Sergeant Orla Vint

Level 8 — Human Fighter (Battle Master)

Available with DM subscription

STR

18 (+4)

DEX

14 (+2)

CON

16 (+3)

INT

WIS

13 (+1)

CHA

8 (-1)

Defense

Armor Class 19 (chain mail + shield + Defense fighting style)

Hit Points 76 (10 + 7d10 + 24 (CON) + 16 (Tough feat) + 24 (human levels: 13 + 7×(6+3) = 76; +16 Tough = 92) — total 92 +3)

Speed 30 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws strength, constitution

Skills Insight +4, Athletics +7, Perception +4, Intimidation +2, Investigation +3

Features

Watch Sergeant's Whistle (custom)

Ratchetworks city watch Level 1

at will

Orla's brass watch-whistle can be heard through two closed doors and 200 feet of gear-noise. Within Ratchetworks, any on-duty watchman who hears it knows her position and comes at a run; a DC 13 Wisdom (Perception) check lets a Crew lookout pinpoint the whistle's source.

The Three False Tallies (custom)

Ratchetworks city watch Level 1

Orla knows the city's three false-tally safehouses by heart — the ones listed under wrong names in the key-register. If the party shares a Warden's pass, she can lead them to all three without alerting the lookouts (no Stealth check required for the approach).

Weapon Mastery

Fighter 1 Level 1

Longsword (Sap): Orla can use the Sap mastery property — on a hit, the target has disadvantage on its next attack roll before her next turn. Light Crossbow (Slow): on a hit, the target's speed is reduced by 10 feet until the start of her next turn.

Tactical Mind

Fighter 2 Level 2

When Orla fails an ability check, she can expend one Superiority die to add it to the roll instead of rolling it. When she does, she doesn't expend the die if the check still fails.

Know Your Enemy

Battle Master 7 Level 7

1/short or long rest

When Orla hits a creature with a weapon attack, she learns its current Hit Points, its Armor Class, and whether it has any Immunities or Resistances.

Tactical Shift

Fighter 6 Level 6

Whenever Orla activates a class feature that grants a Bonus Action, she can also move up to half her speed without provoking opportunity attacks.

Combat Superiority

Battle Master 3 Level 3

5 Superiority dice (d8)/short or long rest

Orla knows 5 maneuvers and can expend Superiority dice to fuel them. Some maneuvers enhance attacks; others are reactions.

Extra Attack

Fighter 5 Level 5

Orla can attack twice, instead of once, whenever she takes the Attack action on her turn.

Student of War

Battle Master 3 Level 3

Orla gains proficiency with smith's tools and can craft weapons and armor with them.

Action Surge

Fighter 2 Level 2

1/short or long rest

Orla can take one additional action on her turn, except the Magic action.

Tough

Soldier background feat (level 6 ASI) Level 6

Orla's Hit Point maximum increases by 8, and by 1 per character level.

Fighting Style: Defense

Fighter 1 Level 1

While wearing armor, Orla gains a +1 bonus to Armor Class.

Second Wind

Fighter 1 Level 1

2/short or long rest

As a Bonus Action, Orla regains 1d10 + 8 hit points.

Behind the character

Character Information

Sergeant Orla Vint is a stocky woman of thirty, built like the door she stands in — arms crossed over a scarred breastplate of darkened steel worn over a grey watch coat, jaw set at an angle that the long pale scar across it pulls into a permanent half-scowl. Her hair is cropped short against lice and gear-oil, her skin weathered brown by years of street shifts in a city where the weather comes from machinery, and her hazel eyes have the flat patience of someone who has watched too many streets slide past and counted everyone on them.

She is not friendly. She is reliable, which is better. Orla speaks in short sentences, asks questions twice — once to hear the answer and once to hear the lie — and has an instinct for a false tally that borders on the supernatural. She has spent two years hunting the Ratchet Crew and lost four watchmen doing it, and the loss has made her careful in the way that careful soldiers are: she checks the walkway before she trusts it, she counts exits before she enters, and she never, ever splits the party of her watch. Her whistle hangs on a cord at her collar, brass worn bright by her thumb, and she touches it before every fight without knowing she does it.

