If Thal is reduced to 0 hit points while his corruption is active, his body dissolves into Far Realm energy (no corpse). If captured alive and cured with greater restoration, all Far Realm features are removed and he becomes a repentant ally who knows Veyron's fortress layout.
Any creature that starts its turn within 10 feet of Thal and can see him must succeed on a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw or be Frightened until the end of its next turn. A creature that succeeds is immune for 24 hours.
Advantage on Strength checks and saves, rage damage bonus (+2 at level 8), resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage. Thal's rage also grants resistance to psychic damage (see Void-Scaled).
Thal's massive greataxe is a mundane weapon warped by Far Realm energy: 1d12 slashing + 1d6 psychic damage when he rages (see Primal Champion). It is not magical on its own and can be looted.
Thal's dragonborn scales have been warped by the Far Realm. He has resistance to psychic damage and advantage on saving throws against the Frightened condition.
Thal's rage damage bonus increases to +2 (already applied). While raging, his first weapon hit each turn deals an extra 1d6+2 psychic damage (Far Realm energy).
Advantage on melee Strength attack rolls; attacks against Thal have advantage until his next turn.
+10 feet speed when unarmored (already reflected when unarmored; base speed shown is armored).
Advantage on Dexterity saving throws against effects he can see.
Advantage on Initiative; can act surprised if raging.
Thal attacks twice when he takes the Attack action.
AC = 10 + Dex + Con when not wearing armor.
N/A
Behind the character
Warden Thal is a hulking dragonborn barbarian in blackened half plate, his once-bronze scales cracked and veined with sickly violet Far Realm energy that pulses beneath his hide like a second heartbeat. His eyes glow with an eerie pale-green light, and when he speaks, it is in a guttural growl that scrapes like stone on iron. He grips a massive greataxe whose blade drips with swirling void-stuff, and Far Realm symbols crawl across his armor as though the metal itself were infected.
Thal was once a noble warrior of clan Karath'zul, sworn to defend his people from otherworldly threats. A failed expedition into a planar tear beneath the Astral Sea changed everything: the Far Realm poured into him, and Lord Veyron found the broken survivor and gave his madness a purpose. Now Thal serves as Veyron's fortress guardian and lieutenant, a weapon pointed at the cult's enemies.
Barely sane, brutal and relentless, Thal enjoys causing pain—but not entirely. There are moments, seconds long, when his eyes flicker bronze and he hesitates mid-swing. The corruption is strong, but the dragonborn beneath it is not gone. His fear aura and psychic resistance mark him as Far Realm-touched; his Dissolution on death marks him as Veyron's failsafe. Yet if captured alive and cured with greater restoration, all Far Realm features fall away, and Thal becomes a repentant ally who knows every corridor of Veyron's fortress—and carries the guilt of everything he did as its warden. He is a tragedy wearing armor, and the party's choices determine whether the tragedy ends in dissolution or redemption.
Before the adventure
Warden Thal's story begins in clan Karath'zul, a proud dragonborn lineage whose warriors served for generations as planewatchers—soldiers who guarded their mountain holds against aberrant incursions from beyond reality. Thal was raised on stories of ancestors who held gates against things without names, and he took the warden's oath young: his body would be the wall, his axe the gate. He was strong even then, and honorable, and his clanmates spoke of him as a future warleader.
He was also, though he never confessed it, carrying a blood-debt: in a duel over an insult to his mate, he killed a clanmate, and the clan's law required a penance he could not bear to face.
When a Cartographer survey team offered coin for hardened soldiers to escort an expedition into a planar tear beneath the Astral Sea, Thal volunteered—not for glory, though he told himself it was for glory, but to run. The expedition found the tear, and the tear found them. What came through did not simply kill; it unmade and remade. Thal remembers only fragments: his shield-brother's scream bending into harmonics no throat should make, light that tasted of rot, and a voice—patient, vast, amused—offering to take the guilt from him if he would only let the void in.
He let it in. His scales cracked and veined violet; his eyes went green; his clan's sacred greataxe, Dawnbreaker, forged to slay aberrations, was inverted into a thing that drips void-stuff.
Thal does not remember how he left the tear. He remembers waking in Veyron's fortress, whole and strong and empty, and Veyron's calm voice explaining that the Far Realm is the true reality, and that Thal had been chosen. Gratitude twisted into loyalty; loyalty into worship; worship into the numb brutality that now defines him. Veyron wove a failsafe into his flesh—the Dissolution—so that no one could ever capture and study a cured warden. Thal commands the fortress guard with his fear aura, drills the cult fanatics mercilessly, and serves as Veyron's executioner.
But the void did not take everything. His hatchmate Vorath was taken alive from the same expedition and remains a lab specimen in the fortress—half-transformed, whispering. Thal's war-horn sits in Veyron's trophy vault. A pouch with his unhatched sibling's eggshell fragment is hidden in his quarters. And in rare seconds of stillness, his eyes flicker bronze. The Far Realm made Thal a weapon; it could not quite make him forget he was a wall once, and walls, even broken ones, remember what they were built to protect.
