Rook commands the harbor chain and its garrison. He can order the great chain raised or lowered, seal the harbor mouth, or grant passage past the tower. He is loyal to Nostramus, not the crown, and will defy Inquisitor Quill's orders if the city's survival demands it.
Rook knows three maneuvers. Precision Attack (add die to an attack roll), Riposte (reaction melee attack after an enemy misses him, add die to damage), Menacing Attack (add die to damage; target makes a DC 14 Wisdom save or is frightened for 1 minute).
Rook knows every smuggling route, cave, and mooring in Nostramus harbor, including Mirelle Vantt's hidden lanes. Any Intelligence (History) or Wisdom (Survival) check involving the harbor, tides, or waterfront is made with advantage.
Rook has advantage on saving throws against disease and against being poisoned by spoiled food or foul water. Thirty years on the harbor have exposed him to every sickness the docks can breed.
Rook regains 1d10 + 6 hit points. In the 2024 rules, this also grants a +2 bonus to the next saving throw he makes before the end of his next turn.
Rook's carved oak leg does not slow him, but he has disadvantage on Dexterity checks and saving throws made to swim, and he cannot swim unaided.
When Rook fails an ability check, he can expend one Superiority Die to add it to the roll, potentially turning failure into success.
Rook attacks twice, instead of once, when he takes the Attack action on his turn.
Rook can take one additional action on his turn, except the Magic action.
Rook gains a +1 bonus to Armor Class while wearing armor.
Behind the character
Chain Captain Rook is a weathered human sailor in his mid-fifties, grey-bearded and wind-burned, with a split eyebrow and a polished oak peg leg planted where his left shin should be. He wears a salt-stained blue tricorn hat and a heavy oilskin coat over a scarred breastplate, a cutlass at his hip and a set of chain-keys on a ring at his belt. He stands at the rail of the Harbor Chain Tower most hours of every day, one hand resting on the massive iron winch, watching the rotting hulk of the Weeping Sister at anchor in the fog below.
Rook is loyal to Nostramus, not to the crown, and he says so plainly when Inquisitor Quill's messengers come climbing his stairs. He has spent thirty years on this harbor — first as a dockside brawler, then as an Ash Watch sergeant, and for the last decade as the captain of the great chain that can seal the city's mouth. He knows every smuggling route, every cave, and every mooring in the harbor, including the hidden lanes Mirelle Vantt's Harbor Kin use, and he has decided which of them to ignore while the city starves.
He is blunt, dry-humored, and hard to impress, but he is not cruel. He feeds the temple row with smuggled grain and looks the other way at desperate families, yet he will not lower the chain on rumor or bribery. He asks for proof, offers fair trades, and keeps his word to the letter. His garrison of nine sailors is sick, frightened, and loyal to him personally. Rook's pride is the harbor itself: as long as the chain holds, Nostramus has a throat that can still be defended, and he intends to be the man holding it when the plague ship finally burns.
Before the adventure
Rook was born in the Ratwharf slums to a net-mender and a dockhand, and he went to sea at twelve as a powder monkey on a coastal coaster. By twenty he was a boarding-party fighter for a merchant house, and by twenty-five he had a reputation as the hardest man on the waterfront — and a side business running contraband past the very chain he would one day command. That side business ended the night a powder keg tore through his boarding boat off the Drowned Bell shoal, killing his first mate and taking his left leg below the knee.
He has never proven who planted the keg, though he has suspected the Vantt family for thirty years, and the question has quietly shaped every choice he has made since.
The Ash Watch offered him a sergeant's cloak while he was still on crutches, partly out of respect and partly because a one-legged brawler who knew every smuggler's route was worth more on the docks than on a ship. He served fifteen years, broke up two riots, drowned three smuggling rings, and taught half the Watch's current veterans how to fight with a boarding axe on wet planks. When the old chain captain died, Captain Vey's predecessor created the post for Rook specifically — the first time in the tower's history that a harbor man rather than a crown officer held the seal.
