Pindle Vex, the Ratchet Fingers

Level 1 Gnome Rogue

Available with DM subscription

STR

8 (-1)

DEX

16 (+3)

CON

14 (+2)

INT

15 (+2)

WIS

CHA

12 (+1)

Defense

Armor Class 14 (Leather armor (11) + DEX modifier (+3))

Hit Points 10 (1d8 + 2 +2)

Speed 25 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws Dexterity, Intelligence

Skills Insight +2, Stealth +5, Survival +2, Deception +3, Acrobatics +5, Perception +2, Persuasion +3, Investigation +4, Sleight of hand +5

Features

Urchin (Background): City of Gears

Background (custom, Urchin) Level 1

Custom background per the campaign: You grew up in the Sump Gears beneath Ratchetworks, running messages and cutting purses for the Ratchet Crew. You know the hidden passages, flooded crawlways and lantern-lit walkways of the undercity, and you can move twice your normal speed while travelling through the undercity of a city you know. Ability Scores: Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence. Origin Feat: Alert.

Sneak Attack

Rogue Level 1

You know how to strike subtly and exploit a foe's distraction. Once per turn, you can deal an extra 1d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have Advantage on the attack roll, or if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it, that enemy isn't Incapacitated, and you don't have Disadvantage on the roll.

Weapon Mastery (Nick: Shortsword; Vex: Hand Crossbow)

Rogue Level 1

Nick: When you make the extra attack of the Dual Wielding weapon property with a Nick weapon, you can make it as part of the Attack action instead of a Bonus Action. Vex: If you hit a target with a Vex weapon and deal damage, you have Advantage on your next attack roll against that target before the end of your next turn.

Alert

Origin Feat (Urchin) Level 1

Initiative Proficiency: When you roll Initiative, you can add your Proficiency Bonus to the roll. Initiative Swap: Immediately after you roll Initiative, you can swap your Initiative with the Initiative of one willing ally in the same combat. You can't make this swap if you or the ally has the Incapacitated condition.

Thieves' Cant

Rogue Level 1

You know Thieves' Cant, a secret mix of dialect, jargon, and code that allows you to hide messages in seemingly normal conversation. Only another creature that knows Thieves' Cant understands such messages. It takes four times longer to convey such a message than to speak the same idea plainly.

Nimble Escape (Sump-Grown Reflexes)

Species (custom) Level 1

at will

Custom species trait (balanced reflavor): You can take the Disengage or Hide action as a Bonus Action on each of your turns. Years of slipping through flooded gear-pits and under Ratchet Crew patrols have taught Pindle to vanish and slip away in a heartbeat.

Expertise (Stealth)

Rogue Level 1

Your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make that uses Stealth. Pindle knows every flooded crawlway under Ratchetworks and moves through the Sump Gears like water finding a crack.

Expertise (Sleight of Hand)

Rogue Level 1

Your proficiency bonus is doubled for any ability check you make that uses Sleight of Hand. Pindle's fingers have been cutting purses since she was twelve; the Ratchet Fingers earn their name.

Darkvision

Gnome Level 1

You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light and in darkness as if it were dim light. You discern colors in that darkness only as shades of gray.

Gnomish Cunning

Gnome Level 1

You have Advantage on Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma saving throws.

Behind the character

Character Information

Pindle Vex, the Ratchet Fingers, is a gnome rogue of the Sump Gears — a wiry, fast-talking cutpurse with cropped auburn hair gone damp at the ends, sharp hazel eyes that count exits before they count faces, and fingers permanently smudged with brass filings. She stands barely three feet tall and moves through the flooded undercity of Ratchetworks like water finding a crack: over patched walkways, under patrol lanterns, through crawlways only the gear-orphans know.

She wears a patched leather jerkin over oil-stained layers, fingerless gloves, and a belt crowded with pick pouches, a coiled waxed cord, and a hand crossbow; a folded indenture paper rides in her left boot, next to a scrap of her mother's handwriting she has never shown anyone.

