# The Boarder — Emergency Replacement PC ("Wick")

*A drop-in PC for the player whose character walked out the front door (see [the enchanted door](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). They rent the spare room upstairs, so they were always here — hand the sheet over and fold them into the scene with no ceremony. The player builds the sheet on D&D Beyond; this is the concept and the plot wiring, not stats.*

## The One-Liner

A lapsed priest of the **Threshold (Práh)** — the death-god's order that counts souls across — hiding from their own failure in the last place a temple would ever look, and the only boarder Orenn trusted under his roof. Now the man who gave them sanctuary is dead in a way resurrection won't touch, which is the exact horror that broke them once already.

## Who They Are

- Goes by **Wick** — a use-name, not the one they were ordained under. (Fitting for a priest of the passage: they tend the flame that marks a soul out, and they've watched too many gutter.) The player can rename freely.
- Rents the small spare room on the upper floor. Orenn didn't let people sleep under his roof — Wick is the exception, and neither of them ever fully said why. Orenn gave sanctuary the way he gave everything: quietly, with rules, and no questions about the past. Wick paid in coin and in the off-books doctoring the house needed — patching brawl wounds, easing withdrawals, sitting with the dying regulars no city physician would touch.
- **Neutral.** No tie to the Scales or the Order — which is exactly why Mags extends them a sliver more rope than she gives the strangers.

## Why They're the Perfect Drop-In

The scene the player re-enters *has a body in it*, and Wick has an instant, natural role: house healer and death-priest both, so examining Orenn is simply what they'd do. Their read is plot-load-bearing:

- They peel the **decoy wound** at a glance — this brawl knock didn't kill him.
- They *feel* the wrongness before anyone rolls Arcana: a soul that isn't where a soul should be. They have no name for it. They've felt it once before, and it cost them their faith.
- If you want the gut-punch, Wick is the ideal target for Mags's **forced Revivify** ([Mags — Act 2](mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm)): the resident death-priest, the one person who *should* be able to call him back, holding a burning diamond over a man who won't come. Let it land.

## What Wick Knows (soft clues — thread-starters, never answers)

Months over the bar have soaked them in the surface of everything without their understanding any of it:

- **Orenn had been off for weeks** — up at odd hours, buying strange supplies (Wick carried a crate of "salt and chalk and holy water" up the steps for him once), checking the cellar more than a wine cellar warrants.
- **Night noises from below.** Scratching, a cold draft up the stairwell, Orenn descending at hours when no barrel needs tapping. He told Wick once, flatly: *"The room at the bottom of the stairs isn't yours. Don't go looking."* They obeyed. They always wondered.
- **The patrons' ailments.** Wick has quietly treated half this room and noticed **Dalla's** tremor and the scars up her arms (they read as ritual bloodletting, not self-harm); **Bren** getting *worse* in a way that isn't madness; and that one of the assassins (**Dace**) sleeps like a man with something eating him.
- **Mags and Orenn were more than they let on.** Wick has seen the scars, the economy of movement, the "decorations" that are weapons. They never asked.

## What Wick Does NOT Know (guardrails — keep the mystery intact)

- Nothing about the **Deep Cellar**, the **Guest**, the vault, or the fixer past beyond "they were dangerous once." Orenn walled the boarder off from the real secret — and *learning it* is part of Wick's night, complicating their grief exactly the way it complicates the party's.
- Nothing about **Xarrul**, the summoning, or who killed Orenn.
- Nothing about **soulcoins** or the guild's rot. Their sense of *"I've felt this wrongness before"* is instinct and old trauma, not knowledge — keep it a feeling, never a briefing.

## The Personal Thread (their light "dossier")

- **The wound.** Wick left the Threshold after a run of deaths in their care where the rites *failed* — souls that should have crossed simply weren't there to guide, and no one at the temple could tell them why. Disbelieved, then quietly shelved, then gone. They came to the city to disappear. Tonight, Orenn dies of the very thing they ran from. *(This is a deliberate, unspoken echo of what [Thera](assassins.md#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) does — a resonance for the DM, not a clue to hand over. If your table pulls the guild-rot thread hard, Wick's history can quietly corroborate it much later.)*
- **The goal.** Protect the one place that took them in — and finally find out what Orenn was hiding under the floor. That drive points them straight at the investigation and, eventually, down the stairs, aligning them with the party by default.

## Standing With Mags

Mags knows Wick, tolerates Wick, and trusted Orenn's judgment in letting them stay. In the [two-layer accusation](mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm) she won't seriously suspect the house's own boarder — which makes Wick a natural bridge between the returning player and Mags's private trust. Play it so the strangers still have to *earn* the rope Wick starts with: Wick can vouch for the party, or spend that standing badly. The player's call.

## Building the Sheet (general only)

Keep it around **level 4** to match the party. The concept wants a **divine healer** — a Grave or Life cleric of the Threshold sits perfectly, and Grave Domain's death-flavored kit (spare the dying at range, holding people up at 0 HP) is thematically ideal — but reflavor freely: a Twilight cleric, a death-touched paladin, a Divine Soul sorcerer, or a secular battlefield physician if the player wants no faith at all. Nothing about Wick's plot role needs a specific class; it needs *someone who tends the dying and feels the wrongness of this one.*

**Dial-down option.** If you don't want the Threshold / soul-death resonance at your table, run Wick as a purely secular **fugitive apothecary** — same room upstairs, same soft clues, same bond with Orenn, minus the death-god history. You lose the thematic echo; you keep the perfect drop-in.

## Read-Aloud: Re-Entry (optional)

> *Ze schodů, které vedou nahoru do soukromých pokojů, sejde postava, kterou dnes večer skoro nikdo nezaregistroval — nájemník z patra, přivolaný tím rámusem. Zastaví se na posledním schodu. Přejede pohledem převrácené stoly, ztichlou místnost, Magsina záda. A pak to, co leží za barem. Ať čekali cokoli, tohle ne.*

*(This is where the returning player takes over as Wick.)*
