Cassius Vane

Level 3 Human Rogue (Assassin)

Available with DM subscription
Register to save this character forever!

This character will be deleted in 0 days. Create a free account to claim all your generated content.

STR
8 (-1)
DEX
16 (+3)
CON
13 (+1)
INT
12 (+1)
WIS
10
CHA
15 (+2)

Defense

Armor Class 15 (Studded Leather)
Hit Points 24 (10 + (5+2) + (5+2) +1)
Speed 30 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws dexterity, intelligence
Skills Stealth +5, Deception +4, Persuasion +4, Intimidation +4, Investigation +3, Sleight of hand +5

Features

The Poison Ring (custom)

Campaign: The Missing of Brinehollow Level 3
1 use (a second dose exists but is unreliable)

Hidden in a hollow beneath the nine-wave seal of his signet is a vial of contact poison. If Vane is captured, he bites the ring as a Bonus Action. The poison acts on him alone: he must succeed on a DC 13 Constitution saving throw or take 2d6 poison damage and be Poisoned for 1 hour. He will bite it rather than be taken to Gull's Rest for interrogation. A DC 15 Intelligence (Investigation) check of his body or ring reveals the mechanism and the remaining second dose.

Broker's Retreat (villain tactics)

Campaign: The Missing of Brinehollow Level 3
DM guidance

Vane never fights fair and never fights last. He opens combat from the highest ground available with his hand crossbow, keeps a hired guard between himself and the nearest threat, and uses his rapier only when cornered. At half his hit points (12 or fewer) he takes the Disengage action and flees through the bookcase tunnel or to the longboat, abandoning his guards without a word. He never surrenders and never bargains for his life.

Alert (Criminal background feat)

Criminal background Level 1

Vane has thrived in the shadows of ports and plantation ledgers. He gains the Alert feat: he can add his proficiency bonus to initiative rolls, and immediately after rolling initiative he can swap his initiative with one willing ally in the same combat (he uses this to ensure his guards move first, keeping them between himself and threats).

Sneak Attack (2d6)

Rogue class Level 1

Vane knows how to strike subtly, interfering with a creature's vital points. Once per turn, he can deal an extra 2d6 damage to one creature he hits with an attack if he has advantage on the attack roll, or if another enemy of the target is within 5 feet of it, that enemy isn't incapacitated, and Vane doesn't have disadvantage.

Assassinate

Rogue subclass (Assassin) Level 3

Vane is deadly in the opening moments of a struggle. He has advantage on attack rolls against any creature that hasn't taken a turn in the combat yet. Any hit he scores against a surprised creature is a critical hit. When he opens fire from the study doorway or the sea-cave ledge, his first shot is meant to end things.

Cunning Action

Rogue class Level 2
Bonus action, per turn

Vane's quick thinking and agility allow him to act speedily. On his turn, he can take a Bonus Action to Dash, Disengage, or Hide. This is how he gives ground rather than trading blows, slipping away through the bookcase tunnel or down the sea-cave ledge without a word.

Vane's Signet Ring (custom item)

Campaign: The Missing of Brinehollow Level 3
At will (recognition/forgery utility)

A heavy brass ring set with a nine-wave seal. Vane's employees and the bribed Gull's Rest harbor watch recognize it on sight, and pressing it into wax forges orders in his name. It opens the manor's locked cabinet and the sea-cave chest.

Expertise (Deception, Stealth)

Rogue class Level 1

Vane's expertise is in people, and in vanishing. He doubles his proficiency bonus for Deception and Stealth checks.

Behind the character

Character Information

Cassius Vane is a tall, spare human in his late forties, with iron-colored hair combed precisely back from a narrow, clean-shaven face. His pale eyes never widen, and his default expression is a thin smile, as though perpetually amused by a joke no one else has heard. He dresses in fine salt-gray coats cut for a man who expects to be photographed by posterity, and his hands are always clean—a fact workers on the plantation find quietly obscene.

