When he finishes a Short Rest, Corin can recover expended spell slots with a combined level of up to 1 (Intelligence modifier, minimum half level rounded up).
Corin's spellbook is a water-stained archive ledger he keeps wrapped in oilcloth; he records everything, including observations of enemies mid-fight.
Corin can cast any spell in his spellbook as a ritual if it has the ritual tag, without expending a slot—ideal for studying the shrine's dead tongue.
Corin knows where and from whom to learn lore; he can reliably find the one person in Nostramus who might know a given piece of information.
When Corin doesn't know a piece of lore, he always knows where or from whom he can learn it (usually books, archives, or Archivist Mora).
Advantage on saving throws against being Charmed; magical sleep can't put him to sleep.
60-foot darkvision, invaluable in the flooded tunnels and shrines beneath Nostramus.
Meditates 4 hours instead of sleeping 8; can keep watch while the party rests.
Proficiency in Insight, Perception, or Survival (chosen: Perception).
6 cantrips known, spellbook contains all listed spells (6 first-level spells in spellbook at level 1). Corin prepares 4 spells each morning; recommended preparations: Detect Magic (ritual anyway), Sleep, Comprehend Languages (ritual), Silvery Barbs. Find Familiar and Identify are in the spellbook but typically cast as rituals.
For 10 minutes, Corin senses magic within 10 feet and can see faint auras of magic, learning its school. Essential for detecting the ley-line magic of the shrine and the plague's enchantment.
A spectral hand for retrieving plague vials, pulling levers, or copying pages without touching cursed ink.
Creates a sound or image. Corin uses it to mimic dripping water or distant chanting to test tunnels for ambushes.
A cold blue beam, 1d8 cold damage and 10-foot speed reduction. Corin uses it to slow cultists on slick, flooded floors.
Puts 5d8 hit points of creatures to sleep in a 20-foot radius. Corin's preferred control spell in narrow tunnels where a fight would be fatal.
Reaction: force a creature to reroll a successful save/attack and grant an ally advantage. Corin's insurance when a cult ritual save goes the wrong way.
Summon a spirit in animal form (Corin favors a rat—ironic, he says, so the Choir's vermin learn what it is to be watched). Acts as his eyes in tunnels and flooded shrines.
Understand any spoken or written language for 1 hour. Corin's signature spell—he reads the shrine's dead tongue with it, though the oldest name still resists translation.
Learn properties of a magic item or spell effect. Corin uses it on cult relics like the Ratbone Token before anyone touches them.
Behind the character
Corin Thale, the Ink-Stained, is a gaunt high elf in his late second century who has spent more years underground than most people spend alive. His fingers are permanently grey-black with iron gall ink, his grey-blue scholar's robe is water-spotted from two weeks of tunnel damp, and his eyes catch lamplight like a cat's, an adaptation to the dark he pretends is ordinary. He keeps his silver hair tied back with a rag and a tallow candle stub behind one ear, because in the catacombs you learn never to waste light.
His spellbook is a repurposed archive ledger wrapped in oilcloth and chained to his belt, and he writes in it constantly: observations, translations, corrections, and, during fights, notes on his enemies' technique and pronunciation. He has been known to pause mid-combat to correct a cultist's dead-tongue grammar before putting him to sleep.
Corin's defining quality is an unnervingly calm curiosity. Danger is, to him, primarily a source of data. He is dry, precise, and sardonic, deflecting fear with footnotes. Beneath the calm is a man who has been avoiding a conclusion for two hundred years: he read the shrine's name in three dead languages long before the plague came, understood what the oldest of them called it, and told no one. He keeps writing now because writing is the alternative to admitting that the catastrophe was already documented, by him, and nobody listened, including himself.
He is Neutral Good in the way archivists are: he will not strike the first blow, but he will lie to an Inquisitor, forge a pass, and walk into a plague vault to preserve a record. He values the truth over comfort and the record over his own survival, though he is only beginning to learn that a record no one acts on is just a longer form of silence. His rat familiar watches for him in the dark, and he finds the irony deliberate and satisfying.
Before the adventure
Corin Thale came to Nostramus's catacomb archive as a young elf apprentice and never really left. For two centuries he catalogued the city's oldest records: grant deeds, burial ledgers, temple inventories, and the restricted shelves no one else would touch. His mentor in those early decades was Archivist Pellon Dray, a brilliant, restless scholar who taught Corin the dead tongue of the shrine beneath the harbor, a language with no living speakers and, Dray claimed, no living readers.
