# DM Notes — The House of Scales & The Unweighed

*All names are placeholders consistent with the Penitent's Journal handout — rename freely, but keep the internal links (Ferren → tribunal office → First Debtor, etc.) intact.*

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# PART I — THE HOUSE OF SCALES
*Lawful Neutral assassins' guild, ~80 years institutional continuity in current form, founded Year 43 of the city's Charter*

## Public Identity

The Scales are the city's open secret: a licensed-in-all-but-name guild of contract killers that the city tolerates because it *works*. Blood feuds don't spiral here. Vendettas end in one sealed death instead of three generations of ambushes. Merchants, nobles, and (quietly) magistrates all understand that the Scales are the court of last resort — brutal, but predictable, and predictability is what a city actually wants from its violence.

Their emblem is a hanging balance with one pan empty. Their motto, engraved above the petition door: *"One death, weighed."*

## The Codex (public version)

1. **Proof of Grievance.** No contract is accepted without the client demonstrating a genuine, substantial wrong done to them by the target. The guild's assessors investigate independently; fabricated grievances get the *client* blacklisted, and in severe cases, contracted.
2. **The Formal Warning.** Every sanctioned target receives one open, witnessed visit: the grievance is named, and the target is offered the chance to settle — restitution, apology, arbitration. Roughly a third of contracts end here. The guild considers these its proudest outcomes.
3. **The Hand of Days.** If the target refuses settlement, the kill follows within five days of the warning. No lingering, no games, no extended dread.
4. **The Clean Kill.** Swift, painless, and touching no one but the named. No collateral deaths, no torture, no terror-theater. Violations are punished by the tribunal — expulsion at minimum, execution for cruelty.
5. **The Seal.** Every kill is publicly claimed with the guild's seal within a day. No innocent hangs for guild work.
6. **The Closing.** A sealed kill legally closes the blood-debt. Retaliation against the client — by family, friends, or hired blades — is forbidden, and the guild *enforces* the closing at its own expense. This is the clause that makes the city tolerate them: the Scales don't just sell death, they sell *endings*.
7. **The Buy-Out.** A target may cancel their own contract by paying triple the fee, which goes to the original client. Rarely used, never refused.
8. **Internal law.** Disputes between members are settled by formal duel or tribunal. Betraying the codex is the only unforgivable crime — worse than failing a contract, worse than dying badly.

## What the Codex Is Actually For (DM only)

Every clause was written twice by the founders — once for the spoken reason, once for the true one (see the Penitent's Journal, Year 43 autumn entry):

- **Hand of Days** → the soul-mark needs **nine days to ripen**; a kill within five days harvests nothing.
- **The Seal** → half of a two-ledger audit with the Temple of the Threshold, comparing sealed kills against souls *arrived*. **This audit — the Reconciliation — lapsed roughly two generations ago**, decaying from tripwire to formality to nothing. Its lapse is what made the Unweighed possible.
- **Proof of Grievance** → takes target selection out of the killers' hands; harvesters need volume and choice.
- **The Closing** → feuds were the old collectors' raw material; every vein of grudge is sealed as it's mined.

**Nobody living in the guild knows any of this.** The current leadership keeps the codex devoutly, as sacred tradition, and would be revolted by the harvest — which is exactly the founders' design. Their ignorance is not a plot hole; it is the vaccine working.

## Structure & Ranks

- **The Guildmaster** — final authority on contracts and external relations.
- **The Tribunal** — one judge plus two rotating elders; investigates codex violations, rules on internal disputes, keeps the archives. The judgeship is the guild's second-most-powerful office and its most trusted. *(This is the First Debtor's office. Sit with that.)*
- **The Assessors** (4–6) — investigate grievances before contracts are accepted. Part detectives, part notaries.
- **Blades** (~25 full members) — the killers, ranked informally by seal-count and cleanliness of record.
- **Aspirants** (~10) — apprentices bound to senior blades. May not kill unsanctioned; most of their training is *law*, not knifework. The guild likes to say it takes two years to teach the blade and five to teach the codex.
- **The Quiet Staff** — clerks, forgers, poisoners, surgeons, informants. Not blades, but sworn.

