Sergeant Holt

Level 6 Human Fighter (Champion)

Available with DM subscription

STR

18 (+4)

DEX

CON

15 (+2)

INT

8 (-1)

WIS

14 (+2)

CHA

12 (+1)

Defense

Armor Class 18 (chain mail (16) + Defense fighting style (+1) + shield (+2))

Hit Points 52 (6d10 + 17 (Constitution) +2)

Speed 30 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws strength, constitution

Skills Survival +5, Athletics +7, Perception +5, Intimidation +4

Features

The Sergeant's Mercy

Custom (Campaign) Level 1

Roleplay

Holt follows orders but hates them. If the party helps his sister, trapped in the temple row, he will look the other way at checkpoints, share the undercity map, and quietly vouch for them to Captain Vey. Mechanically, the party gains Advantage on Charisma (Persuasion) checks against Holt once this trust is earned.

Soldier's Bearing

Background (Soldier) Level 1

Roleplay

Holt is recognizable as a member of the Ash Watch; he can invoke his rank to requisition minor supplies within the keep and expects (and gives) military courtesy.

Ability Score Improvement

Fighter (level 4) Level 4

Holt increased his Strength by 2 (from 16 to 18), reflecting years of hauling barricades and drilling recruits in the keep courtyard.

Second Wind

Fighter (level 1) Level 1

Bonus Action

On a Bonus Action, Holt regains hit points equal to 1d10 + his Fighter level (6). Once per Short or Long Rest.

Extra Attack

Fighter (level 5) Level 5

When Holt takes the Attack action on his turn, he can make two attacks instead of one.

Improved Critical

Fighter (Champion, level 3) Level 3

Holt's attack rolls with weapons score a critical hit on a roll of 19 or 20.

Action Surge

Fighter (level 2) Level 2

1/Short or Long Rest

On his turn, Holt can take one additional action, except the Magic action.

Fighting Style: Defense

Fighter (level 1) Level 1

While wearing armor, Holt gains a +1 bonus to Armor Class.

Behind the character

Character Information

Sergeant Holt is a broad-shouldered human man in his forties, built like the barricades he mans: wide, weathered, and impossible to move without cost. His nose has been broken at least twice and set slightly crooked, giving his face a permanent, lopsided scowl that strangers mistake for hostility and his men know as simply his face. His dark hair is cropped short and going grey at the temples, and deep frown lines carve permanent grooves from the corners of his eyes to his jaw.

He wears the ash-grey cloak of the Ash Watch over a battered chain hauberk that has been patched more times than he can count, a dented kite shield slung across his back and a notched longsword at his hip — a blade he refuses to replace because of whose it was. He stands in the rain-slick keep courtyard at night, torchlight behind him, jaw set with grim, weary obedience.

Holt enforces the quarantine without question, and that is precisely the tragedy of him. He is not cruel. He speaks to prisoners gently, hands water to the families he turns away from the walls, and stands watch over the bodies of the executed so the crows do not get them before their kin can. But when the order comes, he carries it out, every time, because twenty years of service have taught him that the alternative is chaos, and chaos in a plague city kills faster than any sickness. His obedience is not cowardice or ambition — it is the only structure holding him upright in a city that is falling down around him.

Those who work with him long enough notice the cracks. He hesitates a half-second before enforcing the harshest orders. He drills recruits with a fury that seems aimed at something other than the recruits. He asks careful, oblique questions about the temple row that he has no official reason to ask. And he has a sister, Maren, trapped in the plague ward of the Temple of Mercy, whom he has not been able to see since the wards were sealed.

Holt follows orders because following orders is all he has left — but he hates them, and every order he enforces takes something from him that he does not get back. He is a good man being used as an instrument of a bad policy, and somewhere deep down, he knows it.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Holt was born in the Ratwharf district, the son of a Watch sergeant and a net-mender, and he grew up believing the ash-grey cloak was the highest thing a man of Nostramus could aspire to. His father, Sergeant Edran Holt, died holding Marrowgate during the flood riots when Holt was sixteen — officially a hero, officially mourned, officially given a plaque in the keep's hall that Holt polishes every year on the anniversary.

