# Orenn — The Barkeep

*"Welcome to the Nether Inn. Sit anywhere. Don't start anything."*

**Status:** Dead. Killed behind his own bar, in the dark, mid-brawl. He does not come back.

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## Appearance

Tall, lean, mid-fifties. Silver-streaked dark hair pulled back neatly. A close-trimmed beard maintained with more care than the tavern warrants. His clothing was simple but clean — a dark vest over a white shirt with rolled sleeves, revealing old scars on his forearms that he never bothered to hide. His eyes were the kind that measured you completely before you finished sitting down.

In death, his expression is one of genuine surprise. Not fear, not pain. He didn't see it coming — or rather, he didn't believe it possible. Not here. Not in his house.

## Read-Aloud: First Meeting (Before the Brawl)

> *Muž za barem je jiný než všechno kolem. V místnosti plné lidí, kteří vypadají, že by vám za pár měďáků podřízli krk, on vypadá, jako by vám mohl nabídnout čaj. Je vysoký, s klidnýma šedýma očima a pečlivě střiženým plnovousem s proužky stříbra. Pohyby má pomalé a přesné — utírá sklenku utěrkou, která je, a to vás tu překvapí nejvíc, skutečně čistá.*
>
> *"Vítejte," řekne hlasem, který nepotřebuje být hlasitý, aby ho bylo slyšet. "Sedněte si, kam chcete. Jídlo máme teplé, pití studené. A jedno prosté pravidlo — v téhle hospodě se nezabíjí." Odmlčí se. Úsměv, který se mu objeví v koutku úst, je zdvořilý, ale nemá v sobě ani kapku humoru. "Dosud to všichni respektovali."*

## Personality

Orenn was the calm at the center of a storm. He spoke quietly because he didn't need to shout. He was polite because politeness costs nothing and buys time. He ran the Nether Inn with the same precision he once used to clear a room of men who wanted him dead — measured, deliberate, with an exit strategy for every scenario.

He believed in rules not because he was lawful but because rules were the only thing that kept this particular powder keg from detonating. He treated every patron — assassin, cultist, beggar, addict — with the same level of professional respect. Not warmth. Respect. There's a difference.

**Key traits:**
- Never raised his voice
- Remembered every face and every debt
- Treated Mags as an equal in every sense
- Was investigating the Order of Mending quietly — he suspected they were more than scholars but hadn't uncovered the truth
- Kept the previous owners' gear and the **upper-cellar binding circle** in some kind of order out of closed-case habit, without understanding the craft. He left the barred Old Work untouched and never monitored the sealed rift behind it.
- Had a dry sense of humor that surfaced rarely and always caught people off guard

## Background

Orenn was a **fixer** for over twenty years. When the city's underworld had a problem that needed to *stop existing* — a rival crew, a blackmailer with the wrong ledger, a body that couldn't be found, a job that turned out worse than anyone was paid for — the people with money called Orenn and Mags. They worked as a pair: Orenn did the watching, the planning, and the talking; Mags did the killing. They were expensive, reliable, and discreet. They dealt in *people* — and a handful of times, across a long career, in things that turned out not to be people at all. Enough times to own a little salt and a shelf of borrowed books. Not enough to call themselves experts in anything but ending trouble.

The job that ended them was **this house.** Fifteen years ago a den of summoners was working out of the building—calling things up through the thin point in its bottom—and it had gone bad enough that someone paid well to have it cleaned out. Orenn and Mags took the contract, killed and scattered the cult, and it cost them: Mags carries a scar from temple to jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after whatever they found in the dark down there. Haddon and Mother Vyre, then legitimate planar scholars, handled the failing containment afterward; Orenn and Mags never learned to work it themselves. They took the building as **payment** (no one else wanted a cursed cult-den on a bad corner), told the world they'd retired, and settled in on top of a case they were certain was closed.

### The Man Who Went Into the Circle

The specialist was **Haddon**, then a respected young planar scholar working beside Mother Vyre before the Order became a cult. During the cleanup Orenn killed the last summoner inside the central containment chamber, triggering a failsafe that began converting the only living creature inside—Orenn—into a permanent anchor for the breach. Haddon understood that another living person could enter voluntarily and take the binding. Vyre told him not to; the chamber was collapsing, and whoever remained when the outer seal closed was expected to die.