## The Guildhall

A former counting-house near the law courts (the neighbors find this funny; the guild does not joke about it). Notable locations:

- **The Petition Hall** — where clients present grievances. Public-facing, austere, deliberately intimidating in a courthouse way rather than a menacing one.
- **The Seal Wall** — every claimed kill in the guild's history, stamped in lead, in chronological columns. The guild's pride and, unknowingly, one half of the founders' audit — *the party can literally read the guild's side of the ledger off a wall.*
- **The Tribunal Chamber** and its archive — case law going back to Ferren's judgeship. Boring, exhaustive, and containing (misfiled among Year-50s procedural volumes) references to "the seasonal reconciliation" that no one has followed up in sixty years.
- **The Crypt** — founders and honored dead interred below. Maren Vael's niche is unmarked except for a carved sprig of rue.
- **The Reconciliation Room** — sealed behind the archive's rear wall; officially doesn't exist; currently reopened in secret and repurposed as the Unweighed's chapel (see Part II). The Penitent's Journal rests here — or did, until the First Debtor cut pages from it.
- **The cellars** — and below them, behind the third false wall of what was once the Tollhouse chapter-room (the guildhall was built *on* the Tollhouse's bones — decide whether the guild knows the site's provenance; recommended: no), **the Vault** (Part II).

## Key NPCs — The Loyalists

**Guildmaster Verane Chall** (she/her, 60s, former blade with 61 seals, none disputed).
Dry, unsentimental, codex-to-the-marrow. Thinks of the guild as a *civic institution* and herself as something between a judge and a plumber — she keeps the city's violence flowing through one clean pipe. Her blind spot is institutional pride: accusations against her best people read to her as slander until the evidence is procedural. **Win her by out-lawyering her, not by out-arguing her.** The buy-out-clause murder (a target who paid triple and died anyway, off the books, unsealed) is the crowbar — it's the first provable codex breach, and once she accepts one breach, she will follow the thread with terrifying thoroughness. In Phase 3 she becomes the party's most capable ally and the loyalists' rallying point.

**Judge Ilsen Marrow** — see Part II. The First Debtor. To the guild: the incorruptible tribunal judge, Verane's oldest colleague, the person she'd name as her conscience.

**Assessor-Principal Tam Okoye** (they/them, 40s).
Chief grievance investigator. The first loyalist likely to *independently* smell the rot — several recent grievances they assessed felt oddly convenient, as if the wrong had been arranged (it was; the Unweighed manufacture grievances to steer contracts toward chosen souls). Tam has a file of "coincidences" and no theory. A natural early contact for the party: they'll trade information before they'll trust.

**Sera Vint** (she/her, 20s, aspirant to one of the Unweighed lieutenants).
The young assassin who noticed her master's targets die *too well* — flawless kills, and yet the families describe failed resurrections, priests who couldn't find the soul. She has no framework for what she's seeing, can't go to the tribunal (instinct, not knowledge — trust the instinct), and approaches the party in secret. **Your designated first-contact NPC.** Also your tragedy lever if the Unweighed discover her: a marked Sera on a nine-day clock is a mid-campaign rescue with teeth.

**Old Bethic** (he/him, 80s, retired blade, guild archivist).
Half-blind, wholly indispensable, the only person who has read all of Ferren's case law. Doesn't know the secrets but knows *where everything is* — including which wall of the archive "was thicker than the plans said" when they renovated in his youth. The party's key to finding the Reconciliation Room, and the loyalist who performs the "rereading the codex" revelation when the journal surfaces, clause by clause, in front of Verane.

