Skarn holds the Deadvein Gate to the last man. He was sworn brother to Gorek Blacktusk before the exile and has never spoken of it; if Blacktusk stands opposite him, Skarn fights with grim, silent fury and refuses all parley from his old brother.
Maneuvers known: Menacing Attack (Wisdom save DC 14 or Frightened until end of next turn, +1d8 damage), Trip Attack (Strength save DC 14 or knocked prone, +1d8 damage), Rally (ally gains 1d8 + 3 temporary hit points).
Proficiency with Smith's Tools; Skarn keeps a set of Warden campaign maps and a smith's hammer among his gear.
When reduced to 0 hit points but not killed outright, Skarn drops to 1 hit point instead.
Take the Dash action as a Bonus Action and gain 3 temporary hit points.
Skarn sees in dim light within 60 feet as if it were bright light.
Take one additional action on Skarn's turn (not a Magic action).
While wearing armor, Skarn gains a +1 bonus to Armor Class.
Skarn attacks twice when taking the Attack action.
+1 Strength (to 18), +1 Constitution (to 16).
Regain 1d10 + 6 hit points.
Behind the character
Warden Skarn is a tall, heavily scarred orc in a Warden's iron coat — a long, riveted coat of dark grey plates over chain mail — with the iron token of the Ironjaw Wardens on a leather thong at his throat. One tusk is broken short, snapped in the Redstone narrows nine years ago, and he has never had it mended because he considers the flaw a fair price for the men he brought out of it.
His voice is gravel sliding downhill, and he uses as few words as a job requires. He has twenty wardens behind him and no illusions about what twenty wardens can do, and that arithmetic — twenty men against a mountain — is the load-bearing wall of his character: he counts lives the way a smith counts ingots, spends none carelessly, and has spent enough to know exactly what each one costs.
He is Lawful Neutral in the oldest sense: the road must stay open, the post must be held, the word must be kept. He does not hate the Redband; he prices them. He does not love the party; he trusts them, conditionally and professionally, because Gruma Ashfang's report says they kept their word from Ironjaw to the coast, and in the Reach that is the whole of the law.
Under the iron coat there are three things Skarn has never said aloud. The first is that he was Gorek Blacktusk's sworn brother before the exile, and that he was the one who put the ledger in Gruma Ashfang's hands. The second is that he keeps Blacktusk's discarded iron token on the same cord as his own. The third is that he is tired — not of the war, but of the silence, which has gotten heavier every winter for three years.
He fights with a longsword and a heavy shield scored with old axe marks, commands by horn and by hammer, and holds the Deadvein Gate the way he holds everything: completely, quietly, and to the last man if the arithmetic demands it.
Before the adventure
Skarn was born the ninth child of a small forge-clan in Ironjaw Hold's lower quarter, in a house with too many mouths and one anvil. At sixteen the clan's forge could no longer feed him, so he did what ninth children in the Reach have always done: he took the Warden's token. He has served the Ironjaw Wardens for twenty-two years — bazaar patrol, road patrol, the Redstone Draw, and finally the mountain posts — and he has risen the slow, unglamorous way: by never losing a wagon he was assigned to protect and never spending a warden he did not have to.
The Redstone narrows made him. Nine years ago, six wardens under Skarn's command held the Draw's tightest pass against a salt-raider company for a night, and Skarn broke his tusk and nearly his shield doing it. Four of the six came out alive, two of them because Skarn went back into the narrows a third time. The Wardens gave him his full token for it. Gorek Blacktusk, who had fought beside him all night, forged him a new knife-hilt at the Brightsteel forge to mark the occasion, and the two of them swore blood-oath over a fire on the Draw's floor — the oath that neither would outlive the other's honor. For nine years they were inseparable: the quiet Warden and the loud one, the man who counted and the man who burned.
Three winters ago the arithmetic broke. Caravans began to burn on the Ashen Road, and Skarn — detailed to inventory the Warden's Hall's recovered goods — found a ledger in a recovered strongbox that matched patrol timings to raid dates, in a hand he recognized. He carried it to Gruma Ashfang without a word, because that was the procedure and because the evidence was iron. The sentence was exile. Only afterward did Skarn learn what he had not known when he handed over the book: the caravan master whose routes had been sold had first cheated Blacktusk's clan out of a season's pay, and the clan elders had refused redress twice.
Skarn had proven a crime and armed a feud, and by the time he understood the shape of it, the exile was law, Blacktusk had spat at the Hall's door, and speaking would have split the Wardens in a season when they could not afford to be split. So he said nothing. He has been saying nothing for three winters, and it has cost him more than any wound on the Draw.
