This character will be deleted in 6 days. Create a free account to claim all your generated content.
Corvin's hit points are raised to 45 (a CR 3 tuning for a hard fight against four level 3 characters). At half hit points (22) he offers his deal: the Sundered Watch for Ned Fletcher's freedom. If refused, he fights to unconsciousness, never to death — he always chooses nonlethal damage on reduced foes.
Once per combat, when Corvin fails a saving throw or misses with an attack roll, the Sundered Watch stutters and he rerolls the d20, keeping the new result. The watch hums audibly when this is used — a telltale the party can notice (Perception DC 15 to realize the watch is magical and active).
Once per turn, when Corvin hits with a weapon that has advantage, or when another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it and Corvin doesn't have disadvantage, he deals an extra 2d6 damage. He must not have disadvantage on the roll.
Before the confrontation, Corvin has rigged his workshop with clockwork snare traps (Dexterity DC 13; 1d8 piercing on a failure). He can trigger them as a bonus action using Fast Hands while within 10 feet of a snare he knows.
As a bonus action, Corvin can make a Sleight of Hand check, take the Use an Object action, or make a Dexterity check to pick a lock or disarm a trap. He uses this to spring clockwork snares mid-combat.
Corvin hurls heavy brass gears as improvised thrown weapons: +5 to hit, range 20/60 ft., 1d6+3 bludgeoning damage. These count as finesse thrown weapons for his Sneak Attack.
As a bonus action, Corvin gains advantage on his next attack roll this turn. If he moves this turn, the attack roll has disadvantage.
Corvin adds his proficiency bonus to initiative rolls (total +4) and can swap initiative with a willing ally after rolling.
Corvin's climb speed equals his walk speed, and he can make a running jump after moving only 5 feet rather than 10.
Corvin can take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action as a bonus action on each of his turns.
Behind the character
Corvin Sable, called the Minute Hand, is a lean, precise man in his early thirties with the careful hands of a born clockmaker and the exhausted eyes of a man who has not slept a full night in five years. He stands a little over average height, narrow through the shoulders, and moves with the economical grace of someone who has spent a lifetime working in cramped spaces behind clock cabinets.
His fingers are permanently brass-stained, the pigment worked so deep into the creases that scrubbing will never remove it, and he is rarely seen without a clockmaker's loupe pushed up onto his brow like a second pair of eyes. He dresses in a rain-dark traveling coat over a leather jerkin, the coat's hem sewn with fine gears and springs — tools disguised as decoration, or decoration disguised as tools, depending on his mood.
Around his neck, on a chain too short for the purpose, hangs the Sundered Watch, a silver pocket watch that hums faintly and reads the same minute no matter when it is checked. Corvin is soft-spoken, unfailingly polite, and apologetic in a way that unsettles more than it soothes; he thanks people for their patience before he robs them and apologizes to doors he kicks open. He treats violence like a repair job — quick, clean, regrettable, and best done with the minimum number of broken parts.
He lies constantly, but only by telling technical truths, and he never raises his voice until the first clockwork trap springs. Beneath the precision is grief worn smooth as an old gear: his sister Wren died in a mill fire he believes he caused, and he has convinced himself that a stolen watch full of borrowed seconds can give her back one hour. He is not a monster. He is a repairman trying to fix the one thing that cannot be fixed, and he will apologize the entire time it takes to fail.
Before the adventure
Corvin Sable was born in the Clockwork Marches, the second child of a millwright and a seamstress, and grew up in the shadow of Hollow Mill, where his father maintained the great wheel. He was a quiet child with a gift the town noticed early: he could hear when a clock was lying. By twelve he was apprenticed in Bramwell Cross; by sixteen he could build an escapement blindfolded. His sister Wren, four years younger, followed him everywhere, and he taught her the names of tools the way other brothers taught fishing or fighting.
The fire came on a night of hard rain, when Corvin was nineteen and working late at the mill on a repair job his father had asked him to finish. He fixed the mechanism. He also, in his own telling, jammed the mill door's latch with a shim so no one would wander in and disturb the works — a small, thoughtless act of a tired boy protecting his workspace.
