Once per turn, Liss deals an extra 3d6 damage to one creature she hits with an attack if she has Advantage on the attack roll or if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it. She can use a finesse or ranged weapon and needn't have Advantage if she has Disadvantage on no other attack roll.
When she deals Sneak Attack damage, she can add effects by sacrificing Sneak Attack dice: Poison (1 die, target CON save DC 14 or Poisoned), Trip (1 die, target STR save DC 14 or Prone), or Withdraw (1 die, immediately move 15 feet without provoking).
Liss knows the hidden tunnel beneath the docks (the undercity entrance) and the Ratwharf's secret routes. She can guide a group to the Sewer Gate without a Survival check, and she has Advantage on checks to navigate the undercity.
Her climbing speed equals her walking speed, and she gains a climb speed of 30 feet. When she makes a running jump, the distance increases by a number of feet equal to her Dexterity modifier.
As a Bonus Action, she gains Advantage on her next Dexterity attack roll this turn if she hasn't moved; her speed becomes 0 until the end of the turn.
When she makes a Dexterity saving throw to avoid damage from an effect, on a success she takes no damage and on a failure she takes only half.
She can use her Cunning Action to make a Sleight of Hand check, use thieves' tools, or take the Utilize or Stow/Retrieve actions.
She adds her proficiency bonus to Initiative rolls and can swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling.
When an attacker she can see hits her with an attack, she can halve the attack's damage against her.
Liss doubles her proficiency bonus on Stealth, Sleight of Hand, Deception and Perception checks.
She takes the Dash, Disengage or Hide action as a Bonus Action on each of her turns.
Behind the character
Liss Vell is a lean, weathered woman in her early thirties, built like the rigging she grew up climbing: all tendon and tension, with a stillness that reads as either calm or coiled violence depending on the hour. A pale scar runs diagonally across her left cheek, a souvenir from a knife fight she will tell you about differently every time you ask. Her dark hair is tied back with tarred cord, practical and unlovely, and her salt-stained sailor's coat hangs over oiled leather armor that has turned aside more blades than she admits. A curved knife rides her hip, worn to the hand, and her grey-green eyes do the arithmetic of every room she enters before her mouth opens.
She carries herself like someone perpetually halfway out a door. On the piers she is all business: clipped orders, quick hands, a smuggler's economy of motion that wastes nothing, not movement, not words, not trust. Off the piers, in the Rat's Rest with a cup of something rough, a drier humor surfaces, along with the first hints of a conscience she has spent years pretending not to own. She is loyal to Mirelle Vantt with the fierce, borrowed loyalty of someone who was pulled out of the gutter and never fully believed she deserved it, and that loyalty is currently at war with what she has begun to suspect about the cult Mirelle serves.
Liss doubts the Ratbound Choir, and doubt is a dangerous thing to carry in the Harbor Kin. She has seen the rat masks in the undercity tunnels she herself mapped, and she has started asking questions she should not ask. The quarantine has made her city a graveyard, and Liss Vell is deciding, night by night, whether she is a smuggler profiting from the dying or a woman who finally stands for something. She hates that the answer is not obvious to her yet, and she hates more the people who seem to have found theirs.
Before the adventure
Liss Vell was born in a fishmarket tenement in Ratwharf, the second child of a net-mender and a sailor who never came back from the run that fathered her. Her mother died of lung-rot when Liss was nine, leaving her and her older brother Tam alone in a district where the Harbor Kin was the only family that never turned anyone away. Tam was twelve and already running cargo through the pier gaps; Liss learned the trade from him, first as a lookout, then as a diver, then as one of the fastest knife-hands on the wharf. The Kin fed them, housed them, and taught them the first rule of the waterfront: the Kin survives, whatever the city does to it.
When Liss was nineteen, Tam took a run for Mirelle Vantt, who was then only a rising lieutenant and not yet the Harbor Whisper. The run went wrong at the harbor mouth, a Watch patrol, a swamped boat, and Tam went into the black water with a hold full of contraband brandy. His body was never recovered. Mirelle paid for the funeral rites at the Salt Chapel, paid for Liss's mourning year, and then, when Liss had nothing left, offered her a place at her right hand.
Liss has never fully untangled whether she follows Mirelle out of gratitude, love, or the simple fact that Mirelle is the only person who was there when Tam drowned. She paid for the funeral; she also sent the boy on the run. Liss does not say this aloud, even to herself, more than once a year.