Holt enlisted within the month and has served for twenty years without a single blemish on his record: two commendations for the flood riots, a training billet in the keep courtyard, and the quiet respect of every guard who ever stood a wet watch beside him.

The quarantine has changed the arithmetic of his life. Holt has carried out execution orders at the north wall. He has sealed plague houses with families still inside. He has turned away a weeping mother with a coughing child because the writ said no one leaves, and then stood at his post all night listening to the child's cough carry across the water. Each act of obedience has deposited something he cannot name — not guilt exactly, because he believes the orders are necessary, but a kind of erosion, like tide against a seawall.

His men have started to notice that the sergeant who never hesitates now hesitates for half a breath before the worst orders, and that half-breath is the most honest thing about him.

His sister Maren is the fulcrum. She was a candle-maker in the Tallow Yard until the plague reached the district and the Watch moved the sick to the temple row. Holt has not seen her in nine days. He does not know if she is alive. The quarantine orders forbid personal contact inside the wards, and Holt — being Holt — has not broken them, though he has stood outside the Temple of Mercy three times on patrol and each time walked away with his fists clenched inside his gauntlets.

When the party demonstrates that the plague is unnatural and that someone is spreading it deliberately, Holt's obedience acquires a fault line: the orders he follows are protecting the thing killing his sister. If the party helps Maren, Holt will look the other way at checkpoints, share his rough map of the undercity, and quietly vouch for them to Captain Vey — and in doing so, take the first step of a long walk away from the man he has been.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

Holt's sister Maren is trapped in the temple row plague ward under Doctor Fesk's care, infected but not yet dying, and Holt does not know whether she is being treated or experimented on. Every day the party delays, her odds worsen — and Holt's willingness to obey erodes with them.
An old armory clerk claims the order that killed Holt's father at Marrowgate bore a rat-carved seal predating the crown's authority, suggesting the Ratbound Choir has been embedded in Nostramus's bureaucracy for a generation. The quarantine-era archives are scheduled to be burned by Quill's clerks within the week.
Holt has kept forty-one of Sister Neris's daily death-counts folded against his chest. The counts show three deaths on one street in one night — the same pattern Neris reported — and Holt has begun cross-referencing them against the checkpoint logs he signed, suspecting the infection moved through a route the Watch itself guards.
Corporal Durn sits in the keep cells awaiting dawn execution for quarantine-breaking, but the writ he carried was forged by someone with access to the Watch's own seal stock — meaning a forger inside the keep or the Harbor Kin with Watch connections. Holt cannot investigate his own prisoner without confessing his own doubts.
Quill's file on Holt contains a falsified account of his father's death at Marrowgate, written to erase the elder Holt's defiance. If Quill ever deploys that file publicly, it will either destroy Holt's reputation in the Watch or — if the party has already found the true record — become the weapon that breaks Quill instead.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

Holt has been smuggling extra rations from the Watch stores to the temple row nurses for ten days, falsifying the quartermaster's ledgers with skills he learned from Quartermaster Bree herself. If discovered, it is a flogging offense — and Bree knows, and has said nothing, which means Bree wants something.
Holt keeps his father's notched longsword wrapped in oilcloth under his bunk, replaced on the rack with an identical issue blade. The sword's fuller contains a scrap of the true Marrowgate order his father hid there before dying, written in a cipher Holt cannot read — but Corin Thale or Archivist Mora could.
Holt was the guard on duty the night the family was killed at the north wall. He did not fire; his partner did, on Quill's standing order, and Holt said nothing at the inquiry. He has not slept a full night since, and he keeps the family's door-key on the same ring as his Watch keys — a penance he believes no one knows about.

What haunts them

Fears

That his sister will die in the ward believing her brother, the sergeant, helped lock the door on her — that his obedience will be the last thing she knows of him.
That he is his father's opposite in every way that matters: the man who held the wrong gate because the paperwork said to, and that no amount of service can wash that out.
That the plague will reach the keep itself, and he will be ordered to seal the barracks doors with the sick guards still inside — and that this time, he will do it.

