Kane has standing writ to burn any grey-robed (Ash Chorus) vessel entering Harrowgate. She commands two armed harbour guard skiffs and can call the town's watch (see module notes).
Proficiency with Smith's Tools; craft repairs and jury-rigged armour for the harbour crews.
After damaging a creature, move up to half speed without provoking opportunity attacks.
Longsword (Sap), Pike (Push), Dagger (Nick). Can swap masteries on a Long Rest.
4 Superiority Dice (d8). Maneuvers: Precision Attack, Goading Attack, Riposte.
When a check fails, expend a Superiority Die to add it to the roll.
+2 Strength (15→17 base, then human +1 = 18).
One extra action; once per Short/Long Rest.
Regain 1d10+6 HP; 2 uses per Long Rest.
Two attacks with the Attack action.
+1 AC while wearing armour.
Behind the character
Captain Verity Kane is a weathered woman in her forties with cropped grey hair going white at the temples, storm-grey eyes that read water and faces with the same flat appraisal, and a naval coat cut for weather rather than rank. Her hand rests on her sword hilt when she is thinking, and everyone in Harrowgate knows to wait out the silence. She has run the last port before the ice for fourteen years, and the town has learned that her word is the harbour's law: she licenses every hull, commands two armed guard skiffs, and holds a standing Crown writ to burn any grey-robed vessel that enters her water.
She is Lawful Neutral in the way of good harbour officers — the rules are the only wall between a small town and a cold sea, and she does not bend them for charm, coin, or famous names. She does not like strangers, cults, or Carl of the Seven Seas, in that order, and she says so plainly at the Grey Gull with a tankard she barely drinks. Her suspicion is not paranoia; she has lost two fishing boats to the fog this season and she has begun to suspect the fog has help.
Beneath the salt and the discipline is a woman carrying three griefs she has never once discussed: her father's cutter, lost north of the charts thirty years ago; the fishermen she sent out and never saw again; and a night in her own guardhouse when a raving priest told her something she has kept locked in her chest ever since. She fights like a dock worker — pike, longsword, and no wasted motion — and she is at her best and worst when protecting people who did not ask to be protected. She is not cruel, but she is hard, and the hardness has kept Harrowgate alive longer than any wall.
Before the adventure
Verity Kane was born in Harrowgate, the daughter of harbour pilot Edric Kane, a man who could read the northern water the way priests read scripture. Her childhood was signal flags, tide tables, and the smell of tar, and she assumed she would pilot boats until her knees gave out. That changed the year she turned fourteen, when her father's revenue cutter was ordered north past the last charted water to intercept a smuggler and never came back.
The Crown sent a clerk, the clerk sent a letter, and the letter said lost with all hands. Verity read it forty times and did not believe a word of it, because her father had taught her that the sea does not swallow a cutter whole without leaving a plank.
She signed onto a naval patrol at sixteen out of spite as much as grief, and spent twenty years learning the northern coast the hard way: running down smugglers in the salt marsh channels, escorting fishing fleets through the ice, and twice pulling crews out of water that was trying to cook them. She earned her commission at thirty and her harbour captaincy at thirty-two, when the previous captain retired rather than sign the Crown's new writ concerning grey-robed vessels.
Kane signed it without hesitation and has enforced it without exception — twice this season she has had a Chorus ship burned at anchor while its crew stood on the quay and sang.
The town respects her and does not entirely like her, which suits her. She takes her Sunday meal at the Grey Gull because Greta Hearthstone is the one person who knew her before the coat, and she pays the inn's insurance because Greta will not accept charity. She maintains the shrine's memorial candles for the lost list, one hundred names and growing, and she reads the register every year on the anniversary of her father's loss. She has never taken a longer posting south, though the Crown has offered twice; she says Harrowgate is where the wall is thinnest and someone has to stand at it.
Her relationship with the expedition is transactional by design: she will grant a licence when the Chorus cell in her own town is dealt with, because she cannot spare the guard to do it herself, and she will sail with the expedition if the Crown orders it, because an order is an order. But her interest runs deeper than the writ. The fog wall has taken her father, her boats, and her peace, and she has begun to suspect that the answers are not north of the charts at all — they are in the scraped-out lines of scripture, the burned warehouse cellar, and the journal of a priest who came home screaming.
