When a creature you can see attacks a target other than you that is within 5 feet of you, you can use your Reaction to impose disadvantage on the attack roll if you are wielding a shield.
Halvard drills market-square volunteers for free and holds barricades the Watch has abandoned. He has no official authority, but guardsmen obey him anyway out of old habit and respect.
Longsword (Sap: on hit, target has disadvantage on its next attack roll before Halvard's next turn). Heavy Crossbow (Push: on hit, target is pushed 10 feet away).
Halvard was a sergeant of the Ash Watch. Old comrades still recognize him, though his desertion (unfiled by Captain Vey) makes his rank a bitter subject.
On a Bonus Action, you can regain 1d10 + Fighter level (1d10+1) hit points. This represents Halvard's long experience standing in shield walls.
Gain proficiency in one skill of your choice (Survival, from nine years of city watch patrols and flood duty).
Gain Heroic Inspiration whenever you finish a Long Rest.
Behind the character
Halvard Sten, the Unsworn, is a broad-shouldered human in his late thirties, grey threading his close-cropped dark hair and beard like frost working into a wall. Nine years in the Ash Watch built him: chain mail worn dented but immaculate, a salt-stained gambeson beneath, a battered round shield slung across his back, a longsword at his hip and a heavy crossbow across his shoulder. The one thing missing is the ash-grey cloak — the empty clasp at his collar is polished bright from years of absent use, the most eloquent thing about him.
Before the adventure
Halvard Sten joined the Ash Watch at nineteen with nothing but a broad back and a talent for standing still under pressure. He took the ash-grey cloak at twenty-two and made sergeant by thirty, not through politics or cleverness but through the simple, relentless act of being where the line was thinnest. He held the customs house steps through the bread riots for six hours with a broken spear. He held the flood barricade while the harbor seawall came apart, watching Sergeant Holt wade chest-deep through the drown-current with a child in his arms.
He learned the shield wall the way priests learn liturgy, and he taught it to every recruit who passed through his squad, including a scowling young guardsman named Holt who would one day owe him a debt he could never name aloud.
He also learned what orders cost. Four men of his squad died in a dockside fever ward years before the Weeping Sister came, and Halvard held their hands through the last of it because there was nothing else to hold. The sweet stench of that fever lodged somewhere behind his teeth and never left. When the ghost ship drifted into the harbor two weeks ago and the weeping plague began its climb from the docks inward, Halvard recognized the smell on the first day, and told no one, because saying it aloud would mean admitting the city had survived this before and learned nothing.
The end came at the north wall. The quarantine orders came down: kill a family climbing the wall — a tanner, his wife, two children, fleeing the sickness the only way left. Halvard stood at the wall he had defended for nine years, looked at the family, looked at the sergeant giving the order, and lowered his spear. When the sergeant moved to give the order again, Halvard broke his jaw with the spear butt, let the family vanish into Ratwharf, and walked off the wall.
He has not worn the cloak since. Captain Vey never filed his desertion — his folded ash-grey cloak still sits in her quarters at the keep, a mercy that is also a chain — and the empty clasp at his collar has been polished by nine years of habit and two weeks of grief.
He sleeps in the market square now, in the shadow of the barricades he built himself. He drills volunteers at dawn for no pay: fishermen, bakers, a boy who coughs at night and hides it. Guardsmen obey him out of habit older than his disgrace, saluting before they remember they shouldn't, and he returns each salute with a nod that neither accepts nor refuses. Corporal Munt saw the north wall and has been quietly bleeding him for coin ever since; Halvard pays because the alternative is Quill's gallows, and he hates every coin.
He is blunt, unhurried, and quietly furious. He never raises his voice because he has never needed to; the shield wall taught him that a calm man holding a line terrifies more than a shouting one. He speaks to guardsmen the way other people speak to old friends, and to the dying the way a priest wishes he could. He keeps a tally of forty-one names scratched under his shield strap — everyone he has watched die in the quarantine — and adds to it nightly.
His driving goal is simple and impossible: force the Ash Watch to stop guarding the walls against the desperate and start hunting the thing that is actually killing Nostramus. Whether he does it wearing the cloak or standing outside it is the question the city will force him to answer.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Captain Vey never filed Halvard's desertion; his folded ash-grey cloak is still in her quarters at the keep. She will only hand it back when he brings her proof that the plague is deliberate rather than divine. She also needs something she cannot ask for openly: her son is hidden in the temple row, sick, and the Inquisitor's spies are counting the sick. Halvard must walk the barricades of Nostramus, gather the evidence that clears his name, and decide whether a restored rank is worth more than a boy's life.
Bring Captain Vey hard evidence that the plague is unnatural (Fesk's ledger, rat tokens, the manifest).
Personal quest · 2
The family Halvard saved at the north wall — a tanner, his wife, and two children — survived by hiding in the Salt Chapel in Ratwharf. But Corporal Munt, the guard who saw Halvard let them go, has been blackmailing him quietly for weeks, and now Munt wants more than coin: he wants Halvard to help the Harbor Kin move plague-tainted cargo past the barricades, or he names him a traitor to Inquisitor Quill. Halvard must confront the man who holds his secret, protect the family he saved, and decide how far he will let a bad soldier's greed dictate a good soldier's silence.
Locate the tanner's family in the Salt Chapel and confirm they are alive and hidden.