## Guild Relations

- **City Council:** deniable tolerance. Two councilors are past clients.
- **Temple of the Threshold** (death god / psychopomp order): cordial and distant. The temple performs rites for guild dead; neither institution remembers they were once co-auditors. **Keeper Anahit** (60s, temple's soul-registrar) is the one who has noticed souls failing to arrive — her ledger of absences is the other half of the party's clue chain. She becomes the investigation's patron once the party connects failed resurrections to guild seals.
- **The underworld:** the Scales despise freelance killers and periodically hunt them, which the city quietly appreciates.

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# PART II — THE UNWEIGHED
*Lawful Evil cult-cell inside the guild; devotees of Ozhmirrath, the Undersigned (the Debt Beneath)*

## Doctrine

They believe — correctly — that the city was mortgaged at its founding: prosperity purchased with a perpetual tithe of souls, and that the debt has compounded for eighty years since the founders' purge stopped payments. They believe — sincerely — that they are not murderers but *administrators of an inherited obligation*: the tithe will be paid either by orderly selection of the deserving or by foreclosure on everyone. In their own eyes they are more righteous than the Scales: the guild kills for any paying client; the Unweighed have never taken coin, and select only those the city is better without.

Their name is their theology: their kills happen *off* the Scales — unweighed, unrecorded in any afterlife ledger, paid downward instead.

Doctrine in one line, from Judge Marrow's own mouth: *"The Scales sell death to whoever pays. I have never once taken coin. Tell me again which of us is the mercenary."*

## What They Actually Do

Every Unweighed kill is **codex-perfect on the surface**: sanctioned contract, real (or realistically manufactured) grievance, formal warning delivered, clean kill within five days, publicly sealed. The crime is invisible:

1. **The Marking.** Hidden inside the mandatory formal warning visit: three gestures woven into courtesy — the doorframe touched on entering, a coin turned once on the table, a word of the old tongue breathed under the farewell. The target signs for their own harvest by receiving it. To any witness, procedure was followed flawlessly.
2. **The Wait.** The mark ripens in nine days. But the codex demands the kill within five — so the Unweighed *stall*. Their signature tell, hidden in plain sight: **their contracts always run to the last permitted day, then slip a few more on impeccable paperwork excuses** (target traveled, witnesses needed for the seal, weather). Individually reasonable. In aggregate, on the Seal Wall, their kills average 9–12 days from warning to seal while everyone else's average 3. *Nobody has ever had a reason to compute this. The party can.*
3. **The Harvest.** The kill — genuinely swift and painless — sends the soul *down* instead of on. Ozhmirrath mints it into a **soulcoin**; the vault keeps most against the arrears; a commission returns to the cell as regalia fuel.
4. **The Steering.** The cell can't wait for the right clients, so they manufacture grievances: provoke a chosen target into a genuine wrong against a third party, then quietly ensure that party finds their way to the Petition Hall. The client believes it's their revenge. It was always a harvest with paperwork. (This is what Assessor Tam is smelling.)

## Membership Roster

Seven sworn initiates plus the leader. All are guild members in excellent standing; four are among its most celebrated blades — *because* the entity's gifts make them uncanny, which makes young members idolize exactly the wrong people.

**Judge Ilsen Marrow — the First Debtor** (he/him, 50s, tribunal judge).
Ferren's successor in office, four judges removed — a symmetry he knows and savors. Origin: a case eleven years ago where the codex acquitted a man Marrow *knew* was a monster (design this case to fit your city; it should be legally airtight and morally unbearable). His faith in the codex cracked; the entity's whispers found the crack; the whispers led him behind the archive wall to the Reconciliation Room and the journal. Ozhmirrath taught him the withheld word directly, which binds them — the entity has a claim on him no other initiate carries.
As tribunal judge he is the cell's perfect armor: every internal investigation runs through him. He is patient, courteous, incorruptible by money, genuinely kind to aspirants, and completely convinced. **Regalia:** the Chain of Office (multi-slot — three housings; his boss-fight phases each burn a coin) and the original **Debtor's Steel** recovered from the crypt. He keeps the journal's cut pages (Year 44 and the final entry) on the chapel altar — he could not bear to leave the Decanting's location where the temple's road might find it.

