Neris Vale, the Gatebound Oath

Level 10 Infernal Legacy Tiefling Paladin (Oath of Devotion)

Available with DM subscription
STR
16 (+3)
DEX
10
CON
14 (+2)
INT
8 (-1)
WIS
12 (+1)
CHA
18 (+4)

Defense

Armor Class 18 (Plate Armor)
Hit Points 84 (10d10 + 40 +2)
Speed 30 ft.

Proficiencies & Skills

Saving Throws wisdom, charisma
Skills Insight +5, Religion +3, Athletics +7, Persuasion +8, Intimidation +8

Features

The Names of the Fallen (Personal Quest Feature)

custom
Campaign-specific

Neris has memorized the names of every guardian who died at the Shadowed Gate. When she re-carves a fallen guardian's name on a boundary cairn, the gate's ward strengthens: Neris and allies within 30 feet of a restored cairn gain 1d6 temporary hit points per name restored (max 7), and Umbral guardians within 60 feet of a restored cairn have disadvantage on attack rolls.

Oath of Devotion: Sacred Weapon

subclass Level 3
Channel Divinity, 2 per Short/Long Rest

As a Magic action, you imbue one weapon with lunar light for 1 minute: it gains your Charisma modifier (+4) to attack rolls, deals extra radiant damage equal to your Charisma modifier on a hit, and sheds Bright Light in a 10-foot radius. The weapon also emits a 10-foot aura that makes it harder for enemies to hide.

Great Weapon Master

feat Level 8

On a critical hit with a Heavy weapon or when you reduce a creature to 0 HP with one, you can make one attack with a Bonus Action. When you take the Attack action and use a Heavy weapon, you can deal an extra 1d10 damage on a hit, but the attack roll is made with disadvantage.

Soldier Background: Military Rank

background

You are a warden of the Lunar Concord's gate watch, holding the rank of Boundary Warden. Soldiers and Concord knights loyal to your former command recognize your authority and influence, and can often secure access to Concord encampments and fortresses.

Fiendish Legacy (Infernal)

species
Passive / Spells known

You have resistance to Fire damage and know the Thaumaturgy cantrip. At level 3 you gain Hellish Rebuke (2nd level, once per Long Rest), and at level 5 you gain Darkness (once per Long Rest). Charisma is your spellcasting ability for these spells.

Aura of Protection

class Level 6

You and allies within 10 feet gain a bonus to saving throws equal to your Charisma modifier (+4). You are immune to effects that would make you Charmed? No — you gain the save bonus; you and allies within 10 feet add +4 to all saving throws.

Channel Divinity: Turn the Undead

class Level 3
2 per Short/Long Rest

As a Magic action, you present your holy symbol and each undead of your choice within 60 feet must make a Wisdom save (DC 16) or be Frightened for 1 minute or until it takes damage.

Lay on Hands

class Level 1
50 HP pool, replenished on Long Rest

Your blessed touch can heal wounds. You have a pool of 50 hit points that replenishes on a Long Rest. You can also cure disease or poison for 5 points per use.

Divine Sense

class Level 1
5 per Long Rest

As a Bonus Action, you can detect celestials, fiends, and undead within 60 feet that are behind cover or blocked, and sense consecrated or desecrated ground.

Fighting Style: Great Weapon Fighting

class Level 2

When you roll a 1 or 2 on a damage die for an attack you make with a melee weapon you wield in two hands, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll.

Aura of Devotion

subclass Level 7

You and allies within 10 feet are immune to the Charmed condition and have advantage on saving throws against spells cast by fiends and undead.

Oath of Devotion: Turn the Undead (Oath)

subclass Level 3
Channel Divinity, 2 per Short/Long Rest

Fiends and undead within 60 feet must make a Wisdom save (DC 16) or be Frightened for 1 minute; while Frightened they cannot approach you.

Channel Divinity: Divine Smite

class Level 3
2 per Short/Long Rest

As a Magic action, you can expend a use of Channel Divinity to deal 2d10 radiant damage to a creature you hit with a melee weapon attack.

Paladin's Smite

class Level 2
Once per turn, when you hit with a melee weapon

You can expend one spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target: 2d8 plus 1d8 per spell slot level above 1st.

