You are a master of navigating the wilderness. Choose one favored terrain: Forest. You are double proficient in the following skills when making Intelligence or Wisdom checks related to your favored terrain: Survival, Nature, Perception. You also ignore difficult terrain when traveling on foot in your favored terrain.
You have an inborn ability to communicate with beasts. By using a spell slot as an action, you can sense the presence of aberrations, celestials, dragons, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead within 1 mile of you (or within 6 miles if you are in your favored terrain).
You have an excellent memory for maps and geography, and you can always recall the general layout of terrain, settlements, and other features around you. You can find food and fresh water for up to six people each day.
Hunter's Prey — Colossus Slayer: Your tenacity can wear down the most potent foes. When you hit a creature with a weapon attack, the creature takes an extra 1d8 damage if it's below its hit point maximum.
You can use your action to make a ranged attack against any number of creatures within 10 feet of a point you can choose within your weapon's normal range. You make a separate attack roll for each target.
You have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track your favored enemies, as well as on Intelligence checks to recall information about them. Chosen favored enemies: Humanoids (humans and elves).
You can attempt to hide even when you are only lightly obscured by foliage, heavy rain, falling snow, mist, and other natural phenomena.
You have advantage on saving throws against being charmed, and magic can't put you to sleep.
You can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light.
You don't need to sleep. You meditate deeply for 4 hours instead of 8.
You gain a +2 bonus to attack rolls you make with ranged weapons.
Your choice of Perception skill proficiency.
Your base walking speed is 35 feet.
Ranger spells known at level 6: 5 spells known (2 must be level 1, up to 2 may be level 2). Lia knows Cure Wounds, Hunter's Mark, Goodberry, Pass Without Trace, and Spike Growth. Silence is not known — remove it; prepared list should be: Cure Wounds, Hunter's Mark, Goodberry, Pass Without Trace, Spike Growth. Lia prepares the full list of spells known each day.
A creature you touch regains a number of hit points equal to 1d8 + your spellcasting ability modifier.
You choose a creature you can see within range. Until the spell ends, you deal an extra 1d6 damage to the target whenever you hit it with a weapon attack, and you have advantage on any Perception or Survival check to find it.
Up to ten berries appear. A creature can eat a berry as a bonus action to regain 1 hit point. The berries retain their potency for 24 hours.
A veil of shadows and silence radiates from you, masking you and your companions from detection. For the duration, each creature you choose within 30 feet gains +10 to Stealth checks and can't be tracked except by magical means.
The ground in a 20-foot radius becomes difficult terrain. When a creature moves into or within the area, it takes 2d4 piercing damage for every 5 feet it travels. The transformation lasts for 10 minutes.
For the duration, no sound can be created within a 20-foot-radius sphere, and no sound can pass through it. Any creature inside the area is deafened and cannot cast spells with verbal components.
Behind the character
Lia Woodswhisper is a lean wood elf in her second century, all quiet economy of motion: a longbow of pale ashwood, mottled green leathers patched with gray thread, dark hair braided with pine sprigs so she can read the wind by how they move. Ash smudges one cheek more often than not, half camouflage and half habit, because she has spent three years living in the shadow of burned ground. Her pale grey-green eyes miss very little and forgive less, and strangers meet them over the fletching of a nocked arrow more often than over a handshake.
She speaks little and softly, in the clipped cadence of someone who has spent her life signaling rather than talking, and she listens the way hunters listen: for what is absent. She is suspicious of outsiders as a matter of doctrine, not temperament; underneath the wariness is a dry, unexpected humor that surfaces only for those who earn it, usually by tracking well or by admitting honestly what they do not know. She respects competence above all, and she extends grudging, hard-won loyalty to anyone who proves they can read a trail, keep a secret, and put the forest before their flag.
Lia is Chaotic Neutral in the old sense: she owes her allegiance to the Thornwood, not to councils, treaties, or crowns, and she will bend any rule that conflicts with the border's survival. But she is not cruel. She gave water to a human refugee child last winter and threatened the man who saw her do it. Her hatred is specific and evidence-based, aimed at the people who burned the groves and forged the orders, and it is precisely this discipline that makes her valuable: she will not accuse without proof, even when every instinct screams at her to loose the arrow first.