Personal quest · 3
Halvard drilled beside Sergeant Holt for nine years, and Holt's sister is trapped behind a plague-marked door in the temple row, too sick to move and too afraid of the Watch to open for them. Halvard owes Holt a debt from the flood year — Holt carried a drowning child through waist-deep water while Halvard held the barricade — and now the debt comes due. Halvard must get the sister to the Temple of Mercy past Fesk's disguised collectors, who are quietly taking the sickest patients 'for treatment' and never bringing them back.
Reach Holt's sister's tenement before Fesk's collectors make their nightly round.
At the climax of 'The Cloak He Gave Back', Halvard stands in the keep with proof in one hand and Captain Vey's plague-sick son hidden under his own cloak in the other. The Inquisitor's spies are in the courtyard. He can present the evidence and receive his rank and cloak before the assembled Watch — leaving the boy to the temple wards and the census — or he can walk out with the boy, forfeiting the cloak and remaining officially a deserter.
This defines whether Halvard fights the plague from inside authority or outside it, and changes which faction resources the party can call on for the rest of the campaign.
In the Crypt of Mercy, Halvard corners Doctor Fesk among his vials. Fesk, calm and clinical, offers a bargain: his notes contain a partial cure, but only if Halvard lets him continue his 'trials' on the dying poor. Halvard can take Fesk alive to the Watch (risking the Inquisitor burying the evidence), kill him (losing the cure notes' living author), or accept the devil's bargain.
Determines whether the party has cure resources for Act II's plague clouds, and whether Fesk becomes a prisoner, a corpse, or a hidden partner.
During the Inquisitor's Purge at the keep, Quill offers Halvard something no one else can: a full pardon, reinstatement with back pay, and a commission to hunt the cult with Inquisitorial authority — if he names Captain Vey as an accomplice to his desertion and testifies that she knew about the north wall.
Sets Halvard's relationship with the Inquisitor for Acts II and III and decides whether the keep is a safe house or a hunting ground.
Witnessing the ritual at the Sunken Shrine
Halvard sees what the plague truly is — a weapon worked by human hands — and his quiet fury crystallizes into purpose; he gains Heroic Inspiration whenever he defends a civilian from cultists.
Holding the flooded altar stair alone
Standing the line alone while the party breaks the circle, Halvard rediscovers what the shield wall meant; if he survives, he commits to the Champion path with total certainty.
Ally
Holt and Halvard served nine years together in the Ash Watch, and three of those years were the worst the city ever saw: the bread riots of the grain shortage, when Halvard's shield wall held the customs house steps for six hours, and the flood year, when the harbor seawall broke and Holt waded chest-deep through the drown-current carrying a child while Halvard held the barricade line behind him with a broken spear.
They drilled recruits together every morning, drank at the same table in silence, and never once needed to explain themselves to each other. When Halvard lowered his spear at the north wall and let the family go, Holt was twenty feet away, and he did not report it. That silence is the debt between them now — Holt's obedience kept him at the wall while his conscience kept his mouth shut, and he has hated himself a little every day since.
Halvard repays it in 'Nine Years of Ash' by saving Holt's sister from Fesk's collectors, and afterward Holt becomes the Unsworn's man inside the keep: unlocking the sewer gate, slipping the party the undercity map, and looking the other way at exactly the right moments. He follows orders, but he has started choosing which orders deserve following, and Halvard is the reason.
Enemy
Fesk and Halvard are mirror images: two men who watched a plague take everything and chose opposite answers. Halvard lost watch brothers to the fever years before the Weeping Sister came — four men of his squad, dead in a dockside ward he could do nothing for but hold their hands — and he answered by holding the line harder. Fesk lost his own family to an earlier plague and answered by deciding that the weak are the disease.
They have never met before the quarantine, but Fesk knows of him: the Unsworn sergeant who drills volunteers at the barricades appears in Fesk's notes as 'a useful concentration of the healthy' — a man who gathers the strong in one place, making the cull cleaner. When Halvard reads that line in the crypt ledger, the quiet fury he carries becomes something colder and more permanent. Fesk, for his part, speaks to Halvard with genuine courtesy, the way one professional respects another's discipline, and offers him a place in the purified city.
Halvard has never needed to raise his voice, and Fesk has never needed to either; their confrontations are two calm men explaining why the other must die. The personal stake is absolute: Fesk infects the people Halvard has sworn to hold the line for, one cot at a time, with clean hands and a kind word.
Faction
Halvard gave the Ash Watch nine years of his life and it gave him an identity he is still wearing the absence of. He joined at nineteen, took the ash-grey cloak at twenty-two, and rose to sergeant by holding lines nobody else would hold — the customs house steps, the flood barricades, the north wall in winter. He knows the Watch's drill manual by heart, knows which gate captains drink, knows that Quartermaster Bree pads her ledgers and that Sergeant Holt's scowl hides a soft heart.
The Watch, in turn, knows him: guardsmen at the barricades still snap to attention when he passes, out of habit older than his disgrace, and half of them served under him. His desertion was never filed — Captain Vey kept his folded cloak in her quarters rather than turn it in, an act of mercy that is also an act of possession — so officially he does not exist as a deserter at all, which makes his status a wound that cannot close.
The Watch's current leadership under Quill's shadow represents everything Halvard broke with: guarding walls against the desperate while the true killer walks the streets. His goal is not to destroy the Watch but to reclaim it — to force it to stop holding the wrong line. Every favor he banks with Holt, every volunteer he drills, every guard who obeys him out of old habit is a brick in that reclamation, and the cloak Vey holds is the symbol of whether it succeeds.
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