When the Redband's true scale became clear — when the burned caravans resolved into an army digging something out of the Deadvein — Gruma Ashfang quietly massed a mountain column at the gate under Skarn's command. Twenty wardens, a month in the wind, no reinforcement, orders to hold until the road is open or they are dead. Skarn has fed them, held them, and lost not one to desertion, because his wardens know he eats last and spends them carefully.
He has also done something he has never done before: he has started keeping a second tally in his head, the one that counts the wardens he will not be able to save, and it is the reason his voice has gotten quieter this season, not louder.
He carries a longsword, a heavy shield scored with old axe marks, and a set of smith's tools and campaign maps among his gear — the Student of War's kit, and the habit of a man who thinks in logistics. He fights as a Battle Master: Menacing Attack to break a charge, Trip Attack to put a big man on the ground, Rally to keep a warden standing when the wind and the losses say sit down.
He is not a subtle man, but he is a precise one, and his precision is a kind of loyalty: he gives the party the truth of his arithmetic — twenty men, one gate, no illusions — because he believes people fight better when they know the real numbers. What he does not give them, unless they dig for it, is the name on the second token at his throat, and the fact that the war's hardest fight may not be against the Redband at all, but between the two halves of an oath sworn on a canyon floor nine years and three winters ago.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Skarn has never spoken of the night three winters ago when he stood before the Warden's Hall and watched his sworn brother Gorek Blacktusk be named exile. The truth is worse: Skarn was the one who found the stolen caravan ledger in Blacktusk's tent and carried it to Gruma Ashfang. He did not know the caravan master had cheated Blacktusk's clan until the sentence was already passed, and he has carried the guilt of a half-told truth ever since.
When the party captures a Redband courier's dispatch at the Deadvein Gate, they find a letter from Blacktusk addressed to 'the brother who reads my name and says nothing.' Skarn asks the party to carry his answer — a full confession, written in his own hand — to Blacktusk before the final battle, and to stand witness to whatever comes of it.
Recover Blacktusk's letter from the courier's dispatch case and convince Skarn to read it aloud.
Personal quest · 2
Skarn has twenty wardens, no reinforcements, and orders from Gruma Ashfang to hold the Deadvein Gate 'until the road is open or you are dead.' He has done the arithmetic: a frontal assault on the gate costs him at least eight men, and holding the pass afterward costs more. He asks the party for something a Warden is not supposed to ask for — help finding a way to take the gate that does not spend his wardens like coins.
This quest runs the military planning of the gate assault: scouting the goat track with Halden Grist, testing the signal codebook against the gate's bell patterns, and deciding how the twenty wardens are spent. Every plan the party builds changes the gate encounter's shape, and every wardens' life saved or spent is remembered in Cinderfall and Ironjaw Hold.
Reconnoiter the goat track and the watchpost's blind angles with Halden Grist.
Personal quest · 3
Among the blackfire ingots stamped for Moonharbor in the gate's stores, Skarn finds something that stops him cold: a crate of ordinary Reach iron, unrefined, stamped with the mark of his own first clan — the clan he left behind when he took the Warden's iron token. The Redband has been buying iron from the Reach's own smaller forges, including one run by Skarn's niece, who does not know what her metal is being forged into.
Skarn cannot leave the gate, so he asks the party to trace the crate's chain of sale before the finale — from the gate stores back down the coast road, through a Thornwatch factor and a Moonharbor clerk — and either buy out his niece's forge contract or confront her with the truth. It is the last piece of family he has, and the Redband is wearing it as armor.
Trace the crate's consignment papers from the gate stores to the Thornwatch factor who paid for it.
At the Deadvein Gate, before the assault, Skarn offers the party a choice of plans — and the choice of whether he lives like a Warden or dies like one.
Command position: Skarn survives the campaign with full resources, gains the support-maneuver loadout (double Rally, Inspiring tempo), and the wardens hold the pass through the finale with 17 of 20 men. Front position: Skarn fights at full power as an allied NPC, the assault is faster and more brutal, and there is a real chance the campaign's gate commander dies on the iron he swore to hold — permanently removing him from the finale and changing the epilogue's Ironjaw politics.
When Blacktusk's letter reaches Skarn's hands, the party decides whether the sworn brothers' reckoning happens at all — and on what terms.