She earned her scar at twenty-six, on the Grain Scales pier, from a Kin man named Dorn Cutter who tried to sell her routes to the Watch to cover his gambling debts. She left him alive because a feud would have cost the Kin three good runners, and she has regretted the pragmatism every day since, particularly now that Dorn wears a rat mask and sells the same talent for betrayal to the Ratbound Choir.
For the past eleven years Liss has been Mirelle's second: the one who maps the routes, trains the divers, keeps the true ledgers, and vouches for every desperate family the Kin moves through the quarantine at two hundred gold a head. She mapped the hidden tunnel beneath the docks to the undercity herself, three years ago, following a drainage culvert on a dare and finding the Sewer Gate beyond. That tunnel is now the most valuable secret in Ratwharf, and Liss is the only person alive who knows all of its turns.
When the Weeping Sister drifted in crewless, Liss was one of the smugglers paid triple rates to unload her cargo by night: sealed iron drums, carried down her own tunnel on Mirelle's orders, no questions permitted. She asked none, and she has regretted it since the first coughing death in the temple row. She has watched the plague take the wharf she grew up on, watched rats grow bold enough to sit on the dying, and watched Mirelle slip away to meetings at the Salt Chapel with a man in a rat mask.
Liss tells herself the Harbor Kin is only surviving the way it always has. But she keeps a second ledger now, hidden under the Rat's Rest, recording every person Mirelle has moved and every drum she unloaded, and a woman who keeps evidence against her own leader is a woman already halfway out the door. What the party does with her, and what proof they put in her hands, decides which side of that door she lands on.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Liss's younger brother Tam drowned during a run for the Harbor Kin three winters ago, and his body was never recovered from the harbor. Old Pell the ferryman claims he has seen lantern-light moving on the water near the Drowned Bell at low tide, and Liss half-suspects the cult is using drowned bodies for its plague rites. She needs someone brave enough to dive the wreck at low tide while she watches the Ratwharf piers for cult patrols. What they find in the wreck determines whether Liss can finally grieve or whether her brother's corpse has been dragged into the Ratbound Choir's workings.
Meet Old Pell at the harbor after midnight and learn what he saw near the Drowned Bell.
Personal quest · 2
Liss knows where Mirelle hid the stolen manifest of the Weeping Sister: behind a loose brick in the cellar of the Rat's Rest tavern, under the noses of the Harbor Kin. Stealing it from under Mirelle is treason against her own crew, and Liss cannot do it alone. She asks the party to create a distraction at the Tallow Yard while she lifts the manifest, but the job goes wrong when a Harbor Kin informant tips off cultists. The manifest is the single most dangerous piece of paper in Nostramus, and Liss must decide mid-heist who she is loyal to.
Scout the Rat's Rest cellar and identify the loose brick and the watch rotation.
Personal quest · 3
Liss's scar came from a knife fight with a smuggler named Dorn Cutter, whom she left alive on the Grain Scales pier five years ago after he tried to sell her out to the Watch. Dorn is back in Nostramus, trapped inside the quarantine, and he has joined the Ratbound Choir for protection and pay. He knows Liss's face, her routes, and her weaknesses, and he is telling the cult everything. Liss wants him found and dealt with before he sells the location of her undercity tunnel to Corvane, but she cannot decide whether she wants him dead or simply terrified into silence.
Track Dorn Cutter through the Ratwharf using Liss's old contacts and knowledge of his habits.
The party shows Liss hard proof of the cult's true goals: Fesk's coded ledger, a cultist's mask, or Corvane's sealed letter naming the Weeping Sister as his seat. Liss has spent her whole adult life loyal to Mirelle Vantt, who pulled her out of the gutter after Tam drowned, but the evidence shows Mirelle knowingly feeds the Choir's ritual with smuggled plague reagents and prisoners.
If she defects, Liss becomes a full ally: she reveals the undercity tunnel, fights alongside the party, and gains the Know the Waterways benefit permanently for the whole party. If she tries to redeem Mirelle, she gains the Harbor Whisper Ring's secret knowledge but the party loses time before the midnight ritual. If she plays both sides, she gains 200 gp and the Smuggler's Compass but her Trust rating with the party drops and she may betray them at the Sunken Shrine.