Haddon entered anyway. He transferred the binding onto himself, threw Orenn across the threshold, and ordered him to seal the door. The containment burned most of the night. When they finally reopened it, Haddon was alive beside the keystone, his left arm blackened to the elbow and still repeating the final formula. The hand never fully recovered: its fingertips are numb, it trembles after difficult magic, and branching black scars surface beneath the skin when he channels planar power. He learned to write with his right hand afterward.

When Orenn later caught Mother Vyre testing the dormant foundation sigils, he barred her from the Nether Inn. Mags wanted Haddon barred with her. Orenn refused—not because one sacrifice purchased endless forgiveness, but because he had personally seen what Haddon could choose when a life mattered. *"When it mattered, he went into the circle."* Mags answered, *"That was fifteen years ago."* Orenn's reply remained his reason for keeping Haddon's old table and books: *"Then I'll give him somewhere he has to remember it."*

### Grey Quay

Twelve years ago the merchant **Vey Corren** separately hired Sevra to kill a blackmailer and hired Orenn and Mags to recover the blackmail ledger from a warehouse on Grey Quay. Neither team knew about the other. Corren instructed the fixers to place the ledger in an iron payment safe built into the warehouse's exterior wall. Closing the safe would arm hidden locks and ignite whale oil in the walls; Corren's dock gang could then retrieve the fireproof safe from outside after every witness burned.

Orenn noticed the safe was wired to more than its door. He deposited a weighted decoy, Mags cut an escape through the adjoining warehouse, and Sevra stayed behind long enough to make their deaths convincing. They emerged behind Corren's waiting gang and dismantled the ambush together. When Corren arrived and opened the safe with his signet, he found Orenn's note: *"You forgot to weigh the people."* Sevra was waiting for him.

After closing the grievance, Sevra gave Corren's brass signet to Orenn as proof that the betrayal was finished. He filed down one edge and mounted it beneath the bar as a bottle opener. It remains there tonight.

### The Retirement That Wasn't

"Retired" was always a story Orenn told the world — and, on his gentler days, himself. The truth is buried behind a concealed door in the cellar, in the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: a hidden warren that is the couple's real workplace. They never stopped. They just moved the work downstairs and got quiet about it.

- **The fortune.** Twenty years of expensive, discreet fixer work is stacked in the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) — well over 2,000 gp in coin, gems, and deeds. The modest life upstairs (their bedroom lockbox, 150 gp, two silver rings) is genuine and sentimental. The war-chest below is genuine and paranoid. Both are true. That contradiction *is* Orenn.
- **The laboratory.** They still brew — the poisons and suppressants a fixer's trade runs on (the Guest's "trim dose" among them), working out of the den's leftover alembics and the anti-fiend odds and ends the summoners abandoned. Among those remnants is one precious dose of **Oil of Etherealness**, kept as emergency access to the far side rather than evidence that they understood or monitored the tear. See the [Workroom](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-workroom-laboratory).
- **The Guest.** Their darkest ongoing secret: a **changeling** they captured eleven years ago and never released, held in a cell below and used as an off-book spy — most recently to infiltrate the **Order of Mending**. This is *how* Orenn was "investigating the cult." See **[the-guest.md](the-guest.md)**. Orenn told himself, and the Guest, that they'd let it go "eventually." Fifteen years of eventually. He died still meaning to.
- **The Guest's predecessor** starved to death in the next cell when it stopped being useful ([Cell Two](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-two--the-long-dead)). Orenn allowed that. The calm, courteous barkeep who treated every patron with respect was also a man who could keep a person in a cage for a decade and sleep — mostly — at night. The players may learn this. It should complicate how they grieve him.

Orenn was not a good man wearing a bad past. He was a genuinely kind man who had done, and was still doing, monstrous things — and had made his peace with the arithmetic. That's the dark history the Deep Cellar reveals, without anyone having to confess a word.

## How He Died

Xarrul killed Orenn with the full chain: **Brand of Spite** to mark him, **Visions of Spite** to freeze him in a hallucination of his own worst fear, then claws through a body that couldn't flinch. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting target with no allies to intervene, all three stages collapsed into seconds.