Feat: Alert

background feat Level 1

You add your Proficiency Bonus to Initiative rolls, and can swap Initiative with a willing ally after rolling.

Darkvision

species

You can see in dim light within 60 feet as if it were bright light and in darkness as if it were dim light.

Spellcasting

charisma DC 16 +8 to hit Level 1: 4 slots Level 2: 3 slots Level 3: 3 slots

Neris prepares 9 spells (Charisma modifier 4 + half Paladin level 5). The species spells (Thaumaturgy, Hellish Rebuke, Darkness) are always known and do not count against prepared spells. Darkness is included in her species legacy but not listed in prepared spells.

Bless

Level 1 Oath of Devotion
enchantment 1 action 30 feet V, S, M (holy water)

Up to three creatures each gain +1d4 to attack rolls and saving throws for 1 minute (Concentration).

Command

Level 1 class
enchantment 1 action 60 feet V

One creature must obey a one-word command (approach, drop, flee, grovel, halt) or waste its turn.

Divine Favor

Level 1 class
evocation 1 bonus action Self V, S

Your weapon attacks deal an extra 1d4 radiant damage for 1 minute (Concentration).

Protection from Evil and Good

Level 1 Oath of Devotion
abjuration 1 action Touch V, S, M (holy water)

One willing creature is protected against aberrations, celestials, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead: they can't be charmed or frightened by them, and attackers have disadvantage.

Shield of Faith

Level 1 class
abjuration 1 bonus action 60 feet V, S, M (small parchment with holy text)

A creature gains +2 to AC for 10 minutes (Concentration).

Lesser Restoration

Level 2 class
abjuration 1 action Touch V, S

You touch a creature and cure one disease or one condition (blinded, charmed, deafened, frightened, paralyzed, or poisoned).

Zone of Truth

Level 2 Oath of Devotion
enchantment 1 action 60 feet V, S

A 15-foot-radius sphere for 10 minutes: creatures inside can't speak deliberate lies (Wisdom save to resist).

Aura of Vitality

Level 3 class
abjuration 1 action Self (30-foot radius) V, S

For 1 minute (Concentration), you can use a Bonus Action to heal a creature in range 2d6 hit points.

Dispel Magic

Level 3 class
abjuration 1 action 120 feet V, S

Automatically ends one spell of 3rd level or lower on a target; higher-level spells require an ability check (DC 10 + spell level).

Hellish Rebuke

Level 2 species (Infernal Legacy)
evocation 1 bonus action (reaction) 60 feet V, S

When you are damaged by a creature within 60 feet, you can point at it and it takes 4d10 fire damage (Dexterity save for half). Once per Long Rest.

Thaumaturgy

Cantrip species (Infernal Legacy)
transmutation 1 action 30 feet V

You manifest a minor wonder: your voice booms, flames flicker, tremors shake the ground, or similar supernatural signs.

Behind the character

Character Information

Neris Vale, the Gatebound Oath, is a tall, broad-shouldered tiefling woman in gleaming full plate polished to a mirror shine that catches moonlight — polish as discipline, discipline as armor over older wounds. Her skin is deep crimson and her horns are filed short and blunt against her skull, cropped like a soldier's hair; her tail is wrapped tight beneath the plate, a habit of a woman who learned early that a tiefling warden must be twice as immaculate to be half-respected.

Golden eyes, steady and unblinking, look out from beneath the crest of a silver tabard bearing the Lunar Concord's crescent sigil. A greatsword with a crescent-moon pommel rides across her back, and a moonstone amulet glows faintly at her throat. She is level ten, an Oath of Devotion paladin whose Sacred Weapon burns with lunar light and whose Aura of Devotion turns aside charms and fiendish spells. She is steady, formal, and precise — she speaks in the clipped cadence of the gate watch, corrects posture with a look, and takes inventory of exits before she takes inventory of friends.

But once someone earns her trust, an unexpectedly dry, warm humor surfaces, the private inheritance of long night shifts shared with Selene. Her driving goal is simple and enormous: to hold the Shadowed Gate until the Concord remembers it exists. She carries the names of seven dead guardians in her memory like ammunition, and she means to carve every one of them back into the stone before the eclipse falls.

