Lady Seraphine

Level 16 Human Bard (College of Lore) (College of Lore)

Available with DM subscription

STR

8 (-1)

DEX

18 (+4)

CON

13 (+1)

INT

12 (+1)

WIS

CHA

20 (+5)

Defense

Armor Class 17 (Studded Leather + Dex (16 + 1? no) — 12 + 4 Dex = 16; with Mage Armor 17)

Hit Points 99 (16d8 + 16 +1)

Speed 30 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws dexterity, charisma

Skills Stealth +9, Deception +10, Persuasion +10, Sleight of hand +9

Features

Web of Whispers (Spy Network)

custom Level 16

At will (downtime)

CUSTOM FEATURE: Seraphine commands a network of informants and charmed nobles across the empire. Between adventures, she can learn one significant secret about a person, faction, or location (DM's discretion; DC 15 Charisma (Deception) or Persuasion to extract faster). In play, she can produce a piece of blackmail or leverage on most imperial officials once per day.

The Long Con (Infiltrator)

custom Level 16

1/day

CUSTOM FEATURE: Seraphine may plant a Suggestion in a creature she has successfully Deceived during the last 24 hours without using a spell slot, as if casting suggestion (save DC 18). She uses this to sabotage alliances from within.

Cutting Words

subclass (College of Lore) Level 3

Reaction, expends a Bardic Inspiration die

When a creature Seraphine can see within 60 ft. makes an attack, damage, or ability check roll, she can use her Reaction to subtract the Bardic Inspiration die roll from the result.

Countercharm

class Level 7

Reaction

When a creature within 30 ft. that can hear Seraphine fails a saving throw against charm or fright, she can use her Reaction to grant it advantage on the save.

Bardic Inspiration (d12)

class Level 5

Charisma modifier (5) uses, Short or Long Rest recharge

Bonus action: give a creature within 60 ft. a Bardic Inspiration die (d12) to add to one ability check, attack roll, or saving throw.

Font of Inspiration

class Level 5

Short Rest recharge

Seraphine regains all expended Bardic Inspiration on a Short Rest, and can expend a spell slot to regain one use as a Bonus Action.

Actor (Feat)

feat Level 4

Advantage on Charisma (Deception) and Charisma (Performance) checks when passing as someone else; can mimic speech and sounds.

Magical Discoveries

subclass (College of Lore) Level 6

Seraphine has learned Counterspell and Banishment through her infernal studies (counted under Magical Secrets).

Magical Secrets

class Level 10

Seraphine has learned Counterspell and Banishment from other traditions (included in prepared spells).

Alert (Background Feat)

background Level 1

Add proficiency bonus to Initiative; can swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling.

Jack of All Trades

class Level 2

Add half proficiency bonus (+2) to any ability check that doesn't already use proficiency.

Song of Rest (d8)

class Level 2

Passive during Short Rests

Allies regain 1d8 extra hit points during a Short Rest when Seraphine sings or speaks.

Bonus Proficiencies (Lore)

subclass Level 3

Proficiency with three additional skills (represented in the skill list above).

Expertise (Deception, Persuasion, Sleight of Hand, Stealth)

class Level 9

Double proficiency bonus on the listed skills.

Spellcasting

charisma DC 18 +13 to hit Level 1: 4 slots Level 2: 3 slots Level 3: 3 slots Level 4: 3 slots Level 5: 3 slots Level 6: 2 slots

Prepared count (20 spells + 4 cantrips) fits the 2024 Bard formula of 4 + level prepared spells. Cutting Words and Magical Secrets spells are fully legal under SRD 5.2.

Vicious Mockery

Cantrip class

enchantment 1 action 60 ft. V

Wisdom save or 4d4 psychic damage and disadvantage on next attack roll.

Minor Illusion

Cantrip class

illusion 1 action 30 ft. S, M

Create a sound or an illusory image within range.

Prestidigitation

Cantrip class

transmutation 1 action 10 ft. V, S

Minor magical tricks and sensory effects.

Mage Hand

Cantrip class

conjuration 1 action 30 ft. V, S

Spectral hand manipulates objects at range.

Charm Person

Level 1 class

enchantment 1 action 30 ft. V, S

Wisdom save or charmed for 1 hour; target regards you as a friendly acquaintance.

Disguise Self

Level 1 class

illusion 1 action Self V, S

Alter your appearance for 1 hour.

Dissonant Whispers

Level 1 class

enchantment 1 action 60 ft. V

Wisdom save or 5d6 psychic damage and frightened reaction movement.

