As a bonus action, Corvane's flesh briefly runs with rats: he gains resistance to poison damage, can move through spaces as narrow as 1 inch wide, and any opportunity attack against him is made at disadvantage until the start of his next turn.
Corvane can telepathically communicate with any rat or rodent within 300 feet and with any creature he has afflicted with the weeping plague. Rats regard him as kin and will not attack him unless magically compelled.
Agonizing Blast (Cha modifier added to eldritch blast damage), Devil's Sight (see 120 ft. in magical darkness), Whispers of the Gnawing Choir (custom: once per short rest, cast speak with dead without a spell slot).
Corvane is immune to disease and the poisoned condition. A creature that hits him with a melee attack while within 5 feet must succeed on a DC 16 Constitution saving throw or be poisoned for 1 hour.
Whenever Corvane deals poison or necrotic damage with a warlock spell, the target has disadvantage on its next saving throw against a disease or poison effect within 1 minute.
Corvane's familiar is a plague-rat (giant rat statistics, attack carries DC 11 poison save). It can deliver his touch spells and serves as his eyes in the ship's bilges.
Corvane regains expended warlock spell slots without spending Hit Dice.
Warlock slots are all cast at 5th level; Mystic Arcanum spells are cast once each per Long Rest at their listed level.
Three beams, each 1d10+4 force damage on a ranged spell attack.
Ranged spell attack, 1d8 necrotic damage; target can't regain HP until start of Corvane's next turn; undead also can't attack.
Con save or 2d12 poison damage.
Ranged spell attack, 2d8 poison damage; Con save DC 16 or poisoned until end of your next turn.
Wis save DC 16 or charmed; on Corvane's turn he forces the target to attack a creature of his choice.
Melee spell attack, 3d6 necrotic damage; Corvane regains half the damage dealt.
20-ft-radius sphere of nauseating gas for 1 minute; creatures inside must save each turn or be poisoned and lose their action.
Con save DC 16 or 8d8 necrotic damage; plants automatically fail.
Melee spell attack; on three failed Con saves the target contracts a disease of Corvane's choice (Corvane chooses the weeping plague).
20-ft-radius swarm of biting vermin for 10 minutes; creatures in the area take 4d8 poison damage each turn (Con save half).
20-ft-radius poisonous cloud, 5d8 poison damage per turn (Con save half), moves 10 ft. each turn.
Con save DC 16 or 7d8+4 necrotic damage; humanoid killed rises as a zombie under Corvane's command.
Behind the character
Corvane Ashgrove, the Ratbound Bishop, is a gaunt man in his late fifties whose silver hair falls to his shoulders and whose eyes hold a faint green luminescence, as though lit from behind by candlelight seen through stagnant water. He wears a bishop's stole stitched with rat-skull sigils over a dark cassock, and a pale rat mask hangs at his belt — not a disguise but a second face, worn when the Choir speaks through him.
His hands are clean and careful, the hands of a man who once comforted the dying, and he still moves with a healer's gentle economy. Rats perch on his shoulders and boots without fear, and he speaks to them in a low murmur between sentences, as a grandfather hums to himself.
Before the adventure
Corvane Ashgrove was born the son of a Ratwharf fish-gutter and a temple laundress, and he spent the first half of his life climbing toward respectability with the patient discipline of a man who has known hunger. He entered the Temple of Mercy as an acolyte at nineteen, was ordained at thirty, and by forty-five he was the most beloved priest in temple row — the one who sat with the dying through the night, who buried the poor for free, who argued with the temple elders for better medicine in the wards.
His wife died young; his granddaughter Liora was the light of his retirement years, and he had begun, quietly, to plan the sermon he would one day give about the temple's duty to the harbor poor. Then came the fever season that killed Liora and fourteen of his ward's patients in a single month, while the temple elders debated budgets and the nobles behind their walls sent nothing but prayers.
Corvane did what a healer does: he eased the dying with laudanum, mercifully, secretly, and when the elders discovered it, they did not see mercy. They saw a scandal, stripped his stole, and cast him out in the rain at sixty years old, with nothing but his cassock and a grief the temple had no room for. That night, in the sewer culvert where he sheltered, something ancient that had waited beneath Nostramus for centuries heard a heart break in exactly the right shape.
The Gnawing Choir did not tempt Corvane with power; it offered him meaning. It told him his mercy had been holy and the temple's cruelty was the true plague, that pestilence was not punishment but purification, and that rats — the despised, the unclean, the survivors — were its chosen messengers. Corvane wept in the dark and said yes. Twelve years later, the Ratbound Choir is his congregation, the ghost ship Weeping Sister is his cathedral, and the weeping plague is his sermon made flesh.