Under the armor she is a woman who keeps four whistles in a drawer and cannot throw them away, who signs reports she does not believe because the alternative is no report at all, and who suspects — correctly — that the city she has given her life to is being sold out from above her head. She fights beside anyone with a Warden's pass and a straight face, and she will hold a doorway until the building comes down on her before she leaves someone behind. Lawful Good is not her philosophy; it is her discipline, and it is the only thing holding the grief in the drawer shut.

She is a Battle Master of the watch-school: shield up, blade low, maneuvers called like drill commands. Her longsword has a ratchet-toothed spine, and she uses it the way she does everything — methodically, twice, and until it works.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Orla Vint was born in the lower streets of Ratchetworks, third child of a gear-shop wright and his wife, in a house bolted to the tooth of an engine old enough that the family could feel it think. Her father's shop repaired watch-gear and lift-cables for the lower trades, and Orla grew up with a file in one hand and a tally-slate in the other, learning before she could read that everything in Ratchetworks is counted and most of what is counted lies.

Her older brother Wend was the clever one — good with ledgers, good with people — and Orla was the strong one, and both of them knew which one the city valued.

She joined the city watch at sixteen because the watch paid in coin instead of credit and because a watchman's coat meant the sliding streets had to wait for you. She was good at it in the unglamorous way: she learned the false tallies, the wrong names in the key-register, the warehouses that never got robbed, and by twenty-five she had made sergeant on the strength of a single night's work — catching a Concord broker moving three crates of unkeying wedges off a ring that was not yet even failing. Her captain filed the report. Nothing came of it. Orla kept the copy.

Two years ago the Ratchet Crew stopped being a rumor. A runner died on Orla's street with a ratchet-token in his fist and three safehouse addresses in his boot, and Orla traded him a promise — no raids until she could take all three in one night — for the names before he bled out. She has kept that promise for two years, and it has cost her everything she has spent two years earning: every raid she has run since has been on lesser targets, every lesser target has been wired by Marisel Quill, and the crawlway ambush in the Sump Gears took Sergeant Brem and three watchmen into black water that does not give bodies back. Orla was dragged out with her jaw opened by a wedge-fragment. She signed the lift-accident report because her captain ordered it. She keeps the copy with the other one.

Since then she has fought the Crew the only way left to her: patiently. She has mapped the false-tally safehouses from memory, watched Lady Ysolde Marrow's private lift for a year, and taught every surviving watchman under her how to spot a wired walkway. She does not trust the Concord, does not trust the Keywardens' silence, and does not trust anyone who smiles at her — which, in Ratchetworks, is a professional necessity. When the party arrives with a Warden's pass, she sees the first honest tool she has been handed in two years, and she will spend it like one.

She fights like a sergeant: shield forward, blade low, calling maneuvers in the flat voice of a drill yard. Her Tactical Shift keeps her moving between her people; her Know Your Enemy reads a foe's armor and blood the way her father read gear-wear. She is at her best holding a doorway, at her worst in a room where she cannot count the exits, and she has never once in fourteen years left a watchman behind — which is the standard she will hold the party to, whether they know it or not.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

Someone inside the watch-house is selling Orla's raid plans to the Crew. She suspects her lieutenant, Dov Harrow, but the evidence points in three directions at once, and the real leak may be a name she has not considered — possibly someone placed by Sister Aveline Roke.
Orla's brother Wend Vint is held in the Crew's workshop as a witness. He took Crew coin twice to look the other way on the lifts, and the Crew cannot afford to let him talk to a Warden. His fate is a lever Marisel Quill can pull at any moment.
The four watchmen Orla lost were not the first. A watchman named Corr Sallow vanished on a Sump stakeout eleven months before the crawlway ambush, and his whistle was never found. Orla believes he is alive in the Crew's hands; the truth is worse.
The Crew's pay comes in Concord coin, and the laundering route runs through a warehouse Orla has been watching for a year — Grenna Ost's, on the Sixth Ring, which means the money trail runs uphill through the very Concord her captain serves.
Orla's father's gear-shop in the lower streets still operates, run by her mother, and pays protection to Grizel's people. The Crew knows this. Orla has never told her mother what she does for a living, and the Crew has never told her mother either — yet.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