The fire started in the dust above the grinding stones. Wren had come to bring him supper. The shim held. Corvin has spent the years since turning that hour over and over in his hands like a broken watch, and the guilt has become the mainspring of everything he does. He stayed in the Marches, working as a clockmaker of modest reputation and meticulous skill, taking only repair jobs, never commissions, as if building something new might tempt fate.
He took on an apprentice, Ned Fletcher, a fatherless boy with quick fingers, and for three years the workshop under the eaves of the old bell tower was almost peaceful. Then Corvin began hearing about the Sundered Watch — rumors of a silver watch that stored borrowed seconds, built by Mara Quill for a dying friend, a watch that held time the way a jar holds water. He heard the rumors the way a drowning man hears about a rope.
He spent a month observing Mara's shop, posing as a customer three times, asking careful technical questions about the mainspring. On the night of the theft he was polite, precise, and gone in under a minute, which is how he earned the name the Minute Hand. What he did not know — what he is only beginning to suspect — is that he was recruited before he ever decided to steal.
The hourglass coin that paid his room at the Bell and Candle was placed a week before the theft, by a courier of the Hourglass Couriers, and the Collector's sealed letter promised him the one thing he wanted: 'one hour, returned to a deserving client.' He signed without reading the margins. Now the watch's mainspring is gone, sent ahead by a courier he never met, and the watch in his hands is a dead shell that hums with someone else's seconds.
He has chained Ned in the workshop's back room — telling himself the chains are protection — rigged his benches with clockwork snares, and prepared to sell the watch to the Collector to fund one last attempt at the impossible. He fights with thrown brass gears and a clockmaker's hammer, retreats to high ground, and always chooses nonlethal damage on reduced foes, because he has killed once already and will not do it twice. Every clock in his workshop points to the same minute: the minute the shim held.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Corvin seeks out Brother Aldous in Verdigris Fen, hoping the hermit's dream-ledger holds a true account of what the Sundered Watch can and cannot do. He wants an honest answer about rewinding his sister's hour, even if it breaks him. The quest forces Corvin to confront the limits of his grief and the truth that the watch stores borrowed seconds, not reclaimed ones. Completing it plants the seed of his eventual surrender or redemption, and the knowledge he gains becomes the very proof the party can later use to talk him down beneath the bell tower.
Corvin travels the sunken causeway alone, avoiding the wisp that follows the watch's hum, and bargains his way into Aldous's stilt-house.
Personal quest · 2
Corvin's apprentice Ned Fletcher tried to return the stolen watch to Mara Quill, and Corvin chained him beneath the bell tower to protect the plan — and to protect Ned from the Collector, or so Corvin tells himself. This quest follows Corvin through the days before the party's arrival as he maintains the lie that the chains are mercy. It forces him to weigh his obsession against the one person who believed in him, and its outcome determines whether Ned testifies for him or against him when the party arrives.
Corvin returns to the workshop and finds Ned has nearly picked his chains with a file hidden in his boot heel.
Personal quest · 3
Before the party closes in, Corvin wants one last meeting with the courier who pays in hourglass-stamped coins. He intends to ask the Collector for more time — literally — to complete his plan, not realizing he is negotiating his own indenture. The quest takes him back along his own escape route through Hollow Mill at night, past the traps he set, and into a dead-drop rendezvous that reveals how little the Collector values him. It deepens his role as courier-not-mastermind and gives him the sealed letter he will later surrender or leave in his journal.
Corvin recovers his route map's missing half from the mill's hidden compartment and disarms his own snare.
In the workshop beneath the bell tower, at half hit points, Corvin offers the party the Sundered Watch in exchange for Ned Fletcher's freedom.
If genuine, Corvin permanently loses the Sundered Watch and its Borrowed Minute reroll but gains the party's potential mercy and Ned's forgiveness, unlocking his redemption ending and the sealed letter. If a stalling tactic, Corvin keeps the watch, gains one extra Borrowed Minute use, but forfeits any chance of being talked down — his Persuasion DC to surrender rises to 18 and Ned will testify against him. Either way, the mainspring clue passes to the party or dies with him.
Corvin learns from Aldous's ledger and Ned's testimony that the watch cannot rewind his sister's hour — the mainspring is already in the Collector's hands.