She was born in the Sump Gears and never knew a dry ceiling. The Ratchet Crew ran her as a message-runner at eight and a purse-cutter at twelve, and she has spent every year since trying to buy her way out of both — out of the Crew, out of Grizel's ledger, out of the tally of pressed children her own name sits on. She treats every favour as a transaction and every friend as someone she has not yet disappointed, because in the undercity that is how you stay alive: you pay what you owe, you count what you're owed, and you never, never let anyone hold your paper.

She is generous with stolen coin in ways she'd deny under questioning — the gear-orphan Tick has eaten for a week on bread Pindle 'happened to have' — and she is allergic to being owned with a violence that surprises even her.

Her courage is lopsided. She is calm, almost serene, in a flooded gear-pit with pit-eels hunting by vibration, because the water is honest about what it wants. Put her in a room with a door she cannot lock and her hands shake. She fears the slow black tide more than the things in it, fears closed doors she is on the wrong side of, and fears — quietly, in the part of herself she keeps locked in a crawlway — that she is already halfway to becoming Grizel: competent, permanent, and owed by everyone.

Her driving goal is to buy her own name back: a legitimate tally in Ratchetworks, a Warden-stamped record that says Pindle Vex belongs to no one, and never to take another order from anyone as long as the Engine turns. But beneath the transaction is a wound she is only beginning to examine — the discovery that her indenture was not taken but purchased, that someone paid for her specifically, and that her mother, who kept the frequency records in the flooded keeping-station, may not be as dead as Pindle was told.

Every quest she takes pulls at that thread: the tally-book with her page and Cog's beside it, the debts she owes half the undercity, the manifest fragment written in her mother's cipher. She is braver than she knows, more loyal than she admits, and one bad night away from either burning the whole book or becoming the thing she ran from — and the campaign will make her choose which.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Pindle Vex was born in the third level of the Sump Gears, in a lean-to built against the housing of a drowned governor, to a mother who kept records and a father nobody mentions. Her mother worked the keeping-stations — the undercity's unofficial archive of key-bolt frequencies, maintained by keepers who scratched their tallies in private ciphers on brass slates — and taught Pindle the tally-marks as a game before Pindle could read common.

It was the only inheritance that mattered. When Pindle was six, her mother drowned in the flooded station under the third lift, or so everyone said, and Pindle went into the Crew's economy like a coin into a purse: message-running at eight, purse-cutting at twelve, indentured on paper the Crew held and she did not.

The pressing was not random, though Pindle would not learn that for years. A buyer paid the runner who kept the tally-book for her name specifically — why, no one in the Crew's lower ranks knew, and Grizel, who collected her finder's fee, was not talking. Pindle ran the Crew's errands for six years and cut its purses for four more, and the whole time she kept a private ledger of her own: every debt she owed, every debt she was owed, every favour with a price and every price with a name.

It was a survival habit that became a philosophy. She repaid Old Sarn the lamp-oil seller within the month. She left a marker with the ferryman Dredge. She paid the widow Brack's protection toll when the widow's own people wouldn't. Half the Sump Gears knows Pindle Vex settles up, and that reputation is worth more down there than coin.

She escaped the Crew the way she does everything — fast, in the dark, and with a cost she doesn't talk about. The runner who held her tally-book went with her to the strongroom where the paper was kept, and when the diversion came, Pindle locked him in the flooding room and took the only copy of her indenture she could reach: the one folded in her boot, not the one in the Crew's strongbox. She has never learned whether he drowned. She counts exits when she can't sleep.

The Crew, naturally, did not accept the arrangement. Grizel hunts her on principle — a debt unpaid is a challenge to the whole undercity's order — and the Crew's cells on two rings have her description. But Pindle has assets the Crew can't price: Tick, the twelve-year-old guide who has decided Pindle is the person who will bring their brother Cog home from the unkeying engine; the keeping-station records only she can read, because the cipher is her mother's; and now a fragment of the unkeying engine's manifest, lifted from a Crew runner, whose numbers match the tally-marks inside her first purse.

