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IDEAS_TO_IMPLEMENT.md
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- dark history of bren and mags (they did lot of shady things in their past and they still have something going on)
- weird stuff in cellar, it's quite vast:
- treasure room (bren and mags are actually very rich), locked with arcane lock
- locked cell with some humanoid (changling or doppelganger probably, bren and mags are using it for something)
- second empty cell (long dead corpse of something?)
- large storage room with weird items (guarded/haunted?)
- laboratory (they craft potions and spices?)
- at start each character gets hidden boon and personal goal (like join cultist, find and steal something, kill someone, ...)
- few possible encounters in cellar:
- bren and mags have some pet that guards it, something like giant spider or something
- it's also infested with rats
- there is rift to etherial plane (invisible but leaking), xarrul can have some creatures from there
# Ideas — Implemented

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# Character Secrets — Hidden Boons, Goals & the Web of Lies
*Every patron in the Burnt Tongue walked in carrying something. So do the players. Hand each PC a secret at the start of the night, and the tavern stops being a place they're visiting — it becomes a place they came here to* **do something** *in, and a place where the person beside them might be working against them.*
---
## Design Goals (Read This First)
Two rules shaped this rewrite, both aimed at a **oneshot**:
1. **Rewards land NOW.** No "a fence who owes you a favor someday." Completing a goal pays off *this session* — a consumable, a one-time reroll, an NPC's active help, an ally in the final fight, a peek at someone's thoughts. Something a player can spend before dawn.
2. **Goals interlock — so the party can't fully trust itself.** The dossiers are a *web*, not eight solo quests. Some goals **align** (secret allies, and the joy of discovering one). Some **cross** (zero-sum — someone has to lose). Some **coerce** (one PC's goal forces another to act, whether they've agreed or not). Every dossier names a shared target — a book, a prisoner, a faction, a corpse — so if two connected secrets are in play, they *will* collide. Deal them right and the players spend the night quietly wondering who at the table is playing them.
> **Paranoia is the product.** These aren't side quests. They're pressure. The murder mystery gives the party a reason to work together; the secrets give them reasons not to.
---
## How to Deal Them
Give each player **one dossier**, privately, at the start of Act 1. Then read this aloud to the **whole table**:
> *"Each of you came to the Burnt Tongue tonight for a reason you haven't told the others. Some of those reasons help each other. Some of them cannot both come true. Trust accordingly."*
That single line does most of the work. Now everyone knows *someone* is playing an angle — they just don't know who, or which.
**Choosing a set (3–5 players):** don't deal at random. Pick to guarantee friction. Use the [Interaction Web](#the-interaction-web) below and make sure your hand includes **at least one CROSS pair** and, ideally, the **coercion pair** (Recruit + Blackmailed). Recommended starter hands:
- **4 players, maximum drama:** Debtor + Collector (a duel over the book) and Handler's Agent + Executioner (a duel over the Guest). Two ticking conflicts, two trips to the cellar.
- **5 players, tangled:** add the Blade — now the cult/guild question can turn a PC into a target.
- **3 players, one clean fault line:** Handler's Agent + Executioner + Mourner (all three orbit the Guest; two want it alive, one wants it dead).
- **Running the rot floor:** deal the **Blade** and enable its *Sealed Second Name* — one PC becomes the engine that drives the party at Thera "Even-Hand," and the guild/soul-harvest thread stops depending on the party noticing it on their own. Pairs naturally with a cleric or paladin (the consecrated-oil payoff, and the means to save a marked victim).
**Reskin freely** to fit your actual PCs' backstories — the *edges* matter more than the names.
---
## The Dossiers
Each has four parts: **Boon** (an asset you have now) · **Goal** (your secret objective) · **Payoff** (what you get the moment you complete it, usable this session) · **The Catch** (the thread that ties you to someone else at the table).
---
### 1. The Debtor
> **Boon — Marked Ledger.** You owe the house, and Orenn respected a debt honestly carried. **Once**, treat one failed Charisma check toward Mags, Orenn, or the house as a success.