Healing Word

Level 1 class

evocation 1 bonus action 60 ft. V

Heal a creature 2d4 + 5 hit points.

Detect Thoughts

Level 2 class

divination 1 action Self (30 ft. radius) V, S, M

Read surface thoughts; deeper probe allows Wisdom save.

Invisibility

Level 2 class

illusion 1 action Touch V, S, M

Target becomes invisible for 1 hour.

Suggestion

Level 2 class

enchantment 1 action 30 ft. V, M

Wisdom save or pursue a reasonable course of action for up to 8 hours.

Hypnotic Pattern

Level 3 class

illusion 1 action 120 ft. S, M

Wisdom save or charmed and incapacitated for 1 minute.

Fear

Level 3 class

illusion 1 action Self (30-ft. cone) V, S, M

Wisdom save or frightened and drops what it holds.

Sending

Level 3 class

evocation 1 action Unlimited (same plane) V, S, M

Send a 25-word message to any creature you know.

Counterspell

Level 3 Magical Secrets

abjuration 1 reaction 60 ft. S

Interrupt a spell of 3rd level or lower automatically; higher levels require an ability check (DC 10 + spell level).

Greater Invisibility

Level 4 class

illusion 1 action Touch V, S

Target is invisible for 1 minute even while attacking.

Banishment

Level 4 Magical Secrets

abjuration 1 action 60 ft. V, S, M

Charisma save or banished to a demiplane; concentration, up to 1 minute.

Dominate Person

Level 5 class

enchantment 1 action 60 ft. V, S

Wisdom save or charmed and dominated for up to 1 minute (concentration).

Modify Memory

Level 5 class

enchantment 1 action 30 ft. V, S

Wisdom save or reshape up to 10 minutes of the target's memory.

Mislead

Level 5 class

illusion 1 action Self S

Become invisible while an illusory double acts on your behalf.

Mass Suggestion

Level 6 class

enchantment 1 action 60 ft. V, M

Up to 12 creatures (Wisdom save) pursue one suggestion for up to 8 hours.

Eyebite

Level 6 class

necromancy 1 action Self (60-ft. radius) V, S

Each turn, sicken, panic, or charm a visible target (Wisdom save).

Behind the character

Character Information

Lady Seraphine is the empire's beautiful lie made flesh: a woman in crimson and black silk who enters a room like a warm hearth and leaves it like a draft under the door. She is Vane's spymaster and diplomat, the architect of the Web of Whispers, and the reason half the empire's nobility smiles at agents they don't know they have. Her charm is not a performance layered over coldness — it is the coldness, honed for twenty years into something that feels indistinguishable from kindness.

She remembers birthdays, debts, and the exact sentence that will break each person she meets, and she files all of it in a ledger she would burn a city to protect. Beneath the spymaster is a name she abandoned so completely that she keeps its record locked away, unread, in a stolen page — because Seraphine understands, in the way only people who have erased themselves understand, that identity is leverage, and leverage unspent is leverage wasted.

She serves Vane because he lets her indulge, and plots against him because indulgence is not ownership, and she has sworn — in the only vow she takes seriously — that no one will ever own her. She is patient the way rot is patient, loyal the way a loan is loyal, and when she finally stands in the Throne of Cinders and the party speaks the name she sold everything to bury, the mask will not shatter. It will simply, for the first time in forty years, be optional.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Seraphine was born Sera Vellin, the daughter of a Emberfall dock-clerk, in the last years of the old kingdom. She learned early that information was the only currency the poor could mint: which merchant beat his wife, which guard took bribes, which magistrate's son frequented which cellar. By sixteen she was selling secrets to both sides of a dockworkers' strike; by nineteen she had sold out the strike's organizers to save her own skin, and discovered she slept fine afterward.

Vane's collectors came for her sister's name first — the girl had been overheard repeating seditious talk — and Sera traded the name for a position in the new regime's intelligence service. She told herself the girl would only be questioned. She has never checked whether that was true, because she paid the Oarsman for the memory of checking. In Vane's service she rose by the oldest method: she made herself indispensable and made everyone else disposable.

She built the Web thread by thread — a charmed noble here, a blackmailed clerk there — until the empire's secrets flowed through her hands like water through a sieve, and she kept the Ledger of Broken Names as both insurance and scripture. When the party was banished and the decades began, Seraphine did what she always does: she adapted, thrived, and quietly began preparing for the day the Emperor's luck ran out.

Now the soul engine falters, Thorne circles, Vorgath's reminders arrive, and a sister she sold forty-three years ago runs an orphanage in the ruins of the city that made her. Seraphine stands at the center of her own web with every thread in her hand, and for the first time in her life, she is not entirely sure which threads are holding her up — and which are holding her in.