She does not yet understand what that last coincidence means. She suspects, correctly, that it means her mother counted the same bolts the Crew is now counting, and that the machine Marisel Quill is building was written down first in a language Pindle can read.

Her relationship to the Ratchet Crew is thus not the simple enmity of a victim and her oppressors but something more uncomfortable: she grew up inside it, she knows its cant and its hand-signs and its laundry marks, she can walk into a Crew safehouse and be half-invisible, and part of her — the part that finds Grizel's throne practical — never entirely left. Her war with the Crew is also a war with the version of herself that the Crew made, and every quest she completes moves the line: the tally-book burned is her childhood freed, the debts paid are her adulthood claimed, the keeping-station found is her mother recovered.

By the time she faces the Grand Cage, the question is no longer whether she can buy her name back but what she will do with a self that no longer needs buying — and whether the girl who locked a man in a flooding strongroom can live with the woman who walks out of the Sump Gears owning herself.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

Cog, Tick's older brother, is still alive somewhere in a Ratchet Crew workshop, half-deaf from the unkeying engine's hum and working the core because his hands are small enough to reach inside. Pindle has his page from the tally-book; finding the boy it belongs to is a debt she has not yet paid.
Someone paid the Crew specifically for Pindle's name when she was a child — not a random pressing but a purchase. The buyer's identity is a thread running through her mother's keeping-station records and Grizel's whispered hooks, and whoever it is had a reason to want a Sump Gears gnome owned.
The gear-orphan who stole Grizel's tithe chest to buy medicine for the flooded pits is still hidden somewhere in the undercity, and Tick knows who they are. When Grizel finds out, a child dies — unless Pindle moves first.
Pindle's mother kept the frequency records in the flooded keeping-station under the third lift and died there — or, the records hint, did not die at all. The station's last entry is in her hand and dated after the day Pindle was told her mother drowned.
A fragment of the unkeying engine's manifest is now in Pindle's possession, and Marisel Quill knows a fragment is missing. When the Ratchet connects the theft to the girl who took the tally-book, Quill's attention — and her brass hand — will find Pindle personally.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

Pindle can read her mother's tally-marks — a private cipher of scratches and notches — which is the only reason she could decipher the unkeying engine's manifest fragment. She has told no one, because a cipher that opens Crew documents is worth more unshared.
Pindle did not merely escape the Crew: on the night she ran, she left a Crew runner — the man who kept her tally-book — locked in a flooding strongroom as a diversion. She has never said his name aloud and does not know whether he drowned. Some nights she counts exits instead of sleeping.
Folded inside her boot beside the indenture paper is a second, older scrap: a scrap of her mother's handwriting, a single tally-line and the words 'count the bolts, not the names.' Pindle has never shown it to anyone and cannot fully read it — yet.

What haunts them

Fears

Pindle is afraid of rooms with doors she cannot lock — specifically, of being on the wrong side of one when it closes. The strongroom in the Crew safehouse nearly broke her; she will not enter a room she cannot secure, and GM should use this fear whenever she must trust a door to someone else.
She fears drowning in black water — not the pit-eels, but the water itself, the slow rising tide that floods one more walkway every hour. She was nearly drowned the night she ran the Crew, and the sound of rising water makes her hands shake.
She fears becoming Grizel: competent, permanent, and owed by everyone. Every time someone in the Sump Gears calls her 'the next Ratchet-Mother', she hears the throne of broken governors creaking, and she hates that part of her finds the idea practical.

