### Imperial Adjudicator of the Askaria Empire — Assassin, Ideologue, Agent of Anam _"You are not offended by the existence of horses, are you? And yet you harness them. The difference between a horse and a slave is simply the complexity of the tool."_ — Vael Dross, public debate --- ![[Vael Dross.png]] ## Overview **Vael Dross** is one of the Askaria Empire's most dangerous covert operatives — officially titled Imperial Adjudicator, a designation that means nothing to anyone outside the Emperor's inner circle and everything to those within it. He moves through enemy cities with the unhurried confidence of a man who has never been caught and does not expect to start. He is an assassin of exceptional ability, a fluent ideologue, and a shadow agent of Anam the Withered One — the kind of person who can sit quietly in a public space and make grown scholars feel like they are losing an argument they should be winning without anyone around them realising he is there for an entirely different reason. He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. --- ## Statistics |Attribute|Value| |---|---| |**Race**|Human| |**Age**|44| |**Alignment**|Lawful Evil| |**Class**|Rogue (Assassin) / Fighter (Eldritch Knight)| |**Challenge Rating**|20 (25,000 XP)| |**Faith**|Sorgoganis, Dark God of the Askaria Empire — observed rather than felt| |**Languages**|Common, Infernal, Elvish, Dwarvish, Thieves' Cant, Draconic| --- ### Core Statistics |STR|DEX|CON|INT|WIS|CHA| |---|---|---|---|---|---| |18 (+4)|24 (+7)|20 (+5)|20 (+5)|18 (+4)|16 (+3)| **Armour Class:** 21 (Cloak of Shadows, Dex modifier, Defensive Duelist) **Hit Points:** 252 (24d8 + 120) **Speed:** 40 ft. **Proficiency Bonus:** +6 **Saving Throws:** Dex +13, Int +11, Wis +10 **Skills:** Acrobatics +13, Athletics +10, Deception +15, Insight +10, Investigation +11, Perception +16, Persuasion +9, Sleight of Hand +13, Stealth +19 **Damage Resistances:** Poison, Psychic **Condition Immunities:** Frightened, Charmed **Senses:** Darkvision 120 ft., Passive Perception 26 --- ### Key Traits & Features **Assassinate.** During the first round of combat, Dross has advantage on attack rolls against any creature that has not yet taken a turn. Any hit against a surprised creature is automatically a critical hit. **Sneak Attack (12d6).** Once per turn, Dross deals an extra 12d6 damage when he hits a target with a finesse or ranged weapon and has advantage, or when an ally is adjacent to the target. **Uncanny Dodge.** When an attacker Dross can see hits him, he can use his reaction to halve the damage. **Evasion.** When subjected to an effect that allows a Dexterity saving throw for half damage, Dross takes no damage on a success and half on a failure. **Elusive.** No attack roll has advantage against Dross while he is not incapacitated. **Reliable Talent.** Any ability check using a proficiency he is proficient in treats a roll of 9 or lower as a 10. His minimum Stealth check is therefore 29. **Stroke of Luck (1/Long Rest).** If Dross misses an attack or fails an ability check, he can turn it into a hit or success. **War Magic.** When Dross uses his action to cast a cantrip, he can make one weapon attack as a bonus action. **Improved War Magic.** When Dross uses his action to cast a spell, he can make one weapon attack as a bonus action. **Legendary Resistance (2/Day).** If Dross fails a saving throw, he may choose to succeed instead. **Shadow Step.** While in dim light or darkness, Dross can teleport up to 60 ft. as a bonus action to another spot of dim light or darkness. He has advantage on the first melee attack he makes before the end of his turn after teleporting. **Vanish.** Dross can take the Hide action as a bonus action on his turn. He also cannot be tracked by non-magical means. **Blindsense.** If Dross is able to hear, he is aware of the location of any hidden or invisible creature within 10 ft. --- ### Actions **Multiattack.** Dross makes three attacks with Stillwater or two attacks and casts one spell. **Stillwater** _(Legendary Dagger +3, necrotic)._ Melee or ranged weapon attack: +16 to hit, reach 5 ft. or range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 1d4 + 10 piercing + 3d6 necrotic damage. On a hit, the target must succeed on a DC 19 Constitution saving throw or have their maximum HP reduced by the necrotic damage dealt until they finish a long rest. If this reduces a creature's maximum HP to 0, they die. — _With Sneak Attack: +42 average damage per hit on a surprised target._ **The Quiet** _(Special Attack, 2/Long Rest)._ Dross makes a single melee attack against a creature he has surprised or that cannot see him. On a hit, in addition to normal damage, the target must make a DC 19 Constitution saving throw. On a failure they are reduced to 0 hit points. On a success