Once per turn, deal an extra 1d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have Advantage on the attack roll or another enemy of the target is within 5 feet, you don't have Disadvantage, and the attack uses a finesse or ranged weapon.
Choose two of your skill proficiencies (or one skill and Thieves' Tools). Your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make with the chosen proficiency. Kip has Expertise in Stealth and Sleight of Hand.
You know Thieves' Cant, a secret mix of dialect, jargon and code that allows hidden messages in seemingly normal conversation. Kip's version is the Tidewrights' Guild dock-cant, salted with tide-and-tide-table slang.
You gain Initiative Proficiency (add your Proficiency Bonus to Initiative rolls) and Initiative Swap: immediately after rolling Initiative, you can swap your Initiative with one willing ally in the same combat.
You have a reliable contact in the criminal underworld. Kip's is Wren Ashby, a Tidewrights' Guild courier — a dangerous friendship, since the Guild holds his tally-stick.
You can take the Hide action even when you are obscured only by a creature that is at least one size larger than you.
You can move through the space of any creature that is a size larger than you, but you can't end your movement there.
Whenever you roll a 1 on the d20 of a D20 Test, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll.
You have Advantage on saving throws you make to avoid or end the Frightened condition.
Behind the character
Kip Marlow is a wiry halfling in his late twenties, short enough to vanish behind a barrel and quick enough to be gone before you notice the barrel is empty. His curly brown hair is usually pushed back off his face by salt wind, and his grin arrives a half-second before he does — cheerful, fast-talking, and always positioned within bolting distance of a door, a jetty, or a low-tide cave mouth.
He dresses in a salt-faded dark coat over a leather jerkin, trousers tucked into worn sea boots, and carries a shortsword at his hip beside a coiled length of cord and a leather-wrapped set of thieves' tools. Around his neck, on a tarred cord he never takes off, hangs a notched wooden tally-stick — a copy of the Guild's, carved with his own nervous hand, so he can look at the shape of his debt whenever the real one is out of reach.
His eyes are quick and warm but they keep flicking toward the harbour mouth, the tide line, the exits; a man who has spent seven years as someone else's pair of hands learns to count the ways out of every room. He jokes about the debt constantly, fluently, and relentlessly, because the joke is cheaper than the truth: that he is owned, that the number on the stick is one he has never been allowed to read, and that the alternative to laughing is thinking about what happens when it comes due.
Beneath the patter is the finest low-tide hand on the northern coast — a man who knows the sea caves of Gullclaw Cay better than the Guild knows its own ledgers, and who is only now, aboard Carl's expedition, learning what it feels like to work for something instead of against a number.
Before the adventure
Kip Marlow was born someone else, on the Tarred Keel side of Lordinium's dry docks, the fourth child of a rope-walk family that could not feed a fourth child. At fourteen he took the name off a drowned boy on the Gullclaw jetty — a cabin hand lost overboard, unclaimed, unmissed — and became Kip Marlow, because a name that belonged to no living person could not be traced, and a boy with no name could work any jetty on the coast.
The Marlow family still light a candle for their lost son every Sea-Night, and Kip has stood outside their window twice to watch, and both times walked away before anyone saw him. He ran crates for whoever paid, learned the tide tables of the whole northern coast by heart, and at nineteen was pulled out of the surf off Gullclaw Cay by Wren Ashby, a Guild courier with a sharp laugh and no interest in whose name he used.
Wren taught him proper dock-cant, split every free job with him, and never once asked about the tally. The Guild noticed him the way the Guild notices anything useful: quietly, and with a contract. For three years he was their best low-tide hand — the one who could find the sea-cave entrances that opened twice a day and were dry for exactly long enough — until the Gullclaw job went wrong.
He opened a crate he should have left shut, saw grey wax seals and coin stamped with a circle of thirteen dots and a manifest of names, and by morning the crate was gone, the buyer was gone, and Tamsin Quill was writing his name on a debt instead of a manifest. Seven years of jobs later, the tally is still not paid, and Tamsin — who is honest about everything except her own fear — has told him only that the stick in her deepest cave says what it says.
He signed on with Carl of the Seven Seas for three reasons he tells people, and one he does not: forty gold and a share, a ship going anywhere but here, and the chance to be at Gullclaw Cay with witnesses and steel when the tally comes due. The reason he does not say is that the grey coin he saw seven years ago has started turning up in Harrowgate taverns, and the grey-robed collectors are counting something, and Kip Marlow — who is not his real name, and knows what it costs to be a name on someone else's ledger — intends to be in the room when the accounts are finally read.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Kip's indenture is carved on a Guild tally-stick that Tamsin Quill keeps in the deepest cave under the Gullclaw light, and the only way to end the debt is to put that stick in her hand and pay what it says. Tamsin will not simply sell it back; she wants a favour first, and the favour is carrying a sealed oilcloth parcel to a grey-robed buyer in Harrowgate without opening it.
Kip has to decide whether to run the parcel blind, open it and risk the Guild's anger, or find another way to clear the tally before the Chorus arrives at the cave and the whole bargain goes up in smoke.
Reach Gullclaw Cay and negotiate with Tamsin Quill over the tally-stick and the parcel.