What drives them

Aspirations

To see the quarantine end not by the king's decree but by the city being genuinely saved — so that the deaths at the wall meant something other than fear.
To restore his father's name with the true record and hang the notched sword above the keep's hearth, where the Watch can see what defiance for the right reasons looks like.
To teach the next generation of Watch recruits that the oath is to the city's people, not to the paper the orders arrive on — starting with the volunteers drilling in the courtyard.

Personal quest · 1

The Sister in the Temple Row

Holt's younger sister Maren was a candle-maker in the Tallow Yard before the quarantine moved her to the plague ward in the Temple of Mercy. He has not been able to visit; the Watch forbids personal contact inside the wards, and Inquisitor Quill's spies note every guard who lingers near the sick. Holt quietly asks the party to check on Maren, learn if she is infected, and — if she is — find a way to save her that does not require him to break the oath he has served under for twenty years.

Current Stage

The party enters the Temple of Mercy ward and locates Maren, learning she is coughing but not yet marked with the weeping sores.

Mechanical Rewards

Holt permanently unlocks 'The Sergeant's Mercy' as an active ability: once per day he can grant the party Advantage on a Charisma (Persuasion) check against any Ash Watch guard, and he shares the undercity map, opening the Sewer Gate route.
The party gains a loyal ally inside the keep: Holt will hide one party member from an Inquisitorial sweep once per act.

Narrative Rewards

Holt's scowl softens; his loyalty shifts from blind obedience to the party's cause, and he becomes a recurring quest-giver for Act II.

Personal quest · 2

The Prisoner at the North Wall

During the prisoner transfer in the keep courtyard, Holt recognizes one of the bound captives: Corporal Durn, a former squadmate who tried to smuggle his own family out through Marrowgate. The king's orders say deserters and quarantine-breakers hang at dawn. Holt cannot disobey openly, but he cannot watch it either. He needs the party to find proof — any proof — that Durn was acting under Harbor Kin false orders planted by the cult to sow fear, turning an execution into an investigation the Watch can legally reopen.

Current Stage

The party interviews Durn in the keep cells and learns a rat-masked stranger paid him with a sealed writ he never verified.

Mechanical Rewards

Holt gains the 'Hold the Line' reaction: when an ally within 10 feet is hit, Holt can use his reaction to take the damage instead, once per combat.
The forged-writ evidence gives the party permanent Advantage on Deception checks against Inquisitorial spies.

Narrative Rewards

Durn is pardoned and becomes the party's man inside the keep prison, able to pass messages to arrested allies.

Personal quest · 3

The Notched Sword

Holt's longsword belonged to his father, a Watch sergeant who died holding Marrowgate during the flood riots — and who, Holt has recently begun to suspect, was ordered to hold a gate that should have been opened to let refugees in. An old armory clerk at the keep, half-deaf and half-mad, claims he filed the original order and that it was signed not by the king's officer but by someone using a seal that predates the crown's authority — a seal carved with a rat. Holt asks the party to help him find the old order in the keep's records before Quill's clerks burn the quarantine-era archives.

Current Stage

The party searches the keep archive by night, dodging Quill's spies, and finds the order's stub: the seal impression matches the rat-carved tokens surfacing around the city.

Mechanical Rewards

Holt's father's sword is reforged with a silver-lined fuller: his longsword becomes a +1 weapon that deals an extra 1d6 radiant damage to creatures of the plague and undead types.
Holt gains proficiency in Intelligence (Investigation), reflecting his turn from brawn to inquiry.

Narrative Rewards

Holt learns his father died defying the Choir's first infiltration of Nostramus, giving him a personal, generational stake in the campaign's final battle.

Major Decision

Context

The party brings Holt proof of Doctor Fesk's laboratory. The evidence indicts not just Fesk but two Watch guards who looked the other way — men under Holt's own command. Captain Vey wants them arrested quietly; Quill wants a public execution to restore order.

Choice Made

Holt must decide whether to surrender his men to Quill's spectacle or help the party spirit them into the undercity as informants.