Before the adventure
Lia was born in a grove-keeping family on the eastern edge of the Thornwood, where the old trees grow close to the human marches and every warden's child learns two alphabets: the elven script and the blind-signs scratched into bark that tell scouts which paths are watched. Her mother was a border warden who once walked a week alone through the Marches to map orc movements; her father kept the grove's memory, tending the memorial stones of the ancestors. Lia inherited both trades, the watching and the remembering, and she was a promising scout before the war made her a veteran of it.
In the second year of the orc war, human soldiers, some panicked, some drunk, some simply careless with fire, burned the eastern groves while pursuing an orc raiding column. Lia's parents died in that fire. She was pulled unconscious from the burning undergrowth by Malrec Thorn, then a respected warden, and for a season she followed him with the devotion of the rescued. She watched him change. Grief became doctrine, doctrine became a plan, and when his raid councils began speaking of burning human farms in return, Lia walked out. Malrec called her a coward who had forgotten the ash. The word has followed her ever since, and part of her has never stopped wondering if he was right.
She spent the rest of the war running scouting lines for the mixed companies, which is how she met Captain Eldrin Voss, the only human officer who never sent a patrol into the Thornwood without an elven guide and who buried elven scouts with full honors. She also guided a patrol into an ambush she believed was orc, and three humans died before she understood the trap had been set by Malrec's early followers to poison elf-human trust.
She has never told anyone she was the guide. That silence is one of the weights she carries, alongside a piece of a forged order she found and hid in her sister's memorial cairn rather than report, afraid of what the elders would do with it before she understood its meaning.
After the war, the Concord withdrew from joint patrols and Lia returned to solo reconnaissance, watching the border the way her mother had, tallying every burned acre. It was on one of these watches that she saw the thing that defines her present: a human courier in a Crown uniform planting forged Accord orders near Thornwood Edge, orders designed to turn human and elven patrols against each other. She did not shoot. She watched, memorized, and began the slow, patient work of building a case, because she has learned the hardest lesson of the border: an accusation without proof is just another kind of fire.
Now she works the Thornwood Edge alone, suspicious of outsiders but desperate for ones she can trust, because the evidence chain requires hands that are not elven and not human and not Crown. She trained Riel, the hot-headed young scout whose ambush nearly ruined her standing, and she feels his disappearance like a wound. She knows Malrec has marked her. She knows her cousin Vaelis took Choir coin and appears on a list she should not know exists.
And she knows, with the certainty of someone who has counted the ash-dunes herself, that the war everyone fears will not begin with an army. It will begin with a forged order, a wrong-colored wax seal, and a forest full of people too angry to check. Lia Woodswhisper intends to be the one person in the Sundered Marches who checked.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Lia saw a human courier in a Crown uniform plant forged Accord orders at Thornwood Edge, but she has no proof that survives scrutiny. She asks the party to help her track the courier's route from the forest edge to a relay point near Burning Ford, recover the original orders before they are 'discovered,' and capture the courier alive. If they succeed, Lia gains the evidence she needs to accuse the Crown before the Concord without starting a war on a whisper.
Track the courier's backtrail through the Thornwood using Survival and stealth.
Personal quest · 2
The burned grove where Lia's sister died during the orc war has become a Choir safehouse. Cultists are using the sacred ashes to mask their forgeries and their hymns echo through the dead trees. Lia cannot enter alone without triggering Malrec's loyalists, so she asks the party to help her cleanse the site, recover the buried memorial stones, and expose whatever the Choir has hidden beneath the roots.
Infiltrate the ruined grove past Malrec's watchers without killing Concord elves.
Personal quest · 3
Riel, the hot-headed young scout who ambushed the party at Thornwood Edge, has gone missing after learning fragments of the truth. Lia trained him and feels responsible. Malrec's agents are hunting Riel because he saw the human courier's face. Lia asks the party to help her find Riel before Malrec silences him, and to decide with her whether the boy should face Concord justice for the ambush or be smuggled out of the forest entirely.
Follow Riel's panicked trail through the deep Thornwood while evading Malrec's rangers.
At Thornwood Edge, Lia holds a warning arrow aimed at the party while Riel's ambush unfolds. If the party spares the elves, she must decide whether to intervene against her own scout or let the ambush play out.
If she intervenes, Lia reveals her position and takes an arrow meant for a party member (gaining a lasting scar and a debt to the party), and Riel resents her, feeding his later vulnerability to Malrec. If she stays hidden, Riel's ambush may kill a party ally, and Lia carries the guilt, gaining a darker edge: her Colossus Slayer damage increases by 1 but she refuses to parley first in future encounters until redeemed.