Personal quest · 2
Kip has spent years learning the low-tide entrances of every sea cave from Lordinium to the ice, knowledge the Guild never paid him to record. Now Odran the light-keeper needs a route through the caves of Gullclaw Cay that the Chorus does not know, and Kip is the only one who has it. Mapping the entrances means diving at slack water, dodging the Lantern-Jawed Lurker, and deciding whether to sell the map to the Guild — who will own him with it — or give it to the party and Odran for nothing.
Survey the low-tide entrances of Gullclaw Cay's caves.
Personal quest · 3
Wren Ashby, Kip's Criminal Contact and the only friend the Guild never managed to make him regret, has gone missing between Harrowgate and Gullclaw Cay — the same stretch of coast where the Chorus has been murdering Guild couriers after buying their charts. Greta Hearthstone, Wren's sister in everything but blood, will pay in information and free lodging for the truth. Finding Wren means reading the Chorus's grey wax seals, walking into the burned warehouse cellar, and facing the possibility that the friend who once pulled Kip out of the surf is already counting in the dark with the others in unison.
Trace Wren's last route from the Grey Gull to the cay.
Tamsin Quill hands Kip a sealed oilcloth parcel and the price of his freedom: carry it to a grey-robed buyer in Harrowgate without opening it.
Running it blind delivers Chorus coin and deepens the Guild's grey entanglement — Kip gains the Guild's protection token (advantage on Deception checks in northern ports) but carries the Chorus's errand. Opening it reveals Chorus coin stamped with thirteen dots and a note naming the Ninth Terrace, giving the party its earliest clue but costing the Guild's goodwill and adding 100 gp to the tally. Refusing means Tamsin raises the tally and Kip must find another road to freedom.
At the fog wall, Cassian names the price: one life, or a true name freely given. Kip has spent his whole life under other people's names on other people's sticks.
Giving his own true name — spoken honestly for the first time — breaks the fog's hold on Cassian and opens the gate free, but the fog marks Kip: he gains the Warden's favour (advantage on saves against fear and fog-based effects) and a permanent bond to Cassian. Letting the fog take a crew member keeps Kip's name his own but haunts him; the crew's morale drops and Halda Storm watches him differently ever after.
At the Heart of Borealis, the Thirteenth offers Kip the one thing he wants most: the tally-stick, snapped and burned, and every debt he has ever owed — cancelled, for a single drop of blood freely given.
Taking it frees Kip of every debt forever but brands him with the Thirteenth's mark: he gains a permanent +1 to Dexterity saves and the god can always find him. Refusing costs him nothing but the ache of it, and hardens his resolve (+1 to saving throws against charm offers at the Heart). Turning the offer — using Nesa's knowledge to prove the Thirteenth lies about ending death — weakens the god's hold on Maelis and grants Kip advantage on all Charisma checks against the Chorus for the rest of the campaign.
Tamsin snaps the tally-stick across her knee and drops the halves in the fire.
Kip stops joking about the debt, because there is no debt. His fast-talk becomes confidence instead of cover, and he starts choosing who he owes.
Wren Ashby becomes a freed, willing ally rather than a Guild liability.
Ally
Wren pulled Kip out of the surf off Gullclaw Cay when they were both nineteen and neither had a copper between them, and they have been splitting every job that did not belong to the Guild ever since. It was Wren who taught Kip the dock-cant properly, Wren who warned him the night the Gullclaw job went wrong, and Wren who stood in the Guild hall and lied about the manifest while Tamsin Quill wrote Kip's name on a debt instead.
The Guild holds Wren's tally too, which is the joke they never say out loud: two free friends, both owned. When Wren went missing between Harrowgate and the cay, Kip did not tell himself it was coincidence, because couriers who carry Guild charts on that stretch of coast come home in pieces, and Wren is the only person alive who has never once put Kip's name on anything.
Enemy
Tamsin Quill is the Guild factor who put Kip's name on a debt instead of a manifest, and she has never once pretended it was fair — only that it was written, and written is owned. She watched him run crates for three years before the Gullclaw job, knows he was the best low-tide hand on the coast, and considers his debt the price of the mistake he actually made: opening a crate he should not have.
Their history is seven years of bartered favours, shouted bargains across the jetty at Gullclaw, and one night in the Tarred Keel when she bought him a drink and told him the truth — that the tally is not money, it is a leash, and she holds it because someone holds hers. She sold a heretic codex to a grey-robed woman and has been frightened ever since, and the only person she half-trusts with that fear is the halfling whose freedom she is holding hostage. She is his enemy because she owns him, and his almost-friend because she is the only one who tells him the price of everything honestly.
Faction
The Guild has owned seven years of Kip's life, and the ownership is literal: his indenture is carved into a tally-stick in a sea cave under the Gullclaw light, and every job he has run since has shaved a notch off a number he has never been allowed to see. He learned their caches, their tide tables, their wax seals and their very polite debt collectors, and he learned that the Guild will sell a codex to a scholar and the scholar's address to a cult in the same afternoon.
Kip's relationship with the Guild is the shape of his whole character: cheerful on the surface, calculating the exits underneath. He is useful to them, resented by their factors, and quietly brilliant at the work — which is exactly why Tamsin Quill will not let him go easily. Every favour he does the party is a favour stolen from the Guild's ledger, and the Guild notices stolen things.
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