Before the adventure

Character Background

Neris Vale was born in the shadow of the Shadowed Gate, in a warden's cottage of stone and turf that leaned against the wind off the wasteland. The Vale family had kept the boundary stones for four generations — her great-grandmother, her grandmother, her father, and then the children — carving names into the cairns, repairing wards, and asking nothing of anyone, least of all thanks. The Concord's silver knights rode past the gate on their way to more glamorous postings and never once stopped.

Neris grew up memorizing the cairn-book: every stone's location, every guardian's name, every repair in the ward. Her mother taught her the founding rite of the gate as a bedtime cadence, a singsong of old syllables Neris recited for years before she understood it was the true key to the gate's heart. When her father died — worn out, the family said, by a vigil no one relieved — he made Neris swear the boundary would not fall to a stranger's negligence.

Taking the Lunar Concord's oath at sixteen was the only way a tiefling could hold boundary authority, so she took it, filed her horns short like the soldiers she admired, and was posted — to no one's surprise — back to the gate. There she met Guardian Selene, already decades into her own watch, who assigned herself to every bad shift the young tiefling drew and taught her the lesson that became Neris's spine: a vigil is a promise, not a punishment.

For years the gate was quiet and the work was simple. Then the Umbral Court began testing the wards — probing shadows at the archway, mirrorlings scratching names off the outer cairns, duskward knights measuring the gate's defenses from the wasteland. Neris compiled the warning herself, carried it to Silvercourt, and stood in the Grand Hall while archivists exchanged glances over a tiefling gate-soldier's 'superstitions.' Her report was never entered into the record.

She returned to the gate with the silence of the city ringing in her ears, and she has held the watch ever since — polished, punctual, and privately furious. Now the princess is stolen, the eclipse is falling, and everything Neris warned about has come true. Her brother Tam vanished into the Ashen Wilds chasing the lost cairn-book. Selene remains bound to the gate, speaking to it in her sleep. And Neris marches toward the only vindication that matters: not the Concord's apology, but a ward made whole, seven names restored, and a boundary that holds.

Threads to follow

Unresolved Plots

  • The suppression order that buried Neris's warning bears a signature no one in Silvercourt will name — and the archivist who filed it is terrified of someone still inside the Concord. Whoever silenced the warning may still be shaping what the city knows about the eclipse, and Neris's name is not the only one they have erased from the record.
  • The oldest boundary cairn carries a fragment older than the Concord itself, carved in a script the wardens were never taught. It hints that the Shadowed Gate was not built to keep the Umbral Court out — but to keep something inside the Umbral Depths from getting out, something even Queen Nyxara serves or fears.
  • Tam Vale's trail through the Ashen Wilds includes warden's marks dated after his disappearance — someone is keeping the boundary stones in the deep Wilds, and it is either Tam alive and hiding, or someone using his marks to lure the last Vale into a trap.
  • Guardian Selene sometimes speaks to the gate itself in her sleep, answering questions no one asked. Neris has heard her murmur the word 'Eclipse' as a reply, not a password — as if the gate is asking, and Selene has already given her answer to something listening on the other side.
  • The Shroud of Mirrors sent a personal gift to the gate three years ago: a silver mirror framed in boundary-stone, delivered by a lantern-lit courier and never opened. It sits sealed in the gate's underworks, and Selene has forbidden Neris to touch it — which means it is exactly what the Umbral Court most wants examined.

Beneath the surface

Secrets

  • Neris never took the Concord's oath at sixteen by choice — her father, dying, made her swear the family would not lose the gate to a stranger's negligence, and the oath of the Concord was the only legal way a tiefling could hold boundary authority. She has never told anyone that her devotion began as a deathbed debt.
  • Neris can recite the founding rite of the gate's ward from childhood memory — her mother taught it to her as a bedtime cadence before she understood what it was. The rite is the true fourth key to the gate, and the Umbral Court does not know a living soul carries it.
  • The night before Neris left for Silvercourt with her warning, Selene asked her to stay and share the vigil instead. Neris refused, believing the city could still be saved by words. Selene has never mentioned it since — but Neris carries the private guilt that if she had stayed, the cairn names might never have been erased.