He carved his own peg leg from the mast timber of his old ship, and he keeps a splinter of the same wood in a locket he will deny owning. He never married, but he has a wide, loose family: the garrison he feeds from his own stores, Keeper Sable at the lighthouse who once hauled him half-drowned from the shoal water, and the memory of Mirelle Vantt, who was his partner in crime and might have been more before the keg and the years turned them into rivals.
The quarantine has aged him a decade in two weeks. He has watched the plague climb from the docks inward, watched rats grow bold enough to sit on the dying, and watched the Inquisitor's soldiers kill a family at the north wall in the name of the king's order. He has responded the only way he knows: quietly, stubbornly, and outside the law. Smuggled grain reaches the temple row because Rook looks away from certain Harbor Kin boats.
His nightly reports to Vey keep the Watch's last honest officer informed. And the chain stays up — because whatever brought the Weeping Sister into the harbor came from the sea, and Rook will be damned before he lets anything else in.
He knows the tower is compromised. The winch ropes were chewed through by rats with iron teeth, a rune has been carved into his winch post by a hand that knew the tower's blind spots, and one of his own garrison has been seen speaking with a rat-masked stranger. He is a captain down to nine sick sailors, holding a gate that the cult wants sealed shut, and he knows it.
That is why he needs the party: not to save him, but to give him proof he can act on. Rook does not move on rumor. He moves on evidence, on writs, and on the word of people who have bled in front of him. Bring him the sabotage order, clear his basement, and he will lower the chain and hand you the lantern. Betray him, and you will learn why thirty years of harbor captains have learned to fear the man with the oak leg and the iron chain.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Rook's harbor chain is not merely stuck; it has been sabotaged with a rune carved into the winch post, and he suspects a traitor among his garrison. He asks the party to find proof against the young sailor Finn, who was seen speaking with a rat-masked stranger. The party must investigate the tower, uncover the blackmail, and decide Finn's fate before Rook acts on his own grim justice.
Investigate the sabotage and identify the cult's agent among the garrison.
Personal quest · 2
Rook lost his leg thirty years ago when a smuggler's powder keg tore through his boarding party off the Drowned Bell shoal. He believes the keg was meant for him, planted by a rival captain he never named. Now, with the harbor dead and the fog thin, he asks the party to dive the wreck of that old ship at low tide and bring up the locker he was carrying that night — proof, he says, of who paid for his death.
Dive the Drowned Bell wreck and recover the sealed locker from the old captain's cabin.
Personal quest · 3
Rook's garrison has dwindled to nine sick and frightened sailors, and two have already coughed blood. He refuses to send them into the plague city, but he cannot hold the tower without them. He asks the party to escort his men to the Salt Chapel in Ratwharf, where Brother Aldous once kept a quarantine ward, and to find out why the chapel's consecration has failed — the sick who shelter there sicken faster, not slower.
Escort the garrison to the Salt Chapel and discover why its warding has turned poison.
Act III, at the chain tower: the cult's sabotage team holds the winch, and the party has just cleared the basement. Rook can lower the chain to open the harbor — but lowering it also unseals the harbor mouth for anything else that wants in, including whatever the bound water elemental calls to from the deep.
If lowered fully, the party reaches the Weeping Sister quickly but the finale gains an extra wave of Drowned Keelhands rising from the open water. If lowered halfway, the party must row the last stretch (DC 12 group Athletics) but the finale lacks the extra wave. If Rook refuses, the party must use the sea cave alone and Rook's Harbor Authority trait is lost for the rest of the campaign — he will not raise or lower the chain again for anyone.
Rook has spent the quarantine defying Inquisitor Quill's orders in small ways — feeding smuggled grain to the temple row, ignoring Harbor Kin boats. Quill has finally sent soldiers to arrest him at the tower.