Impact

If Holt sides with Quill, he gains 'Iron Discipline' (+2 AC while allies with the Watch are within 10 feet) but loses 'The Sergeant's Mercy' permanently and the party loses their keep ally. If he defies Quill, Holt loses his sergeant's rank (Intimidation drops by 2 permanently) but gains 'Oathbreaker's Shield' — once per long rest, he can negate one ally's failed saving throw by taking 2d10 psychic damage himself, embodying the cost of conscience.

Major Decision

Context

At the ritual in the Sunken Shrine, the counter-words require a voice the plague has touched. Maren, Holt's sister, survived Fesk's infection and is present — the only living carrier whose blood can anchor the words.

Choice Made

Holt can offer his sister as the ritual's living anchor (saving the city but binding her to the shrine's ley line, making her the shrine's new warden), or refuse and attempt to destroy the staff by force alone, risking the ritual's completion.

Impact

If Holt offers Maren, the party gains the 'Shrine-Warded' boon (Advantage on all saving throws against disease and plague effects for the rest of the campaign) and Holt gains 'Warden's Vigil' (he can cast protection from evil and good once per short rest, feeling the ley line through his sister). If he refuses, the ritual fight is fought at High difficulty and the staff's destruction deals Holt 4d10 necrotic damage as the plague magic lashes out — but Maren remains free and human.

Major Decision

Context

Before the final boarding of the Weeping Sister, Captain Vey asks Holt to lead the Ash Watch's remaining strength in holding the harbor chain against the cult's counterattack — a post he will likely not survive — while the party goes below through the sea cave.

Choice Made

Holt can obey and hold the tower (possibly dying in a heroic last stand), or he can abandon the post and join the party aboard the ship, leaving the Watch understrength.

Impact

If Holt holds the tower, he gains 'Last Stand' (while at 0 HP he remains conscious for 1 minute) and the party fights the finale without Watch reinforcements but with the chain secured for escape. If he joins the party, Holt gains 'Shipfighter' (advantage on attacks and no penalty in the ship's confined corridors) but the finale begins with a wave of cult reinforcements at the chain tower, and if the tower falls the party's retreat route is cut — someone must hold the cave mouth in the final battle.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Learning Maren was deliberately infected by a man wearing the Watch's sanctioned physician's mask.

Transformation

Holt stops saying 'the orders are clear.' His dialogue changes from reciting regulations to asking the party what they need him to do.

Mechanical Changes

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Witnessing Quill burn quarantine-breakers at the wall after the party saved them.

Transformation

Holt's alignment shifts from Lawful Neutral toward Lawful Good; he begins quietly falsifying patrol routes to help civilians.

Mechanical Changes

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Discovering his father's erased defiance in the archives.

Transformation

Holt takes up his father's notched blade in place of his issue sword and starts drilling volunteers — the same work Halvard Sten does — closing the gap between the Watch and the people it serves.

Mechanical Changes

Ally

Captain Vey

Relationship commanding officer and wary friend

Influence 8/10

Loyalty 7/10

Shared History

Holt has served under Vey for eleven of his twenty years in the Watch, and she was the lieutenant who pulled him out of the flood riots at Marrowgate with a broken shield arm and a promotion he did not want. They drilled recruits together in the keep courtyard every winter morning for a decade, and Vey attended the funeral of Holt's mother with her cloak pinned as a shroud.

But the quarantine has strained them: Holt has executed her lawful-but-monstrous orders without complaint, and he suspects — correctly — that she is hiding her infected son somewhere in the temple row while her guards drag other people's children to the wards. He has never confronted her about it. He is not sure which would be worse: being wrong, or being right. Vey, for her part, trusts Holt with everything except the truth, and his blind obedience is the one thing she can still rely on in a keep full of Quill's spies.

Potential Breaking Points

If Holt learns Vey prioritized her son over ward assignments, his loyalty drops by 3 until confronted.
If the party exposes Vey's son to Quill, Holt may side with the Inquisitor's purge to force Vey's hand.

