Wenna Callow
tiefling cooper's daughter who swore a vow over her brother's grave and has been trying to keep it ever since
Where they come from
Corvel Reach, a ferry town on the Sallow River where eels are smoked in alder-fired sheds. The air always smells of burnt sap and tar, and the ferry bell rings every hour even in fog.
The incident
The winter of the Thin Ice, age 15. The ferry master, Ansel Gorrow, ordered the last crossing before the river froze fully. Wenna's younger brother Tobin, age 9, was on the ferry because he had gone to fetch their mother's pay. The rope snapped halfway over and the ferry went under the broken floe. Gorrow's manifest, which listed the passengers, was never found. Gorrow told the town the boy had not been aboard. Wenna watched the ice close over the place where the ferry had been.
Why a paladin (oath of redemption)
Wenna learned to hold a line as a cooper: a barrel holds only if every stave is pulled tight. The paladin oath gave her a way to make that discipline mean something. She does not fight to win. She fights to bind people to what they swore, and she offers a way back to anyone who still can turn. Lay on Hands is the only healing she trusts herself with, because it asks for something back.
Someone who still matters
- Sabeth Callow, Wenna's mother, a smoke-house foreman who never forgave her daughter for swearing the oath and never asked her to stop — Still runs the eel sheds in Corvel Reach. Her hands have lost two fingers to a smoker's rack. She sends a jar of smoked eel with every letter, and her letters have stopped coming since spring. Sabeth knows what Gorrow did with the manifest, and she has refused to say. Wenna's oath depends on whether her mother is protecting someone, and whether Gorrow paid her to stay quiet. Make them an NPC →
The unresolved thread
The ferry manifest. Wenna believes Gorrow sealed it in the Corvel Reach toll house under the floor of the old scale room. She has promised Tobin's grave marker, a cedar post she carved herself, that she will read his name back to the town before the river freezes again.
Flaw
She will not leave a surrender unpunished, even when the surrender is real. She tells prisoners who repent that they still owe a hearing, and she makes the party wait out that hearing. She also refuses to let anyone else take the risk she thinks is hers to take, so she goes into the water first and reports back last.
For the DM
- A child in the party's current town calls out 'Tobin' in her sleep, or the name is painted on the side of a ferry the party has to cross.
- Ansel Gorrow now sits as a magistrate in a town on the party's route, and he has written to Sabeth Callow asking her to forget the manifest for a fee.
- The river freezes early this year, and the ferry bell in Corvel Reach starts ringing with no one at the rope, forcing Wenna to decide whether to go home.