Rest without a spell slot via Magic Initiate, or normally with a slot.
An invisible barrier grants +5 AC (including against the triggering attack) and immunity to Magic Missile until the start of Nessa's next turn.
Behind the character
Nessa Starquill is a slender high elf scholar in her second century, with pale silver hair braided tightly back and sharp violet eyes that never stop moving, cataloguing everything in a room before she has finished entering it. She wears layered traveling robes of slate blue and ivory, ink-stained at the cuffs in a way she has stopped apologizing for, with a sage's satchel heavy with scrolls slung across her back.
In one hand she carries a worn ashwood quarterstaff that has seen more doors held open than blows struck; around her neck, on a cord she reflexively hides under her collar, hangs a small moonstone focus that glows faintly blue in the dark and hums when corruption is near. Her boots are road-worn from the ashen Marches, and her expression is the particular scowl of someone who has just found a question she cannot put down.
Before the adventure
Nessa was born in Sylvaneth Enclave and entered the scholar's track at sixty, younger than most and ambitious about it. Caelum Starquill took her as his apprentice when she was ninety, and for thirty years they studied the corrupted relics recovered from the old orc wars, mapping how the artifacts spread corruption through stone, flesh, and magic alike. Nessa learned the orc dialect to read the war-tablets, learned Caelum's cipher-marks to navigate his notes, and learned to ask questions the enclave council did not want asked.
When the council formally forbade the research and confiscated all their notes, Caelum accepted the ruling in silence. Nessa did not. She argued, she appealed, and finally she was exiled from the scholar's track, though not from the enclave itself, a distinction the council thought generous and Nessa thought insulting. She left Sylvaneth with her spellbook, her quarterstaff, and a moonstone focus she took from the vault the night before she departed, a theft she has never confessed to anyone.
For two years she worked as a translator for the Accord Remnant, reading orc war-tablets in Accord Hall and the Marches for anyone who paid, and she was good enough at it that Captain Eldrin Voss began bringing her the fragments no one else could parse. It was unglamorous work and she loved it, because every tablet was a question with an answer buried in it. Then she came home to Sylvaneth Enclave the day Duchess Sera Moonveil's hunters returned from the breeding pits with a sealed crate, and Nessa recognized the resonance signature of the artifact inside it before the crate was even opened.
Everything she was exiled for is now the most urgent question in three nations, and the council that forbade her research is the institution least prepared to answer it. Nessa is precise, curious to the point of rudeness, and constitutionally unable to leave a question alone; she has been thrown out of three archives and one dinner party for asking follow-ups. She is Chaotic Good in the specific way of a scholar who believes rules are hypotheses to be tested.
She carries guilt she does not name: that her research may be the reason anyone knows how to use the artifacts as weapons, and that Caelum let her take the exile alone. She wants, more than anything, to be proven right in a way that cannot be ignored.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Caelum Starquill lost his moonstone focus in the breeding pits and is too frightened to retrieve it, but without it he cannot safely destroy the corrupted artifact, and Duchess Sera's faction will keep the relic. Nessa must search the enclave vaults, the council archives, and the duchess's townhouse for the ritual notes Caelum hid, following a trail of her teacher's old cipher-marks. Along the way she must evade Sera's hunters, decode Caelum's hidden shorthand, and confront the fear that made her mentor abandon his own research. The quest begins with Caelum Starquill in Sylvaneth Enclave.
Search the council archives for Caelum's cipher-marks and ritual notes.
Personal quest · 2
Nessa spent two years translating orc war-tablets for the Accord Remnant, and one tablet has never left her mind: a fragment describing a 'god-machine sleeping under the pits' in a dialect no one else could read. Now that the Choir is hunting artifacts, Nessa realizes the tablet's final lines were a warning, not a boast. She must return to Accord Hall's archive, cross-reference the tablet with the coded hymn recovered from the murder scene, and reconstruct the full warning before the Choir destroys the remaining tablets. The quest begins with Mira Scribe, the Accord archivist.
Recover the original war-tablet fragment from the Accord archive and compare it with the coded hymn.
Personal quest · 3
Nessa wears a small moonstone focus on a cord she reflexively hides under her collar, and she has never explained where it came from. When the party reaches Sylvaneth Enclave and Caelum's own focus is recovered from the breeding pits, Nessa's stone begins to resonate with it, humming in the dark. The two stones are a matched pair from the same corrupted vein, and the resonance is a map: it pulls toward a third stone buried in the enclave vaults, one the council has kept locked away for a century.
Nessa must follow the resonance into the vaults, past Vault-keeper Thessaly and a moonveil spell-eater, and learn what the council has been hiding. The quest begins when the resonance starts, after The Scholar's Stone.
Follow the resonance through the enclave at night and find the vault entrance.
In Caelum's hidden study, Nessa finds his secret copy of the artifact schematics, the very documents the council confiscated from her years ago. She can turn them over to the council and let Caelum face judgment, keep them to complete the research they were both exiled for, or destroy them to protect her mentor.
Exposing them turns the enclave against Duchess Sera and earns Nessa the council's grudging respect, but Caelum is stripped of rank and their relationship is permanently damaged. Keeping them gives Nessa the ritual to destroy the artifact and a permanent +1 to Arcana from studying them, but makes her complicit in the same crime she was exiled for. Destroying them protects Caelum but leaves the enclave defenseless against the artifact, and Duchess Sera's faction keeps the relic.