If Rook resists, he gains the flavor of a martyr but is wounded (his HP maximum drops by 10 permanently until cured). If he hands over his seal, the party gains temporary use of Harbor Authority (they may order the chain raised or lowered once per day), but Rook is absent from the finale unless freed. If he surrenders quietly, Quill later can be turned into an ally with the party's evidence, restoring Rook with a pardon and full authority.
After the Weeping Sister's plague focus is destroyed, the harbor chain must be raised to keep the fleeing cultists and the freed water elemental from escaping into open sea — but raising it also traps the party's boat and any wounded aboard the sinking ship.
If Rook seals the chain, any party members or NPCs still aboard the Weeping Sister take escalating damage from the sinking wreck and must escape through the sea cave; Rook gains the permanent trait 'Warden of the Black Tide' (+2 AC while within sight of the harbor mouth). If he leaves it open, the city is saved but Rook's reputation is stained — he loses Harbor Authority's garrison loyalty, and his chain can no longer be raised without a DC 15 Charisma (Persuasion) appeal to the restored Ash Watch.
Completing 'The Leg He Left in the Water'
Rook stops being a man defined by an old wound and becomes an active hunter of the conspiracy that maimed him — his Menacing Attack DC rises to 16.
The garrison's fate in 'The Last Muster'
If most of his men survive, Rook fights beside the party in the finale as an allied NPC; if most die, he fights alone and recklessly, gaining a second Extra Attack but losing Second Wind.
The final chain decision
Rook either becomes the Warden of the Black Tide, a legend of the saved city, or a disgraced captain who sails away on the repaired Weeping Sister — the party chooses which story is told.
Ally
Sable was a young signal-woman on Rook's first ship thirty years ago, the same boarding action that took his leg. She hauled him out of the water after the powder keg went off, and she has never let him forget that he owes her a life. When she took the lighthouse post, Rook had the harbor chain's signal codes rewritten so that only the two of them know the full set — a private language of lantern shutters that has outlasted three harbor masters and one war scare.
During the quarantine, Sable is the only person Rook trusts to watch the harbor mouth at night, and her reports of lights on the Weeping Sister are the reason he believes Corvane walks the deck. He sends the party to her without hesitation, and he has quietly promised her that if the plague breaks, the first free ship out of Nostramus will carry her name on its manifest.
Enemy
Rook and Mirelle grew up on the same wharf, children of the same dockside slums, and for ten years they were partners — he ran the chain, she ran the cargo that slipped past it. He lost his leg the night her family's rivals planted a powder keg on his boarding boat, and though he never proved the Vantt hand behind it, he stopped opening the harbor for her ships that same season.
Mirelle never forgave him for choosing the city's law over their partnership, and Rook never forgave himself for suspecting her without proof. Now she serves the Ratbound Choir and he commands the last sealed gate in Nostramus, and each of them holds a secret that could destroy the other: she knows which Ash Watch officers he has bribed to feed the temple row; he knows the sea cave route beneath her lighthouse.
When the party brings word of her cult bargain, Rook's vengeance becomes personal — he wants her taken alive, to face the city she sold, and he will pay in favors, coin, and the lowering of the chain to get her.
Faction
Rook was an Ash Watch harbor sergeant for fifteen years before the chain captaincy was created for him, and half the Watch's veterans learned rope work, boarding drills, and barricade fighting at his hands. He has never worn the ash-grey cloak since his promotion — he says the tower is the city's throat and a captain should not dress like a soldier when he guards a sailor's gate — but every guardsman on the walls still calls him Sergeant Rook when the Inquisitor isn't listening.
His loyalty to Captain Vey is absolute and quietly subversive: he has used the chain tower's stores and the Harbor Kin's bribes to keep grain flowing to the temple row, defying Quill's quarantine edicts in ways that cannot be proven. The Watch knows, and says nothing. If the party brings Vey's writ of passage, Rook will treat them as Watch-adjacent and share what he knows; if the party works for Quill, he will seal the tower against them and lower the chain for no one.
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