She tells herself she will know what to do when the moment comes. She has always known what to do when the moment comes. That is precisely what frightens her about the ones that are coming.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

Seraphine's sister survives in Emberfall's ruins, running an orphanage that shelters children marked by soul collectors — a living witness to the sale that made Lady Seraphine, and a thread the party can pull toward mercy, blackmail, or ruin.
Someone is smuggling River Styx water into the empire's wine and dissolving Seraphine's charms one noble at a time; the supplier is the Pale Oarsman's rival ferryman, who is selling memories and mind-rot to a buyer Seraphine has not yet identified.
Duke Vorgath holds an unclaimed favor from Seraphine dating to before Vane's coronation — the terms are unknown even to her handlers, and Vorgath has begun, quietly, to send reminders.
A defector in Tidewatch possesses the final page of the Ledger of Broken Names, containing Seraphine's true mortal name and the names of everyone she has ever sold — including, possibly, people the party once knew.
High Inquisitor Thorne has petitioned the Emperor twice for Seraphine's interrogation and been refused; a third petition is being drafted, and Thorne is gathering evidence that could also damn half the imperial court.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

Seraphine sold her own sister's name to Vane's soul collectors to buy her own place at court; the memory of the sale was later paid to the River Styx and sits in the Oarsman's keeping.
She maintains the Ledger of Broken Names — a complete record of every soul she has sold, charmed, or betrayed — as insurance against Vane, Thorne, and everyone else, hidden in a vault only she can open.
She has already secretly promised Duke Vorgath the pact contract's destruction in exchange for her survival after Vane falls, a bargain that directly conflicts with the party's need to use the contract against the Emperor.

What haunts them

Fears

Being commanded — truly owned the way her charmed nobles are commanded — is the one horror she cannot joke away, and it is why she will eventually move against Vane.
That the sister she sold remembers her face, and that the reckoning will come not as a knife but as forgiveness she has not earned.
That the Web dies with her: that twenty years of threads unravel into nothing because she trusted no one enough to inherit them.

What drives them

Aspirations

To outlive Vane — not as his successor by conquest, but as the power behind whoever inherits the ashes, holding the strings while someone else wears the crown.
To destroy the pact contract so that no infernal court, including Vorgath's, can ever hold a claim on her again.
To learn, once, what it feels like to be trusted by someone who knows exactly what she is — and to find out whether that is even possible for a woman made entirely of leverage.

Personal quest · 1

The Ledger of Broken Names

Seraphine keeps a hidden ledger of every soul she has sold, charmed, or betrayed, including the mortal name she abandoned decades ago. She wants the ledger's missing final page, stolen by a defected informant who fled to Tidewatch, because the page contains the true name she traded to Vorgath's court years ago. Recovering it means recovering a piece of herself she pretends not to miss, and destroying it means becoming the mask forever.

Current Stage

Identify the defector through Seraphine's Web of Whispers network among Tidewatch's dockworkers and merchant clerks.

Choice

Extract the defector quietly through charm and blackmail, or burn their safehouse and everyone in it to guarantee silence.

Quiet extraction preserves the network's reputation; burning it sends a terror-message that ripples through the empire's underworld.

Mechanical Rewards

The Ledger of Broken Names (custom item): once per day, produce a piece of true blackmail on any imperial official without a check.
Permanent +1 Charisma or an upgraded Long Con, depending on the path chosen.

Narrative Rewards

Seraphine's relationship with Vane shifts: he begins to suspect the ledger exists, forcing her into deeper duplicity.
The defector's fate becomes a story beat that colors how the party trusts her.

Personal quest · 2

The Gilded Cage

Seraphine's network depends on a dozen charmed nobles, but one of them — Duchess Ilvara Mourn, keeper of the empire's western ledgers — has begun resisting her enchantments. Rather than replace her, Seraphine wants to understand why, because Ilvara's resistance suggests the soul engine's magic is destabilizing, and if the engine falters, Vane's entire apparatus, including Seraphine's protections, begins to crack. She needs someone to enter Ilvara's dreams and find out what is breaking the spell.

Current Stage

Infiltrate Duchess Mourn's estate during a masquerade and use Detect Thoughts and Modify Memory to trace the source of her resistance.

Choice

Rewrite Ilvara's memories to restore control, or leave her mind intact and learn what she knows about the engine's instability.

Rewriting preserves the network but silences a warning; leaving her intact risks exposure but reveals the truth about Vane's weakening grip.