He wears a heavy brass signet ring stamped with nine interlocking waves, the mark of the Ninth Wave, and beneath that seal hides a vial of contact poison he intends to bite rather than be taken alive. Vane carries a rapier with a plain steel hilt he rarely draws and a dark lacquered hand crossbow he uses often. He is cold, courteous, and never loud. He treats cruelty as bookkeeping: entries in a ledger, debits against his standing with the Ninth Wave.

He uses people's names, not numbers, because names unsettle them more, and he has memorized every worker he has ever sold. He offers wine before he offers threats, and he means both. He laughs thinly at things that are not funny. He never raises his voice, even when losing, and never admits fear—only inconvenience. Vane is not a fanatic. He does not believe in the Tidefather's divinity so much as his inevitability, and he has arranged himself accordingly, like a man buying passage on a ship he knows will sail whether or not he boards.

He owes the Ninth Wave a debt he cannot pay in coin, so he pays in people, and he has convinced himself that the workers of Brinehollow were always going to be taken by someone—better him, a reasonable man, than some brute who would mistreat the inventory. He never surrenders and never bargains for his life.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Cassius Vane was born the third son of a minor shipping family in Marrowgate, a position that guaranteed him nothing but expectations. His father's firm collapsed under debt when Vane was nineteen, and the family's creditors took the house, the name, and nearly the lives of everyone in it. Vane learned the lesson that would define him: debt is the only true master, and the only freedom worth having is the freedom of the creditor.

He went to sea as a purser's clerk, then a factor, then a broker, and discovered he had a talent for the arithmetic of human cargo—the contracts, the insurance, the quiet column of losses written off as fever or escape. He was good at it because he never flinched. Where other men drank after a signing, Vane reviewed the manifest. By thirty he had built a modest brokerage in Gull's Rest's parent port, and by thirty-five he had made the mistake that brought him to Brinehollow: he extended credit to the Ninth Wave.

Whether through arrogance or ambition, he underwrote a shipment that vanished—sold out from under him by a rival, though he has never confirmed which—and the Ninth Wave does not forgive bad debts. The organization's collectors gave him a choice: repay in coin he did not have, or repay in cargo he could acquire. He took the plantation proprietorship on Brinehollow as a debtor's posting, a man managing his own liquidation.

For five years he has run the salt-cane operation efficiently and quietly, and for the last five months he has run the second business beneath it: selecting workers, mostly those with no family on the island and no one to ask questions, and shipping them on new moons to the Ninth Wave's buyers. Every shipment buys him another month of standing. Every month of standing, he believes, is another step toward the inner circle that will survive the Tidefather's ascension—the ark he is building for himself out of other people's chains.

He has bribed the harbor watch and at least two town officials, and he keeps meticulous records, because records are leverage and leverage is the only currency he trusts. He has come to think of Brinehollow as a waiting room. The manor is comfortable, the ledgers balance, and the tide brings his letters from the Ninth Wave on schedule. He has not yet burned the latest letter, demanding more cargo without delay, because burning it would feel like pretending. Vane does not pretend. He does the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says the island drowns either way.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

  • The neighboring-island broker who has been skimming Vane's shipments remains at large, and his name appears in the master ledger—a rival with the same masters and none of Vane's debts, who will fill the power vacuum the moment Brinehollow falls.
  • The Ninth Wave's auditors, mentioned in the enforcers' report, are en route to Brinehollow and will arrive regardless of whether Vane is alive to receive them, bringing the faction's scrutiny directly to the island.
  • Vane's harbor-watch contact holds a private ledger of every bribe, every date, and every name—a document that could hang half of Gull's Rest's officialdom if the party finds it.
  • Captain Voss's two lost crew members were recruited in Marrowgate by someone who knew their names before they landed, implying a Ninth Wave informant network deeper than any single broker.
  • The worker Vane refused to sell, early in his tenure, whose name appears in no ledger and whose fate is the only secret Vane keeps even from himself.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

  • Vane once refused to sell a worker—a woman whose name appears in no ledger—and arranged her passage to the mainland himself. It is the only decision of his life he has never rationalized, and the only entry he never recorded.
  • Vane has begun keeping a master ledger naming every accomplice, bribe, and shipment, not as a record of his operation but as insurance against the Ninth Wave itself—the first time he has planned for a future he does not control.
  • Vane does not believe in the Tidefather's divinity. He believes in the Tidefather's inevitability, and he has never said aloud, even to himself, that these are different things.