Orla carries Marisel Quill's polished whistle, found hung on a hook after the crawlway ambush. She has never told anyone, because admitting the Crew's field hand is playing with her feels like losing, and she keeps it to remind herself what she is hunting.
Orla signed the lift-accident report herself. The official record of her four dead watchmen — 'lift cable failure, no foul play' — is in her hand, because her captain ordered it and she obeyed. It is the single thing in her life she cannot forgive herself for.
Orla knows the Crew's three false-tally safehouses because a dying Crew runner told her, two years ago, in exchange for a promise she has since regretted: that she would not raid them until she could take all three in one night. She has been waiting two years for enough watchmen to keep that promise, and the promise is the only reason the safehouses still stand.

What haunts them

Fears

That the fifth whistle in the drawer will be her own — that she will die in the Sump Gears the way her four did, alone in black water, with a report that calls it an accident.
That her brother Wend took the Crew's coin because he is weak the way she is strong, and that freeing him will put a traitor's face across the family table.
That the Deep Mist's song is true — that the dead watchmen are held somewhere singing, and that everything she has done for two years has been keeping them from being found.

What drives them

Aspirations

To take all three false-tally safehouses in a single night, cleanly, with every watchman coming home — the promise kept, the debt paid.
To see Marisel Quill in a Warden courtroom, in irons, with the ledger of her kills read aloud into the record.
To make the watch what it is supposed to be — an institution that answers to the city and not to the Concord — even if she has to build it out of the wreckage of the one she has.

Personal quest · 1

Four Whistles on the Wall

Orla keeps four watch-whistles in a drawer at the watch-house — one for each watchman she has lost hunting the Ratchet Crew in the Sump Gears. The families of two of the dead have never been told how their people died, because the watch's official report blames a lift accident. Orla wants the truth written down properly: descend with the party to the third level of the Sump Gears, find the flooded crawlway where Sergeant Brem and his three partners were ambushed, recover their brass tallies, and bring them back to the families.

The crawlway is near Marisel Quill's workshop, so the quest runs alongside the main assault — but Orla will not abandon the search even if it endangers the mission, and the party must decide how to hold her to the plan.

Current Stage

Show Orla the Warden's Pass and earn her trust; she names the crawlway and the four tallies.

Choice

Agree to search for the tallies even though it costs time in the rising water, or press her to stay on mission.

Agreeing makes Orla a permanent ally who will fight to the end for the party; refusing leaves her compliant but cold, and she withholds the third safehouse.

Mechanical Rewards

Orla's personal maneuver 'Ratchet Hold' — she can expend a Superiority die to grapple a creature that attacked an ally this round, automatically
A permanent +1 to Orla's AC from refitted Crew plate found in the crawlway

Narrative Rewards

Orla's full, unconditional loyalty and her knowledge of all three false-tally safehouses
The four families' names entered in the watch-house book, and Orla's guilt finally given a shape

Personal quest · 2

The Tally in Ysolde's Sleeve

Orla has suspected Lady Ysolde Marrow for two years — the magnate's warehouses never get robbed, her caravans never get stopped, and her private lift runs at odd hours. She has never had proof, and a watch sergeant does not search a magnate's mansion without it. With the party's help, Orla wants to catch the tithe in motion: intercept the monthly payment that runs from Ysolde's counting room toward Marrow Spire under a false Concord tally, and follow it to its hand-off.

The hand-off man is a Choir singer with chimes at his hem, and the payment ledger, once taken, names three years of tithes and one signature Orla does not expect.

Current Stage

Stake out the freight-lift yards on tithe night and identify the courier without spooking him.