What haunts them

Fears

  • That she will stand the last watch at the gate alone, forgotten, the final entry in a ledger no one reads — inheriting Selene's vigil not as honor but as erasure.
  • That her brother Tam is already dead, and that the warden's marks in the Ashen Wilds are a cruel mimicry luring her to his grave — or worse, that he has been turned, his marks leading the Umbral Court home.
  • That the Concord was right to ignore her — that her warning was wrong, the gate was never that important, and everything she has sacrificed was for a boundary stone in a wasteland that never mattered.

What drives them

Aspirations

  • To restore every fallen guardian's name to the cairn line and hear the gate's ward burn bright again — a vigil made whole.
  • To see the Vale name entered in the Concord's rolls with honor, so that no warden of her family's line is ever dismissed as a tiefling's superstition again.
  • To free Selene from her endless watch — or, if she cannot, to become a guardian worth inheriting the vigil, one whose name will never need to be re-carved because no one will ever forget it.

Personal quest · 1

The Names of the Fallen

The ward on the Shadowed Gate is fed by the names of every guardian who died keeping it, and the Umbral Court has spent years scratching those names off the boundary cairns scattered across the wasteland. At the Shadowed Gate, Neris can walk the cairn line with Selene, fight off the duskward knights sent to finish the erasure, and re-carve each name from memory and from the fragments left in the stone.

Every name restored strengthens the gate's ward and weakens the guards who hold it; if Neris restores all seven, Selene can leave her post for the first time in decades and fight beside the hero in the Umbral Depths. If she restores fewer than four, the gate opens anyway but the ward collapses behind them, and no one can follow.

Current Stage

Locate the seven defaced boundary cairns along the wasteland with Selene's guidance.

Choice
Restore the cairns openly and draw the duskward knights into open battle, or carve in secret while the knights erase names elsewhere.
Open restoration rallies the wasteland's scattered wardens to Neris's side; secret carving preserves names but abandons the outer stones to the Umbral Court.
Mechanical Rewards
  • The Names of the Fallen feature (restored cairns grant 1d6 temp HP per name, max 7, and impose disadvantage on Umbral guardians within 60 feet)
  • Ward of the Gate permanent blessing OR Selene as an Act III ally
  • A re-forged crescent-pommel greatsword, Moonbound Edge (+1 greatsword, +1d6 radiant vs. fiends and undead when within 30 feet of a restored cairn)
Narrative Rewards
  • Selene's blessing and the true history of the gate's founding
  • Recognition from the Lunar Concord's oldest wardens, restoring the Vale family's honor
  • The knowledge of Queen Nyxara's true name, learned from the oldest cairn fragment

Personal quest · 2

The Warning Nobody Believed

Three years ago, Neris carried word of the Umbral Court's first probing of the Shadowed Gate to Silvercourt, and the Concord's archivists dismissed her as a tiefling soldier with an overactive imagination. Now the eclipse proves her right, but the record of her warning was never entered into the Grand Hall archive — erased at someone's order. Neris must find who buried her report and why: was it incompetence, or was Captain Theron already feeding the Umbral Court, and did her silenced warning cost the princess her freedom? Walking the barracks, the archive, and Theron's old duty rosters, Neris reconstructs the night her warning died.

Current Stage

Search the Grand Hall archive and the barracks for the original report and its suppression order.

Choice
Confront the archivist who buried the report privately, or accuse her publicly before Lady Seren.
The private route reveals the archivist was ordered by a signature she was too frightened to name; the public route panics the Court's spies into destroying evidence.
Mechanical Rewards
  • Voice of the Wardens or Vow of the Boundary (player's choice of permanent feature)
  • The original warning scroll (a historical document proving the Court's first breach)
  • Ally bond with Sable Vane or leverage over Captain Theron
Narrative Rewards
  • The Vale family name restored to the Concord rolls
  • The truth of who silenced the warning and what it cost
  • Lady Seren's open apology on behalf of Silvercourt

Personal quest · 3

The Vale Boundary Stones

The Vale family kept the boundary stones for four generations without thanks, and the family cairn-book — a ledger of every stone, every name, and every repair — was lost the night the Umbral Court first tested the gate. Neris's younger brother Tam, who inherited the warden's duty when she took the Concord's oath, vanished into the Ashen Wilds chasing the cairn-book and hasn't been heard from since. Following his trail through the Wilds, Neris must decide what her family's legacy means: a duty she abandoned for a shiny oath, or a promise she can still keep.