What haunts them

Fears

  • Drowning—not as death, but as the Tidefather's actual claim on him, the possibility that the ark has no seat with his name on it.
  • Being known—having his operation understood by an outsider, because his entire method depends on being misread as a reasonable man doing necessary work.
  • The ledger read aloud—his master ledger falling into hands that would name every accomplice, including the ones he protected and the one he refused to sell.

What drives them

Aspirations

  • A seat on the ark: a place in the Ninth Wave's inner circle that survives the Tidefather's ascension, earned not through faith but through performance.
  • Solvency: the debt repaid in full, the plantation owned outright, and the arithmetic of his life finally coming out in his favor.
  • To be the creditor: the one fantasy he admits to no one, that a day might come when he holds the paper and someone else does the selling.

Personal quest · 1

Villain — Cassius Vane, Proprietor of Brinehollow Plantation, Broker of the Ninth Wave

Current Stage

Vane intercepts a courier from the Ninth Wave at the Gull's Rest docks and learns the organization doubts his reliability. He must forge a ledger entry showing a surplus shipment and arrange for the courier to carry it back to Marrowgate without the courier realizing the numbers are false.

Choice
Vane may frame his own harbor-watch contact for the shortfall, cutting off a bribe he depends on, or absorb the risk himself.
Framing the contact makes Vane more isolated and paranoid; absorbing the risk makes him desperate and more likely to accelerate the next shipment.
Alternative
Vane decides whether to test the forged ledger against the real one with his spy, risking discovery, or trust his own bookkeeping.
This choice determines whether his spy remains loyal or becomes the party's informant in Act I.
Alternative
If the courier grows suspicious, Vane must choose between letting him go (and losing the guarantee) or silencing him and creating a body the town might find.
A missing courier is the kind of loose thread that draws investigators—possibly the party—to the manor.
Alternative
Vane chooses which worker to list as 'surplus' on the forged manifest, knowing the Ninth Wave may demand that specific person by name.
This is the moment Vane stops being a broker and starts being a selector, and the barracks tally records the name.
Alternative
Vane decides whether to deliver the forged ledger personally to the courier's drop point or send his spy, keeping his own hands clean but his control weak.
This is the first time Vane leaves the manor for the docks at night, and it is the party's best chance to see him in motion.
Mechanical Rewards
  • Permanent +1 to Deception checks (raising expertise modifier from +4 to +5)
  • Gain a second poison dose for the signet ring
Narrative Rewards
  • Vane secures a written guarantee from the Ninth Wave naming him to the inner circle's manifest, which becomes evidence the party can steal

Personal quest · 2

Villain — Cassius Vane, Proprietor of Brinehollow Plantation, Broker of the Ninth Wave

Current Stage

Vane notices the harbor watch has grown sloppy—drunk, talkative, and spending bribe money visibly. He must discipline, replace, or deepen his investment in the watch before the town's fear turns into questions.

Choice
Vane may quietly replace the watch captain with a man of his own, or double the existing captain's bribe and bind him tighter.
A new captain is a stranger with unknown loyalties; the old captain is a known coward, and Vane prefers known quantities.
Alternative
Vane decides whether to move the next shipment a week early to avoid the watch's distracted period, breaking the new-moon tide schedule.
Breaking the tide schedule is the first crack in the pattern the party's Investigation checks rely on.
Alternative
When a watchman's daughter asks Vane directly whether her brother was on a shipment, he must decide whether to lie, tell a comforting half-truth, or have her followed.
Vane uses her brother's name, as he uses all names, and the kindness of it makes the lie worse.
Alternative
Vane discovers two town officials have been talking to a mainland shipping agent. He must decide whether to increase their bribes, threaten their families, or cut them loose entirely.
This is the moment Vane's network begins to cost more than it earns, and he notices.
Alternative
Vane must decide whether to attend the harbor watch's monthly dinner in person to shore up loyalty, or send his spy and stay hidden.
Vane at the dinner is charming, generous, and utterly false—the party's best chance to see the mask fitted properly.
Mechanical Rewards
  • Permanent +2 to Vane's armor class against the first attack in any combat (his Alert feat sharpens into anticipatory reflexes)
  • Gain the ability to swap initiative with any of his hired guards, not just willing allies
Narrative Rewards
  • Vane identifies the party as investigators rather than hired labor, and begins preparing the sea cave specifically for them