When the moonstone resonance begins, Nessa learns her own focus is drawn from the same corrupted vein as the breeding pit artifacts. She can stop using it entirely and switch to a mundane focus, losing a small casting benefit but cutting the connection, or she can embrace it and study the resonance, learning to read the god-machine's hum.
Abandoning it removes a corruption risk and gives Nessa a permanent +1 to saving throws against necrotic damage, but she loses the resonance map and the ability to sense corrupted artifacts at range. Embracing it gives her the ability to sense corrupted artifacts within 60 feet and advantage on Arcana checks about them, but she gains vulnerability to necrotic damage and the Ashen Choir can sense her stone when it is uncovered.
At the enclave council confrontation, Nessa holds proof that Duchess Sera has a secret agreement with the Ashen Choir. She can present it immediately and publicly, giving Sera no chance to escape but also no chance to explain, or she can confront Sera privately first, risking that Sera destroys the evidence or buys Nessa's silence.
Presenting publicly triggers the council vote immediately; if the evidence is complete, Sera is stripped of rank and the enclave pledges neutrality, and Nessa gains a permanent +1 to Persuasion when speaking to high elf authorities. Confronting privately risks Sera escaping with the artifact, causing the high elves to withdraw from the peace talks, but if Nessa succeeds she may turn Sera into a reluctant ally who helps seal the breeding pits, granting Nessa access to enclave vault knowledge no outsider has.
Completing The Scholar's Debt
Nessa either becomes the enclave's trusted expert on corrupted artifacts or a scholar in exile for the second time, and her relationship with Caelum is permanently defined.
Enclave council ally or enemy
Completing The Moonstone's Twin
Nessa learns the truth about her own focus and must accept that she carries a piece of the corruption she fights.
Moonstone focus becomes a corrupted-vein focus or is replaced
The enclave council confrontation in Act II
Nessa becomes a political actor rather than a scholar, and her testimony decides whether the high elves stay in the peace talks.
Permanent +1 when speaking to high elf authorities if the public presentation succeeds
Ally
Nessa was Caelum's apprentice for thirty years before the enclave council forbade their research into corrupted relics and confiscated her notes. He taught her the orc dialect, the cipher-marks she still uses, and the discipline of never writing down what she could not prove. When the council's judgment came, Caelum did not defend her; he accepted the ruling quietly and let her leave the enclave alone, and Nessa has never forgiven him for his silence.
But she also knows he kept working in secret, hiding his ritual notes and a copy of the artifact schematics where only someone who knew his ciphers would look. When Nessa returned to Sylvaneth Enclave and found him terrified of the very artifacts he once studied with her, she understood that his silence was not cowardice but fear of what they had both uncovered. Now he needs her moonstone focus and her courage, and she needs his knowledge and his ritual. Their reunion is strained, full of thirty years of unspoken apology, and every conversation between them carries the weight of the research that cost them both their standing.
Enemy
Duchess Sera Moonveil commands the enclave's mages and artifact hunters, and she believes the corrupted artifacts beneath the breeding pits are too dangerous for anyone but the high elves to hold. Nessa believes they are too dangerous for anyone to hold. Sera sees Nessa as a disgraced apprentice meddling in matters beyond her station, and Nessa sees Sera as an aristocrat willing to sacrifice border towns to fill the enclave vaults.
Their conflict became personal the day Sera's hunters returned from the breeding pits with a sealed crate and Nessa recognized the resonance signature of the artifact inside it. Sera has since offered Nessa a position on her research staff twice, both times with a smile that made clear it was an offer Nessa could not refuse safely. Nessa holds proof that Sera has a secret agreement with the Ashen Choir to split the artifacts, and Sera knows Nessa has it. They are circling each other through enclave politics, and only one of them will leave the council chamber with their reputation intact.
Faction
Nessa has worked as a paid translator for the Accord Remnant for two years, reading orc war-tablets for anyone who could pay her rate. The work began as pure necessity after her exile from Sylvaneth Enclave left her without patronage, but it became something more: Captain Eldrin Voss treated her as a professional rather than a disgraced elf, and the archive clerks learned to bring her the strangest fragments first.
She decoded the tablet fragment describing the god-machine sleeping under the pits, and she was in Accord Hall on a translation contract the day the human envoy was murdered in the square. The Remnant values her precisely because she has no flag on her sleeve; a high elf who reads orc and works for coin is the definition of neutral. Eldrin has quietly offered her a permanent position as the Remnant's chief translator and analyst, which would give her access to every archive the Remnant holds, including the restricted stacks where the forged orders and the Choir's financial trail are kept.
The Remnant's weakness is also its appeal to Nessa: it is undermanned, underfunded, and politically isolated, which means it cannot protect her from Duchess Sera or the Ashen Choir, but it also cannot order her to bury a finding.
Join thousands of players and create rich, detailed character backgrounds with Fable Fiesta!
Register to unlock personal quests, relationships, and narrative hooks!
Sign Up Now - It's Free!No credit card required. Start creating in minutes!