Mechanical Rewards

Either permanent enchantment resistance and restored inspiration, or telepathic bonding and engine-instability leverage.
Access to Duchess Mourn's western ledgers, revealing supply lines and hidden imperial vaults.

Narrative Rewards

Ilvara becomes either a restored pawn or a dangerous, grateful loose end.
Thorne's suspicion of Seraphine crystallizes into an internal rivalry questline.

Personal quest · 3

What the Styx Kept

Only unlocked if Seraphine read her ledger page: the Pale Oarsman holds a memory of hers — the day she sold her own sister's name to Vane's collectors to save herself. She remembers the debt but not the face. She wants the memory back, not out of guilt, but because the sister survived, and Seraphine needs to know if the woman who remembers her betrayal is building a life in the empire or a knife.

Current Stage

Bargain with the Pale Oarsman, who demands a memory of equal emotional weight in trade — Seraphine must choose which memory to surrender, and the party witnesses the cost.

Choice

Pay with the memory of the single moment she felt genuine loyalty to Vane, weakening her cover, or with a stolen memory from a party member (with their consent negotiated in play).

Sacrificing her loyalty-memory makes her deception against Vane easier but hollows her; taking a party memory poisons trust irreparably unless freely given.

Mechanical Rewards

Either enhanced deception immunity or genuine inspiration power, per path.
A resistance contact in Emberfall (reckoning path) or total mental opacity (erasure path).

Narrative Rewards

The sister's fate becomes a mirror for Seraphine's final choice in the Throne of Cinders.
The Oarsman remembers her debt paid — he owes her one crossing, no toll, no questions.

Major Decision

Context

During the Council of Free Peoples, Seraphine infiltrates the council disguised as a Tidewatch merchant envoy. The party has the chance to expose her — or, if she has earned a fragile rapport with them, she offers a devil's bargain: she will feed Vane false intelligence about the alliance's march route in exchange for a seat at the table after the war.

Choice Made

Expose the spymaster, or accept the traitor's bargain.

Impact

Exposing her forces a public confrontation where she fights or flees, and Vane loses his eyes inside the council (party gains advantage on the march). Accepting the bargain gives the party her Web of Whispers intelligence for one arc but plants The Long Con inside the alliance — she can later sabotage the march unless the party keeps her bound by an oath, a favor, or a secret of their own.

Major Decision

Context

Seraphine discovers the soul engine is failing and that Vane's protections — including the charms anchoring her network — will collapse with it. She approaches the party in secret with everything she knows about the Emperor's Vault: layout, wards, the dead man's switch. Her price: when Vane falls, she wants the pact contract destroyed, not used, so no one can ever command her the way Vane did.

Choice Made

Take her intelligence and honor the terms, take the intelligence and betray her, or refuse and interrogate her instead.

Impact

Honoring the deal grants the party a complete map of the vault and Seraphine's Counterspell support during the infiltration — but the contract's destruction means Vorgath's tithe can never be formally reclaimed, angering the infernal court. Betraying her makes her a vengeful enemy who sells the party's identities to every remaining imperial agent, imposing disadvantage on all social checks in imperial territory.

Major Decision

Context

In the Throne of Cinders, as Vane falls or falters, Seraphine stands at a crossroads made of everything the party has learned about her: the ledger, the sister, the failing engine. She can fight to the death at Vane's side, flee with the Web's treasury and vanish into the underworld, or — if the party confronted her with her own name — kneel, surrender the network's secrets, and ask for the one thing she has never had: a sentence of her own choosing.

Choice Made

Fight her, let her flee, or accept her surrender and judge her.

Impact

Fighting her adds a CR 16 spellcaster to the final battle but yields her mask (a legendary item granting advantage on all Deception and immunity to divination). Letting her flee seeds a post-campaign antagonist or uneasy ally. Accepting her surrender transfers the Web of Whispers to the party as a downtime resource and removes her from the final battle — but if the sister quest ended in erasure, the surrender is a trap, and she strikes the moment the party turns their backs on Vane.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Reading the ledger's final page

Transformation

Seraphine stops speaking of her past in the third person. Her mannerisms soften almost imperceptibly; her cutting words begin to aim at targets she chooses rather than targets she is ordered to cut.

Mechanical Changes

Charisma

+1 (to 21) as reclaimed identity deepens her presence

The weight of a true name makes her performance more real than any mask.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The Gilded Cage — learning the engine is failing

Transformation

Seraphine shifts from loyal lieutenant to quiet usurper. Every interaction with Vane thereafter is performance, and she begins hoarding resources against the day the throne cracks.

