Quill carries the king's writ of quarantine and a Seal of Office. Ash Watch guards obey her commands without question, and she can requisition guards, supplies, and information. This is a narrative resource, not a mechanical buff.
Deal an extra 3d6 damage to one creature you hit with an attack if you have advantage on the roll or another enemy of the target is within 5 feet, you don't have disadvantage, and the attack uses a finesse or ranged weapon.
Trade up to 2 Sneak Attack dice for an effect. Quill favors Poison (1 die): the target makes a Constitution save (DC 13) or is Poisoned for 1 minute. She pairs this with her rapier and crossbow bolts.
Use your Bonus Action to make a Sleight of Hand check, use thieves' tools, or take the Use an Object action — including lighting and throwing Quill's smoke pellets and fire pots.
Add proficiency bonus to Initiative (+6 total), and immediately after rolling Initiative you can swap your roll with a willing ally — typically an Inquisitorial guard.
Communicate secretly using coded speech and hidden messages understood only by those who know Thieves' Cant. Useful for Quill's network of spies in the Ash Watch.
Climb at full speed as part of movement without spending extra movement, and jump your full running distance when making a running long jump.
Gain advantage on your next attack roll this turn if you haven't moved; your speed becomes 0 until the end of the turn.
Take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action as a Bonus Action on each of your turns.
When an attacker you can see hits you, halve the attack's damage against you.
Double proficiency bonus on Investigation, Insight, Stealth, and Deception.
Behind the character
Sera Quill is a tall, severe woman in her forties with iron-grey hair pulled into a merciless knot and pale eyes that never soften. A thin scar crosses her jaw, the only mark on a face otherwise carved from the same grey stone as the keep she commands. She wears a long black coat over studded leather, the king's seal on a heavy chain at her breast, a rapier at her hip, and a light crossbow slung across her back.
Every movement is economical, every word measured, every decision final. She does not raise her voice because she has never needed to; guards straighten when she enters a room the way soldiers straighten for a general. She smells of ink, lamp oil, and the faint sweetness of the plague that clings to everything in Nostramus.
Quill is not cruel. She is worse than cruel in the eyes of the desperate: she is consistent. She applies the king's law with the precision of a surgeon and the warmth of one, and she has never once deviated from a lawful order, even when the order was to burn a house with the sick still inside. She believes, with the unshakable conviction of someone who has watched a plague consume everything she loved, that the quarantine is the only thing standing between Nostramus and annihilation.
She sees the party as potential carriers, useful tools, or obstacles, depending on what they carry and how they carry it. She is loyal to a king she has never met in person and to a kingdom she has served since she was old enough to hold a blade. If proof of the cult is placed in her hands, she will act on it with the same ruthless efficiency she applies to everything else. But until that proof arrives, she is the wall the party must climb, and she does not climb down for anyone.
Before the adventure
Sera Quill was born in the capital to a tanner's family in the river district, where the tanneries' waste ran green into the gutters and children learned to hold their breath passing the rendering yards. Her father died of a lung sickness when she was nine, and her mother followed within the year, leaving Sera and her younger brother Tomas alone in a rented room above the tannery. Sera took work as a runner for a shipping clerk, carrying sealed documents across the city for coppers, and learned to move fast, read fast, and trust no one who smiled too easily.
Tomas caught a fever when he was eleven. Sera carried him to three temples and was turned away from two for lack of coin. At the third, he was placed in a ward with forty other children and watched by two exhausted priests. She sat with him for nine days while he coughed blood into her cupped hands. On the tenth day, a nurse told her to go home and pray. She went home. Tomas was buried in a pauper's trench with eleven other children from the same ward, and the temple sent no notice.
She joined the city watch at fifteen because it was the only institution that fed her, and she rose because she was the only recruit who never drank, never gambled, and never asked why. At twenty-two, she caught a Harbor Kin smuggler red-handed in a warehouse and, alone and overconfident, tried to arrest him. He put a knife across her jaw before she put her thumbs through his throat. She carried the scar and the lesson: never corner a desperate person without backup, and never trust a system that sends you into a warehouse alone.
At twenty-eight, she was recruited into the Inquisitor's office, a small crown service that investigated sedition, smuggling, and corruption in the realm's port cities. She spent twelve years building cases against merchant princes, corrupt harbormasters, and cult cells, learning that the most dangerous people in any city are the ones who believe they are saving it.
Eight months before the plague ship arrived, Quill was appointed Inquisitor of Nostramus. Her official mandate was to root out Harbor Kin smuggling and investigate rumors of a pestilence cult operating in the undercity. She built a network of three spies inside the Ash Watch, cultivated informants among the dockworkers, and filed seventeen reports on cult activity that were never answered. When the Weeping Sister drifted into the harbor crewless and the plague began, she sealed the gates within six hours on her own authority, before Captain Vey could object and before the king could be consulted. She has ruled the city's quarantine ever since, burning infected buildings, executing gate-runners, and counting the dead in a ledger she keeps in her own hand.
She carries three things she never shows anyone: a sealed letter from the king with instructions she has never read, a small wooden rat carved by Tomas the year before he died, and a private report recommending the city's destruction that she cannot bring herself to finish writing. She fights with a rapier and a light crossbow, directs her guards from behind cover, and uses smoke pellets and fire pots to flush enemies from hiding.