Mechanical Rewards

The tithe ledger — a permanent +2 to Orla's Insight (raising it to +6) as she learns to read people the way she reads tallies
A Choir chime-blade, which Orla learns to use as a second weapon (she gains a chime-blade attack dealing 1d8+4 slashing plus a DC 13 Wis save or deafened for a round)

Narrative Rewards

Proof of Ysolde's funding, and Orla's two-year suspicion finally given teeth
The Choir's ritual schedule for Marrow Spire

Personal quest · 3

The Fifth Whistle

The drawer at the watch-house has room for a fifth whistle, and Orla knows whose it would be: hers. She has planned the raid on the Crew's false-tally safehouses a dozen times, and a dozen times the Crew has known she was coming. Someone in Ratchetworks is selling her raid plans, and Orla has begun to suspect it is someone she trusts — her own lieutenant, Dov Harrow, who signs the duty rosters and always seems to be one street away when an ambush springs.

Orla wants the party to set a trap: feed Dov a false raid plan through three different hands, watch which version reaches the Crew, and catch the leak with the noose already around it.

Current Stage

Design the trap with Orla — choose which false plan goes through which channel.

Mechanical Rewards

Orla's whistle upgraded with key-metal: her Watch Sergeant's Whistle now carries through the Sump Gears' water and noise, summoning watchmen anywhere in the city
Either 2 additional Superiority dice or the Crew's pay-chain ledger (see choices)

Narrative Rewards

The leak closed, and Orla's raids finally work — the three false-tally safehouses can be taken cleanly
Orla's trust, which she has not given anyone in two years

Major Decision

Context

Orla has spent two years fighting the Ratchet Crew by the book — warrants, raids, evidence. The book has gotten four of her watchmen killed and caught her nothing. When the party shows her the unkeying engine's plans and the truth about the Crew's scale, she faces a choice: keep fighting by the law, or fight like the Crew fights — ambushes, false tallies, no warnings.

Choice Made

The Lawful Blade or the Ratchet Blade

Impact

If she stays lawful, Orla remains a watch asset: her whistle summons legitimate watchmen, and she can make arrests that hold. If she goes ratchet, she resigns her sergeantcy, takes up Crew tactics, and gains the 'False Tally' ability — she and the party can move through Ratchetworks' underworld without being marked, and she gains a Crew oilskin disguise granting advantage on Stealth in the Sump Gears — but the watch will arrest her on sight, and her whistle becomes a dead brass tube to everyone but her.

Major Decision

Context

Orla's brother, Wend Vint, left Ratchetworks eight years ago after a quarrel over their father's gear-shop debt. He was last seen working the freight-lifts. When the party exposes Hask Verrin, Orla learns Wend's name is on the Crew's pay ledger too — not as a saboteur, but as a lift-worker who took Crew coin to look the other way, twice, and is now held in the workshop as a witness the Crew cannot afford to free.

Choice Made

The Brother in the Workshop

Impact

If Orla asks the party to risk freeing Wend during the workshop assault, she gains the 'Kin's Debt' trait — once per day, she can take a hit for an ally, absorbing half the damage of an attack against them — but the assault is harder, because the Crew knows Wend is leverage and fights harder to keep him. If she leaves him, Wend testifies against the Crew from a Warden cell later, giving the party the pay-chain names — but Orla's Insight drops by 1 permanently, because she has learned what she is willing to trade.

Major Decision

Context

At Marrow Spire, if Ilse Marrow is confronted and the truth about the Mist comes out, Orla — who has spent two years believing the Crew were simply criminals — hears the Cantor's song for the first time. It is beautiful. It tells her, in her father's voice, that the watchmen she lost are not lost, that they are held and singing, and that if the Cage opens she can have them back.

Choice Made

The Song in the Nave

Impact

Orla must make a DC 15 Wisdom save each round she listens; if she fails three, she is charmed and fights the party until broken free. If she resists all three rounds, she gains the 'Mist-Deaf' trait — permanent advantage on saving throws against the Choir's charm effects and the Mist's song — and she can shout down the Cantor's song for one ally per round, granting them advantage on their saves. If she falls, she can be recovered, but she carries a permanent DC 10 Wisdom save whenever she hears the Mist's song, and her whistle rings wrong in fog ever after.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Recovering the four tallies from the Sump Gears crawlway

Transformation

Orla's grief stops being a wound and becomes a ledger. She begins writing down every name the Crew takes, and the list becomes the watch's first honest record of the war.

