Bruna can study a creature for 1 minute to learn its relative Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and Armor Class compared to her own. She uses this on every delegation that enters her hall.
Bruna's word carries legal weight in the Deepforge Holds. She can command the outpost's garrison, open or close the mountain pass, and call on other thanes for arbitration of grudges.
Bruna can take one additional action on her turn, except the Magic action. She can use this once per Short or Long Rest.
Bruna has 4 Superiority Dice (d8) per Short or Long Rest. Known Maneuvers: Riposte, Menacing Attack, Disarming Attack.
Bruna gains Tremorsense with a range of 60 feet for 10 minutes while on a stone surface. Usable once per Long Rest.
Bruna is proficient with Smith's Tools and gains a battle-standard banner she can plant as a rallying point.
As a bonus action, Bruna regains 1d10+6 hit points. She can use this feature twice per Short or Long Rest.
Bruna is proficient with the Warhammer, Handaxe, Battleaxe, Light Hammer, and War Pick.
Bruna has advantage on saving throws against poison and resistance to poison damage.
Bruna's hit point maximum increases by 1 per level (included in HP total).
Bruna attacks twice instead of once when she takes the Attack action.
While wearing armor, Bruna gains a +1 bonus to Armor Class.
Behind the character
Thane Bruna Ironvow is a grey-braided mountain dwarf in heavy plate etched with six generations of clan knotwork, every scar on the steel matched by one on the woman beneath it. She carries a heavy iron warhammer at her belt and a round shield of banded steel on her arm, and she sits a stone throne in a torchlit great hall as though the throne were a siege position and the hall a battlefield she has already mapped. Her gaze is her most disarming weapon: calculating, unhurried, and utterly unimpressed, it weighs every visitor like ore assayed for fraud.
Before the adventure
Bruna has buried two husbands and three kings' treaties, and she has drawn her own conclusions from all five funerals. Her first husband, Thane Orin Ironvow, died holding the Deepforge pass in the second year of the orc war; her second, Korgan, died in a border skirmish with human soldiers that Bruna has always privately suspected was staged. The three treaties — one with each of three human kings across three decades — all promised the Holds neutrality in exchange for open trade, and all three kings broke them the moment war was convenient. Bruna keeps a private ledger of every broken clause, because in the Holds a debt is not forgotten simply because the debtor is crowned.
She came to the thanehold young, amid grief, and ruled it through the worst years of the war: rationing the grain, hammering coffin plates, and learning that a thane's word is only as strong as the evidence behind it. The war taught her to read people the way she reads ledgers — for hidden entries. Her Battle Master's training was not learned in any academy but in the pass itself, where she developed the habit of studying every creature that enters her hall before a word is spoken: posture, armor weight, hand placement, the relative strength and speed of a potential enemy. Delegates find it unnerving. She finds it necessary.
Now the orcs are broken and the peace is dying, and Bruna stands at the hinge of the campaign: the Crown has offered her a fortune to close the mountain passes, which would strangle the Accord's road network and hand the coming war to Chancellor Vaelor. She has not said yes and she has not said no, because Bruna does not decide on gold — she decides on proof. She has noticed the wrong wax on the forged orders, the Crown silver paying for that wax in her own market, and the Choir hymns that echo in the war tunnels below her outpost.
If the party brings her evidence that the Crown is lying, she will keep the pass open and make Deepforge's neutrality a shield for the peace. If they bring her nothing, she will close the gates and sell steel to whoever pays — because a thane who guesses wrong buries her people, and Bruna has buried enough.
She is lawful to the bone but not naive about law: she knows treaties are weapons, that grudges are currency, and that the only honest arithmetic left in the Sundered Marches is kept in dwarven ledgers. She respects courage, despises flattery, and tests everyone — including the party — before she trusts them. Her hall is warm, loud, and full of forge smoke, and every dwarf in it is watching how the party answers her questions.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Bruna has begun to suspect that forged Accord orders were sealed with wax made in her own outpost. She quietly asks the party to trace the wax recipe, examine Dain Emberhand's forge records, and determine whether her own people produced the seals that turned human and elven patrols against each other. The investigation forces Bruna to weigh her thane's duty to protect her people against her duty to the truth, and whether to publicly implicate Deepforge in the Choir's plot.
Examine the wax recipe book recovered from the Hymn-Ruined Outpost and match it to Deepforge's forge records.
