When attacking from hiding, missing does not reveal position. Dim light doesn't impose disadvantage on Perception checks using sight, and hiding when obscured is possible.
Once per turn, deal an extra 3d6 damage when hitting with a finesse or ranged weapon while having advantage, or when another enemy of the target is within 5 feet.
Use a Bonus Action to make a Dexterity (Sleight of Hand) check, use thieves' tools to disarm a trap or open a lock, or take the Use an Object action.
Reliable and trustworthy contact in a criminal network who provides information about local organizations, their key members, and their activities.
When using Sneak Attack, can trade out 1d6 of damage for one Cunning Strike effect: Poison (1d6 damage), Trip, or Withdraw.
Add proficiency bonus (+3) to Initiative rolls. Can swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling.
Climbing costs no extra movement. Jump distance increases by a number of feet equal to DEX modifier.
Double proficiency bonus (total +6) on two skills: Stealth and Deception.
Gain proficiency in one skill of choice (Athletics) and one feat (Alert).
Take the Dash, Disengage, or Hide action as a Bonus Action on each turn.
Halve the damage of an attack that hits (not auto-hit/crit).
Gain Heroic Inspiration whenever finishing a Long Rest.
Behind the character
Vex Copperlock is a wiry human woman in her mid-twenties, all sharp angles and restless energy, with a mop of unruly copper hair that she cuts herself with a belt knife and green eyes that catalog every exit, every purse, and every lie in a room within seconds. She wears a patched leather vest over a dark linen shirt, fingerless gloves worn thin at the fingertips from picking locks and pockets, and tall boots with a knife sheathed in each.
Her grin is crooked and frequent, and it is precisely as trustworthy as she wants it to be — warm when she is selling, cold when she is calculating, and genuinely delighted only when someone surprises her.
She moves through Scarfall Bazaar like she owns it and like it might turn on her at any moment, which is exactly the truth. Her stall is a cluttered fortress of rolled maps, locked strongboxes, scrap paper covered in cipher marks, and at least three hidden compartments she will deny exist. She talks fast, bargains faster, and listens better than anyone gives her credit for. Her Wisdom is poor — she misjudges people's character and trusts flattery — but her instinct for survival is flawless, honed by three years of running supplies through a war zone and two years of selling secrets in the place where the war died.
Vex is chaotic neutral in the truest sense: she serves no flag, swears no oath, and believes every faction in the Marches would sell her inside a week. But beneath the mercenary shell is a woman who feeds bazaar children from her own profits, who kept a dead brother's coded hymn for two years rather than selling it to the people who would pay most for it, and who is quietly terrified that the war she profited from is about to start again — this time with her in the middle of it.
Before the adventure
Vex Copperlock was born in a border village in the Sundered Marches that no longer exists. Her family — her father a carpenter, her mother a weaver, her older brother Tamsin a courier — fled east when the orc hordes came through in the second year of the war, joining a refugee column of three hundred people moving toward the Ashen Scar. Vex was seventeen. The column was intercepted at a ford by what she was told were orc raiders.
She later learned they were something worse: a mixed force of Choir cultists and paid mercenaries, burning refugee columns to keep the roads clear for the war's logistics. Her parents did not make it out. Tamsin did, briefly — and then he made a choice that has defined Vex's life since. He left the column that night and walked back toward the fires. Vex does not know whether he was recruited, coerced, or converted.
She found the coded hymn on the body of a Choir courier two years later, recognized the courier's route as one Tamsin once ran, and has carried it ever since.
After the column, Vex survived the only way the Scar allows: by being useful and invisible. She fell in with a smuggler crew called the Copper Bells — halflings, a dwarf, a deserting elf — who ran supplies, messages, and stolen goods through the old orc war tunnels beneath the breeding pits. She learned locks, blades, ciphers, and the thousand small deceits of the black market. She learned that everyone in the Scar is selling something, and the ones who survive longest are the ones who sell to all sides.
When the war ended and the Copper Bells were given the Choir's ultimatum — work for the cult or vanish — most vanished. Vex built her stall in Scarfall Bazaar's night market from the wreckage of the crew's last wagon and started over.
