# Nether Inn

## History

The Nether Inn has stood on the corner of Žlutá Street and Popelová Alley for over forty years. It started as a safehouse, became a flophouse, and eventually settled into what it is today: neutral ground. The name comes from where it sits — half-sunk below the street, so you step *down* into it, into the nether dark beneath the city's notice. What happens here stays here; talk of it elsewhere and you may lose the tongue that spoke of it.

Fifteen years ago, **Orenn** and **Mags** took ownership—not by buying it, but by *earning* it. They were **fixers**: the people the city's underworld called when a problem needed to stop existing—a rival crew, a blackmailer with the wrong ledger, a gang war about to spill into the merchant quarter. Not heroes. The last job of their working lives was this very building: a den of summoners had been operating out of it, calling things up through the fault in its cellar, and it had gone bad enough that someone paid well to have it cleaned out. Orenn and Mags killed and scattered the owners; **Haddon and Mother Vyre**, then legitimate planar scholars, handled the failing containment afterward. During that work Haddon entered a collapsing circle and took its living-anchor binding from Orenn, saving his life at permanent cost to his left arm. They took the house as their fee and told the world they'd retired. Running the most dangerous bar in the city was, somehow, the quieter life—and the summoners' leftover work, sealed and silent in the dark below, was a closed case they never expected to reopen.

Under Orenn's rule, the Nether Inn became sacred ground. Assassins could drink next to their marks. Cultists could study next to inquisitors. The rule was simple: **no killing**. Orenn enforced it not with threats but with the calm certainty of a man who had killed worse things than you, and everyone in the room knew it.

## The Rules of the House

Carved into a wooden plaque above the bar in Common and Thieves' Cant:

1. **No killing.** Brawling is permitted. Death is not.
2. **No magic that harms.** Cantrips for comfort, fine. Anything with intent, take it outside.
3. **Debts are honored.** If you owe the house, you pay the house.
4. **The barkeep's word is final.**

The first rule has just been broken — and the barkeep who enforced it is the victim.

## The Enchanted Door

The only public way in is the heavy front door at the bottom of the entry steps. It is **enchanted and password-warded** — Orenn's first line of control over who shares his neutral ground.

**Getting in.** The door opens from outside only for someone who speaks the current password (Orenn changed it often; regulars are told, Mags knows it). To a stranger it simply won't budge, and if pressed it answers — in Orenn's own recorded voice — *"State your business. Or step back up the stairs."* After his death, that voice is quietly horrible. The PCs begin the night already inside; they never had to deal with the door, and that's deliberate.

**If a PC leaves before the lockdown.** Nothing stops them physically — but Broath Got at night is not friendly, they forfeit whatever they came for (Orenn's references, their dossier goals), and the door **won't let them back in** without the password they don't have. Use it to *inconvenience*, not to trap: banging, bargaining through the door, or finding a regular to vouch gets them back. This is a soft social lock — the game's way of saying *take the hook.* Worst case, a player insists on walking their character out for good; hand them the pre-made **[Boarder](../npc/the-boarder.md)** — "Wick," a resident with a room upstairs, already inside, wired into the plot with local knowledge and a hook of their own — and carry on.

**The midnight lockdown (Act 2).** When Orenn dies, Mags shatters a fist-sized **ward-crystal** kept on the shelf above the bar. It discharges the tavern's stored wards into every exterior opening at once — front door, shutters and any other route outside — until midnight, when the charge lapses on its own.

- The mundane door can still be picked (**DC 20 Thieves' Tools**), forced (**DC 25 Strength**) or destroyed. Doing so only exposes the smooth, translucent planar shell behind it. *Knock* opens the physical lock; *Dispel Magic* suppresses the visible surface for a heartbeat. Neither permits passage.
- The shell cannot be punctured or dispelled during the session. It blocks physical escape, Ethereal travel across the exterior, teleportation, and Astral projection alike. It is scenery, pressure and a deadline—not an alternate anti-Xarrul ending.
- Breaking the crystal is **one-way**. No password lifts it, and Mags herself cannot reopen the Inn early. She is locked in with everyone else, on purpose.
- The **cellar trapdoor remains physically locked but is not part of the exterior shell**. Mags intended to confine people to the building, not bar herself from her own cellar.