He has not raised his voice since the night he was cast out. He speaks softly, paternally, with absolute conviction, offering every opponent a place at his side before he offers them death — and meaning it both times. He keeps his granddaughter's body in a glass casket in the ship's hold, preserved against the day the ritual grants him the power to call her back, and it is for her, more than for any god, that he will burn a city.
His plan is threefold: let the plague weaken Nostramus until the faithful few remain, complete the ritual at the sunken shrine to make the sickness airborne and irreversible, and sacrifice the willing Odessa Marr aboard the Weeping Sister to shed his mortal flesh and become the Ratbound Bishop eternal — an immortal shepherd over a kingdom of the cleansed. He is not mad. He is worse: he is kind, and he is certain, and he has done the arithmetic of acceptable loss with a healer's steady hands. Redemption is impossible for Corvane not because he cannot be reached but because he has already forgiven himself for everything, in advance, in Liora's name.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Corvane was once a beloved priest of the Temple of Mercy, and the ledger of his old sermons still lies in a sealed reliquary in the temple's crypt, confiscated by Inquisitor Quill after his first heresy. He sends his plague-rat familiar to whisper to cultists that the sermons must be recovered before the party finds them, for in their margins he first heard the Gnawing Choir speak. If Corvane's agents recover the reliquary, he gains renewed conviction and his cultists gain advantage on their first morale check in the final battle.
If the party destroys or claims the sermons, Corvane's certainty cracks: he suffers a moment of doubt at a critical juncture, giving the party one round of advantage against him.
Cultists infiltrate the Crypt of Mercy to retrieve the reliquary while the party investigates Fesk's laboratory.
Personal quest · 2
Corvane's immortality ritual requires a living sacrifice bound by blood or by vow, and he has chosen Odessa Marr, the last living soul who sailed the Weeping Sister with him. But the ritual's terms, recorded in the ship's log, specify that the sacrifice must be willing. Corvane has spent weeks in quiet conversation with Odessa through the door of her cell, offering her family's survival, her crew's resurrection, and a painless end.
He directs his chanters to bring him tokens of her past life from the drowned wreckage of her home district, believing each gift brings her closer to consent. If he gathers all three tokens, the ritual can complete even if the party disrupts the circle once. If the party intercepts the tokens or speaks with Odessa first, her refusal breaks the ritual's terms permanently.
Cult chanters comb the drowned districts for Odessa's tokens while the party works the harbor.
Personal quest · 3
Corvane's immortality ritual requires a living sacrifice bound by blood or by vow, and he has chosen Odessa Marr, the last living soul who sailed the Weeping Sister with him. But the ritual's terms, recorded in the ship's log, specify that the sacrifice must be willing. Corvane has spent weeks in quiet conversation with Odessa through the door of her cell, offering her family's survival, her crew's resurrection, and a painless end.
He directs his chanters to bring him tokens of her past life from the drowned wreckage of her home district, believing each gift brings her closer to consent. If he gathers all three tokens, the ritual can complete even if the party disrupts the circle once. If the party intercepts the tokens or speaks with Odessa first, her refusal breaks the ritual's terms permanently.
Cult chanters comb the drowned districts for Odessa's tokens while the party works the harbor.
In Act II, after the party disrupts the ritual in the Sunken Shrine, Mirelle Vantt flees wounded and Corvane learns his lieutenant has been broken. He faces the choice of punishing her, promoting her rival Liss Vell, or offering Mirelle a chance at redemption within the Choir.
If Corvane shows mercy, Mirelle remains loyal and the Harbor Kin stay compromised, making Act III infiltration harder but giving the party a potential turncoat at the ship. If he punishes her, the Harbor Kin fracture and Liss Vell actively aids the party, opening earlier routes to the ghost ship. If he offers redemption and she refuses, Corvane executes her personally, hardening his cult and granting all chanters +2 to hit in the finale.
When the party reaches the captain's quarters, Corvane offers each of them a place in his kingdom of the faithful, and he means it. He can restore a dead loved one, cure a plague victim, or grant power, and the offer is backed by real magic.
Accepting grants a permanent boon (a restored NPC ally, immunity to the weeping plague, or one warlock invocation of the GM's choice) but marks the character as the ritual's backup sacrifice and makes them a target for the Choir's protection — cultists will not attack them, which isolates them from the party. Refusing enrages Corvane past his usual calm, causing him to abandon tactics and fight recklessly, which the party can exploit.
If the party threatens Liora's casket or Odessa Marr, Corvane must choose between completing the ritual on schedule or delaying it to protect what remains of his family.
If Corvane delays the ritual to guard the casket, the plague focus remains vulnerable and the party can destroy it early, but Corvane gains a desperate rage: his spell save DC rises to 18 for the remainder of the fight and his dying curse becomes permanent. If he abandons the casket to complete the ritual, the casket can be shattered freely, but the ritual proceeds and the party must break it under time pressure.