Choosing the last attempt grants Corvin 'Desperate Precision' — +2 to attack rolls and initiative for the final fight, but he loses Villain Grit's nonlethal restriction and can now be killed outright. Choosing acceptance removes him from combat entirely, hands the party the sealed letter and journal, and grants him the 'Clear-Eyed' insight feature for future acts as a redeemed informant against the Collector.
The Collector's courier offers Corvin double payment and a vial meant 'for the apprentice' during the dead-drop meeting at Hollow Mill.
Taking the deal grants 40 gp, an extra Thug retainer, and a one-time escape plan that lets Corvin auto-succeed on one Disengage escape, but brands him with 'Marked by the Collector' — the Collector's agents can always find him. Refusing grants 'Unbought' (advantage vs. the Collector's agents' intimidation), keeps the sealed letter intact as evidence, and makes Ned willing to hide Corvin from the watch — but the Collector sends a second courier the party must eventually face.
Reliving the mill fire through Aldous's ledger
Corvin stops lying by technical truth; his dialogue becomes plain and direct, and he can no longer deceive the party about the watch's nature.
Gains 'Clear-Eyed' (advantage vs. charm/illusion saves) or, if he refused the memory, the hardened variant that raises his surrender DC to 18.
Ned nearly picks his chains
Corvin confronts the gap between protecting Ned and imprisoning him; the workshop's chains become the symbol of his own trap.
Gains 'Second Thoughts' (once per day, offer a deal to end combat) or loses a Thug retainer and takes disadvantage on final-scene Insight checks.
The vial 'for the apprentice'
Corvin understands the Collector would have him poison the boy he claims to protect; his patron becomes his enemy in all but name.
Gains 'Unbought' (advantage vs. the Collector's agents' intimidation) or 'Marked by the Collector' (agents can always locate him) depending on his choice.
Ally
Corvin took Ned Fletcher on as an apprentice three years ago when the boy's father died in the same flood that damaged the Bramwell Cross clock tower. Ned had quick fingers and a quicker mind, and Corvin taught him everything: gears, escapements, the patience of a truly good mainspring. Ned was the first person Corvin told about his sister Wren and the mill fire, and the only person he ever showed the sketches of a machine that could hold an hour.
When Corvin stole the Sundered Watch, Ned helped him carry it out of Bramwell Cross, believing his master's grief made the theft forgivable. But Ned drew the line at selling it. He tried to slip the watch back to Mara Quill's shop, and Corvin — terrified the Collector would punish the failure with Ned's life — chained him in the workshop's back room and told himself the chains were protection. Ned has been picking at those chains ever since, and the argument between them has become the truest conversation Corvin has left.
Enemy
The Collector hired Corvin a month before the theft, paying in hourglass-stamped coins and promising, in writing, that the Sundered Watch could be made to 'return one hour to a deserving client.' Corvin believed he was a customer; he now suspects he was a courier all along, that the mainspring was the true prize and the watch a decoy left in his hands to draw pursuit away from the real buyer.
The dead-drop meeting — the double payment, the vial 'for the apprentice' — confirmed the Collector would spend Ned's life as easily as a coin. Corvin cannot fight the Collector, so he fights the party sent to recover what the Collector no longer wants, hoarding the one piece of leverage he has: the sealed letter. His hatred is quiet and practical, like everything else about him — he has begun keeping a journal page titled 'What I Owe,' and the Collector's name is the largest entry.
Faction
The Hourglass Couriers are the Collector's delivery network: carter-middlemen, coin-minters, and dead-drop keepers stretching from Bramwell Cross to a mint beyond the marches. Corvin was recruited through them — his room at the Bell and Candle was paid with an hourglass coin before he ever agreed to the job, a detail he only later recognized as a test. The faction's influence over him is contractual and coercive rather than loyal: they know his routes, his traps, his sister's grave, and the name Ned Fletcher.
When Corvin weakened the mill snare as an act of mercy, a courier noticed within a day, and the observation was reported in the ledger that accompanies every payment. Corvin's standing with them determines whether the Collector sends a second courier or simply waits; if he is spared by the party, the Couriers mark him for collection, and his survival into Act II depends entirely on the party's willingness to shield a former enemy.
Join thousands of players and create rich, detailed character backgrounds with Fable Fiesta!
Register to unlock personal quests, relationships, and narrative hooks!
Sign Up Now - It's Free!No credit card required. Start creating in minutes!