**Corvana Este — the Actuary** (she/her, 40s, guild clerk-treasurer, never a blade).
Keeps the **Ledger of Arrears** — real math, terrifying trajectory: at current harvest rates the debt compounds faster than payment; **default (foreclosure) projected within 15–20 years**, which is why the cell is escalating. Descendant of the family that sheltered **Corvisser** after the purge — her inheritance included his cache (a starter coin, his correspondence, and the family's oldest debt: silence). She recruited *Marrow*, in truth, by arranging for the whispers and the wall to meet — decide how much even Marrow knows about that. **Regalia:** the Actuary's Chain (perfect recall; soul-appraisal at a glance — stage an early scene where she "adds up" a PC, described innocuously).
She is the cell's brain and its least loyal member: Corvana serves the *ledger*, not the god. If default becomes avoidable some other way, she can be turned — at a price.

**Lieutenant Dray Mantell** (he/him, 30s, blade, 34 seals, the guild's golden son).
Sera Vint's master. Charming, generous with aspirants, publicly the codex's best advertisement. Privately the cell's most prolific harvester and the most gift-altered — he has spent souls freely and it is starting to *show* in quiet ways (his shadow keeps time poorly; dogs have opinions). **Regalia:** Mourning Band (the extra-life surge — the party's first "kill" of him fails, and the cracked, spent coin left behind is their first physical evidence) and a Second Face ring.

**Lieutenant Issa Roan** (she/her, 40s, blade-assessor, 28 seals).
The grievance-manufacturer: as an assessor she both arranges the wrongs and then "independently" verifies them. Cold, precise, believes hardest of anyone after Marrow. **Regalia:** the Listening Pearl (hears the recent dead; how the cell stays ahead of temple investigators) and a Second Face ring.

**Three junior initiates** — **Fenn** (quartermaster; runs the coin courier route disguised as jewelry commissions — your interceptable supply chain), **Widow Karsk** (poisoner of the Quiet Staff; her kills mark through the *warning letter's* wax seal rather than a visit — a variant marking the journal doesn't cover, your curveball for players who over-trust the handout), and **Brother Halm** (a *temple* initiate — the Threshold's junior registrar, Keeper Anahit's assistant, the cell's eyes inside the soul-ledger. The party's clue chain has a mole in it. Use with care and maximum cruelty.)

**The eighth chair is empty.** The cell recruits like the Tollhouse did: find someone already in debt. If a PC or Sera fits, the chair is for them.

## The Chapel & the Vault

**The Reconciliation Room**, reopened: audit table turned altar, the two ancient ledgers still on their facing lecterns (the cell finds this funny in a way they'd call reverent), Marrow's cut journal pages between them. Taking this room back — physically and symbolically — is the campaign's mid-point set piece.

**The Vault**, below the old Tollhouse chapter-room under the cellars: the heap of coins that never grows past a certain height, warm ones on top. Sensory palette from the journal (Year 38): the congregation-whisper when the heap shifts; full coins that *listen*. Somewhere in the heap, if unspent: Maren's three marked names. The vault is also where the entity is *nearest* — divinations behave badly, and the withheld word is audible here to anyone foolish enough to listen for it.

## Regalia Reference (quick table)

| Item | Wearer | Passive (1 chg/day) | Active | Surge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Second Face (signet) | all blades of the cell | divination-blank; alignment/scrying slide off | borrow a seen face, 1 hr (2 chg) | be unrememberable for a scene (5 chg) |
| Mourning Band | Mantell | no sleep needed | absorb a wound (1–3 chg) | coin dies instead of wearer (whole coin) |
| Listening Pearl | Roan | impressions from the recent dead nearby | one silent question of a fresh corpse (2 chg) | — |
| Debtor's Steel | Marrow | utterly silent blade | — | *fills* on a marked kill (the harvest instrument) |
| Actuary's Chain | Este | perfect recall | appraise a soul's "value" at a glance (1 chg) | — |
| Chain of Office | Marrow | 3 slots; DM's choice of boss kit | — | phase-per-coin boss fight |

Coins: ~10 charges (common soul), 20+ (potent). Empty = consumed forever. **Destroyed mid-use with charges remaining = the soul escapes** — a freed spirit that may testify, or turn on its wearer. Coins cool over a season: warmth dates the kill.