What drives them

Aspirations

Pindle wants her name entered legitimately in the Ratchetworks tally — a legal, Warden-stamped record that says Pindle Vex belongs to herself. She would trade a great deal, though not everything, for a Warden's Pass with her own name on it.
She wants to see Cog come home up the ferry rope, half-deaf and scowling, so Tick can stop looking at her like she is the person who is going to make it happen. She does not know what she will do if he is already dead.
She wants, though she would never say it plainly, to be the kind of person who has friends she cannot disappoint — to owe someone a favour that never comes due, and find that the debt was the friendship all along. Tick is the closest she has come, and it terrifies her.

Personal quest · 1

The Price of a Name

Tick, a gear-orphan of the Sump Gears, knows which Ratchet Crew runner keeps the tally-book of pressed children — the book that holds Pindle's own indenture and Tick's brother Cog's page beside it. Pindle must get into the Crew's safehouse on the second level of the Sump Gears, lift the tally-book from a locked strongbox, and burn her own page without Grizel or the Crew learning who did it. The book is bound in key-metal wire, so burning one page burns the binding and every name in it, including Cog's; Pindle has to choose between a clean escape and a copy.

The safehouse is guarded by two Crew saboteurs, a trapped floor and a Gear-Gnaw Rat nest in the strongbox wall, and the water in the pits rises while she works.

Current Stage

Meet Tick in the flooded crawlways beneath the third lift and learn where the tally-book is kept and who guards it.

Choice

Pay Tick the copper they ask for, or press them for the information for free.

Paying earns Tick's trust and a warning about the trapped floor; pressing them sours the gear-orphans against Pindle and costs her a guide later.

Mechanical Rewards

Pindle's indenture is destroyed or copied — she can never be sold back to the Crew, and any Ratchet Crew attempt to press her fails automatically.
A copied page of pressed children's names (if chosen), usable as leverage or evidence.
Tick's loyalty: the gear-orphans of the Sump Gears will shelter, feed, and pass messages for Pindle for the rest of the campaign.
250 gp worth of coin and salvage recovered from the Crew safehouse.

Narrative Rewards

Pindle walks out of the Sump Gears with her name back and tells Tick she is done taking orders from anyone.
Ratchet-Mother Grizel either fears Pindle or owes her a grudge, depending on how quietly the job was done.

Personal quest · 2

The Debts of the Drowned Walkways

Pindle owes favours to half the Sump Gears — a debt to Old Sarn the lamp-oil seller, a promise to the widow Brack in the half-flooded gear-teeth, and a marker she left with a ferryman named Dredge who now won't surface. Settling them one by one drags Pindle through every crawlway she grew up in, and each debt paid teaches her something she didn't know about the night she was indentured.

Current Stage

Repay Old Sarn's debt of lamp-oil and coin, and learn from him that the tally-runner who pressed Pindle was not acting alone — someone paid for her name specifically.

Choice

Ask Sarn who paid for her name, or pay the debt and walk away without asking.

Asking drags Pindle back toward the question of who wanted her owned; walking away keeps the past buried but leaves the question open.

Mechanical Rewards

A network of paid debts: safehouses, ferries, and free lamp-oil across the Sump Gears.
Either Dredge's ferry passage or the Renegotiator's Edge ability.
A lead on who paid for Pindle's name — a thread that leads back to the Ratchet Crew's paymasters.
150 gp in recovered and repaid coin.

Narrative Rewards

Pindle learns she was not pressed at random — someone wanted her owned, and that someone is still in the Sump Gears.
The undercity begins to say that Pindle Vex pays her debts, which is worth more than coin down there.

Personal quest · 3

The Tally That Counts the Sliver

Pindle lifts a scrap of paper from a Crew runner that turns out to be a fragment of the unkeying engine's manifest — and the numbers on it match the tally-marks her mother scratched inside Pindle's first purse before she died. Someone in the Sump Gears is keeping a second tally-book, one that counts not children but key-bolt frequencies, and Pindle's mother may have been one of its keepers.

Current Stage

Decipher the manifest fragment using her mother's tally-scratches as a cipher key, learning that the Ratchet Crew's frequencies were first written down by undercity keepers — including her mother.