During the theft of the manifest at the Rat's Rest, Liss discovers that Mirelle has been smuggling people OUT of the city for 200 gold a head, using the same hidden routes Liss knows. Some of those people are plague carriers being paid to leave, seeding other ports. Others are innocent families who paid everything they had.
Sealing the routes grants Liss a permanent +1 to AC as she dons heavier oiled leather for open war against the Kin, and the Ash Watch marks her an ally. Keeping them open gives the party a potential escape route in Act III but adds a plague-outbreak complication to the finale. Taking over the routes gives Liss leadership of a faction remnant and a small smuggler crew (2 scouts) who can aid one encounter.
At the Sunken Shrine, Mirelle Vantt is defeated and offers Liss, not the party, the choice of her fate: kill her, let the Watch take her, or help her flee the city by the hidden routes. Mirelle reminds Liss that she is the only mother figure she has left.
Killing Mirelle gives Liss the Harbor Whisper Ring and unlocks her final character growth (she gains Uncanny Dodge twice per short rest, having burned away her last hesitation), but she becomes colder and loses her Deception expertise flavor. Sparing Mirelle for the Watch earns Captain Vey's permanent favor and a writ of authority for the party. Helping Mirelle flee costs the party the Harbor Whisper Ring but gains them a favor Mirelle will repay in Act III: she reveals the sea cave entrance and the bound water elemental's weakness.
Seeing the Plague Vault cages with her own eyes
Liss stops calling the plague 'bad luck' and admits to herself that the Kin's silence makes them complicit.
Learning Tam's body was used in the cult's rites
Her grief becomes purpose; she volunteers the undercity tunnel without being asked.
Ally
Crane has watched Liss grow up on his docks since she was a nine-year-old orphan stealing fish from the morning catch, and he never once turned her in, though he made her work off every stolen mackerel hauling rope. When Tam drowned, it was Crane who rowed out in the rain for three days dragging the harbor for the body, and it was Crane who told Liss the truth when Mirelle would only tell her comforting lies.
He is one of only three people who know Liss keeps a knife under the floorboard of her room at the Rat's Rest, and he has quietly looked the other way on every smuggling run she has ever made through his manifests. In return, Liss has never let the Harbor Kin rob his stores, and twice she has warned him of Kin raids disguised as Watch inspections. Their relationship is built on forty years of dock-side silence: they rarely say anything warm to each other, but Crane limps down to the pier every dusk she is out on the water, and Liss always brings him the first catch of any run. Now Crane is the one feeding her information about the ghost ship, and both of them know he is risking his wooden leg and his life to do it.
Enemy
Five years ago Dorn Cutter tried to sell Liss to the Ash Watch to cover his own debts, and she put the scar on her own cheek diving away from his knife on the Grain Scales pier. She left him alive because killing a Kin man over an informer's word would have started a feud, and she has regretted the mercy ever since. Now Dorn wears a rat mask and sells the Choir everything he knows about the Ratwharf's routes, including the ones Liss uses.
He has told the cult that Liss Vell is Mirelle's soft spot, which means Liss is on Corvane's list of people to recruit or bury. For Liss, Dorn is not just an enemy but a mirror: he took the coward's road she could have taken, and every time she sees that rat mask she sees the version of herself that would have sold the whole city to survive. She wants him dealt with before he sells her tunnel to the Bishop, and she wants it done by her hand or her order, not by the party's, because this is a debt with her name on it.
Faction
Liss is Mirelle Vantt's second in the Harbor Kin, which means every runner, diver and warehouse rat in the Ratwharf answers to her when Mirelle is not present. She has spent eleven years earning that standing: she mapped the undercity tunnel, she trained half the Kin's young divers, and she personally vouches for every person the Kin move through the quarantine. This influence is precisely what makes her dangerous to the cult and valuable to the party: she can call off a Kin ambush with a word, open any warehouse on the wharf, and move the party through Ratwharf checkpoints without a coin changing hands.
But her influence is also her burden. Half the Kin do not know Mirelle serves the Choir, and if Liss turns against her, she risks splitting the faction into a civil war on the docks at the exact moment the city needs every smuggler running food and medicine. Liss knows that if she breaks with Mirelle, she must take the Kin's loyalists with her or watch them be fed into the cauldron one by one, and that responsibility weighs on her more than the cult's knives do.
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