Corin learned it well enough to translate the shrine's name, and what the oldest inscription called it frightened him enough that he filed the translation in a restricted shelf and told no one, including Dray, including Mora. It is the decision that has defined his life: the archivist who knew, and chose the quiet shelf.
Decades later, Dray left the archive under circumstances never explained, and Mora took over as senior archivist. Corin and Mora became the archive's two halves: she the keeper of access, he the keeper of the oldest and worst materials. They argued about classification, traded inks, and trusted each other with the restricted keys. When Doctor Fesk's plague reached the temple row and the quarantine sealed the gates, Corin was underground, cataloguing, and simply never came up.
He has lived since on stored lamp oil, rainwater filtered through grave sand, and the archive's dry stores, keeping his ledger by candle stub and watching rats move through the tunnels in patterns he slowly realized were not natural.
The ghost ship's arrival confirmed his oldest fear. The plague's symptoms match descriptions in the Grey Stair codex, a first-hand account of the last time the shrine woke, written by an archivist who went mad mid-sentence two hundred years ago. Corin has avoided that codex's final pages for two centuries, telling himself the seal on the ossuary shelf was for preservation. Now the deadline is midnight, and the ritual clock is running.
His driving goal is to understand exactly what the Ratbound Choir is awakening and to write it down where someone will find it, which is both his purpose and his evasion: writing is what he does instead of acting. His personal quest, recovering Mora's stolen map and its cure ritual from the Plague Vault, forces him to act, to read what he has avoided, and to confront Dray, whose theft note was written in Corin's own early shorthand, a message that says: I know your hand.
Come find me. Corin's story is the story of an observer who must decide, before the plague goes airborne, whether the record he keeps is a monument or an excuse.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Archivist Mora's original map of the sunken shrine was stolen by a cultist who was once her student, and it now lies in the Plague Vault among the prisoners. The map's margin carries a cure ritual in the shrine's own dead tongue, and Corin is one of the few people alive who can read it. He must recover the map, copy the ritual into his own spellbook before the ink runs or the page rots, and deliver the counter-words to the shrine before midnight.
Descend through the Sewer Gate with the party and reach the Catacomb Hall, where Mora barricades herself against cult patrols. Corin must earn her trust by proving he can read the shrine's dead tongue, translating a fragment she offers as a test.
Personal quest · 2
Before the quarantine, Corin catalogued a sealed ossuary shelf in the catacombs whose ledgers predate Nostramus itself. One ledger, the Grey Stair codex, contains a first-hand account of the last time the shrine woke, written by an archivist who went mad mid-sentence. Corin has avoided reading the final pages for two hundred years. Now the plague matches the codex's descriptions exactly, and he must finish what another scholar could not.
Locate the collapsed Grey Stair in the catacombs and clear the passage to the sealed ossuary, avoiding the cult's patrols and the wretches that nest in the collapse.
Personal quest · 3
Corin's old mentor, Archivist Pellon Dray, catalogued the catacombs with him for forty years before choosing the Ratbound Choir's path. Dray is the cultist who stole Mora's map, and Corin knows his handwriting on the theft note. Corin must decide whether to redeem, expose, or destroy the only person who ever taught him anything, and Dray has left a message: a page of Corin's own early notes, annotated in Dray's hand, asking to meet in the Tallow Yard.
Corin follows the annotated page to the Tallow Yard, the corpse-staging district, where Dray waits among the shrouded dead in his rat mask, removed and folded politely in his lap.
In the Plague Vault, Corin holds the only copy of the cure ritual's margin and the party is bleeding out around the cauldron. He can transcribe it now, in the filth, spending the time that might save an ally, or seize the moment to escape with the map intact.
Transcribing grants Corin the cure ritual permanently and a permanent +1 Intelligence (his hand learns the dead tongue's shapes), but a chosen ally may die or suffer the plague. Running preserves the map for the city's archive and grants Corin the Fleet Scribe trait (+10 feet speed in tunnels) but delays the cure by a full day, during which an NPC in the temple row dies.
Dray offers Corin the Choir's archives and the dead tongue's full grammar, the scholarly inheritance of a lifetime, in exchange for joining or feigning to join the Ratbound Choir.
Refusing locks Corin out of the Choir's inner lore but grants him the Ash Watch's full trust and a permanent +1 to saving throws against enchantment (his resolve hardened). Infiltrating grants the Choir Sense ability and access to the Plague Vault's secrets but forces Corin to betray one piece of real information per act, with consequences for the city. Wavering grants permanent inspiration but makes Corvane's final offer mechanically stronger against him.
At the Sunken Shrine, Corin can speak the counter-words himself with Theron's coaching, knowing the words are written in a language that eats the speaker's memory, or hand the task to another party member and keep his mind intact for the archive he still must write.