Delivered: Blacktusk may stand aside or even fight beside the party at the refining floor (a second allied CR 6 body in the hardest fight of the campaign), and Skarn's maneuvers expand. Sealed: Skarn fights the finale with cold fury (+2 damage vs. Redband, but loses Rally) and the feud poisons the Ironjaw epilogue. Blood: a duel that either gives Skarn a blackfire greatsword and blackfire resistance, or costs the party their gate commander at the moment they can least afford it.
After the gate falls, Skarn must split his twenty wardens: hold the pass and the gate against Redband relief columns, or march down to Cinderfall and defend the village while the party is in the deep.
Wardens at the pass: if the militia failed to march (Thornwatch fell), nothing holds the gate and a Redband relief column can cut the party's retreat from the deep — the finale becomes an extraction under pressure. Wardens at Cinderfall: the village survives any reprisal and the miners march into the deep as porters and charge-carriers (advantage on all charge-setting checks in the finale), but the party's line of retreat through the gate is unguarded and Skarn himself must choose which post to stand at — splitting his own oath in half and costing him his Warden's Oath feature for the finale.
Reading Blacktusk's letter aloud
The silent Warden becomes a man with something to say, and either finds his confession or hardens into the gate's stone.
Gains Parry and an additional Superiority Die, or loses Rally and gains +2 damage vs. Redband
The gate assault's outcome
Skarn's arithmetic of twenty men is proven right or wrong in blood, and his command philosophy — and the Wardens' memory of him — is set for the epilogue.
Between 8 and 20 wardens survive the gate, directly scaling the forces available for the pass defense and Cinderfall
The clan-stamped crate
Skarn's abstract war becomes a family war, and his conviction turns into measurable iron.
Permanent +1 HP per level if the truth is delivered; wardens gain +1 to attack rolls during the finale's early phases
Ally
Skarn served under Gruma Ashfang for eleven years before the mountain column, first as a road warden on the Redstone Draw patrols and then as her gate commander. She pinned his iron token on him herself when he made full Warden, and she was the one who read the exile sentence on Gorek Blacktusk three winters ago while Skarn stood in the second rank with the stolen ledger in his pack and his jaw shut.
Gruma has never asked him what he knows about the exile, and Skarn has never volunteered it, and both of them know exactly what that silence means. She trusts him with the hardest posts because he does not waste men and does not waste words, and she has lost nine wardens this season knowing that Skarn's twenty are the last iron she can afford to spend. When she quietly massed the mountain column at the gate for a month, it was Skarn who fed, watered and held twenty men in the wind without a single desertion — and it was Gruma who sent no reinforcement, because there was none to send. Their relationship is built on shared arithmetic: both of them count lives the way smiths count ingots, and neither has ever lied to the other about the total.
Enemy
Gorek Blacktusk was Skarn's sworn brother for nine years — they held the Redstone narrows together against a salt-raider company with six men, they forged each other's knife-hilts at Thokk Brightsteel's father's forge, and they swore blood-oath over a fire on the Draw's floor that neither would outlive the other's honor. Then Skarn found the ledger proving Blacktusk was selling caravan routes, carried it to Gruma Ashfang, and said nothing when the sentence was passed — because he did not yet know the caravan master had cheated Blacktusk's clan first, and by the time he learned it, the exile was law and speaking would have broken the Wardens.
Blacktusk has spent three winters certain his brother sold him for a token, and he is half right. Skarn has spent three winters knowing he did the right thing in the worst possible way, and has never once said Blacktusk's name aloud. At the Stand at Thornwatch and again at the Deadvein Gate, the two of them will face each other across iron, and Skarn refuses all parley — not from hatred, but because he does not trust what he would say. The unfinished reckoning between them is the largest unexploded charge in the campaign, and it sits directly under the finale.
Faction
Skarn is the Wardens' mountain commander and one of Gruma Ashfang's three most trusted officers, which in an organization of two hundred fighters for four hundred miles of road makes him one of the most powerful men in the Reach. He joined at sixteen after his clan's forge could no longer feed its ninth child, and he has given the Wardens twenty-two years — every post from bazaar patrol to gate command.
The rank and file know him as the Warden who does not spend men cheaply and who eats last, and two of the wardens in his column are men he pulled out of the Redstone Draw with his shield. His loyalty to the institution is absolute and slightly dangerous: he believes the Wardens are the only thing standing between the Reach and the road's death, and he will hold a post to the last man on that faith alone.
The Wardens' leadership, however, does not fully know him — his silence about Blacktusk means the institution he has given his life to is built partly on a truth he buried, and if that truth surfaces, the Wardens must decide whether Skarn is the loyalist who stopped a traitor or the brother who betrayed a brother and hid behind the token. Both readings are true, which is exactly why he has never let either be spoken.
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