Today she is the bazaar's most reliable broker of secrets that are actually true. She sells maps of the Marches, stolen correspondence, cipher work, and access to people who do not want to be found. She has buyers in every faction: Accord clerks who need deniable intelligence, Crown officers who need to know what the elves are doing, dwarf merchants who want to know which passes will close, and at least one high elf agent she suspects works for Duchess Sera.
She pays protection to Orla Flint, pays off the Remnant office when necessary, and pays nothing to the Choir — which is why the Choir wants her broken or bought.
Her stall is her identity as much as her livelihood. It sits at the junction of three market lanes under a swinging lantern, close enough to the brick arcade to watch the approaches, far enough from Orla's office to be neutral ground. She has rigged it with tripwires, a hidden strongbox under the floorboards, and a decoy ledger designed to be found first. She feeds three bazaar orphans from her profits and pretends she does not. She drinks at the Broken Banner when she travels to Accord Hall and cheats at cards only against people who deserve it.
The coded hymn sits in a locked case beneath her counter, and it is the one thing she has never sold despite offers that would buy her the arcade corner she dreams of. Every buyer who has pressed too hard has been a Choir agent, and every one of them has left her stall with a knife mark on their coat as a warning. She does not know what the hymn says. She suspects it says Tamsin's name. She is not ready to know, and she is running out of time not to be.
The party's arrival in Scarfall Bazaar changes her calculus. For the first time since the war ended, there are people in the Scar who are not selling anything — or at least, not to her — and who might be able to read the hymn, face the Choir, and give her the answer she has been avoiding for two years. She will trade the hymn for a favor or a fight, as she always says. What she means is: prove to me that knowing is survivable, and I will let you open the case.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Vex possesses a coded Choir hymn she lifted from a dead courier two years ago. She has never been able to decode it, and every buyer who has offered for it has been either a Choir agent or someone who ended up dead. She will trade it for a favor or a fight, but secretly she wants it read and understood, because she suspects it names the person who killed her brother during the evacuation of the Scar. The party must help her decode it, trace its origin, and confront the truth about what happened to her family.
Vex offers the hymn to the party in exchange for a favor: retrieving a locked strongbox from the flooded quarter of the bazaar that she cannot reach herself.
Personal quest · 2
Before the war ended, Vex ran supplies through the Ash Road with a smuggler crew called the Copper Bells. When the Choir bought out the route, her crew was given a choice: work for the cult or disappear. Most disappeared. Her old partner, a halfling named Wick, took the coin and now runs Choir contraband through Scarfall Bazaar under a different name. Vex has avoided him for a year, but the party's presence gives her cover to approach him — and Wick has information about the Choir's tunnel network that no one else in the Scar possesses.
Vex identifies Wick's new operation and asks the party to arrange a 'chance' meeting at her stall.
Personal quest · 3
Vex's stall in the night market is her fortress, her livelihood, and her identity. Someone has been buying information through intermediaries about exactly where she keeps her most dangerous stock — the Choir hymn, her ledger of buyers, and a map of the breeding pits she stole from Duchess Sera's agents. She knows a fire is coming. She wants the party to help her set a trap: stage the stall's destruction, catch the arsonist, and discover who is pulling the strings. The trail leads somewhere she never expected: to Quartermaster Orla Flint's own ledger and a name Vex trusted.
Vex asks the party to help her rig the stall with a decoy strongbox and watch from hiding across three nights.
When the coded hymn is finally decoded and names the traitor inside the Accord, Vex holds the only copy. She can sell it to the highest bidder — the Crown, the Thornwood Concord, or Duchess Sera's agents — for enough gold to disappear forever, or give it to the party and the Accord Remnant for nothing but the promise that the peace will hold.
If she sells it, Vex gains 500 gp and vanishes from the campaign for two acts, returning only if the party finds her in the capital. If she gives it freely, she loses her most valuable asset but becomes a permanent ally, gaining the feat Alert (already possessed) upgraded to +2 initiative and the ability to call on bazaar smugglers once per adventure for an ambush or escape. If she destroys it, the party must find the hymn's contents elsewhere, and Vex's guilt drives her to volunteer for the breeding pits descent.