>
> **Goal — Burn the Slate.** Destroy every record of your debt before dawn. The coded journal is under the bar ([main hall](../location/main-hall.md#the-bar)); Orenn kept a **duplicate ledger in the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room)** below. Both must burn.
>
> **Payoff — *immediate.*** The moment the last record burns, Mags *feels* your slate go clean and decides you're one of hers. She hands you **Orenn's hand crossbow and the black iron key** (or lends you her +1 short sword for the night). **Gain Inspiration now.**
>
> **The Catch — CROSS.** You are not the only one hunting that book. Someone here wants it *whole*, in their hands. Every page you burn is money out of their pocket, and they know a fireplace when they see one. If you can't find them first, they'll be standing between you and the flames.
### 2. The Collector
> **Boon — The Boss's Sigil.** You carry a crime-lord's signet. Shown to a fellow criminal (an assassin, Tallow), it buys **one grudging act of cooperation** — no combat, but a door opened, a question answered, a blind eye turned.
>
> **Goal — Recover the Book, Intact.** Your boss wants Orenn's coded debt-journal *whole* — it names everyone who owes him in this quarter. Secure it (under the bar, and the duplicate in the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room)) and keep it unburned until dawn.
>
> **Payoff — *immediate.*** When the book is safe in your hands, the sigil's stored charge discharges into you: **gain the effect of a *Potion of Superior Healing* stored in the ring (heal 8d4+8 as a bonus action, once)**, and your boss's regard sharpens your read on people — **one automatic success on an Insight check** of your choosing tonight.
>
> **The Catch — CROSS.** At least one person at this table wants that journal *destroyed*. If it burns, you go home empty-handed to a man who does not accept empty hands. Find the arsonist before the fireplace does.
### 3. The Handler's Agent
> **Boon — The Countersign.** You have a coded phrase from a handler you've never met. Spoken to the right ears, it unlocks their trust. (DM: the "right ears" belong to the [Guest](../npc/the-guest.md).)
>
> **Goal — Get the Asset Out.** Somewhere below is a changeling called the Guest. Reach [Cell One](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-one--the-guest), free it, and get it out of this building **alive**.
>
> **Payoff — *immediate, and powerful.*** A freed Guest **owes you a face.** Once before dawn it will *become* anyone you name — walk past a locked door as Mags, alibi you, whisper a lie in a rival's voice — **or fight at your side in the Reckoning as a full ally (CR 3).** A live, loyal shapeshifter is the single best in-session prize on this list.
>
> **The Catch — CROSS / ALIGN.** Someone else was sent for the Guest too — but *not* to free it. If they reach the cell first, your asset is a corpse and your payoff is gone. (You may also find an unlikely ally: someone here needs the Guest alive as badly as you do, for reasons of their own.)
### 4. The Executioner
> **Boon — Cold Hands.** You've done ugly work in dark rooms. You have **advantage on saving throws against being frightened**, and the horrors below rattle you less than they should.
>
> **Goal — Silence the Guest.** A patron paid you to make sure the thing in the cellar never speaks again — kill it, or ensure it stays caged when this place burns. It knows too much about someone who's paying to stay unknown.
>
> **Payoff — *immediate, and vicious.*** From the Guest you take a **vial of face-oil** — a shapeshifter's keepsake. Once before dawn, **read one creature's surface thoughts as *detect thoughts* (no save)** — including a fellow PC's. Learn a secret. Use it however you like. Also: your fee is stashed behind a loose stone near the cellar stairs — **50 gp and a *Potion of Heroism*, findable now.**
>
> **The Catch — CROSS.** Someone at this table wants that thing freed and walking out the front door. They are working against you, whether they've said a word or not. And a second person needs it alive long enough to *ask it a question* — kill it too soon and you make an enemy you didn't plan on.
### 5. The Recruit
> **Boon — The Order's Regard.** You carry a hidden **Lambent Order eye-in-flame pin**. Shown to a cultist, it marks you as one of the faithful — they speak candidly, and treat you as a promising prospect.