Choice

Follow the cipher to her mother's old keeping-station under the third lift, or sell the fragment to Grizel and let someone else dig.

Following it means learning who her mother really was; selling it buys short-term safety and Grizel's fleeting favour.

Mechanical Rewards

Her mother's tally-slate (advantage on identifying or countering unkeying devices), or the delay of the Crew's engine calibration.
The buyer's name — a story-critical lead connecting Pindle's past to the Ratchet Crew's plans.
Either Keywarden goodwill or undercity notoriety, each with mechanical teeth.
200 gp in salvage from the keeping-station.

Narrative Rewards

Pindle learns her mother helped keep the frequencies that the Crew is now perverting, and that her indenture was bought, not taken.
The keeping-station's records give the party a map of every key-bolt frequency on the Fourth Ring.

Major Decision

Context

At the climax of 'The Price of a Name', Pindle holds the tally-book over a lantern flame with the water rising around her. She can burn it whole — freeing every pressed child including herself but erasing the only record of their names — or copy the names first and risk being caught by the returning guards.

Choice Made

Burn the book whole, or copy the names first and burn later.

Impact

Burning whole permanently destroys the Crew's leverage over every pressed child and removes any Crew claim on Pindle forever, but the names are lost and Tick grieves a brother with no grave. Copying first gives Pindle written leverage — eleven names that can be used as evidence or blackmail — but leaves her own indenture technically intact in Crew records until the burn, and the guards' return forces a hasty, noisy escape that raises the Sump Gears' alert level for the rest of the act.

Major Decision

Context

In 'The Debts of the Drowned Walkways', the ferryman Dredge has broken the terms of his marker with Pindle by going silent and leaving her debt to rot. She can honour the marker in full anyway — paying what she promised to a man who defaulted — or declare the debt void and take the re-opened negotiation as her due.

Choice Made

Honour the broken contract, or void it and take the edge.

Impact

Honouring it earns Dredge's ferry (free silent passage across flooded gear-pits, twice per day) and cements Pindle's reputation as someone whose word is iron. Voiding it grants the Renegotiator's Edge — once per long rest, when a deal turns against her, she can re-open it with advantage on her next Charisma check — and teaches the undercity that Pindle Vex's contracts cut both ways, giving her advantage on Intimidation but disadvantage on first Persuasion checks with new undercity contacts.

Major Decision

Context

In 'The Tally That Counts the Sliver', Pindle discovers the name of the person who paid for her indenture. She can take that name to Warden-Commander Sela Brant and let the Keywardens' law handle it, or settle it herself in the undercity's way — quietly, finally, and without witnesses.

Choice Made

Give the name to the Wardens, or settle it herself.

Impact

The Wardens' path gains Pindle a Keywarden patron, advantage on Charisma checks with Sela Brant's people, and eventually a Warden's Pass with her own name legitimately entered in the Ratchetworks tally — the literal fulfilment of her driving goal. The undercity's way permanently grants her one additional use of Sneak Attack per round against that specific enemy, advantage on Intimidation in the Sump Gears, and the knowledge that she chose the pit over the ledger — which colours every Warden interaction that follows (disadvantage on first impressions with Keywardens).

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Completing any two of the three personal quests.

Transformation

Pindle sheds the Ratchet Fingers as a Crew label and claims it as her own name. She gains the feature Own Tally, Free Hand: once per day, when a creature attempts to press, command, or claim her through debt, indenture, or threat of contract, she may make a Charisma (Persuasion or Intimidation) check to break the claim, and on a success the creature loses all leverage over her permanently.

Mechanical Changes

new_ability

Own Tally, Free Hand (once per day): break any claim of debt, indenture, or command placed on Pindle with a successful Charisma check.

Pindle's entire arc is about refusing to be owned; this ability makes that refusal a mechanic rather than a hope.