Lia captures proof that the forged orders were written by a human hand and sealed in Deepforge wax. The Concord elders want her to present it as proof of human treachery and authorize retaliation raids. Captain Eldrin Voss begs her to share it with the Accord instead.
If she keeps the evidence for the Concord, the Thornwood gains a raiding advantage (Lia and Concord scouts deal +2 damage in the first round of any border skirmish) but the border slides toward war and Malrec gains legitimacy. If she shares it, Lia gains the Accord Signet's trust network and the party's evidence chain stays intact, but Malrec brands her a collaborator and sends rangers after her.
At the Forest Heart, Lia faces Malrec Thorn, who offers her a place at his side, arguing that every proof she has gathered only proves humans cannot be trusted and that fire is the only language they respect.
If she joins Malrec, Lia becomes a hostile CR 8 ranger lieutenant with poison arrows and forest ambush tactics, and the party must defeat or turn her. If she refuses, Lia's conviction hardens into resolve: she gains the Heartwood Seed's blessing (advantage on saves against fear and charm in forest terrain) and becomes a permanent ally who can guide the party to the Throne of Ash.
The courier is captured alive and confesses.
Lia stops assuming the worst of outsiders and begins demanding proof before judgment, changing her dialogue and willingness to parley.
The burned grove is cleansed and her sister's stone is recovered.
Lia's grief resolves into purpose; she stops drinking herself silent at night and takes an oath to protect the border, not avenge it.
Riel is saved or lost.
If saved, Lia becomes a mentor and leader; if lost, she becomes ruthless toward Choir agents, executing captured cultists unless the party intervenes.
Malrec's ritual at the Forest Heart.
Lia commits fully to the fragile alliance, wearing the mixed colors of the Accord alongside her Concord leathers, a visible symbol of her change.
Ally
During the orc war, Lia ran scouting lines for the mixed companies while Eldrin Voss held the line at Burning Ford, and twice her arrows turned orc raiders away from his wounded. She trusted him then because he never once ordered a patrol into the Thornwood without an elven guide, and he buried elven scouts with the same honors as his own soldiers. After the war, when the Concord withdrew from the joint patrols, Eldrin was the only human officer who kept sending Lia warnings about movements near the border, passing notes through Sister Elian rather than official channels.
He covered for her when she shot a poacher who turned out to be a Crown tax collector, paying the man's family from his own purse to keep the incident quiet. Lia still does not like humans as a rule, but she likes Eldrin, and his request for proof rather than vengeance in the envoy's murder is the reason she has not already put an arrow in a Crown officer. She knows he keeps a list of soldiers who took Choir coin, and she suspects her own cousin's name is on it.
Enemy
Malrec was once Lia's teacher. When human fire took the eastern groves in the second year of the war, he pulled her unconscious body from the burning undergrowth and carried her three miles to safety, and for a season she would have followed him anywhere. But Lia watched him change: grief curdled into doctrine, and doctrine into a plan to burn a hundred miles of human borderland, children included. When she refused to join his first raid council, he called her a coward who had forgotten the ash, and the word stuck because part of her feared it was true.
Now they are mirror images: both saw the same fires, both lost family, and each believes the other has forgotten what the forest actually needs. Malrec hunts Lia's informants and has marked her for the Forest Heart ritual, where he intends to offer her a final choice at the stone. Lia carries a single white-fletched arrow she has sworn to put through his heart if the forest cannot be saved any other way, but she loses sleep over the knowledge that she may be the only person who remembers the man he was, and the only one who could still turn him.
Faction
Lia has served the Concord since she was old enough to string a war bow. Her mother was a border warden and her father a grove-keeper, and the Concord raised her after both died in the war, folding her into the scout lodges where she learned the blind-signs, the ash-reading, and the patient arithmetic of the border: every burned acre remembered, every debt tallied. She has run solo reconnaissance deeper into human territory than any scout in a generation, and the clan elders trust her reports absolutely, which is precisely why her current position is so dangerous.
Lia is sitting on evidence that the forged orders were not elven work, and if she presents it wrong, the elders will authorize retaliation that plays into the Ashen Choir's hands; if she presents it right, she can pull the Concord back from the brink. Riel's ambush nearly ruined her standing, since it happened on her watch, and Malrec's faction whispers that she has gone soft on humans. Her influence within the Concord is real but conditional: she is respected as a scout, not yet heeded as a voice, and every choice she makes in this campaign is a test of whether the elders will finally listen to her or replace her with someone angrier.
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