She does not trust Carl, whom she remembers as a loud boy from the palace who never thanked the harbour crews that provisioned his first voyages. She trusts competence, she trusts Greta, and if the party earns either, they earn her — a hard ally with two skiffs, a signal horn, and a standing order she will enforce to her last breath.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Kane's two lost fishing boats were not taken by fog — the Ash Chorus crewed them with her own missing sailors and uses them to ferry grey-robed couriers up the coast. She needs someone to shadow the boats to their landing, take one intact, and bring back proof: the Chorus tokens sewn into her fishermen's coats. If the party recovers the boats, Kane's guilt over sending those crews out is answered, and she grants the expedition's licence without condition.
Track the grey-sailed boats from the Harrowgate quay without being seen by the Chorus watcher.
The Burned Warehouse — the licence bargain
If she grants the licence, Kane gains the custom feature 'Harbour Authority' (once per day, she can commandeer any vessel or dock worker in a Crown port as a bonus action) but takes on responsibility for every life the expedition loses. If she refuses, she keeps her watch intact but loses the town's respect, and her Standing Order feature is downgraded for the rest of the campaign.
The Fogwall Gate — the price of passage
Giving the name opens the gate for free but costs Kane her father's signal horn, a keepsake that granted her advantage on Perception checks at sea; she replaces it with the Warden's discipline, gaining the Tactical Mind manoeuvre permanently at the cost of one Superiority Die per long rest.
The Heart of Borealis — the Crown's honour
Reporting the truth makes Kane an enemy of the Crown's clerks but grants her the 'Sworn Witness' feature — advantage on all Insight and Investigation checks about official documents. Burying the orders makes her complicit: she gains a permanent +2 to her maximum hit points from the Crown's quiet gratitude, but can never again use her Standing Order against ships flying royal colours.
Ally
Greta and Kane grew up two streets apart in Harrowgate, daughters of a chandler and a harbour pilot respectively. When Kane was nineteen and her first command nearly foundered on the winter ice, it was Greta who organised the rope line that hauled her crew off the floes, and Kane has eaten at the Grey Gull every Sunday since. Greta keeps Kane's debts — she insists they are debts — in the back of her ledger, and Kane quietly pays the inn's insurance against fire and raid each quarter.
Greta's brother's disappearance with the Guild courier run has reopened the old wound: Kane feels she failed Greta twice, once at sea and once on the quay, and has doubled her patrols of the coast road since. Greta is the only person alive who can make Kane laugh about the fog, and the only one Kane would burn a grey-robed ship for without an order.
Enemy
Kane has never met Maelis and knows her only as the grey-robed woman who paid in coin a hundred years out of mint and asked the way to the Ninth Terrace — but Maelis knows Kane very well. The Chorus's agents in Harrowgate report to Maelis, and it was Maelis's cell that took Kane's two fishing boats and turned her own fishermen into couriers. Worse, Maelis has been saving the blood price for a crew, and Kane's licence and guard skiffs are the last obstacle between the Chorus and the expedition's people.
Maelis regards Kane with genuine warmth, the way one regards a good watchdog, and has written her name into the offering ledger as 'the keeper of the last door'. Kane, if she ever reads that ledger, will take it as the worst insult of her life: to be counted as part of the price rather than a defender against it.
Faction
Kane holds a Crown commission as harbour captain, renewed every year for fourteen years, and her writ to burn grey-robed vessels was signed by a Crown clerk whose name she has never learned. She has spent her career being the Crown's answer to the question nobody in Lordinium wants asked: what actually happens at the end of the charts? The Crown pays her late, licenses her hulls, and has quietly stopped answering her requests for a second patrol ship — she suspects, correctly, that the clerks would rather she not send reports at all.
She has met King Soleiman once, at a harbour inspection, and remembers that he asked about his brother's last voyage and did not like her answer. Her loyalty is to the office, not the man: she will obey a Crown order to sail north with the expedition, and she will also put the King's own sealed orders in front of the whole harbour if they prove the Crown knew the price. That tension — duty to a throne that may be feeding people to a god — is the fault line the campaign can drive a wedge into.
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