## Counter-Detection (why nobody has caught them)

- Bodies pass every inspection; kills honor every clause; the tribunal *is* the cell's leader.
- Speak with dead finds nothing to speak to — but sealed kills are legally closed; no one casts it.
- Failed resurrections are grieved privately, family by family; the pattern only exists in the temple's arrival ledger, which only Anahit reads — and her assistant is Halm.
- Second Face rings blank the members to divination. The counter: a diviner who notices a *suspicious absence* has found something.

## Timeline & Escalation

**Backstory:** ~80 yrs ago — purge & founding. ~60 yrs ago — Reconciliation lapses. 11 yrs ago — Marrow's case. 9 yrs ago — Este completes his recruitment; cell founded. Since: ~2–4 harvests per year, recently accelerating as Este's default projection worsens.

**Phase 1 — Harvest (campaign start).** Quiet steering of contracts. Party-visible symptoms: failed resurrections; Sera's unease; Tam's too-convenient grievances; the seal-to-warning day-count anomaly; a bought-out target killed anyway (**the crowbar** — first provable breach).

**Phase 2 — Quota.** Este's math says contracts can't keep pace. The cell infiltrates the census and lobbies (through puppets) for expanded execution statutes — every lawful execution they can touch is a tithe payment the city makes for them. District-level dread spreads where harvests cluster; the entity, better fed than in decades, stirs; divinations citywide grow unreliable near the guildhall.

**Phase 3 — Hostile Takeover.** Verane finally moves on proof — and finds the tribunal, half the senior blades, and the guild's own machinery already sworn. The cell seizes the seal, the reputation, the client list, and pitches the council: *the tithe comes due either way; let us administer it in order, starting with your enemies.* Some councilors say yes. The loyalist rump — Verane, Tam, Bethic, Sera, the codex-faithful blades — becomes the party's army: old-school killers who are suddenly the closest thing the city has to paladins.

**Endgame stakes.** Default = foreclosure on *"the city, whole, and all souls resident therein."* The party's real options, per the journal: exploit **the Flaw** (the pact obliges no one to supply collectors — kill the teaching and the entity has no hands, buying another century), renegotiate using the true name **Ozhmirrath** and the Charter Below's own clauses, or find what even Maren didn't record. There is no honest pay-it-off ending; the treadmill is the design.

## The Three Ledgers (the campaign's spine, for your notes)

1. **The Seal Wall** — deaths claimed (guild, public).
2. **The Arrival Ledger** — souls received (temple, Anahit).
3. **The Ledger of Arrears** — souls owed (cell, Este).

The whole investigation is the party reconstructing the founders' audit without knowing it: names in Ledger 1 missing from Ledger 2, explained by Ledger 3. When all three are on one table — probably in the Reconciliation Room, probably with Verane and Anahit both present — the campaign's mystery is over and its war begins.

## Secrets Checklist (who knows what)

| Fact | Verane / loyalists | Marrow | Este | Other initiates | Anahit | Party learns via |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Souls are being harvested | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | suspects a pattern, no cause | failed resurrections → arrival ledger |
| Codex's true design | ✗ | ✓ (journal) | partial | ✗ | ✗ | journal, Year 43 |
| The pact & default clause | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ (her math) | doctrine-level only | ✗ | journal, Year 36 |
| Reconciliation Room exists | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | Bethic's thick wall |
| Decanting exists / location | ✗ | ✓ (cut pages) | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ (it's in her own vault) | cut pages on the altar |
| Halm is a mole | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | up to you — earn it |
| Este's Corvisser lineage | ✗ | your call | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | mundane genealogy |
| Marked targets can be saved (9-day window) | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | journal, Year 33 |
