Twenty years before the mast: Brannoc can work rigging, knots, and deck-handling in darkness or fog without disadvantage on checks made for shipboard tasks (climbing, splicing, hauling, steering).
Half proficiency bonus (1) added to Strength (Athletics) and any ability check to jump, climb, swim, or balance.
When you fail an ability check, expend a use of Second Wind to add 1d10 to the roll after seeing it.
+1 AC while wearing armor. (Reflected in AC above: 16 total.)
Attack twice when you take the Attack action.
Take one additional action this turn.
Regain 1d10 + 6 hit points.
Behind the character
Brannoc Tull is a wide, quiet man in his fifties, built like the capstan he has spent twenty years turning: broad through the shoulders and chest, thick-armed, with a low centre of gravity that makes him nearly impossible to knock down on a wet deck. His broken nose was set slightly wrong decades ago and never corrected, and his face carries the deep weathering of a life spent in salt wind — creased brown skin, grey going white at the temples, small pale eyes that do not move much and miss nothing.
He wears a salt-stiff oilskin coat over a wool shirt, a boatswain's pipe on a leather cord at his throat, and a boarding axe at his belt that he has never once had to draw. His hands are enormous, scarred across every knuckle, and always doing something: a knot, a splice, a coil. He speaks rarely and briefly, in the flat grammar of a man who learned that most sentences do not need finishing.
He does not drink, does not whistle on deck, and will not say the island's name after dark. He is superstitious the way a good surgeon is careful — every rule he keeps has a body behind it. Around Carl he is deferential and watchful; around the crew he is patient and exacting; around strangers he is a wall with eyes. The second sea-chest in his cabin is packed for a man who is not coming home, and he has not told anyone why.
Before the adventure
Brannoc Tull was born in the Salt Quarter of Lordinium, third of five children of a rope-maker's family, and went to sea at thirteen because the alternative was the ropewalk and he had already decided he would rather drown. He came up through the coastal packets, learned rigging from a Martonese bosun named Cutler who beat the lessons into him and then drowned doing the thing he had taught Brannoc to do, and by twenty-five was rated able seaman on ships that mattered.
He met Peg Leg Carl — not yet peg-legged, then just Carl — on the *Fair Merrow*, a grain runner out of Greyharbor, and the two men took to each other the way a keel takes to water: without discussion. Carl was the talker, the gambler, the man who could sell a voyage to a room full of people who should have known better. Brannoc was the one who made the voyage happen.
Over twenty years the pattern never changed: Carl found the horizon, Brannoc found the crew, the stores, the channel, and the way home. Eleven months ago the pattern broke. On the black sand of Borealis, with the crew sick and the ship leaking and the fog singing, Carl made an arrangement that Brannoc understood before it was spoken — the island's arithmetic was visible in the blood-channel in the sand, and two men had to go into it, and Brannoc did not argue, because thirty lives were on the other side of the scale and he has always been a man who counts.
He held one of them down. The other went quietly. The crew came home and the crew will not sleep, and Brannoc came home and does not drink, and every night he counts the crew twice and gets the same number and checks a third time anyway. He has packed a second sea-chest for Weller — oilskins, letters, the man's unspent advance — and he cannot deliver it, because delivering it means saying the name, and saying the name means admitting what he did, and he has not yet decided whether he is asking forgiveness or asking to be punished.
He vouches for Old Hask because Hask pulled him out of the Firth fifteen years ago, and because he believes debts are paid by trusting the debtor, not by pretending the ledger is clean. He is superstitious in a practical way: no whistling on deck, no island's name after dark, salt over the shoulder before a hard tack. Each rule has a story and he tells none of them. He is Lawful Neutral in the way of a man who believes that order is the only thing standing between a crew and the water, and the campaign will test that belief against the fact that the most orderly man he knows — Carl — is also the one who made the arrangement on the beach.
His nephew Alder signed onto this voyage to find his father, and Brannoc knows what the boy will find, and every day he does not tell him is a day the second sea-chest gets heavier. He is the expedition's spine: the crew obey him without noticing they are doing it, and if Carl's secret ever surfaces, whether the Saltspray holds together or fractures will depend entirely on which way Brannoc turns.