She will retreat if the party proves the cult exists, because her mission is to save the kingdom, not to win arguments. But if the party stands between her and what she believes is necessary, she will go through them with the same cold efficiency she brings to everything else, and she will not lose sleep afterward.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Quill's spies report that Doctor Orlan Fesk is infecting patients in the Temple of Mercy, but her own agents cannot reach the crypt without alerting the cult. She deputizes the party to seize Fesk's coded ledger, the single document that proves the plague is deliberate. If they deliver it, she must choose between the king's quarantine doctrine and the truth in her hands.
Infiltrate the Temple of Mercy crypt and locate Fesk's laboratory.
Personal quest · 2
One of Quill's three spies inside the Ash Watch Keep has gone silent. She suspects Captain Vey has discovered the informant and turned them, or worse, that the cult has flipped her agent. Quill tasks the party with entering the keep under quarantine pretenses, identifying which of three suspects is her operative, and extracting them before Vey's patrols close the net.
Gain access to the keep's barracks and observe the three suspects.
Personal quest · 3
Quill has not received a response to her last three dispatches to the capital. The courier boat returned empty, its crew missing. She privately fears the plague has spread beyond the walls, or that someone at court wants Nostramus to die. She asks the party to intercept the next courier at the harbor chain tower and discover what happened to the previous one.
Meet Chain Captain Rook and learn what the courier boat carried.
Quill has captured Sergeant Holt for aiding the party and intends to execute him as an example. The party can intervene by fighting her guards, exposing Fesk's ledger to prove the plague is deliberate, or letting the execution proceed to maintain their cover.
Saving Holt by force makes Quill a permanent hostile enemy who hunts the party through Acts II and III. Presenting the ledger converts her to a wary ally and grants the party her Seal of Office. Letting Holt die preserves the party's cover but costs them a key ally and Holt's sister's trust forever.
Quill discovers that Captain Vey's son is infected and hidden in the temple row. Royal protocol demands the boy be moved to the plague pits. Quill offers the party a deal: turn Vey over to Inquisitorial custody, and she will quietly arrange for the boy to receive Fesk's partial cure.
Betraying Vey earns Quill's full trust and a permanent +2 bonus to all Charisma checks against authority figures, but Vey withdraws all Ash Watch support. Protecting Vey's secret makes Quill suspicious, imposing disadvantage on Persuasion checks with her for the rest of the campaign, but preserves the Watch as allies.
After the party proves the cult exists, Quill must decide whether to relax the quarantine to let the dying reach the temple, or maintain it to prevent the plague's spread. She puts the choice to the party as a test of their judgment.
Recommending relaxation grants the party a permanent ally in Quill and unlocks her combat support in the final battle, but risks the plague spreading if the ritual fails. Recommending maintenance keeps the quarantine intact, giving the party a +1 bonus to all saving throws against the weeping plague (from reduced exposure), but Quill remains emotionally distant and will not fight alongside them.
Reading Fesk's ledger and realizing the plague is deliberate
Quill shifts from enforcing quarantine to hunting the cult, changing her encounter behavior from obstacle to ally-in-progress.
Learning the king has been silent for weeks
Quill begins acting on her own authority, issuing writs without royal approval.
Witnessing the party risk their lives to save plague victims she would have written off
Quill's cold efficiency cracks; she begins treating the party as equals rather than suspects.
Ally
Quill recruited Holt personally nine years ago when he was a dock brawler with a talent for following orders. She taught him to read a battlefield, to hold a line, and to never question a lawful command. Holt has followed her through two riots and a flood, and she trusts him more than any other Watch officer. When the quarantine orders came down, Holt was the first she briefed. She knows about his sister in the temple row and has quietly ensured she receives extra rations, though she would never admit it. Holt's arrest during the Inquisitor's Purge is a wound Quill carries privately; she ordered it because protocol demanded it, not because she believed him guilty.
Enemy
Quill and Mirelle have crossed paths three times before the plague. Two years ago, Quill nearly caught Mirelle smuggling contraband through the harbor chain and lost her when Mirelle bribed a Watch corporal. Quill has never forgiven the corruption that let her quarry escape. Now Mirelle's smuggling network is moving infected people and cult supplies through the same routes Quill is trying to seal. Mirelle knows Quill's patrol patterns, her spies' identities, and her habit of walking the walls alone at dawn.
Quill knows Mirelle is the Harbor Kin's leader but does not yet know she serves the Ratbound Choir. Each woman represents everything the other despises: Mirelle sees Quill as the king's chained dog, and Quill sees Mirelle as the rot that killed the city's honor before the plague killed its people.
Faction
Quill was appointed Inquisitor of Nostramus eight months before the plague arrived, tasked with rooting out smuggling and sedition in the harbor. She built her spy network inside the Watch by offering promotions, pay raises, and protection from Captain Vey's blunt discipline. Three serving guards report directly to her, and a dozen more owe her favors. The rank-and-file resent her but obey her because she carries the king's seal and has the authority to have them flogged.
Captain Vey tolerates Quill's presence but views her as the crown's leash on the Watch's independence. Since the quarantine began, Quill's influence has grown: she can requisition any guard, open or close any gate, and order any citizen searched. The Watch's growing desperation has made her authority absolute, and she uses it without hesitation, sealing districts and burning infected buildings with the same efficiency she once applied to catching smugglers.
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