Alden secretly keeps a copy of the solar ritual's first verse beneath the chapel's altar stone. He knows the solar's true name—Solarael—but shares it only if the party saves the Chapel of the Dawn from the Unbound Choir. This is a plot feature, not a combat ability.
When stabilizing a dying creature, it regains 1 HP and becomes conscious. As a Magic action, heal 1d6 + 4 + creature's HD with a Healer's Kit. Alden learned this tending plague victims in Ashfen.
As a Magic action, destroy 1/2 CR or less undead within 30 feet; or deal 2d10 + cleric level radiant damage to creatures within 30 feet (Con save DC 14 for half).
The priest of the Dawn channels solar radiance. Alden's faith is tied to the Order of the Dawn and the sleeping solar Solarael.
From the Acolyte background: knows 2 cantrips (guidance, thaumaturgy) and can cast bless once per long rest without a slot.
As a Reaction, impose disadvantage on an attack roll against a creature within 30 feet that can see Alden.
Alden chose Potent Spellcasting: add Wisdom modifier (+3) to cantrip damage.
Undead of CR 1/2 or less destroyed when turned.
Prepared spells total 12 from class + 4 domain spells always prepared. Cantrips: 3 from class + 2 from Magic Initiate (guidance, thaumaturgy listed above are usable via that feat). Alden's broken left arm imposes disadvantage on Strength checks and Athletics until magically healed—a roleplaying detail, not a mechanical crippling.
Dex save DC 14 or take 2d8 radiant (Potent Spellcasting: +3).
Target gains +1d4 to one ability check within 1 minute.
Manifest minor wonders of the Dawn.
Object sheds bright light in 20-ft radius.
Up to 3 creatures gain +1d4 to attack rolls and saves for 1 minute.
Heal 1d8 + 3 HP.
Target gains +2 AC for 10 minutes (concentration).
Wis save DC 14 or obey a one-word command.
Spectral mace, +5 to hit, 1d8+3 force damage per turn.
End one disease or condition.
Wis save DC 14 or paralyzed (concentration).
3 creatures gain +5 max/current HP for 8 hours.
Spirits of the Dawn circle Alden: 3d8 radiant on failed Con save, half speed (concentration).
Ends curses; can free a creature from the Codex's lesser whispers.
Return a creature dead less than 1 minute to life with 1 HP.
Dex save DC 14 or 3d6 fire damage (half on success).
Dex save DC 14 or outlined, granting advantage on attacks (concentration).
60-ft sphere of sunlight for 1 hour.
Dex save DC 14 or 8d6 fire damage (half on success).
Behind the character
Father Alden is a weathered man in his fifties with a kind, lined face the rain of Ashfen has mapped with fine creases. Gray streaks his brown hair, and his eyes carry the particular patience of someone who has sat with the dying for decades and learned that most fear the dark less than they fear dying alone. He wears white and gold vestments gone mud-spattered at the hem, a chain shirt beneath them—a practical concession to the Choir's knives—and a simple wooden solar symbol on a leather cord.
His left arm hangs in a crude sling of linen and splints, and he waves off every offer of magical healing with a rueful smile and some deflection about the Dawn teaching patience. His right hand grips a heavy mace with a sunburst head, more often used to lean on than to swing. He speaks softly, asks questions before offering answers, and has a habit of humming solar hymns under his breath when he is worried.
His stubbornness is quiet but absolute: he has been offered conversion, torture, and death by the Unbound Choir, and answered all three with the same gentle refusal. He is a teacher at heart, and once he decides to trust someone, he trusts completely—a flaw as much as a virtue. Around him, even in gloom, a stubborn warmth seems to gather, like the last light of a sun that has not yet finished setting.
Before the adventure
Alden came to Ashfen twenty years ago as a young priest ordained by a traveling chapter of the Order of the Dawn, sent to tend a chapel that most of the Order had forgotten. He arrived during the first of the bog plagues and never left. Over two decades he buried more parishioners than he married, learned every family's name in the village, and turned the Chapel of the Dawn from a dusty waypoint into the beating heart of Ashfen's stubborn little faith.
The plague years forged him: he dragged the sick from flooded cottages with his own hands, performed last rites by candlelight through the night, and once held a dying woman's hand until dawn because she was afraid of the dark. It was during those years that the Order's archivists first shared with him the fragmentary records of the solar Solarael—the sleeping celestial whose name could one day unmake the Codex of Flayed Whispers.
Alden copied the ritual's first verse in his own hand and sealed it beneath the altar stone, a secret he has kept even from his acolyte, Brother Kaelen. He has prayed to a solar he has never seen for twenty years, and the not-seeing has never once shaken him—or so he tells himself. In truth, the plague victim whose eyes opened during last rites has haunted him ever since, and the Codex's whispers, when they first reached Ashfen, sounded uncomfortably like that man's voice.
When the Unbound Choir came hunting Elara Voss and the first page, they took Alden in his own vestry, defaced his altar, and put a silver dagger to his throat. Under the blade he gave them a half-truth about the ritual—enough to buy time, not enough to satisfy them. He does not know whether that half-truth will save his congregation or doom it, and the uncertainty sits on him heavier than the broken arm the raid's void-touched raven gave him days before. Now he waits for worthy hands to cut his bonds, weighing the oldest question of his faith: whether the light is meant to be guarded, or given away.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
A patient escaped from the Gilded Asylum staggers into Ashfen with silver stitches sealing his eyes, babbling about a matron who flays minds. Father Alden begs the party to shelter the man and learn what he witnessed. Removing the stitches safely requires a DC 15 Medicine check; a failure kills the patient. Alden's healer's instincts and guilt drive him—he treated plague victims in Ashfen for a decade and cannot bear watching another soul slip away while he stands by with a broken arm.
