If Korrag can identify the party's healer (Insight DC 12, or automatically after one round of observation), he targets them exclusively, ignoring opportunity attack penalties to reach them.
Granted at level 7 in standard progression; the module grants it early as a narrative ability: after one round of observation, Korrag can identify the party's healer and weakest combatant.
Korrag cannot be turned, charmed, or persuaded while Vessaria lives, and he has advantage on saves against being Frightened while she is within 60 feet.
Korrag's body is a map of burn scars from the Glass Flats. He has resistance to fire damage and advantage on saving throws against extreme heat.
Trip Attack (knock prone, STR save DC 14), Menacing Attack (frighten, WIS save DC 14), Disarming Attack (drop weapon, DEX save DC 14).
When Korrag fails an ability check, he can expend one Superiority Die, add it to the roll, and use the new result.
Korrag's mercenary decades taught him to read a battlefield like a ledger.
Korrag's hit point maximum increases by 12 (2 per level).
Korrag attacks twice when he takes the Attack action.
Push beyond normal limits for one decisive moment.
Recover hit points with a veteran's grit.
Four d10s power his combat maneuvers.
+1 AC while wearing armor.
Behind the character
Korrag Ashfist is the Ashbound's fist: a broad, fire-scarred human in ash-wrapped chain mail who speaks rarely, obeys instantly, and kills without ceremony. His bald head and forearms are crossed with burn keloids from a Glass Flats ambush that should have ended him—instead it ended the man he was and began the one Vessaria found half-buried in a sandstorm six years ago. She told him his scars were the Hollow Sun's handwriting.
He has never believed a word of her theology, and he has never doubted a word of her. That distinction is the whole of him: he does not worship the Hollow Sun; he worships the woman who gave his ruined life a shape.
Blunt, loyal, brutal, and perceptive, Korrag is the cult's operational spine. He trains the zealots, rations the fire flasks, runs the Ash Orchard dig, and vets every convert for false faith—the only cultist who never takes the party's deceptions at face value and demands hard proof before he moves. In battle he is methodical and merciless: he holds chokepoints, detonates the orchard's glass fruit over his enemies, and always, always hunts the healer first, because he learned long ago that armies die from the surgeon outward. He fights to the death as a matter of identity; surrender would mean the burning man in the sand was right to be abandoned.
His tragedy is that he is perceptive enough to see the cracks in the scriptures and loyal enough to bury them. He keeps his doubts in a ledger, next to his debts, and waits for Vessaria to be right. If she is ever proven wrong, Korrag Ashfist will not break—he will burn, one way or another, as the cult's last true believer.
Before the adventure
Korrag was born in the frontier hill-country east of Dunharrows Gate, the third son of a goat-herder who sold him at fourteen to a mercenary company called the Broken Spear because three sons could not eat. The company made him a soldier the way a river makes stones: by grinding off everything soft. For twenty years he fought in border wars, escort jobs, and caravan contracts across the frontier, developing a reputation as a man who held walls that should have fallen and never once broke a contract. He kept a ledger of every debt—wages owed, wages paid, lives saved, lives taken—because a mercenary's word was his only capital and Korrag intended his to be solvent.
The ledger's one open page dates from twelve years ago: a caravan crossing the Glass Flats, paid to escort salt-merchants to a frontier market. Korrag took the rear-guard. Bandits—or something worse, wearing bandit rags—hit the column at dusk with fire flasks and glass-shear traps, and the caravan master gave the order to ride on, leaving Korrag's squad burning in the glass. Korrag remembers three things from that night: Sela Brant's voice carrying the order to ride, the sound of his own skin, and the strange mercy of the desert cold that came at midnight and froze the wounds shut.
He crawled twenty miles on his elbows. The Broken Spear crossed him off their rolls as dead. The caravan master never paid the death-benefit, and the debt has never been settled.
For six years afterward Korrag drifted—bodyguard work, pit fighting, a season guarding diggers in the Glasswaste's edge. He drank, he fought, he healed crooked, and he stopped believing his life would ever be worth its ledger. Then came the sandstorm. He was half-dead of thirst, three days lost, when a tall woman in ash-wrapped robes walked out of the blowing dust without a scarf, without a waterskin, without hurry, and stood over him. Vessaria Ashbound looked at his scars—every mercenary he'd ever met had looked at his scars with pity or calculation—and said: 'The Sun wrote on you. Come and read.' He has followed her since.
He learned quickly that the cult's scriptures contradicted themselves in places, and that Vessaria's certainty papered over them. A more theological man might have investigated. Korrag instead doubled his discipline: he trained the zealots, rationed the fire flasks, ran the Ash Orchard dig, and began quietly vetting every convert who joined after Dryfall, because faith that arrives late is the kind that runs. He distrusts Marchant's conversion completely—an old initiate who fled and came crawling back is, in Korrag's ledger, a debt still open. He has not yet decided whether to report the man, ruin him, or kill him, and the not-deciding gnaws at him.
Every atrocity he commits is an act of devotion. When he fired the lower terraces at Last Root, he did it because Vessaria asked; when he detonates the orchard's glass fruit over intruders, it is a hymn. He does not expect the new world to make sense. He expects to be standing in front of it, between Vessaria and whatever comes, and that is the only prayer he knows. If she is ever redeemed—if the party proves the scriptures false and she kneels—Korrag will not follow her into mercy.