The party recovers and reads Corvane's confiscated sermons.
Corvane's certainty cracks for the first time in decades; he writes a final, honest letter to Liora's grave that the party can find after his death, revealing the last shred of the man he was.
Corvane hesitates one round when first reduced below half hit points, losing his bonus action that round.
Odessa Marr refuses Corvane to his face in the finale.
The paternal mask drops entirely; Corvane stops speaking and lets the rats speak for him, becoming more monster than man for the remainder of the encounter.
Corvane gains one additional 5th-level spell slot but loses access to his social abilities for the fight.
The plague focus in the bilge is destroyed while Corvane still lives.
Stripped of the ley line's feed, Corvane's flesh begins to run with rats permanently; he fights his last minutes as something half-consumed, cursing the party with his true dying breath.
Becomes permanent: Corvane gains the swarm's damage resistances and can no longer be grappled, but loses 20 maximum hit points as his body unravels.
Ally
Corvane found Orlan Fesk fifteen years ago in a quarantine camp outside Nostramus, a broken physician who had watched his wife and two daughters die of a fever the city's nobles ignored while they drank imported wine behind sealed doors. Corvane did not recruit him with promises of power; he sat with him through the night, held his hand, and told him that his grief was holy, that the fever had shown him the truth the temples were too cowardly to speak.
Fesk wept for the first time since the funeral and has never left Corvane's side since. It was Fesk who refined the weeping plague from the Choir's raw gift into something that could be carried in vials and syringes, Fesk who designed the laboratory beneath the Temple of Mercy — deliberately beneath the temple, as a blasphemy he and Corvane designed together over many cups of bitter tea. Corvane is the only person Fesk has ever spoken to about his daughters, and Corvane remembers their names, their ages, and the exact words Fesk's wife said at the end.
This memory is Corvane's most potent hold on his lieutenant, and also the one thing that could break it: if Fesk ever believed Corvane saw him as a tool rather than a brother in grief, the Kindly Knife's clinical detachment would curdle into something dangerous. Fesk's coded ledger names the sunken shrine because Corvane trusted him with the whole design, a trust no other lieutenant shares.
Enemy
Quill and Corvane have never met face to face, but they know each other's work intimately, and each considers the other the greatest fool in Nostramus. Quill believes the quarantine is saving the kingdom; Corvane knows the quarantine is his greatest weapon, sealing the healthy in with the sick and the sick in with despair. Quill's spies in the Ash Watch Keep have twice come close to uncovering the Choir's undercity routes, and Corvane has twice had to sacrifice valuable cult cells to misdirect her — once by framing a Harbor Kin warehouse fire, once by feeding her a false lead toward the Drowned Bell.
What Corvane does not know is that Quill was the junior inquisitor who signed the order that burned the quarantine camp where Fesk's family died, and that she carries that signature like a stone. If she ever learns that the plague's architect is the priest she once defended against heresy charges — Corvane's first heresy trial was quietly dismissed by her predecessor with Quill's reluctant signature on the dismissal — her certainty will fracture exactly as his did.
Corvane's deepest fear regarding Quill is not her sword but her pen: her reports to the king could bring royal troops that no plague can soften. He keeps a file on her, updated weekly by rat and by bribed guard, and he has written her three letters he has never sent, each one an offer to convert her, each one more honest than the last.
Faction
Corvane founded the Ratbound Choir twelve years ago from the remnants of a dockside burial society that tended the unclaimed dead of Ratwharf, and he has shaped it in his own image: hierarchical, gentle in manner, utterly ruthless in practice. Every cultist was recruited in a moment of grief — a lost child, a drowned spouse, a plague-dead parent — and Corvane personally conducts the initiation of each new member, holding their hands and telling them their loss has meaning.
This paternal intimacy is his true power over the faction, far more than the plague magic or the ratbone staff; his followers would die for him not from fear but from love, which makes them far more dangerous and far harder to turn. His word is scripture within the Choir: the inner circle of chanters and priests recites his sermons from memory, and the cult's rituals are staged adaptations of the Temple of Mercy's own liturgy, deliberately corrupted line by line.
The faction's resources — the Weeping Sister, the Plague Vault, the hidden undercity lair, and the rat swarms — are all held in Corvane's name, and no lieutenant can command them without his seal, a rat skull pressed in green wax. His influence extends into the Harbor Kin through Mirelle Vantt's secret allegiance and into the keep through paid spies, but he keeps those threads deliberately separate, so that no single betrayal can unravel the whole web. If Corvane dies, the Choir does not disband: it fractures into three grief-mad splinters, each convinced it alone heard the Choir's true voice.
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