they take 10d10 additional necrotic damage. Creatures immune to necrotic damage are immune to this effect. **Garrote** _(Grapple Attack)._ Dross attempts to grapple a creature of his size or smaller. On a success the creature is grappled and cannot speak or cast spells with verbal components. While grappled this way, at the start of each of the creature's turns they take 4d6 + 7 bludgeoning damage automatically with no saving throw. Dross can maintain the garrote while making one weapon attack per turn with his off hand. **Shadow Bolt** _(Cantrip — Eldritch Knight)._ Ranged spell attack: +11 to hit, range 120 ft., one target. Hit: 3d10 + 5 necrotic damage. The target cannot take reactions until the start of their next turn. --- ### Bonus Actions **Shadow Step.** Teleport up to 60 ft. between areas of dim light or darkness. **Cunning Action.** Dash, Disengage, or Hide as a bonus action. **War Magic Attack.** One weapon attack after casting a cantrip. **Vanish.** Take the Hide action. --- ### Reactions **Uncanny Dodge.** Halve the damage of one attack from an attacker Dross can see. **Defensive Duelist.** When hit by a melee attack while holding Stillwater, add +6 to AC against that attack, potentially causing it to miss. **Counterspell** _(3rd level, 3/Long Rest)._ When a creature within 60 ft. casts a spell, Dross attempts to counter it. Automatically counters spells of 3rd level or lower. For higher level spells, make an ability check (DC 10 + spell level) using his Intelligence modifier (+11). --- ### Spells _(Eldritch Knight — Intelligence based)_ **Spell Save DC:** 19 **Spell Attack Bonus:** +11 **Slots:** 1st (4), 2nd (3), 3rd (3), 4th (1) **Cantrips:** Shadow Bolt _(custom)_, Booming Blade, Minor Illusion, Mage Hand _(invisible)_ **1st Level:** Shield, Absorb Elements, Fog Cloud, Silent Image **2nd Level:** Blur, Misty Step, Darkness, Silence **3rd Level:** Counterspell, Fear, Haste, Hypnotic Pattern **4th Level:** Greater Invisibility _(his most used spell slot — he is almost never visible when he does not want to be)_ --- ### Equipment **Stillwater** — A dagger +3 with a blade of dull grey metal that makes no sound when it strikes. Deals 3d6 additional necrotic damage and reduces maximum HP on a failed Constitution save. The name is what his targets become. He has carried it for nineteen years. **Cloak of Shadows** — A deep black cloak that functions as Armour of Shadows and grants advantage on Stealth checks in dim light or darkness. While wearing it Dross has no visible shadow, which is the detail that perceptive creatures sometimes notice first. **Ring of Mind Shielding** — His thoughts cannot be read. His alignment cannot be detected. His soul, if he dies, is trapped in the ring rather than passing on — a contingency he arranged himself and considers practical rather than morbid. **Belt of Many Pockets** — Contains: six additional daggers, a vial of contact poison (DC 19 Con save or paralysed 1 hour), two doses of Sovereign Glue, thieves' tools, a sealed letter bearing the Emperor's mark, and a small notebook written in a cipher no living person outside the Imperial inner circle can read. **Medallion of Imperial Passage** — A flat disc of black iron that grants him diplomatic immunity within any Askarian territory and identifies him to Imperial agents worldwide. He keeps it hidden at all times while in Free Kingdom cities. --- ## Appearance Vael Dross is lean and unremarkable by design. Medium height, medium build, the kind of forgettable face that is constructed rather than natural — not magically altered, simply carefully managed. His hair is dark and close-cropped. His features are even. Nothing about him catches the eye unless he wants it to. In Brensistria he wears deep black travelling clothes and a full cloak, hood up. In other contexts he adjusts as needed. He has seventeen different ways of presenting himself in public and considers none of them more authentic than the others. His hands are the one tell, for those who know what to look for — the particular stillness of them, the way they never fidget, the slightly unnatural precision of every movement. The hands of someone who has been killing people for twenty-five years and has made peace with it completely. His voice is quiet, even, and calibrated — every sentence the right length, every pause in the right place. He speaks like someone who has decided what effect he wants to have before he opens his mouth. --- ## Ideology — The Debate Position Vael Dross is not a fanatic. He does not believe in slavery the way a zealot believes in a god. He believes in it the way an engineer believes in load-bearing structures — as a functional solution to a real problem, supported by evidence, and unnecessarily complicated by sentiment. His debate position, deployed