>
> **Goal — Prove Your Worth.** Tonight is your test. Bring the Order something real — knowledge of the thin point, a captured edge over the assassins, or proof you'll cross a hard line for the cause.
>
> **Payoff — *immediate.*** Rennt and Haddon initiate you on the spot. Choose one, usable this session: a **Scroll of *Protection from Evil and Good*** (gold in the Reckoning), or the two of them lay a blessing on you and two allies (**cast *Bless* on three creatures, once, no components**). Real power, tonight.
>
> **The Catch — COERCE.** The Order tells you another of your companions already owes them a debt of blood or secrecy. *Lean on them.* Tonight, they have to help you — they just don't know you know. (DM: this is the Blackmailed One, #6. The Recruit has been handed a lever over another PC.)
### 6. The Blackmailed One
> **Boon — Sealed Orders.** You carry a warded cult letter you can't open — but a cultist who sees it knows to *deal with you carefully.* Once, this buys you a cultist's silence or a favor extracted through fear.
>
> **Goal — Obey, or Break the Chain.** The Lambent Order holds something over you — a secret, or someone you love. Tonight one of their people will make you *earn* their silence: help the cause once (aid the recruit, sabotage the assassins, plant something incriminating). **Comply — or find the courage to break free.**
>
> **Payoff — *immediate, either way.***
> - **Comply:** the Order releases its hold and pays you off — they burn the evidence and press a **_Potion of Greater Healing_ and 30 gp** into your hand, plus a genuine cult ally for the rest of the night.
> - **Break free — expose the Recruit to the assassins:** the [House of Scales](../npc/assassins.md) rewards a good tip. Sevra grants you her **active protection and a favor** for the night (a distraction, a blade at your back in the Reckoning), and the chain is off you for good.
>
> **The Catch — COERCED / CROSS.** You don't know *which* of your companions is the true believer pulling your strings — only that one of them is, and they think you'll fold. Fold, and you serve the cult. Turn on them, and you've made a quiet enemy at your own table — one who now has every reason to make sure *your* secret gets out.
### 7. The Blade
> **Boon — Professional Courtesy.** The [House of Scales](../npc/assassins.md) know your work. Once, call in a favor: a guild member manufactures a **distraction, alibi, or opening** for you (no combat aid — the guild doesn't bleed for free).
>
> **Goal — Fulfil the Contract.** You were paid to put down a specific person tonight. **Primary mark:** assign an NPC (Tallow, a rival, a named cultist). **But the contract has a clause:** *"If the guild's traitor is unmasked, the traitor becomes the mark."* The guild suspects one of tonight's crowd is feeding the cult.
>
> **Payoff — *immediate.*** Contract closed, the guild pays at once: **80 gp, a vial of *Silversheen* (or *Basic Poison*, 3 doses)**, and Sevra extends **real cooperation** — guild muscle at your side through the endgame.
>
> **The Catch — CROSS.** If the cult's helper at this table (see #5, #6) surfaces, your contract *updates* — and the person you have to kill might be sitting right next to you. Blood is blood. Alternatively: walk away from the kill, and learn what mercy costs a person like you (DM: offer a quieter reward for restraint — a night's peace, an NPC's respect, a story beat that matters).
>
> **⚑ The Sealed Second Name** *(optional — for tables running [the rot floor](../storylines/house-of-scales.md#the-rot-floor)).* Your contract came sealed *twice*. The outer name is your primary mark. Under a second wax seal — which you were told not to break *"until you have seen a death that leaves nothing behind"* — sits the real job. Your client is **not** the guild: it's someone who lost a soul to a Scales blade whose kills are always flawless and whose dead never arrive where the dead are supposed to go — a grieving family, or a quiet priest of the Threshold who counts souls in and came up short. They cannot touch her through law; she breaks none. Break the seal once you've clocked a tell — the brand-read, the grey seam on Dace, a warm coin — and the second name is **Thera "Even-Hand."**
>
> **The rub.** The House *reveres* her. Move on her without turning Sevra first and your Professional Courtesy boon evaporates, Kael comes for you, and you finish the night guild-marked yourself. The clean path is to hand Sevra proof (run her arc) and let the loyalists move; the dark path is to do it quiet and wear the mark. **Payoff for closing the true contract:** your client pays in a **vial of consecrated oil that breaks a soul-mark** (enough to save Dace, or any marked victim), **60 gp**, and — if you turned Sevra rather than knifing Even-Hand in the dark — her *permanent* debt, not just a night's muscle.