Personal quest · 2
Bruna's first husband, Thane Orin Ironvow, died holding the pass during the orc war; her second, Korgan, died in a border skirmish with human soldiers that Bruna has always suspected was staged. She asks the party to find Korgan's old patrol reports in the Accord archive and determine whether the skirmish was provoked by forged orders — the same forgery pattern the Choir is using now. If the party proves Korgan was murdered by a plot, Bruna must decide whether her grief becomes vengeance or evidence.
Search the Accord archive and interview veterans of Korgan's patrol.
Personal quest · 3
The Crown has offered Bruna a fortune to close the mountain passes. She has buried three kings' treaties and knows how little royal paper is worth. She sets the party a final test: bring her proof — the bribe letter, Dain's confession, or the Choir sigil — that the Crown is lying about who threatens the pass. If they succeed, she keeps the pass open and names Deepforge's neutrality a shield for the peace. If they fail, she closes the gates and sells steel to whoever pays.
Present evidence of the Crown's deception in Bruna's great hall.
When the Choir hit squad attacks Dain Emberhand in her hall, Bruna must choose between shielding the forger who shamed her hold or letting the crowd's justice fall on him.
Protecting Dain: Bruna gains his confession and the Emberhand Hammer enters play, and she permanently gains advantage on Insight checks against dwarves. Abandoning him: Dain dies, the pass closes for a month, and Bruna loses one Superiority Die permanently as her certainty curdles into paranoia.
Spymaster Lys Ardent sends a private letter offering Bruna double the Crown's gold to close the pass and blame the elves.
Taking the gold: Bruna gains 2,000 gp and the Deepforge Holds sell steel to the Crown's invasion, giving Crown troops +1 AC from dwarven plate. Exposing it: Bruna gains the 'Know Your Enemy' feature permanently against any Crown-aligned creature and the Accord Remnant names her a sworn ally.
After the Iron Vein sabotage, other thanes demand Bruna close all holds and arm for war against humans and elves alike.
Rallying for peace: Bruna's battle-standard banner becomes a magic rallying point (allies within 30 feet gain +1 to saving throws), and she gains the Ironvow Shield. Rallying for war: Bruna gains a permanent +2 to melee damage but loses her Feudal Authority in Accord-patrolled lands, as the Remnant brands her a war-thane.
Learning the forged seals were made in her own hold
Bruna stops judging by clan loyalty and starts judging by evidence, changing how she evaluates every delegation.
Bruna gains proficiency in Insight
Korgan's death is proven a staged murder
Bruna's grief becomes resolve; she stops burying treaties and starts enforcing them.
Bruna adds Goading Attack to her known maneuvers
The pass is kept open against the Crown's gold
Bruna publicly commits Deepforge to the peace, becoming the Holds' voice for neutrality.
The feature extends to guaranteeing safe conduct on Accord roads
Ally
Dain forged weapons under Bruna's first husband, Orin, and she inherited him along with the thanehold. When Orin died holding the pass, it was Dain who hammered the iron plates onto his coffin and Dain who stood beside Bruna at her second wedding. She has trusted him with her hold's steel for twenty years, which is precisely why his confession about the forged seals cuts so deep: the man who made Orin's coffin also made the wax that is killing the peace.
Bruna has not yet decided whether Dain is a traitor or a victim, and she keeps him within arm's reach in the great hall — partly for protection, partly so she can watch his hands when he lies.
Enemy
For three months a gray-hooded man has come to Deepforge Outpost's market, buying wax in bulk and paying in Crown silver. Bruna's clerks logged every purchase without question — wax is wax, and silver is silver. Now she knows that wax sealed the forged orders that got dwarven patrols killed at the Thornwood Edge ambush, and that her own market fed the plot. She has sworn a formal grudge against the buyer, which under dwarven law can only be settled by his death or his confession. Every delegation that enters her hall is measured with Know Your Enemy, because she no longer trusts any face she has not weighed.
Faction
Bruna is the Ironvow thane, and the Ironvows have held Deepforge Outpost for six generations. Her word carries legal weight across the Holds: she can command the garrison, open or close the mountain pass, and call on other thanes for arbitration of grudges. The older mine-lords respect her because she buried two husbands for the hold and never remarried for advantage; the younger merchants resent her because she refuses to sell steel to both sides of a coming war.
When the other thanes debated arming against humans after the Iron Vein sabotage, it was Bruna's banner that kept the council voting for neutrality — and it is her banner the war party will test first.
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