Shelter the patient at the Chapel of the Dawn while Choir agents close in.
Personal quest · 2
Father Alden secretly copied the solar ritual's first verse onto vellum and hid it beneath the chapel's altar stone. The Unbound Choir suspects this and has defaced the altar searching for it. Alden will not reveal the verse—or the solar's true name, Solarael—unless the party saves the Chapel of the Dawn from the cultists holding him in the vestry. This quest is the key that unlocks the campaign's endgame ritual.
Rescue Alden from the Choir interrogators in the vestry.
Personal quest · 3
Before the Choir came, Alden buried eleven plague victims from Ashfen in the bog near the Sunken Archive. Now the Codex's whispers have stirred them: drowned dead claw at the bog's edge each night, and Alden's Radiance of the Dawn can only reach so far with his arm in a sling. He asks the party to help him lay his congregation to rest—by force or by funeral—and to discover why the whispers chose his flock.
Investigate the bog graves at night and confront the risen dead.
After the party saves the Chapel of the Dawn, Alden holds the first verse of the solar ritual—knowledge the Choir tortured him for.
If he gives it freely, the party gains the Dawnwarden's Silver Dagger and a head start, but Alden stays behind and cannot aid them in Act II. If he travels with them, he becomes an allied caster (daily free bless), but the chapel remains unconsecrated and Ashfen offers no rest benefits. Either path permanently shapes who guards the ritual's beginning.
In Act II, Alden learns the Gilded Asylum's patients include people he once treated, now stitched and harvested by Matron Vela—a woman who, like him, lost her family to plague.
Demanding death grants Alden the Vengeance of the Dawn feature (his Radiance of the Dawn deals +1d10 against Choir leaders) but closes Vela's redemption permanently. Pursuing redemption costs a DC 18 Persuasion effort; if it succeeds, Vela surrenders the Solar Sigil freely and testifies against the Choir, but Alden gains a recurring doubt: his Radiance's damage drops by 1d10 as his certainty falters.
At the Altar of the Last Word, Alden realizes the ritual's final verse—carved in his memory from the altar stone—implies a mortal of true faith could finish the last word if the solar falters, at the cost of the mortal's own life.
Offering himself gives the party a safety net: if Solarael falls, Alden can complete the final page (campaign succeeds, but Alden dies and his soul joins the Dawn). Refusing removes that option but grants Alden the Dawn's Blessing—advantage on all saving throws during the Solar's Sacrifice—as reward for accepting the solar's sacrifice without presumption.
The party saves the Chapel of the Dawn.
Alden shares Solarael's true name and may join the party; his broken arm becomes a badge of survival rather than shame.
The Drowned Congregation quest is completed.
Alden's grief for his plague-dead congregation resolves into iron conviction; his faith deepens visibly.
Witnessing Solarael's sacrifice at the Altar of the Last Word.
Alden finally understands that the Dawn asks everything of those who serve it—and accepts it without bitterness.
Ally
Twenty years ago, Elara Voss studied under the Order of the Dawn's archivists while Alden was a young acolyte copying solar hymns in the same scriptorium. They spent one winter transcribing the Order's fragmentary records of Solarael, arguing late into the night over whether the solar's name could ever be safely written down. Elara insisted all knowledge must be preserved; Alden insisted some names must be guarded. They parted ways when she left to pursue the Codex's history and he took his vows at Ashfen.
When the Choir came hunting the first page, Elara fled to the one person she trusted to keep a secret: the priest who had once argued that names should be guarded. Alden hid her route through the bog, warned Marla Fen to watch the roads, and was still arranging her escape when the cultists took him. Their reunion—her ink-stained hands cutting his bonds—is the first time either has seen the other since that winter, and the old argument resumes within the hour.
Enemy
Nira personally led the raid that shattered the Chapel of the Dawn and put a silver dagger to Alden's throat while her cultists defaced his altar. She knows his face, his voice, and—worse—his breaking point: under the blade, Alden whispered a half-truth about the ritual, and Nira has spent weeks turning that half-truth over, certain the old priest lied to her. She considers him her first true failure and intends to return to Ashfen to finish what the dagger started, flaying the truth from him page by page.
Alden, for his part, saw something in Nira's eyes during the interrogation—a flicker of the terrified girl she must have been before Mor saved her—and it haunts him. He prays for her soul even as he knows she will come for his congregation. Their conflict is not merely hunter and prey: each represents what the other might have become. If they meet again, Nira will offer Alden a choice—join the Choir's silence or watch Ashfen burn—and Alden must decide whether the girl behind the scarred face is still reachable, or whether mercy is just another word the Void has taught her to mimic.
Faction
Alden was ordained by the Order of the Dawn's last traveling chapter, which passed through Ashfen two decades ago and never returned. He is, as far as he knows, the Order's only living priest in the Reach—a title that weighs on him nightly. The Order's hidden chapels still recognize his seal, and knights who cross his path offer him deference bordering on reverence, which embarrasses him deeply. In practical terms, the Order owes him old favors: a knight named Captain Lysa Dawnward owes Alden her life from the plague years and will rally her hidden chapel to his call once, no questions asked.
But the Order also watches him. Its surviving commanders know a solar's true name is the most dangerous secret in the Reach, and they have quietly questioned whether a lone village priest can be trusted with it. If Alden shares Solarael's name with outsiders—the party—the Order may demand an accounting. Alden's standing with the Order could rise to full reinstatement if the Codex is destroyed, or the Order could brand him an oathbreaker if the name falls into the wrong hands. He carries this tension silently, praying each dawn that faith and duty will not ask him to choose between them.
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