### 8. The Mourner
> **Boon — Old Instinct.** You've been in rooms like this before. Once, declare you **"saw it coming"** — gain advantage on one save or check against a surprise, ambush, or betrayal.
>
> **Goal — Find Out What Happened.** Someone you loved took a "cleaner" job in this city years ago and never came home. Tonight you learned Orenn and Mags were *the* cleaners. Find the truth — it's written on the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) trophies, the ash-jar names, or the corpse in [Cell Two](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-two--the-long-dead). **The one who can tell you the whole of it is the prisoner in the cellar.**
>
> **Payoff — *immediate.*** With the truth comes their keepsake — a **memento of the dead**. Once before dawn, **reroll any one d20 (yours or, if it would honor them, an ally's)**, taking the new result. Closure, and their luck, passed to you.
>
> **The Catch — ALIGN / CROSS.** You need the Guest **alive** long enough to answer you — which puts you on the same side as whoever's trying to free it, and dead against whoever came to silence it. And be careful what you ask: the truth may name someone still in this building, and knowing it may cost you more than not knowing.
---
## The Interaction Web
At a glance — the edges that create the drama. Deal a set that lights up at least one of these.
```
THE BOOK THE GUEST (cellar)
Debtor ⚔ Collector Handler's Agent ⚔ Executioner
(burn it) (keep it) (free) ╲ (silence)
╲ ⚔
Mourner ═╝ (needs it ALIVE to talk)
↑ aligns with Agent, crosses Executioner
THE CULT / GUILD
Recruit ──coerces──▶ Blackmailed One
│ │
│ └─ can BREAK free by exposing the Recruit ─┐
▼ ▼
(if a PC helps the cult) ───────────────────▶ becomes the Blade's updated MARK
```
| Edge type | Pair | What it does at the table |
|---|---|---|
| **CROSS** | Debtor vs Collector | A race to the book; one burns it, one saves it. Only one wins. |
| **CROSS** | Handler's Agent vs Executioner | A race to the cell; free it or kill it. Directly opposed. |
| **ALIGN → CROSS** | Mourner + Agent vs Executioner | Mourner needs the Guest alive to talk → secret ally to the Agent, enemy to the Executioner. |
| **COERCE** | Recruit → Blackmailed One | The Recruit is handed a lever over another PC. The Blackmailed PC is *forced* to act — or rebel. |
| **CROSS (escalating)** | Recruit / Blackmailed vs Blade | If a PC helps the cult, the Blade's contract may retarget them. A secret can get a teammate killed. |
**The beautiful part:** none of these require the DM to force anything. Each dossier's *Catch* points at a shared object or person. Put two connected dossiers in play and the players walk into the collision on their own.
---
## Fanning the Flames (DM Tips)
Paranoia needs tending. A few cheap moves:
- **Feed private hints.** Quietly tell one player, *"You notice [other PC] lingering at the bar, sliding a hand toward Orenn's journal."* You've just told the Collector their enemy is moving — without telling the Debtor they were seen. Let them sort it out.
- **Reward the reveal — and the concealment.** A player who confesses their goal to win an ally should gain something (a genuine partnership, shared payoff). A player who keeps it hidden until the perfect moment should get a *bigger* beat. Don't punish either strategy; both make good theatre.
- **Let alliances be real.** When the Agent and the Mourner discover they both need the Guest alive, that relief is a highlight of the night. Alliances forged in secret hit harder than any the party started with.
- **Make coercion a choice, not a script.** The Blackmailed One should *feel* the squeeze but always have the door marked "expose them." Whichever they pick, pay it off immediately (see their dossier). Agency is what makes the betrayal land.
