Voz Lirayne
A necromancer and secret Norgorber cultist who operated a bookshop in Breachill as cover for her research into Alseta's Ring. She was the party's first real antagonist, and they killed her for it.
Voz Lirayne came to Breachill looking for somewhere small enough to ignore her. She found it. For however long she ran the Reliant Book Company, the town took her at face value: an esoteric half-elf with a talent for manuscripts and an apparent preference for being left alone. That assessment was correct on every count. It simply missed the part where she was also cataloguing the dead below Hellknight Hill, corresponding with a merchant's guild in Katapesh, and planning to found an assassin's school in Norgorber's name in the citadel's basement.
The Reliant Book Company
The bookshop was not incidental cover. It was load-bearing. Voz understood that obscurity was its own protection. A book dealer who bought and sold esoteric manuscripts had reason to own profane texts, to conduct research in locked rooms, to leave town for days without explanation. The Reliant Book Company was small and did not attract much foot traffic, which was also by design.
She kept the shop's accounts scrupulously clean. She was courteous to customers who came in and efficient with the ones who didn't need to be charmed. She had taken on Calmont as an apprentice not out of any mentoring impulse, but because her research into Alseta's Ring had crowded out the time she needed to manage the shop's daily business. When he stole the fire mephit parchment and set the town hall ablaze, she did not mourn him — she immediately told anyone who asked that she'd fired him days before.
The bookshop's back room told a different story. Notes in Necril, scattered in her rush to leave. A ledger entry for a magical parchment, annotated: missing. Research into Breachill's founding history, annotated with the kind of contempt she usually kept better hidden. Rich. Idiot humans trusting that lying wizard.
Norgorber
Voz found Norgorber at the Imperial Academy in Canorate, where she had been studying under a fabricated identity. Her parents, neither of them equipped for what she was, had mortgaged their home in Tamran to pay the fees. She had repaid that sacrifice by attending a prestigious Molthuni institution as the fictional daughter of laborers from Eranmas. She kept her head down, learned what was available, and used the access to dig into what actually interested her: necromancy and the mechanics of enslaved souls.
The cleaning staff member who found her books in her room — the profane tomes she had received under a false name and failed to properly hide — did not survive the discovery. Voz packed her research that same night and left the country.
Norgorber's teachings had the quality of articulation. Not revelation, exactly. More like finding a name for something she had already been doing. The Reaper of Reputation held thievery and assassination and secrets as sacred, and what Voz had always wanted was the power that secrets conveyed, the precision of a blade nobody saw coming, and the particular satisfaction of making inferior people useful after death. She had been moving toward this her whole life. He simply explained the direction.
She did not tell anyone. That too was doctrine.
Alseta's Ring and the Scarlet Triad
The elf gate network under Hellknight Hill was the piece that made everything else possible. Voz had been looking for a way to fund her guild — the Reliant Book Company made enough to stay afloat, not enough to build something — when she found the references to Alseta's Ring in her research. A functioning network of aiudara beneath a citadel outside a town she already lived in. A perfect hidden installation. Everything she needed in one place.
She reached out to contacts, circuitously, looking for financing. The Scarlet Triad responded. A merchant's guild in Katapesh, that was all she could determine, with a stated interest in the ring's functionality. If she could confirm its existence and activate its portals, they would fund her guild. She agreed with the wariness of someone who understood she was agreeing to something she didn't fully understand. Her Triad correspondent signed letters under the name Laslunn.
She used the escape tunnel from the Hellknight crypts to reach the Pickled Ear's basement, and paid Roxie Denn to keep quiet about her comings and goings. She hired the Bloody Blades, a minor band of half-orc mercenaries led by a hobgoblin named Dmiri Yoltosha, to occupy Guardian's Way and discourage anyone who followed her trail. She had arranged a working truce with the tixitog Balka, who lived in the caves. She was methodical about it. She had been clearing the route toward Alseta's Ring piecemeal, at her own pace, while managing the shop and maintaining the correspondence and giving nothing away in town.
She did not know about Calmont until it was already done.
Guardian's Way
By the time the party reached her camp, she had cleared through the cave centipedes and the vermin on the path as far as Renali's spider lair, and she had heard the sounds of combat in the meadow above. She was ready. She had two undead minions at hand. She positioned herself to cast and stay mobile and make the party work for every foot of ground.
It wasn't enough.
Her knapsack contained the journal and papers, including the Scarlet Triad correspondence. The name Laslunn appeared in the letters, with no explanation beyond the promise of financing. The research on Alseta's Ring was thorough, as far as it went — she had confirmed the ring existed beneath the citadel, had found accounts from the Goblinblood Wars of soldiers who'd encountered it, had established that at least one gate had once led to Kyonin. What the remaining five portals connected to, she had not yet determined. She had expected to find out in person.
Voice
Voz maintained a register of mild, professional courtesy that was almost entirely performance. The mechanism behind it was not warmth but calculation: which tone gets the least attention, which response closes a conversation fastest. Around customers she rarely knew by name, she was unremarkable by design. Around Calmont, who she found useful and not much else, she was efficient. The contempt in her personal notes was the honest thing. Fool should have just left them to die — guilt gets you nothing.
The sneering the adventure text describes was habitual, not theatrical. She had grown up in Tamran, which she considered a backwater, escaped to Canorate, which she considered nearly adequate, and ended up in Breachill, which she considered a different kind of backwater, but one with the significant advantage of leaving her alone. Her opinion of everyone around her was not disguised so much as deprioritized. She had more important work to do.
What she wanted was not destruction for its own sake. She wanted a guild, a school, a position. She wanted to be the person who built something with Norgorber's name on it. The cruelty was instrumental: she killed the cleaning staff member because he saw, and she hired the Bloody Blades because guards were useful, and she animated the dead because corpses were a resource. She was, above everything else, practical.
The thing she never resolved was whether the Scarlet Triad would have honored the deal. The correspondence suggests she knew she was the smaller party in that negotiation. She had agreed anyway, because the alternative was staying where she was indefinitely.
Statistics
AC 20 (21 with mage armor) | HP 56 (+ 10 temp from false life) | Speed 25 ft.
Fort +10, Ref +12, Will +9 | Perception +7
Str +1, Dex +3, Con +3, Int +4, Wis +0, Cha +2
Languages Common, Elven, Goblin, Halfling, Necril, Orcish
Skills Arcana +13, Deception +11, Library Lore +11, Mercantile Lore +11, Occultism +11, Religion +7, Society +11, Stealth +10
Arcane Prepared Spells DC 23, attack +15; 3rd bind undead, paralyze, vampiric touch; 2nd acid arrow, false life, mirror image, spider climb; 1st fear, grim tendrils, mage armor, ray of enfeeblement; Cantrips chill touch, detect magic, light, read magic, shield
School Spell DC 23; call of the grave (1 Focus Point)
Ritual DC 23; create undead
Equipment +1 dagger (bonded item), healing potion, scrolls of sleep and true strike