He has already decided, privately, that if it comes to it, he will say the names out loud — Weller and the other one, whose name he keeps in a private ledger in a hand nobody else can read — and let the account fall where it falls. He just needs the voyage to be over first. Or he needs someone to make him say them now. He is not sure which he is waiting for.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Brannoc has kept the second sea-chest packed for eleven months: two sets of oilskins, two letters, and a ship's log with two pages cut out. When the party earns his trust, he opens it and confesses what happened on the black sand of Borealis — that Carl gave two crewmen to the island to buy the rest of the crew's return, and that Brannoc held one of them down while the tide came in.
To resolve it, Brannoc must find out whether the tithed men still walk the island in some flowered half-life, speak their names at the treeline altar, and decide whether to tell the crew, tell the King, or carry the secret into the grave. The quest forces him to choose between twenty years of loyalty to Carl and the account he owes two dead men.
Earn Brannoc's trust aboard the Saltspray; he tests the party with small duties and silence before opening the chest.
Personal quest · 2
Brannoc vouches for Old Hask, but the vouching is not charity: fifteen years ago Hask pulled Brannoc out of the Weeping Firth after a wreck that killed four of their crew, and Brannoc has never repaid it. Now Hask is drinking himself to death in the Salted Eel with an unspent Concord purse, and Brannoc intends to settle both debts at once. He asks the party to help him get Hask sober, hear his testimony about the fog, and recover the purse — which carries Concord markings that make it evidence. Delivering Hask to the Saltspray as a sober pilot means confronting what Hask saw, and what the purse implies about who else was paid.
Sit with Hask in the Salted Eel through three nights of drinking and half-finished sentences.
Personal quest · 3
Brannoc can work rigging blind because of one night twenty years ago when the Saltspray's lanterns failed in a squall and he spliced the main brace by feel while the ship came apart around him. The old foretop still carries a knot he tied that night — a 'widow's hitch' of his own invention — and the Saltspray's new crew do not know it. Before the fog crossing, Brannoc wants to teach it to every hand aboard, and he needs the party to help him run a night drill: all lanterns doused, the ship worked by touch and voice alone.
But the drill goes wrong when something in the fog above Greyharbor answers the crew's silence with singing, and Brannoc must decide whether the drill was preparation or an invitation.
Learn the widow's hitch from Brannoc and help him run the night drill above Greyharbor.
After the night drill above Greyharbor, a crewman who walked toward the rail confesses to Brannoc that he has been hearing the singing since Carl's last voyage — and that Carl told the crew it was whales. Brannoc must decide whether to confront Carl now, log the man as unfit and leave him in Greyharbor, or keep him aboard and watch him.
If Brannoc confronts Carl, Carl deflects with a joke but begins sleeping in the chart room, and the party gains a +1 bonus to Insight against Carl thereafter — Brannoc has learned his tells. If the man is discharged, the crew's morale drops but the Saltspray is safer; if kept aboard, the man becomes a fog-touched asset who can hear the singing's direction (advantage on Perception in fog) but must be watched every night, and Brannoc takes a level of exhaustion during any night watch he covers for him.
At the Gate of the Twelve, Brother Cassian finally says plainly what the gate wants. Brannoc, who has spent twenty years keeping Carl's crew alive, steps forward before the party can argue and offers himself — freely given, no mark on anyone else. The party must decide in that moment whether to let him.
If Brannoc is accepted, he survives — the gate takes a tithe of his blood, not his life, because it was freely given by a man who has already given blood once — but he loses the use of his left hand (disadvantage on two-weapon and climbing checks) and gains 'The Gate's Mark': the drowned will not attack him, and he can speak to them. If the party substitutes an item, Brannoc is spared but carries the guilt of having offered, granting him advantage on death saving throws thereafter and permanently straining his trust in the party's judgment.
When the tithe ledger surfaces with two of Carl's own crew among the names, Brannoc holds the only copy of the cut log pages. He must decide, on the eve of the Tide-Heart, whether to give the proof to the King's letter, read it aloud to the assembled crew, or burn it and keep the expedition together long enough to stop Vane.
