fixing plotholes, streamlining

npc/assassins.md

@@ -100,6 +100,12 @@ Sevra later gave Corren's signet to Orenn as proof the debt was finished. He mad
 - She'll share everything she knows about the cultists' activities, including safe house locations.
 - She owes the party a favour — one job, any target, with the codex in place.
 
+### Sevra in the Reckoning
+
+Xarrul's whispers aim Kael's grief at Rennt and Haddon until the nonlethal brawl becomes a real faction war. The compact prevents Xarrul itself from killing again before the Vacancy finishes, but it does not protect either faction from the other. Sevra can stop that default only if given an actionable threat: proof Xarrul killed Orenn, proof of Dace's betrayal, or proof of Thera's soul-work. Once convinced of Xarrul, she supports sealing or Ethereal destruction and helps Mags keep the cultists from rebinding it.
+
+If the party openly attacks Mags to help Xarrul, Sevra stands with Mags. If they instead produce a witnessed bargain that names everyone to be spared and Nessa to be returned, Sevra may enforce the room's neutrality and leave Mags politically isolated—but only after proof that Xarrul keeps exact promises. A frame can delay her, not fool her forever: Dace explains the faction rot but not Orenn's fiendish brand; Thera explains the missing soul but not the ethereal claw marks. A successful frame must account for both halves or arrange evidence Mags cannot test until after midnight.
+
 ### The Thing She Can't Name (DM — her arc)
 
 Sevra carries an unease she has never spoken aloud, because she has no framework for it and it feels like heresy: **Thera's kills are too clean.** Perfectly warned, perfectly sealed, and yet in the last two years the families of Thera's marks grieve *wrong* — priests who couldn't find the dead to bless them, resurrections paid for and failed, a widow who swore her husband "never crossed over." Sevra has filed each as coincidence because the alternative is unthinkable: that the guild's most honoured blade is doing something the codex has no clause against because the founders never imagined it.
@@ -165,7 +171,7 @@ Dace has been meeting an Order of Mending contact in the tavern's private room t
 The signs are on him now, hiding in plain sight behind his nerves:
 - He sleeps poorly and doesn't know why (reads as guilt).
 - At the candles, **his shadow falls a half-breath late** — DC 15 Perception if a PC watches him move near a flame.
-- True sight, *Veil Dust*, or a DC 15 Medicine/Arcana check up close reveals **a hairline seam of grey light at the base of his throat**, like a cracked glaze.
+- True sight or a DC 15 Medicine/Arcana check up close reveals **a hairline seam of grey light at the base of his throat**, like a cracked glaze.
 
 **Saving him** is possible before the mark ripens: consecration (holy water, *Consecrate*, a cleric or paladin's touch), *Remove Curse* / *Greater Restoration*, Thera's death, or — hardest — the genuine forgiveness of the grievance that named him, offered and *meant*.
 
@@ -173,7 +179,7 @@ The signs are on him now, hiding in plain sight behind his nerves:
 
 ### If Exposed
 
-Dace tries to talk his way out first (Deception +8). If that fails, he turns violent — he'll grab the nearest person as a hostage (likely Vetch or Bren) and demand safe passage. If that fails, he fights. He's dangerous but not suicidal — at half HP, he surrenders.
+Dace tries to talk his way out first (Deception +8). If that fails, he turns violent — he'll grab the nearest person as a hostage (likely Bren or an isolated PC) and demand safe passage. If that fails, he fights. He's dangerous but not suicidal — at half HP, he surrenders.
 
 Sevra's reaction to proof: cold fury. She won't kill him in the bar (the rules still matter to her, even now), but she will restrain him and promise that guild justice will follow. This is worse than a quick death and everyone knows it — **and it is, unknowingly, exactly what Thera wanted: Dace neutralised without a single question asked about *why* she wanted him gone.**
 
@@ -274,7 +280,7 @@ Thera carries at least one **soulcoin** — the physical proof the whole subplot
 > A coin the size of a crown, warm to the touch though it's touched nothing warm. It has a face stamped on neither side — just a worn blankness that your eye keeps trying to resolve into features and failing. Held to the ear in a quiet room, it *whispers*, in a voice folded very small. Held longer, you get the unbearable sense it is not whispering. It is *listening*.
 
 - **What it is:** a person, minted. Not destroyed — folded, cold, and (while the coin holds charge) *recoverable*.
-- **Detection:** Mags smells the necrotic residue instantly and goes grey; a cleric or paladin *feels* the trapped soul; *Veil Dust* or true sight shows it glowing wrong; DC 15 Arcana reads it as necrotic with a personal, fingerprint-like signature.
+- **Detection:** Mags smells the necrotic residue instantly and goes grey; a cleric or paladin *feels* the trapped soul; true sight shows it glowing wrong; DC 15 Arcana reads it as necrotic with a personal, fingerprint-like signature.
 - **Warmth dates the kill:** soulcoins cool over a season. A warm coin is a *recent* kill — and can be matched to a recent sealed contract on the guild's rolls, tying Thera to a specific death.
 
 ### Stat Block
@@ -317,7 +323,7 @@ Thera carries at least one **soulcoin** — the physical proof the whole subplot
 
 ### Soulcoin Surge (the escape / the foreshadow)
 
-The first time Thera is reduced to 0 HP, if she still carries a charged soulcoin, she does not die. With a whispered word the coin in her pocket **cracks and spends a life in place of hers**: she drops instead to 1 HP, becomes briefly half-real (misty, silent), and takes the Disengage and Dash actions as a free move, slipping toward the nearest exit or the thin point in the cellar. She leaves behind a **cracked, cooling coin** — the party's first physical proof of what she is, whether or not they ever catch her.
+The first time Thera is reduced to 0 HP, if she still carries a charged soulcoin, she does not die. With a whispered word the coin in her pocket **cracks and spends a life in place of hers**: she drops instead to 1 HP, becomes briefly half-real (misty, silent), and takes the Disengage and Dash actions as a free move, slipping toward the nearest exit or, if she knows the route, the tear in the Deep Cellar's Old Work. She leaves behind a **cracked, cooling coin** — the party's first physical proof of what she is, whether or not they ever catch her.
 
 *Use this to keep her from dying anticlimactically to a lucky crit, and to leave the players holding evidence even if she gets away. A blade of the rot is hard to kill for good — that's the point.*