Whether Thal dissolves into Far Realm energy on some obsidian platform or stands cured in the silver void, axe restored, depends entirely on whether anyone cares enough to capture the monster alive.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Before his corruption, Thal swore an oath to defend the dragonborn clan of Karath'zul from otherworldly threats. Deep within Veyron's fortress lies his old war-horn, taken as 'payment' when Veyron recruited him. Recovering it would remind Thal of who he was.
Learn from cult fanatics that Thal's war-horn is kept in Veyron's trophy vault.
Personal quest · 2
Thal's corruption began when he led a dragonborn expedition into a planar tear beneath the Astral Sea. The expedition's survivors were harvested by Veyron's cult. One survivor, a hatchmate named Vorath, still lives as a lab specimen in the fortress laboratory.
Interrogate fortress guards to learn the laboratory's location and Vorath's cell number.
Personal quest · 3
Thal's greataxe was once the clan-relic 'Dawnbreaker,' forged to slay aberrations. The Far Realm inverted it. A Cartographer forge-shrine in the Citadel's ruins could restore it—but only if Thal willingly surrenders the weapon for a night, which his madness resists.
Locate the forge-shrine beneath the Citadel's grand orrery while dodging patrols.
During the fortress assault, Thal corners the party's weakest member alone. The Far Realm whispers for blood.
Execution: Thal gains the Feral Instinct upgrade 'Slaughter's Momentum' (bonus-action dash while raging) but loses all redemption potential. Capture: enables the greater restoration cure, converting Thal into an ally who knows every corridor, ward, and Veyron's teleport destination—the Maw of Nothing.
If cured, Thal must choose between seeking his clan to atone, or staying to help close the gate his service made possible.
Exile: Thal departs but sends Vorath's stabilized memories (granting the party a permanent +2 to all Arcana checks about the Far Realm). War: Thal joins the final battle as a level 8 ally, but if he dies there, his Dissolution effect returns as a dying curse dealing 5d10 psychic damage around him.
Thal's corruption is anchored to Veyron's amulet; the entity inside it speaks to him constantly.
Absorbing it: Thal permanently loses his Void-Scaled resistance but gains 'Void-Sight' (truesight 30 feet against aberrations) and immunity to the Frightened condition. Refusing: the scream stuns the party for 1 round, but Thal remains fully human—er, dragonborn—and sane.
Hearing the war-horn
Thal's eyes flicker from eerie green to bronze for 1d4 rounds; during this window his corruption features are suppressed.
Greater restoration cast
Violet veins fade to bronze scales; Far Realm features (Void-Scaled, Dread Aura, Primal Champion psychic damage, Dissolution) are permanently removed. He becomes a lawful neutral repentant ally.
Ally
Thal and Kaelen have served Veyron side by side for three years, and theirs is a partnership of mutual contempt that has nonetheless saved both their lives. When a gravity wraith tore through the fortress's eastern spire, Kaelen's mirror image spell distracted it long enough for Thal's axe to shatter its form; in turn, Thal once carried the elf, unconscious from psychic backlash, through three collapsing corridors. Kaelen finds Thal crude and Thal finds Kaelen a coward, but each knows the other is the only competent soul in the fortress.
Kaelen is one of the few who has seen Thal hesitate, and he quietly keeps notes on the dragonborn's lapses—notes that could either cure Thal or destroy him, depending on who reads them first.
Enemy
Sora's freebooters raided a cult supply barge two years ago, and in the fighting they took Thal's left tusk as a trophy; he tore off her first mate's arm in retaliation. Since then, Thal has hunted her ship on three occasions, and she has escaped him each time by diving into psychic storm zones that would shatter his corrupted mind. Sora considers Thal a monster worth killing for free; Thal considers her the last enemy who ever made him feel fear—a sensation the Far Realm has since devoured, leaving only the memory of hate. Their next meeting aboard or near the fortress will be to the death, and Sora knows the fortress's blind spots better than almost anyone.
Faction
Thal is the cult's shield and symbol: the proof that Veyron's patron entity can elevate mortals. Cult fanatics whisper prayers to his corrupted scales, and Thal tolerates it because the worship drowns out the whispers that tell him what he was. His rank as Warden gives him command of the fortress guard, and he has drilled them brutally—his fear aura makes discipline easy. Yet the cult's scholars, Kaelen included, secretly catalogue his deterioration, and the entity behind the amulet considers Thal a spent vessel to be discarded at the Maw of Nothing.
Thal senses this on some level, and his loyalty is a performance of desperation: if Veyron ever openly dismisses him, the last thread holding Thal to the cult—and to sanity—will snap.
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