Sending it south secures the Crown's favour and a hereditary harbour-right for the party but risks the crew mutinying before the finale. Reading it aloud splits the crew — half stand with Brannoc, half with Carl — but any crew who stay gain advantage on saves against fear at the Tide-Heart, having chosen their fight knowingly. Burning it keeps the expedition whole and gives Brannoc 'Quiet Ledger': once per day he may reroll a failed Charisma check, the weight of a kept secret made into discipline — but the Crown's epilogue turns cold, and the King's sealed letter, if opened, orders his arrest too.
Opening the second sea-chest and confessing to Alder Tull
Brannoc shifts from keeper of Carl's secrets to keeper of the crew's truth. His loyalty becomes conditional and explicit for the first time in twenty years, and he begins making decisions aloud instead of in silence.
From Lawful Neutral toward Lawful Good, as he chooses men over orders
Ally
Brannoc and Old Hask came up together on the coastal packets out of Lordinium, young men on the same foretop, and were wrecked together on the Weeping Firth fifteen years ago when the packet *Merrow's Teeth* missed the channel in fog. Four of their crew drowned in the surf that night, and Hask went back into the water three times to pull men out — the last one was Brannoc, half-drowned and tangled in net, hauled up by the collar and thrown on the shingle to cough seawater while the fog sang.
They have not spoken of it since, in the way of sailors who owe each other their lives and find the debt easier to carry in silence. Brannoc got Hask his berth on the Concord run years later as a favour, which is the thing Hask has never forgiven himself for: the purse Hask took to forget what he saw was signed for on a voyage Brannoc recommended him for.
Brannoc knows this and carries it as a second debt. When Carl asked for a pilot who had seen the fog, Brannoc named Hask without hesitation and without telling him why — because he believes a man pays a debt by trusting the debtor with something hard, not by pretending the ledger is clean.
Enemy
Brannoc has never met Vane, and hates him the way a man hates a mirror. Vane does openly, with arithmetic and a schedule, the thing Brannoc did once with his hands on a black-sand beach: spend two lives to buy the return of the rest. Brannoc held one of Carl's crewmen down so that thirty others could go home, and Vane has held ninety down so that he himself can become a god, and Brannoc cannot find the line between those two acts except in the admitting of it.
This is why Brannoc does not drink, why he keeps the second sea-chest, why he will not say the island's name after dark — every superstition is a scar from the night he became, for one minute, the kind of man Vane is all the time. When Pell Ardan's testimony reaches the Saltspray and Brannoc hears the admiral's exact words — 'Ninety is not enough. I need a hundred and one' — he goes to the rail and is sick, quietly, and comes back and says only: 'He counts like Carl counts.
Someone has to stop the counting.' Brannoc intends to be at the Tide-Heart, and he intends to be the one who puts Vane's own arithmetic in front of him: the cut log pages, the tithe ledger, the names. He does not want Vane dead. He wants Vane to sit down in the coral bowl and be quiet, the way Brannoc has had to be quiet for eleven months, and he knows that is not justice, and he wants it anyway.
Faction
Brannoc is the expedition's spine and knows it. Twenty years before the mast under Carl, the last six as first mate and quartermaster of the Saltspray, have made him the man the crew actually obey: Carl signs the charter and spends the advance, but it is Brannoc who rations the water, drills the reef channel, counts the crew twice a day and notices when the count comes up two short.
His influence is quiet and total. He controls the stores, the watch rotations, and the crew's superstitions — the men will not whistle on deck because Brannoc does not, will not say the island's name after dark because he does not, and half of them have copied his habits without ever being told to. When Carl's secret surfaces, the expedition's survival depends almost entirely on which side of the argument Brannoc stands on: if he defends Carl, the crew grumbles and holds; if he turns, the Saltspray fractures within a day.
He is aware of this power and it frightens him, because he has seen what a man with a crew's loyalty can decide to do with it — he has read Vane's sealed orders and recognised the shape of the authority. His long service has also left him the expedition's institutional memory: he knows the old routes, the paymasters, the wrecks, and which of the crew have family in Greyharbor who will ask questions if they do not come home.
He keeps a private ledger of his own, in a hand nobody else can read, and it is the only record of the expedition that has not been edited by anyone.
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