with cold precision and occasional devastating effect, runs as follows: **On the existence of slavery:** Every civilisation in history has organised labour around a hierarchy of necessity. The question is not whether some people will perform the work that others will not — they will, they always have — but whether that arrangement is acknowledged honestly or hidden behind wages that amount to the same compulsion dressed in different clothes. The Askaria Empire, he argues, is simply more honest about the structure everyone else maintains through poverty and desperation. **On clothing and provision:** Resources spent on non-essential provision for a labour class are resources not spent on the infrastructure that labour class maintains. A slave who is housed, fed, and physically maintained is more productive than a wage worker who must spend a third of their earnings on those same necessities. The Empire's provision model is not cruelty — it is efficiency. The Free Kingdoms' model outsources the cost of survival to the worker and calls it freedom. **On barbarians specifically:** Peoples who organise themselves around subsistence and tribal conflict generate less value than their physical capability warrants. Integration into an Imperial labour structure does not diminish them — it applies them. He uses the word _applied_ deliberately. It sounds almost complimentary. **On enemies of the Empire:** Those who take up arms against a legitimate sovereign authority and lose have forfeited the protections that authority provides. Slavery as a consequence of military defeat is, he argues, considerably more merciful than the alternative — which is execution. He presents this as humanitarian. **On nudity, beauty, and the objectification argument:** When confronted with the treatment of slaves — specifically those kept unclothed as a display of ownership — Dross does not flinch. He reframes the objection entirely. Beauty, he argues, is a resource like any other. A person of exceptional physical form generates value through their presence — in courts, in households, in public display — in the same way a skilled craftsman generates value through their hands. To clothe that resource unnecessarily is to diminish its utility. He draws a deliberate parallel to fine art: no one covers a painting. The outrage people feel at this comparison, he suggests, reveals their discomfort with honesty rather than any genuine moral principle. He then turns it further. The objection that a person is being treated as an object, he argues, applies equally to any labour arrangement — a dockworker's back is used as a tool, a soldier's body is deployed as a weapon. The distinction his opponents are reaching for is not between object and person but between _acknowledged_ use and _unacknowledged_ use. The Empire, again, is simply more honest. This is where rooms go quiet. It is not because he is right. It is because the counter-argument requires a distinction between personhood and labour that takes longer to articulate than he gives anyone before moving on. **Where he wins points:** The economic efficiency arguments are genuinely difficult to immediately counter without preparation. He is correct that wage labour and slave labour produce similar outcomes for the worker at the lowest economic level, and he delivers this observation with the calm patience of someone who has made it many times before and watched people realise they do not have a fast answer. Scholars who know the counter-argument often cannot land it cleanly under pressure. He knows this and moves on before they finish. **What he never mentions:** Hexa Mount. The specific conditions of the mines at Hearth Multin. The children. The life expectancy figures. He keeps the argument economic and abstract because the moment it becomes specific it becomes indefensible, and he knows that too. --- ## Background Vael Dross was born in Askaria to a minor noble family with more tradition than money. He was educated well, trained in law and rhetoric before being recruited at nineteen into the Emperor's covert apparatus — an organisation with no official name and no public existence. He spent his twenties as an operative, his thirties as a senior agent, and is now at forty-four one of perhaps six people in the Empire who hold his specific combination of authority and capability. His connection to Anam the Withered One was established approximately eight years ago through channels he has never fully understood — an intermediary, an offer, a set of tasks that have since been completed. He does not worship Anam. He works with him the way he works with the Emperor: as a power structure that currently aligns with his interests and will be navigated accordingly when it does not. He has killed forty-one people that he