The timing was the trick. Orenn had stepped down to storage for supplies just before the brawl broke—which is *why* it ran unchecked; with him gone there was no one to shut it down. He came back up to do exactly that, waded into the scrum, and caught a mundane knock (a bottle, a chair) that left him bruised and bleeding but very much alive. Then **Rennt's Thunderwave killed the candles** and the hall went black. Xarrul spent the one Stored Incursion it had charged during the previous night: three Material rounds behind the bar to brand Orenn, lock his mind, and land the killing Multiattack before the charge dragged it back Ethereal as the lights returned. The expression on Orenn's face isn't surprise at death. It's the last frame of whatever Xarrul forced him to see.

**He cannot be brought back.** Whatever the brand did, his soul is beyond reach — *Revivify*, *Raise Dead*, *Resurrection*, all of it finds nothing to hold. Mags burns a diamond proving it in [Act 2](../npc/mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm). This is permanent, and the module never softens it. (Leave the *reason* unspoken in play; it should feel wrong, not diagnosed.)

**Physical evidence on the body:**
- A **black brand** on his chest, roughly the size of a spread hand. It's not a burn in the traditional sense — the skin is unmarked on the surface, but beneath it the flesh is charred. DC 14 Medicine reveals the damage radiates *outward* from the heart, as if something ignited inside him.
- **A mundane brawl wound (decoy).** He's cut and bruised from the blow he took wading into the fight — it *looks* like the brawl killed him. DC 14 Medicine confirms it didn't: the injury is survivable; the fatal damage is internal, with no external wound to explain it.
- **No defensive wounds.** He didn't fight back against the *thing that killed him* — there was nothing to fight.
- **DC 15 Arcana on the brand:** Identifies it as necrotic damage with a fiendish signature. Not any spell in common use — something older, more personal. Like a fingerprint.
- **DC 18 Arcana:** The brand's pattern contains a fragment of Xarrul's true name. A character who records the pattern and later compares it to fiendish lore (Orenn's bestiary in the bedroom, or Haddon's texts) can identify the specific type of fiend they're dealing with.

## What He Knew (For DM Reference)

Orenn suspected something was wrong for weeks — but he was looking in the wrong direction, and he never once looked *down.* His whole career had trained him to think in people and factions, not in the thing sealed under his own floor, and the case on that was *closed.* What his surveillance actually turned up (all of it on the [case board](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-long-cut-central-corridor) in his old cellar ops-room) was a **district-wide** wrongness he read as an *underworld* problem:
- People turning up dead or gone across the quarter in ways that didn't add up — some of it Thera's work, some of it he couldn't source at all
- The Order of Mending meeting more often, more urgently — his strongest, realest lead, and the one that let him blame everything else on the cult
- Patrons and neighbours *changing* around his own roof — Bren's worsening ravings, repeated cold dreams, regulars who stopped returning — which he filed as recruits, marks and ordinary street attrition, not symptoms
- A cold that had crept over the district these last weeks, dreams gone bad on the block, the corner's old unlucky name getting louder

He didn't know about Xarrul, and he never connected any of it to the sealed rift beneath him. He thought the trouble was out in the city. He was preparing anyway — the holy water, silversheen, and warding chalk in the storage room were recent, nervous purchases, a fixer buying insurance against something not-human he could feel moving but couldn't name. The letter in Mags's apron was his contingency. He ran out of time, twenty feet above the answer.

## Items on His Person

- A set of **tavern keys** (all rooms, cellar trapdoor, front door)
- A **plain black iron key**, heavier than the rest, that fits nothing upstairs. It is one of a matched pair and opens the **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** to the Deep Cellar, the Arcane-locked [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room), and the lower cells. Mags carries its mate. Anyone who searches the body (DC 12 Investigation, or automatic if they loot him) finds it; recognizing what it opens is the mystery. The Guest, if reached, will happily point at it.
- A **silver ring** (plain, matches one in the lockbox upstairs)
- 12 gp, 8 sp in a belt pouch
- [**Orenn's silver mirror**](#orenns-silver-mirror), kept in his breast pocket

### Orenn's Silver Mirror

A small magic hand mirror in Orenn's breast pocket, found automatically by anyone who searches the body. While looking into it, a creature sees everything within the mirror's reflected field exactly as if under *See Invisibility*: invisible creatures and objects are visible, and creatures and objects on the Ethereal Plane appear ghostly and translucent.

The effect is permanent, requires no charges or attunement, and functions only through the reflection. It has no properties beyond *See Invisibility*. The mirror does not make an Ethereal subject Material or allow attacks or other effects to cross the planar boundary.