Ally

Sister Neris

Relationship quiet correspondent

Influence 5/10

Loyalty 6/10

Shared History

Every corpse cart that leaves the temple row passes Holt's checkpoint at the Ward Gate, and for the first week of the plague he waved them through without a word. Then Neris started handing him the count — a folded slip of paper with the day's dead written in her small, steady hand — because she believed someone in the Watch should know the true number, not the one Quill's clerks reported.

Holt has kept every slip, folded in his breastplate over his heart, forty-one papers thick. He has never answered her. He does not know what he would say. But when the party needs access to the temple ward, it is Neris's count that convinces him to look away, and it is Holt's checkpoint that lets Neris's ledger travel safely out of the row.

Potential Breaking Points

If ordered to seal the Temple of Mercy, Holt will hesitate — a hesitation the cult can exploit or the party can use.

Enemy

Doctor Orlan Fesk, the Kindly Knife

Threat Level 7/10

Conflict Type moral and personal

Personal Stakes

Fesk walks the temple row in a physician's mask sanctioned by the Watch, and Holt has checked his papers a dozen times — always in order, always signed by the Inquisitor's office. Holt's sister Maren is one of Fesk's patients. When the party reveals that the calm, clinical man Holt personally escorted through three checkpoints is deliberately infecting the dying, Holt's obedience becomes a wound: every signature he verified, every escort he provided, was a delivery service for the plague.

Fesk knows this, and when they meet he speaks to Holt with terrible gentleness, calling him 'the most honest man in the city, because you did what you were told.' Holt has sworn — quietly, to the party, not to his officers — that he will be the one to put Fesk down, and he will break any order, any oath, to do it. This is the first promise Holt has ever made that his chain of command did not authorize.

Possible Resolutions

The party lets Holt land the blow that ends Fesk, cementing his break from blind obedience.
Fesk is captured alive and Holt must watch the courts free him on a technicality — pushing Holt toward the Choir's nihilism or the party's cause, depending on who reaches him first.

Enemy

Inquisitor Sera Quill

Threat Level 6/10

Conflict Type ideological

Personal Stakes

Quill is everything Holt's father's ghost whispers against: merciless in the right words, efficient in the wrong ways. She has twice overruled Holt's recommendations for leniency at the wall, and once made him stand watch over the hanging of a boy he had personally promised would see a trial. Holt has never raised his voice to her; he simply stopped volunteering for the duties she assigns. Quill has noticed. She keeps a file on every Watch sergeant who hesitates, and Holt's file is the thickest.

If the party's investigation ever requires Holt to choose between Quill's authority and his conscience, Quill will invoke his father's record — the erased record, the shameful version her clerks wrote — to break him. What she does not know is that Holt has already found the true version, and it has made him unbreakable in a way she cannot predict.

Possible Resolutions

Holt testifies against Quill's purge with the forged-writ evidence, turning the keep's rank and file against her.
Quill breaks Holt with his father's falsified record, and he must be pulled back from despair by the party or by Maren's survival.

Faction

The Ash Watch

Standing 9/10

Influence

Holt is the Watch's spine in miniature: twenty years of service, two commendations for the flood riots, a training billet in the keep courtyard, and a reputation among the rank and file as the sergeant who never asks you to do anything he won't do first. Half the guards on the wall learned shield work from him, and when Holt gives an order at a checkpoint, no one checks it against Vey's countersign.

This makes him both invaluable and dangerous: Quill's spies have flagged him as 'reliable but rigid' — reliable to the Watch, rigid about everything else. The Watch's trust in Holt is the party's key to the keep: through him they can requisition supplies, borrow the courtyard for drilling, and reach Captain Vey without passing Quill's clerks. But it also means that if Holt breaks — if he is seen defying orders or aiding quarantine-breakers — the disappointment lands on every guard who ever called him sergeant, and the Watch's fragile discipline could fracture at exactly the moment the city needs it to hold.

Obligations

Holt owes the Watch his dawn drills regardless of the campaign's events — the party must work around his schedule.
If the Watch is ordered to burn the temple row, Holt's faction standing will be tested to destruction.

Benefits

Party members in Holt's company can pass Ward Gate and Market checkpoints without papers.
Holt can requisition one crate of Watch supplies (rations, torches, or a potion of healing) per act.

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