The party may spend resources proving that the physical exits are irrelevant, but resolving the night means dealing with what is inside.

### Room-Bound Area Wards

The Inn's old containment craft treats every enclosed chamber as a separate ward-cell. An area spell that establishes a sustained magical boundary—most importantly *Mordenkainen's Private Sanctum*—cannot extend across a doorway, open arch, stair, trapdoor, concealed door, wall, floor or ceiling inside the building. Its caster may use the spell's full permitted dimensions, but only within the room where the casting is completed.

The Main Hall is one room. The kitchen, storage room, private room, upper cellar, each chamber of the Deep Cellar and the Old Work are separate rooms; the Long Cut is one continuous corridor-cell. This restriction does not weaken the spell inside its chosen room. It prevents a single cube from blanketing the entire vertical complex.

> **DM — what the crystal really is.** The "stored wards" are not Orenn and Mags's work; they are the **summoners' emergency containment device**, left with the building — an *oh-shit button.* If a calling ever punched a hole to another plane, breaking the crystal withdrew power from the internal seals and threw it into a resilient shell **around every planar version of the building at once**. The design deliberately trades a cork for a bottle: an intruder already at the fault may cross inside, but neither it nor the plane behind it can spread beyond the house.
>
> Mags knows none of this. To her it's the panic button that bolts the doors. In truth, shattering it is **the last thing [Xarrul](../npc/xarrul.md#the-nights-clock--presence--escalation) needed**, and it engineered Orenn's murder precisely to make her do it:
> - **It trades the inner barrier for an outer cage.** Before activation, Xarrul is held on the Ethereal side and can manage only one three-round **Stored Incursion** after a full night charging at the tear. It spends that charge killing Orenn. When Mags breaks the crystal, the internal planar seals lose their power; Xarrul crosses fully into the Material interior and regains Ethereal Jaunt, but the new exterior shell traps it on both planes with everyone else.
> - **It cuts the diffusion.** Nothing bleeds out to the district anymore, nothing bleeds in. The wrongness that used to spread thin across the quarter — the reason Orenn never localized it — is now trapped and concentrated *inside*, with its source. From tonight, the players can finally trace it home.
> - **The seal lapses at midnight.** Until then no creature or projected spirit can leave, so the Guest cannot be delivered to the Astral Plane and the Vacancy cannot begin. As the exterior shell falls, power returns to the internal containment and creates one three-round transfer window before the tear reseals. Xarrul's old tether still confines it to the Inn's footprint after the exterior opens; only embodiment lets it leave. The lockdown timer *is* the night's clock (see [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock)).

## Atmosphere

The tavern is larger than it looks from outside. The building is old stone and dark wood, sunk slightly below street level so you step *down* into it. The air is thick with pipe smoke, tallow candle smell, and the sweet-sour tang of cheap spirits. Everything is dimly lit — not for ambiance, but because the clientele prefers it that way.

The noise level before the brawl is a low murmur punctuated by occasional harsh laughter from the assassin table and quiet scholarly debate from the cultists. After the murder, it's oppressive silence broken by whispers.