Current Stage

Track Tam's path through the Ashen Wilds using warden's marks only a Vale would recognize.

Choice
Follow the marks alone and quietly, or bring the party through territory the Shroud of Ash patrols.
Going alone honors the warden's solitary tradition but risks ambush; bringing allies breaks tradition but keeps her alive.
Mechanical Rewards
  • The cairn-book (grants proficiency bonus to all checks involving the gate's wards and history)
  • The founding rite of the Shadowed Gate's ward
  • Tam as a sworn sidekick OR the 'Last of the Line' resolve
Narrative Rewards
  • Reunion with her brother and the truth of why she really left home
  • The Vale family cairn-book restored to the gate's records
  • A warden's answer to the question of what her oath is actually for

Major Decision

Context

At the Shadowed Gate, after the cairn line is walked, Neris must decide the fate of the vigil itself.

Choice Made
Free Guardian Selene from her endless vigil by taking her place, or compel her to abandon the gate and fight beside Neris in the Umbral Depths.
Impact

Inheriting the vigil grants Neris 'Ward of the Gate' — permanent +2 AC within 30 feet of consecrated ground and the ability to consecrate ground once per long rest — but Selene stays behind. Freeing Selene gains a powerful guardian sidekick for Act III, but the gate stands unguarded and the party cannot retreat through it. This decision defines whether Neris is the gate's heir or the one who finally released it, and colors her final confrontation with Nyxara — another fallen guardian.

Major Decision

Context

When evidence surfaces that Captain Theron silenced her warning three years ago and feeds the Shroud of Mirrors, Neris holds the truth that could destroy him — and Sable Vane's faith in her old captain.

Choice Made
Deliver the proof to Sable Vane immediately, keep it sealed as leverage until the Obsidian Spire, or confront Theron alone and offer him a path back to the light.
Impact

The Sable route forges an unbreakable ally bond (+1 to hit when adjacent, rerolled Insight checks). The leverage route grants a decisive advantage on one confrontation with Theron but poisons Neris's honesty with Sable (Sable's trust drops; if discovered, the ally bond is lost). The redemption route risks everything on Theron's conscience: success turns him into a double agent for the Concord (granting the party the Spire's patrol schedule — advantage on all Stealth in the Spire), failure drives him fully into the Umbral Court as a sworn enemy in the Obsidian Spire.

Major Decision

Context

Duskward knights hold Neris's brother Tam and demand the founding rite of the gate's ward — the oldest page of the Vale cairn-book — as ransom.

Choice Made
Trade the founding rite for Tam's life, or refuse and fight the knights with Tam as a hostage.
Impact

The trade saves Tam but hands the Umbral Court the means to corrupt the ward from within, imposing a necrotic hazard on all allies near the gate during the final battles. Refusing preserves the founding rite — a one-time ritual that fully restores the gate's ward and grants all allies resistance to necrotic damage throughout Act III — but risks Tam's life in the ensuing fight. The choice crystallizes Neris's deepest conflict: family or duty, blood or boundary.

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Restoring the first fallen guardian's name on a boundary cairn

Transformation

Neris speaks a dead warden's name aloud for the first time in years and feels the gate answer. Her oath shifts from institutional duty to personal covenant — she stops being a Concord soldier posted to the gate and becomes the gate's own.

Mechanical Changes

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Learning that her silenced warning cost the princess her freedom

Transformation

The guilt Neris buried under polish and discipline surfaces. She must choose whether vindication or vigil defines her — and either path permanently changes how she wields her voice (Voice of the Wardens) or her body (Vow of the Boundary).

Mechanical Changes

Transformative Moment

Trigger

Standing before Queen Nyxara and recognizing a fellow guardian who was also unheard

Transformation

Neris understands that Nyxara is what a guardian becomes when no one remembers her name. Whether she speaks Nyxara's true name in compassion or cuts her down, Neris's understanding of her own oath — and of the vigil she may inherit — is forever altered.