Mechanical Changes

The Long Con

Upgraded: the planted Suggestion lasts 8 hours instead of 1, and she may maintain two concurrent long cons.

Practicing deception against the emperor himself hones her craft to its edge.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The sister's reckoning or erasure

Transformation

The last mirror of her old self is faced or destroyed. Seraphine either finds a sliver of the woman she was, or becomes something entirely of the Web's making.

Mechanical Changes

Inspiration / mental opacity

Reckoning: once-per-day free Bardic Inspiration, new flaw 'Haunted by Mercy'. Erasure: immune to lie-detection and thought-reading, permanently loses inspiration.

The soul, or its absence, changes what her voice can do.

Ally

Duchess Ilvara Mourn

Relationship Charmed asset / reluctant confidante

Influence 7/10

Loyalty 5/10

Shared History

Seraphine charmed Ilvara eleven years ago at the emperor's command, intending a routine asset. But Ilvara was cleverer than most, and over years of manufactured friendship — theater trips, late ledgers, shared wine — Seraphine made an error she has never repeated since: she enjoyed the company. Ilvara's western ledgers became the Web's backbone, and her estate the one place Seraphine goes without a mask. When Ilvara began resisting the charm, Seraphine's first instinct was not replacement but fear — fear that the one relationship she has that is almost real was never real at all.

Ilvara, for her part, has fragments of memory that don't fit, a loyalty she cannot explain, and a growing suspicion that her dearest friend is the reason she wakes some mornings with the taste of ash and the certainty she has forgotten something vital.

Potential Breaking Points

If Ilvara's memories are restored fully, she becomes the party's key witness to Seraphine's methods — and the woman most qualified to dismantle the Web from within.
If Seraphine rewrites her again, Ilvara's mind begins to fray, and the fraying draws High Inquisitor Thorne's attention to the estate.

Enemy

High Inquisitor Thorne

Threat Level 8/10

Conflict Type Rivalry within the Emperor's court

Personal Stakes

Thorne and Seraphine are the two blades of Vane's rule — his open fanaticism, her hidden hand — and they have spent a decade carving territory from each other. Thorne's soul collectors twice seized nobles Seraphine had spent years charming, burning assets she cultivated for a decade, and Seraphine answered by feeding three of his inquisitors to a rebel ambush and letting him bury 'martyrs' whose dossiers she had quietly falsified.

He suspects she keeps a ledger of the court's sins; she knows he keeps one of hers. Each has a file on the other that grows every season. Thorne believes charm is weakness and that Seraphine's network is a tumor the Emperor will one day let him excise. Seraphine knows Thorne has petitioned Vane twice for her interrogation, and both times Vane refused — which means Vane values her more, and Thorne hates her for it.

Their rivalry is the empire's cold civil war, fought with informants and forged warrants instead of armies, and the party can light the fuse between them at almost any point in Act 3.

Possible Resolutions

The party can feed Thorne proof of the ledger, triggering an imperial purge that cripples Seraphine's network before the march on the throne.
Alternatively, they can broker a poisoned truce — Seraphine offers Thorne the soul engine's instability in exchange for standing down, knowing the knowledge will drive him to Vane at exactly the wrong moment.

Faction

The Web of Whispers

Standing 10/10

Influence

Seraphine did not inherit the Web; she built it, thread by thread, over twenty years — first as a street informant in old Emberfall, then as Vane's spymaster with imperial coin behind her. Every charmed noble, every bribed clerk, every blackmailed priest belongs to her personally, not to the crown, and she has structured it that way deliberately: the Web's loyalty runs to Seraphine, and through her to Vane only so long as she wills it.

This is her life's work and her true throne. The network spans the empire's ports, courts, and kitchens; its members know each other only by sigils and dead-drop protocols, so no single capture can unravel it. Its influence touches Emperor's Legion supply schedules, Tidewatch's merchant councils, and even a few of the Oracle's pilgrims. The Web is also her vulnerability: it is the ledger's shadow, the thing Thorne hunts, and the inheritance she has no heir for.

Whether she weaponizes it against the party, trades it for her life, or kneels and hands it over in the Throne of Cinders, the Web's fate is inseparable from hers.

Obligations

Seraphine must periodically feed the Web's nobles small victories to keep their charms sweet — neglected assets begin to resist, as Ilvara did.
She owes Duke Vorgath's court one unclaimed favor from a bargain struck decades ago, a debt she has quietly never let come due.

Benefits

Daily access to blackmail or leverage on most imperial officials.
Between-adventure intelligence on any significant person, faction, or location in the empire.

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