He will lead the diehards who fight on, because a worshipper cannot survive his god's repentance. And if she dies first, the ledger closes with a single line: paid in full, in ash.
Threads to follow
Beneath the surface
What haunts them
What drives them
Personal quest · 1
Korrag keeps a tally of every debt he owes and is owed from his mercenary days. One name remains unpaid: a caravan master who left him burning in a Glass Flats ambush. He wants the man's head before the cult's work is done.
Learn the caravan master's whereabouts from caravanserai contacts at Dunharrows Gate or Last Root.
Personal quest · 2
Korrag suspects the Seed of the First Tree is more than a key. A dying Keeper's words at the dig site—'the sun's heat is the engine'—haunt him. He secretly doubts Vessaria's scriptures, and buries the doubt under doubled brutality.
Interrogate captured Keepers and dig deeper than Vessaria ordered.
Personal quest · 3
Korrag distrusts Marchant's conversion utterly and has begun quietly vetting every cultist who joined after Dryfall. He intends to present Vessaria with a list of 'false converts'—and Marchant's name tops it.
Gather proof of Marchant's wavering loyalty.
Act Two, the Ash Orchard: the party breaches the dig. Korrag holds the root-hollow with six zealots.
Detonating the fruit deals area fire damage to the party each round but destroys the glass-fruit treasure and risks igniting the Seed chamber. Holding it preserves treasure (200 gp of glass-fruit gemstones and 3 vials of alchemist's fire on his body) but costs him the zealots' picket line, letting the party isolate him. Either choice permanently changes the encounter's treasure parcel and terrain.
Act Two climax, the Defense of Last Root: Vessaria withdraws at half strength. Korrag's orders are to follow.
If he withdraws, he survives to Act Three and guards Marchant at the Seed chamber (harder Seed chamber fight, +1 veteran combatant). If he stays and dies, the party gains his Debt-Paid Blade and interrogation notes, but the cult's raid claims more civilian lives as his zealots fight unshackled. His defiance, if he survives it, earns Vessaria's absolute trust and a permanent +2 hit points per Hit Die (Vessaria's ash-rite blessing).
Act Three, the Heart of Dust: if Vessaria is talked down, half her zealots stand down. Korrag does not.
The charge is a deadly wave (Korrag plus four zealots, Korrag fighting with Action Surge and reckless fury, gaining advantage on all attacks but granting advantage to attackers against him). If he kneels, he becomes the binding's willing sacrifice candidate: 'a life freely given to the dust'—the campaign's darkest redemption, granting the party the BIND path without losing an ally, at the cost of Korrag's life and the epilogue's tone.
The party defeats him at the Ash Orchard but spares his life
Korrag interprets mercy as contempt. He escapes, and for the rest of the campaign he targets the party's healer first and never accepts surrender from them. His Menacing Attack maneuvers gain +2 to their save DC.
+2 (from 14 to 16)
Vessaria is turned at the Heart of Dust
Korrag's entire identity collapses. He either dies leading the diehards (gaining one free Action Surge and +20 temporary hit points as the cult's last true believer) or, with overwhelming proof and her command, kneels as the sacrifice.
Temporary hit points 20; Action Surge available even if already used
Ally
Cindra was a Dunharrows Gate water-seller whose well dried the year the Glasswaste's heat pushed the frontier back. Korrag found her pouring her last jug on the sand in offering and brought her to Vessaria. She has fought beside him at Dryfall and the Ash Orchard, carrying the fire flasks he hurls. She is the only cultist Korrag trusts with his doubts, and the only one who knows about the Scar Ledger. If Korrag dies, Cindra inherits his list of 'false converts' and becomes a persistent recurring antagonist; if he lives, she fights and dies at his side in the Seed chamber shield-wall.
Enemy
Sela Brant quartermastered a caravan out of the Glass Flats twelve years ago—the same caravan job that left Korrag burning in an ambush while the caravan master rode on. Sela was there; she helped organize the retreat that abandoned him. She does not remember his face, but he remembers her voice giving the order to ride. Their enmity is the campaign's cruelest irony: Sela is the party's key ally and quartermaster, and Korrag's first target in any raid on Last Root is her stores and her water.
If the party learns this history (from Korrag's Scar Ledger, found on his body or in his tent), they can weaponize it—Sela's guilt makes her reckless around him, and Insight DC 13 on Korrag during the Last Root raid reveals he is fighting the battle around her, not the battle at hand.
Faction
Korrag is the Ashbound's fist—its commander of shock troops, dig operations, and discipline. He joined six years ago after Vessaria pulled him, half-dead and half-mad from the Glass Flats, out of a sandstorm and told him his scars were 'the Sun's handwriting.' He does not believe her theology; he believes in her. Every zealot's training, every watch rotation, every fire-flask ration passes through his hands, and the rank-and-file fear him more than they love Vessaria—which she permits, because his brutality is her mercy: he kills quickly so her sermons can convert slowly.
His command of the Ash Orchard dig and the raid's shock troops makes him the cult's operational spine; kill him early and the cult fragments into squabbling cells, losing the time-sensitive Seed extraction and weakening every subsequent encounter by one zealot.
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