Mechanical Changes

Ally

Guardian Selene

Relationship mentor and fellow guardian
Influence 9/10
Loyalty 10/10

Shared History

Selene was already standing the Shadowed Gate's watch when sixteen-year-old Neris Vale arrived with a fresh oath and filed-down horns, the first tiefling the boundary watch had accepted in a generation. The older knights gave Neris the worst shifts and the coldest looks, but Selene assigned herself to every one of those shifts alongside her. She taught Neris that a vigil is a promise, not a punishment — that the gate does not care who watches it, only that someone does.

When the Umbral Court began testing the gate's wards, Selene was the one who helped Neris compile the warning that Silvercourt ignored, and she stood at the archway watching Neris walk away toward a city that would not listen. Selene has not left her post in decades; the gate's magic binds her to it, and she has made her peace with that — or claims to. Neris is the only person Selene still speaks to by name rather than by duty.

Their shared history is written in the cairn line itself: Selene knows where every guardian is buried, and Neris is the only living soul who remembers all seven names by heart. Selene's quiet, worn humor matches Neris's own, and their conversations at the gate are the closest thing either has to home.

Potential Breaking Points

  • If Neris frees Selene against her will, the freed guardian's gratitude is shadowed by the broken vow she never chose to end
  • If Neris lets the cairn line fall, Selene may conclude the Vale line's watch is truly over — and side with the gate over the girl

Enemy

The Shroud of Mirrors

Threat Level 8/10
Conflict Type corruption of everything Neris guards

Personal Stakes

The Shroud of Mirrors is the architect of everything Neris has lost. It was her spies who fed the Umbral Court the gate's patrol patterns; her illusions that made Silvercourt's archivists dismiss Neris's warning as shadow-play and superstition; her mirrorlings that scratched the first names off the boundary cairns while the watch slept. Worse, the Shroud knows what Neris carries in her memory — the seven names that feed the gate's ward — and she wants that memory extracted and turned, so the ward can be unmade from within by its own keeper's recollections.

When Neris finally faces the Shroud at Mirror Lake, the Shroud will wear the faces of the fallen guardians, then Selene's, then Tam's, forcing Neris to strike at reflections of everyone she has failed. The Shroud's personal taunt is the cruelest truth she owns: 'Your city heard your warning and chose not to believe a tiefling. I merely arranged the silence.' Neris fights her not with hatred but with a terrible recognition — the Shroud, like Nyxara, is what becomes of a guardian whose name no one remembered to carve.

Possible Resolutions

  • Destroy her and take the Mirror Sigil by force
  • Show her Thalia's locket and offer the redemption her mother never stopped hoping for
  • Trade the founding rite of the gate's ward for her withdrawal from the cairn line — a bargain that would haunt Neris forever

Faction

The Lunar Concord

Standing 4/10

Influence

The Concord is the order Neris swore herself to at sixteen, and the institution that failed her three years ago. As a Boundary Warden of the gate watch, she holds military rank that Concord knights and soldiers still recognize — her word can open encampments and fortresses across the Reach, a residue of respect the order pays to rank even when it pays nothing to the person holding it. But her standing within the Concord's Silvercourt hierarchy is poisoned: she is the tiefling warden whose 'hysterical' warning about the Umbral Court was stricken from the archive, the embarrassment the archivists hope stays at the gate where she belongs.

The rank-and-file knights remember her differently — the warden who never missed a shift, whose armor was always polished, who pulled three drowning recruits from the gate's flooded underworks. Her influence among them is real and growing as the eclipse proves her right. The Concord can grant her vindication, the city vault's aid, and troops for a march on the gate — or its bureaucratic silence can bury her a second time.

Neris's relationship with the Concord is the campaign's quiet tragedy and its potential redemption: she does not fight for the Concord anymore. She fights for the gate, and dares the Concord to remember why the gate exists.

Obligations

  • Stand the gate's watch until relieved or released
  • Report breaches of the boundary to Concord command — an oath she kept, and they ignored
  • Aid any Concord knight in distress within the boundary marches

Benefits

  • Military Rank: access to Concord encampments, fortresses, and supply lines
  • Rank-and-file knights will fight beside her when asked
  • Potential formal vindication and the Voice of the Wardens feature

Ready to Unleash Your Character's Full Potential?

Join thousands of players and create rich, detailed character backgrounds with Fable Fiesta!

Register to unlock personal quests, relationships, and narrative hooks!

Sign Up Now - It's Free!

No credit card required. Start creating in minutes!