Mechanical Changes

Insight

+1 permanent

She has learned to read grief in faces the way she reads tallies in ledgers

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Standing beside the party at the Driftline as the drifting Sliver is saved or lost

Transformation

Orla has never seen the Deep Mist up close. Watching it eat — or nearly eat — a county of people rewrites her understanding of what the Crew is unleashing, and of what the Keywardens have been hiding.

Mechanical Changes

Wisdom

13 → 14 (+1 permanent)

She has seen the thing at the edge of the world and did not look away

Ally

Foreman Dace Kettle

Relationship ally

Influence 8/10

Loyalty 7/10

Shared History

Orla and Dace Kettle have been drinking at the Weighed Anchor's far end of the common room — metaphorically, since neither has left Ratchetworks in years — for a decade. When Orla made sergeant at twenty-five, Dace was the first guildsman to shake her hand, because she had once pulled his apprentice out of a gear-train on the third lift with her bare hands and a ratchet strap. Since the Crew began stealing his freight-lifts, Dace has fed Orla every schedule anomaly he catches, and Orla has quietly posted two watchmen on his lift-yard gates without telling her captain, because the captain answers to the Concord and Dace does not.

Dace knows Orla suspects Lady Ysolde and has never once repeated it, which is the only reason she still has a job. He will not go down into the Sump Gears — his knee, his family, his fear — but he will hand the party a lift-key and tell Orla exactly which shaft the Crew is using, and he has never been wrong.

Potential Breaking Points

If Orla goes 'ratchet' and resigns her sergeantcy, Dace will still help her, but he will stop feeding her guild information — he cannot be seen with a deserter.

Enemy

Marisel Quill, the Ratchet

Threat Level 9/10

Conflict Type professional and personal

Personal Stakes

Marisel Quill is the woman who killed Orla's watchmen. Two years ago, Orla led her first real raid on a Crew safehouse in the Sump Gears; Marisel had wired the walkways with unkeying charges, and four watchmen went into black water that does not give bodies back. Orla has the scar on her jaw from the wedge-fragment that caught her as she was dragged out, and she has spent every shift since learning how Marisel thinks — where she drops, how she wires, which way she runs.

Marisel, for her part, knows Orla's name, keeps a tally of the watchmen she has killed in a notebook she carries like a joke, and considers the sergeant the only person in Ratchetworks worth outsmarting. They have met three times in two years, and each time Marisel has left something behind — a whistle, once, cleaned and polished, hung on a hook where Orla would find it. Orla has never told anyone about the whistle. If they meet again, one of them will not walk away, and both of them know it.

Possible Resolutions

Orla can be talked out of a killing only by proof that Marisel's niece is free and Marisel has turned — vengeance traded for a weapon against the Unkeyed Warden.
If Marisel is killed by the party, Orla takes the brass hand as a trophy and hangs it in the watch-house; the Crew never forgives Ratchetworks for it.

Faction

The Ratchetworks City Watch

Standing 6/10

Influence

Orla is the watch's best sergeant and its most inconvenient one. She joined at sixteen, made sergeant at twenty-five, and has spent the five years since fighting a war her superiors insist is not happening. The watch-house captain answers to the Concord's interests, which means Orla's reports about the Crew get filed and forgotten, and her raids get underfunded and undermanned — which is why she lost four watchmen. The rank and file love her: she pulls double shifts, she remembers names, she has never once ordered a man into a place she would not go first.

The command structure tolerates her because she gets results and because removing her would cause a mutiny in the lower streets. Her whistle carries real authority — any on-duty watchman within earshot comes at a run — but every use of it spends credit she cannot replace. If she resigns or is stripped of rank, the watch will not hunt her, but they will not help her either, and the whistle becomes a memory.

Obligations

Orla owes the watch the truth about her dead — the official record still says lift accident, and she has signed it.
She owes Dace Kettle two watchmen on his gates, which she posts from her own off-duty hours.

Benefits

Watch backup via the whistle, anywhere in Ratchetworks, twice before it costs her
Access to the watch-house evidence room, including confiscated Crew gear

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