Speaking them grants Corin the Ley-Touched trait: advantage on all saves against plague magic and the ability to cast Detect Magic at will, but he permanently loses the memory of one named NPC from his past (player's choice), which changes his personal quests' endings. Letting another speak preserves his memory and grants him the Archivist's Clarity trait (+2 on all Intelligence checks for the rest of the campaign) but the ritual disruption check is made at disadvantage unless Theron's chime was recovered.
Reading the Grey Stair codex's final pages.
Corin stops being a man who records history and becomes a man who is inside it. His notes shift from third person to first.
The dry detachment cracks; Corin begins speaking of the plague's victims by name.
Gains Read Madness ritual and permanent immunity to the shrine's fear aura.
The confrontation with Dray in the Tallow Yard.
Corin's calm is revealed as armor, and he must choose whether to keep wearing it.
The Mora relationship deepens into genuine trust or cools into professional distance, depending on what he told her about the codex.
Gains permanent advantage on Insight against the Choir, or the Choir marks him for death.
Speaking or surrendering the counter-words at the Sunken Shrine.
Corin pays the shrine's price in memory or in pride, and either way he is changed at the level of the self.
If he speaks the words, one named memory is gone forever; the player chooses which.
Ley-Touched trait (plague magic resistance) or Archivist's Clarity (+2 Intelligence checks).
Ally
Corin and Mora served the same catacomb archive for over a century, she as senior archivist and he as the cataloguer of the oldest shelves. They spent decades arguing over classification systems, trading rare inks, and dividing the night watch over the restricted ledgers. Mora taught Corin the archive's unwritten rule: a record is only as good as the person who will read it after you are dead. When the quarantine sealed the gates, they were separated by a collapsed stair, and Corin spent three days digging toward her camp before cult patrols forced him back.
He found her instead by leaving translated fragments of the shrine's dead tongue on sarcophagus lids, a code only the two of them could read. Their reunion in the Catacomb Hall is less a meeting than a resumption: she immediately checks whether his spellbook survived, he immediately checks whether her spectacles did. But there is a wound between them now, because Mora's stolen map was taken by Dray, whom both of them mentored, and each privately believes they should have seen the betrayal coming.
Corin's quest to recover the map is as much an apology as a mission. If Corin shares the codex's terrible implications with her, Mora becomes his closest confidant and the co-author of the record he hopes will outlive them both.
Enemy
Dray was Corin's mentor for forty years and the only person who ever taught him the dead tongue's grammar, sharing a desk in the catacomb archive through two floods, one fire, and a hundred quiet nights of cataloguing. Corin worshipped him the way only a lonely apprentice can. Dray's fall to the Ratbound Choir is not abstract to Corin; it is the corruption of the very voice in his head that corrects his translations.
Dray stole Mora's map personally, knowing Corin would be the one sent after it, and his theft note was written in Corin's own early shorthand, a deliberate message: I know your hand, come find me. Corin's stakes are existential. If Dray is right that the Choir's archives will outlive the city, then everything Corin believes about the purpose of records is wrong, and Corin would rather kill his mentor than admit it.
Dray, for his part, sees Corin as his finest work and his greatest failure: the student who learned the language but not the lesson. Their conflict is fought in annotations, marginalia, and stolen pages as much as in knives, and every exchange between them is conducted in a written code the cult cannot read. Corin's fear is not that Dray will kill him, but that in their final conversation, Dray will be right about something.
Faction
Corin's relationship with the Ash Watch began badly and improves on evidence. When the quarantine sealed the gates, Watch patrols swept the catacomb entrances and burned Corin's supply cache as 'cult material,' costing him two months of lamp oil and three rare dictionaries, an insult he has not forgiven and mentions constantly. He has since watched Watch deserters executed at the north wall and recorded each one in his ledger with date, name, and the exact wording of the order, which is technically sedition and would hang him if the Inquisitor ever read it.
His value to the Watch is precisely what makes him dangerous to them: he is the only living citizen who can read the shrine's dead tongue, which means he is either their greatest asset in proving the plague is deliberate or the man who knew and said nothing for two weeks. Corin must choose how to present himself. If he brings Captain Vey the ledger, the map, and Dray's testimony, the Watch grants him official sanction, a writ of passage, and grudging respect, and Quartermaster Bree stops overcharging him.
If he is caught carrying Choir cipher materials during his potential double-agent gambit, the Watch will arrest him as a cultist, and only Vey's personal intervention, or hard evidence of his loyalty, can save him from the Inquisitor's rope.
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