## General Layout

```
                    ┌──────────────────────────────────┐
                    │          UPPER FLOOR              │
                    │  Orenn & Mags │ Wick's spare room │
                    │        [locked, private]          │
                    └──────────────────────────────────┘

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        MAIN HALL                             │
│                                                              │
│  [Assassin     ┌─────────┐              ┌──────────────┐    │
│   Table]       │Fireplace│              │     BAR      │    │
│                └─────────┘   [Bren's    │  (Orenn's    │    │
│                               Corner]   │   domain)    │    │
│  [Cultist                               └──────┬───────┘    │
│   Table]       [Center tables,                  │            │
│                 stools, debris]        ┌────────┴────────┐   │
│  [Curtained                            │ Door to Kitchen │   │
│   Booth]       [PC / center tables]    └────────┬────────┘   │
│                                                 │            │
│  ┌──────┐                              ┌────────┴────────┐   │
│  │ENTRY │                              │   BACK ROOMS    │   │
│  │(down │                              │ Kitchen/Storage/ │   │
│  │steps)│                              │ Private Room     │   │
│  └──────┘                              └────────┬────────┘   │
│                                                 │            │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────┘
                                          ┌───────┴───────┐
                                          │ CELLAR (UPPER)│
                                          │ (trapdoor in  │
                                          │   storage)    │
                                          └───────┬───────┘
                                          concealed door
                                          ┌───────┴───────┐
                                          │  DEEP CELLAR  │
                                          │ (hidden warren:│
                                          │ vault, cells, │
                                          │ lab, the rift)│
                                          └───────────────┘
```

## Read-Aloud: Entering the Tavern

> *Schody vedou dolů. Tři kamenné stupně, vyšlapané generacemi bot, které sem raději nechtěly být viděny vcházet. Těžké dveře se za vámi zavřou s tupým úderem, který zní nepříjemně definitivně.*
>
> *Vzduch uvnitř je hustý — směs tabákového kouře, levné kořalky a starého dřeva nasyceného desítkami let rozlitého piva. Místnost je větší, než jste čekali. Nízký strop podpírají masivní dubové trámy, zčernalé od sazí. Svíčky v železných držácích vrhají neklidné stíny po zdech pokrytých starými výčepními tabulemi, kde některá jména byla záměrně vyškrábnuta.*
>
> *Zvuk se změní, když vstoupíte — ten sotva znatelný pokles hlasitosti, když místnost plná nebezpečných lidí zaregistruje někoho nového. Několik párů očí vás změří. Většina se vrátí ke svému. Jeden pár — ten za barem — ne.*

## Secrets

- The tavern is built over a **natural thin point** between the Material and Ethereal planes: the same single place as the sealed tear in the Deep Cellar's [Old Work](deep-cellar.md#the-old-work). Orenn and Mags know this — they cleaned a den of summoners off the fault years ago and believe they sealed it. They do *not* monitor it; to them the danger is fifteen years dead. Ethereal entities nevertheless find the sealed house broadly easier to haunt.
- The wooden plaque with the house rules has a **hidden fifth rule** on the back, in Orenn's handwriting: *"If the veil tears, burn the cellar stores and seal the door. We'll handle the rest."* — Mags can reveal this if pressed, but it will shake her.
- The building's stone foundation carries **old sigils** — not Orenn and Mags's work, but the **summoners'** who ran this place before them: the upstairs remnant of the binding-and-containment craft that runs down into the [cellar](cellar.md). A character examining the foundation stones (DC 15 Investigation or Arcana) reads them as long-inert summoning-and-warding work and clocks that whoever built this house was working the thin point on purpose. It's a breadcrumb toward the house's occult past — *not* a barrier anyone maintained. The thing actively being torn open is far below, at the [Old Work](deep-cellar.md#the-old-work).
- Behind the barrel racks in the cellar, a **[concealed door](cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** leads down to the **[Deep Cellar](deep-cellar.md)** — a hidden warren that is Orenn and Mags's real, ongoing workplace: a vault, a laboratory, two cells (one occupied), a trophy-hold, and a widening rift to the Ethereal Plane. "Retired" was always a story. This lower level is the module's optional exploration track — sneaking, looting, environmental backstory, and a fight or two — for players who'd rather *do* than talk. The fifth rule on the plaque (*"burn the cellar stores and seal the door"*) refers to it.