Personal quest · 3

Villain — Cassius Vane, Proprietor of Brinehollow Plantation, Broker of the Ninth Wave

Current Stage

Vane receives a second letter from the Ninth Wave, this one addressed not to 'the Broker of Brinehollow' but to his name. The change in formality is a message: he is being watched personally. He must determine who inside his operation reported on him.

Choice
Vane may interrogate his two thugs, his spy, and his harbor-watch contact, or he may feed a different false confidence to each and see which version reaches Marrowgate.
Vane discovers the mole method suits his nature perfectly, and the pleasure it gives him frightens him.
Alternative
Once identified, Vane must decide whether to feed the mole false information to regain the Ninth Wave's trust, or remove the mole and accept the scrutiny.
Vane realizes he is now running two deceptions: one against the party, one against his own masters.
Alternative
Vane must decide whether to tell his spy the truth about the surveillance, making the spy a co-conspirator, or keep the spy ignorant and expendable.
This is the closest Vane comes to trusting another person, and he weighs it like a purchase.
Alternative
Vane considers sending a secret response to the Ninth Wave, acknowledging the surveillance and requesting terms, or staying silent and letting his work answer.
Vane drafts the letter four times and burns each draft, an act of weakness he would deny under torture.
Alternative
Vane must decide whether to begin the master ledger—naming every accomplice—as insurance against the Ninth Wave, or to keep no record that could ever hang him.
The ledger is Vane's confession and his shield in one, and he cannot decide which it will be.
Mechanical Rewards
  • Vane gains a permanent +2 bonus to initiative (his Alert feat fully matures)
  • His hand crossbow attacks gain +1 to hit against surprised targets
Narrative Rewards
  • Vane completes his ledger of the entire operation—a single document that names every accomplice, bribe, and shipment, which becomes the campaign's master evidence if captured

Major Decision

Context

When Vane's spy reports investigators at the docks, Vane must decide within a day whether to move the cargo early or fortify.

Choice Made
Accelerate the shipment or delay and fortify the sea cave
Impact

Vane's choice to accelerate or delay the shipment in response to the party's investigation sets the entire clock of Act I. Accelerating means the party must reach the sea cave with less preparation but catches the operation understaffed; delaying means Vane's defenses are strong but the barracks tally grows by names the party may recognize, hardening the town's silence into potential testimony.

Major Decision

Context

Vane's signature move is courtesy as a weapon. Inviting the party to dinner at the manor lets him study them, mislead them, and use their names gently.

Choice Made
Invite the party to dinner or remain hidden in the manor
Impact

If Vane offers the dinner, he gains advantage on Insight against the party and one use of his Deception expertise, but he exposes himself in a room full of witnesses and gives the party their first direct read of him. If he refuses, he keeps his anonymity but loses the initiative entirely, and the party's investigation proceeds unshaped by his hand.

Major Decision

Context

At the sea cave, with the tide rising and the party at the cave mouth, Vane must choose in the moment between the cargo and the fight.

Choice Made
Order the cage into deep water as a hostage threat, or hold the floor and delay
Impact

The hostage threat forces the party into round-by-round choices between combat and negotiation and can cost worker lives; the delaying action keeps the cargo intact but commits Vane's guards to a losing fight and leaves Vane tactically exposed on the ledge. This decision determines whether the sea cave is a rescue, a negotiation, or a massacre.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The second letter, addressed to his name rather than his title

Transformation

Vane realizes the Ninth Wave is watching him personally, and his obedience acquires a crack that never closes.

Mechanical Changes

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The confrontation with the neighboring-island broker

Transformation

The rival broker's revelation that the inner circle does not exist as Vane imagines it shakes his theology of survival.

Mechanical Changes

Transformative Moment

Trigger

The sea-cave confrontation

Transformation

Facing the party in the cave, Vane finally chooses between the man he told himself he was and the thing the arithmetic always said he was.