During the breeding pits descent, Vex discovers her old partner Wick is being held in a Choir cell near Talia Voss's cage. The party can only extract one prisoner before the tunnel collapses — Talia, whose testimony is vital to the campaign, or Wick, who holds the Choir's complete tunnel maps.
Rescuing Talia advances the main quest and Vex loses Wick forever, gaining a permanent +1 to Dexterity saves from grief-forged reflexes and a vow never to leave anyone behind again. Rescuing Wick provides the tunnel maps (granting the party a shortcut through the pits and bypassing one encounter) but Talia is lost, the Accord's traitor is never named by her testimony, and Vex gains the Skulker feat's full benefits but carries the failure of the main quest. Either choice permanently alters Act II's trajectory.
After the bazaar arson attempt, Vex learns the buyer who targeted her operates out of the Accord Remnant's own Scarfall office — someone wearing the peacekeepers' colors. She can expose them publicly, which would shatter the bazaar's fragile trust in the Remnant and possibly trigger a riot, or handle it quietly, which protects the Remnant's reputation but leaves the traitor's network partially intact.
Public exposure grants Vex permanent hero status in the bazaar (advantage on all Charisma checks there, and free lodging and supplies) but the Accord Remnant's presence in the Scar collapses, making later supply runs harder. Quiet removal earns Vex a favor from Captain Eldrin Voss (a one-time use of Accord soldiers as backup in any Act II encounter) and keeps the Remnant's office open, but the traitor's employer — the Chancellor's shadow — is never fully identified, creating an unresolved thread that resurfaces in Act III.
The hymn is decoded
Vex shifts from transactional neutrality to invested alliance.
The breeding pits choice
Vex confronts whether she values people or information more.
The arson trap
Vex stops being a lone operator and accepts the party as her crew.
Ally
Vex and Orla Flint have circled each other since the bazaar's founding. During the first winter after the war, when Scarfall was little more than tents in orc ruins, Vex ran the supply lines that kept Orla's quartermaster office stocked — and Orla looked the other way when those supplies included goods that fell off Accord wagons. Their arrangement is built on mutual utility and mutual suspicion: Orla's ledger records every bribe Vex has ever paid, and Vex knows exactly which of Orla's guards are on her payroll.
They have saved each other's lives twice — once when a Choir cell tried to burn Orla's warehouse and Vex tipped her off with an hour to spare, and once when Orla quietly released Vex from a Remnant detention cell after Vex stole from the wrong Crown officer. Neither has ever said the word 'friend,' but neither has ever broken the arrangement either. Orla is one of the few people who knows Vex had a brother, and Vex is one of the few who knows Orla's ledger names Spymaster Lys as a Choir gold recipient — a fact both women have agreed never to speak of aloud.
Enemy
Sorn is the Choir agent who recruited Vex's brother into the cult, and who personally led the raid that burned the refugee column Vex survived — the column where her brother died, whether by Choir hands or his own choice, she still does not know. Sorn knows Vex has the coded hymn, and he has been trying to recover it for two years through intermediaries, arson threats, and finally the coercion of the bazaar children Vex feeds.
Vex has twice put a knife mark on Sorn's coat as a warning, and he has twice returned it with a Choir coin placed in her lockbox — a message that he knows where she sleeps. Their feud is a slow, patient game of leverage and counter-leverage, and it will end only when one of them is dead or when the hymn changes hands. Sorn's presence in the bazaar is the single greatest threat to Vex's operation, and she will pay well — in coin, information, or favors — for anyone who can remove him permanently.
Faction
The Choir has been trying to recruit Vex since the war ended, and their patience is running out. They see her network of informants, her access to every faction's buyers, and her stall at the center of the bazaar's information economy as an asset they must either acquire or destroy. Sorn's recruitment attempts began politely — offers of protection, gold, and a place in the new empire — and have escalated to arson, coercion of children she cares about, and a standing bounty on her head that any Choir cultist in the Scar can collect.
Vex has survived this long by being useful to everyone and loyal to no one, but the Choir's pressure is forcing her to pick sides. The coded hymn she carries is the Choir's most valuable single document outside their own vaults, and they will burn the bazaar quarter to the ground to get it back. Vex's relationship with the Choir is the engine of her personal quests and the reason she needs the party more than she will ever admit.
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