remembers specifically. He does not keep a record. The number is approximate. --- ## Role and Current Mission Dross operates on a dual mandate wherever he is deployed: monitor targets connected to both the Emperor's intelligence interests and Anam's network requirements, and eliminate secondary targets when the opportunity presents itself cleanly. He participates in public intellectual life — debates, lectures, civic events — because it maintains his cover as an educated traveller and because he finds it useful. A man who can hold his own in a philosophical argument about slavery is not the man most people are watching for. When he is in a room, he is watching someone. He does not always act. He is patient in a way that most people are not built for. He will return when conditions are right. --- ## Relationships & Connections **The Emperor of Askaria** — Serves him directly and without sentiment. The Emperor is a tool of power that Dross has chosen to work within. If the Emperor became an obstacle, Dross would file that information away and plan accordingly. He has never said this to anyone. **Anam the Withered One** — A working relationship of mutual utility. Anam provides resources and intelligence that make Dross more effective. Dross provides eliminations and infiltration that Anam's more obvious agents cannot achieve. Neither trusts the other. Both find this arrangement satisfactory. **[[Servian Dault]]** — Recognised him immediately as the most dangerous intellectual in the room. Made a note. Has read _On Chains_ and considers it the most coherent argument against his position he has encountered, which is precisely why Dault is on a list that Dross maintains. **Benjamin Lightfoot** — Finds him useful as a debate foil. Lightfoot's anti-theist position and his own pro-Imperial position create a dynamic where the room's attention fractures between two uncomfortable arguments, which suits Dross perfectly. He has no other opinion of him. **[[Ziritha Mourne]]** — Noted her. Her research into magical conservation has implications for Imperial resource exploitation strategy that he has flagged in a report to the Emperor's intelligence apparatus. She is not yet a target. She may become one. --- ## Roleplaying Guidance **Default mode:** Still, quiet, faintly amused. He listens more than he speaks in unfamiliar company. When he does speak it is measured and complete — no filler, no uncertainty, no revision. He sounds like someone who has already had this conversation and knows how it ends. **In the debate:** Cold and systematic. He does not perform outrage at opposing positions. He identifies the weakest load-bearing assumption in an argument and applies pressure to it with the patience of someone who has all day. He never raises his voice. He occasionally smiles, very slightly, when someone realises they are losing ground. **When he feels genuinely threatened:** Nothing visible changes. The stillness becomes a different quality of stillness. Creatures with high Passive Perception (18+) feel something shift in the room without being able to identify what. **When he is recognised for what he is:** He has contingency plans for this. Several of them. He will use whichever is most efficient. **On slavery, when pressed personally:** He does not get defensive. He asks a question instead — usually about the questioner's household, their trade, their supply chains — and lets the silence after it do the work. **Voice:** Quiet, precisely paced, with the particular cadence of someone who learned rhetoric as a discipline rather than a passion. Every sentence feels like it was prepared in advance. Because it was. --- ## Adventure Hooks **The List** — Dross maintains a document. [[Servian Dault]] is on it. So are two other names the party may recognise. The document is encrypted, kept in his cipher notebook, and would be extraordinarily valuable to the right people — if they could get close enough to take it without dying. **The Target** — Dross is watching someone the party knows or travels with. They may not know they are being observed. They may not know until something goes wrong. **The Emperor's Commission** — Dross has been given a secondary mission in whatever city he is operating in that has nothing to do with Anam — a piece of pure Imperial intelligence work that would destabilise a key Free Kingdom alliance if completed. Stopping it requires finding him first, and finding him requires getting very close to something that kills people for a living. **The Debt** — Dross operates partly as a collector — he gathers what is owed to the Empire in favours, information, and compliance. Someone the party knows or cares about owes a debt that Dross has come to collect. He is not unreasonable about terms. He is completely immovable about payment.