Mechanical Changes

Ally

Wrenn, the Spy

Relationship Ally (paid, tested, possibly turned)
Influence 3/10
Loyalty 14/10

Shared History

Wrenn came to Brinehollow eight years ago as a dockside informant selling scraps to anyone who paid, and Vane bought everything he sold—not because the information was good, but because Vane understood that a man who sells everything has nothing of his own, and a man with nothing of his own can be given a purpose. Vane trained him personally: how to walk a roof without sound, how to count guards by their shadows, how to report in ledger notation so that no intercepted note ever read as anything but bookkeeping.

Wrenn sleeps in the manor's kitchen, eats at Vane's table twice a week, and has never once been told what happens to the cargo. He knows, of course. Everyone on the island knows. But Vane has never said it, and that silence is the structure of their loyalty: Wrenn protects the fiction, and Vane protects Wrenn. In eight years Vane has never raised his voice to him, never withheld pay, never used his name as a threat—though he uses everyone's name.

Wrenn's loyalty is not love and not fear; it is the professional pride of a man who is very good at the only thing he has ever been valued for. Whether that loyalty survives the party's arrival—whether Wrenn can be turned with the truth Vane has never spoken—is one of the quiet questions of Act I.

Potential Breaking Points

  • If shown the truth of a shipment in progress
  • If the party outbids Vane's pay
  • If Vane orders him into the cage as cargo to protect the operation

Enemy

Captain Rilla Voss

Threat Level 4/10
Conflict Type Professional rivalry shading into obsession

Personal Stakes

Rilla Voss has raided Brinehollow's storehouses for months, and every raid burns an empty building Vane emptied first. She believes Vane is hiding something worth more than salt-cane, and she is right, and he knows she knows. For Vane, Voss is the living proof that his operation is not as quiet as his ledgers claim—a pair of eyes on the horizon that no bribe can close. He has doubled the harbor watch, moved the shipments to new moons, and still she circles.

What Vane will not admit, even in his own ledger, is that Voss frightens him more than the Ninth Wave does, because the Ninth Wave's rules are known and Voss's are not. For Voss, Vane is the door to the Ninth Wave, and she has lost two crew to the organization's recruiters in Marrowgate. She wants the manifest; he wants her ship gone. Their war is conducted entirely at a distance—her fires, his paperwork—and neither has yet stood in the same room as the other. The sea cave may change that.

Possible Resolutions

  • Vane frames Voss for a shipment theft to bring the Ninth Wave's enforcers against her ship
  • Voss captures Vane's longboat mid-shipment, forcing him to negotiate
  • The party brokers an impossible truce between them against the Ninth Wave

Faction

The Ninth Wave

Standing 2/10

Influence

The Ninth Wave owns Cassius Vane, and both of them know the exact terms. Five years ago Vane underwrote a shipment that vanished, and the organization's collectors converted his debt into a posting: run Brinehollow, ship cargo on the new moon, buy back your life one worker at a time. Every letter arrives with the tide, sealed in nine-wave wax, and every letter is a reminder that the debt compounds.

Vane's influence within the faction is that of a well-performing asset: known, valued, and entirely expendable. He believes—needs to believe—that consistent performance will earn him a place in the inner circle that survives the Tidefather's ascension, and he has structured five years of his life around that belief. The faction's influence over him is total but impersonal: they do not threaten him, they send invoices. The second letter, addressed to his name rather than his title, told him he was being watched, and it changed him more than any raid or riot could have.

Vane's relationship with the Ninth Wave is the campaign's engine: the debt that fills the cage, the ledger that names the buyers, the letter he cannot burn. When the party breaks the Brinehollow link, the faction does not collapse—it sends another broker, which is the first hint of how large the chain truly is.

Obligations

  • New-moon shipments without delay
  • Personal surveillance compliance
  • Absolute discretion about the Tidefather

Benefits

  • Monthly supply sloop and funding
  • Inner-circle candidacy (Vane's belief)
  • Enforcer support in emergencies

Ready to Unleash Your Character's Full Potential?

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!