Ally

Tick

Relationship ally

Influence 8/10

Loyalty 9/10

Shared History

Tick was six years old when Pindle found them shivering in a dry crawlway off the third lift, three days after the Ratchet Crew took Tick's brother Cog. Pindle fed the child stolen bread for a week and taught them which grates the patrol lanterns miss. Since then Tick has guided Pindle through every flooded pit in the Sump Gears without being asked twice, and Pindle has quietly paid Tick's protection toll to Grizel's collectors out of her own cut.

Tick is the only person in the undercity Pindle has never once thought of as a transaction — which frightens her more than the pit-eels do. Tick, in turn, has decided — with the fierce, unexamined loyalty of a twelve-year-old — that Pindle is the person who is going to get Cog back.

Potential Breaking Points

If Pindle burns the tally-book without copying Cog's name, Tick's trust in her cracks — not broken, but permanently dented, and Tick begins keeping secrets from her.
If Pindle trades information about the gear-orphans to Grizel or the Crew, even under duress, Tick learns of it and disappears into the crawlways, surfacing only to spread the word that Pindle Vex sold a child.

Enemy

Ratchet-Mother Grizel

Threat Level 6/10

Conflict Type personal

Personal Stakes

Grizel held Pindle's indenture paper for six years and collected a finder's fee on every purse Pindle cut — and she intends to collect on both for the rest of Pindle's natural life. When Pindle burned or stole her way out of the Crew's books, Grizel lost coin, face, and a productive little thief, and Grizel does not forgive losses. Worse, Grizel knows something about the night Pindle was pressed that Pindle does not: the name of the buyer.

Grizel wields that name like a hook, letting it slip in front of witnesses whenever Pindle gets too proud, because a Pindle Vex who goes looking for her buyer is a Pindle Vex who might dig up things Grizel buried herself — including the true origin of the tithe Grizel has been quietly reselling.

Possible Resolutions

Pindle can destroy Grizel's leverage by recovering the original buyer's name from the keeping-station in 'The Tally That Counts the Sliver' and making it public before Grizel can use it.
Pindle can return Grizel's stolen tithe chest unopened, buying a cold truce — Grizel stops hunting her, but the buyer's name stays in Grizel's hand as a blade she keeps sheathed rather than broken.
Pindle can go to war: expose Grizel's resale of the stolen tithe to the undercity, ending Grizel's rule at the cost of chaos in the Sump Gears and the loss of every safehouse and ally Grizel's people provide.

Faction

The Ratchet Crew

Standing -7/10

Influence

Pindle grew up inside the Ratchet Crew's machine: she ran messages at eight, cut purses at twelve, and learned the Crew's cant, signals, and safehouse layouts from the inside. She knows that the runner who pressed her kept the tally-book, that the Crew pays in Concord coin, and that the oilskins its saboteurs wear carry a Sump Gears laundry mark — knowledge the party will not find in any Warden briefing.

Her infiltration of the Crew's safehouse in 'The Price of a Name' makes her one of the few people alive who has seen the tally of pressed children and walked out again. The Crew, for its part, has a standing interest in her: she is a stolen asset, an embarrassment, and now a witness. Crew cells on the Sixth and Fourth Rings have her description, and Marisel Quill — who reads every manifest — will eventually connect the girl who took the tally-book to the fragment of the unkeying engine's manifest that went missing the same week.

Obligations

The Crew holds one copy of Pindle's indenture (until she destroys or steals it), which grants any Crew officer the nominal right to press her back into service — a claim that fails only if she completes 'The Price of a Name'.
Pindle owes a marker to the ferryman Dredge, who runs for the Crew when the water is high; settling or voiding that marker determines whether the Crew's ferry network will carry her or report her.

Benefits

Pindle knows Thieves' Cant and the Crew's hand-signs, granting the party advantage on Deception and Stealth checks when impersonating or shadowing Crew members.
Her knowledge of the safehouse layouts gives advantage on Investigation checks to find Crew caches and drop-points in the Sump Gears.

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