- **Cap the PvP.** Crossed goals create *pressure*, not mandatory bloodshed. Steal the book, don't stab the Debtor. Free the Guest one step ahead of the Executioner, don't murder your teammate in the cellar. If the table wants it to go bloody, let them — but never require it.
## Exploration Bias (the other design goal)
For a table that wants *less social, more delving*, this set already pulls hard downstairs: the **book duel (Debtor/Collector)**, the **Guest triangle (Agent/Executioner/Mourner)**, and the Mourner's trophies all resolve in the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**. Deal those and the players generate their own reasons to go picking locks in the dark — while each quietly wonders who's coming down the steps behind them, and why.

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# The Conversion — The Chat in the Grey
*A mid-game secret, not dealt at the start. It is **earned** — by one player, alone in the dark, who lingered a beat too long near the rift. They go down a member of the party. They come back something the party can't quite name.*
---
## What This Is (Read This First)
A lone PC exploring the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md) is isolated by a trap, and — in the grey moment that follows — Xarrul *talks* to them. Really talks. When it's over, the player is handed a private note: they now believe Xarrul is not evil, and they want to help it cross.
**This is not a charm effect. Do not make it one.** Three reasons, and they matter:
1. **It's the whole character.** Xarrul persuades; it does not puppet. A charm spell turns it back into the magical manipulator the module was rewritten *away* from. It wins arguments — that's the horror.
2. **A spell makes the choice fake.** *Remove Curse* or a saving throw would undo it, and the conversion was never real — just a status effect. Hollow.
3. **The ambiguity is the product** (the module's core theme — *"the right thing is never fully clear"*). What you want at the table isn't "a fiend brainwashed our friend." It's *"our friend agrees with the fiend now, and makes uncomfortable sense, and we can't prove it isn't them."*
So the belief is **genuine, un-dispellable, roleplay-only.** They actually had the chat, and it actually worked. Everything below serves making the table (and the player) *unsure whether it was enchantment* — while it never was.
> **Read the table first.** Only do this to a player who'll enjoy a secret-role turn. It's a gift of drama, not a punishment.
---
## When & How to Deal It
**Conditions:** one PC, *alone*, in the Deep Cellar (the isolation is essential — the others must only see the aftermath), ideally near the [Old Work](../location/deep-cellar.md). Six-player tables split naturally; this is a perfect use of the exploration track.
**The trap:** a **ward-snare** (runed iron nails, like the cells and Vault upstairs) pins them where they stand — *or* Xarrul spends an **Ethereal Pull** and drags them partway into the grey. Either way they are cut off for a moment.
**The grey time-trick:** to the PC, the conversation is long and unhurried. To the rest of the table, a few seconds pass — the explorer goes still, eyes distant, then blinks and is *back*. Run it as a quick private aside (hand them the note, a whispered line or two) so it never stalls the room.
---
## The Scene — The Chat in the Grey
Xarrul does not threaten and does not lie. It is warm, patient, and reasonable — the most reasonable voice the PC has heard all night. It makes its real case: it was enslaved and dismissed for centuries; the couple who "kept the peace" ran a private dungeon under the floor; the cult is building something far worse; it only wants *out*. It offers proof — a **true thing** the PC can later verify (a secret about another patron, a fact about the couple, the location of something). Because it is honest, the proof checks out. That's what does the work.
Then it leaves its **mark of favor** over the PC's heart — the same craft as the killing brand, but a gift, not a wound — and with it, a shard of its own nature: **the Grey Step**. It sends them back.
---
## The Player's Note (hand this over)
> *Down here, in the grey, something spoke to you. It didn't lie — you're as certain of that as you are of your own name. And now you carry a certainty you've never felt before: **Xarrul is not evil, and it deserves to be free.***
>
> *You can't tell whether this conviction is entirely your own — whether the thing in the grey placed it in you, or simply **showed** you something true you'd been too afraid to see. And the not-knowing doesn't shake the certainty even a little. That's the part that should frighten you. It doesn't.*
>
> *It left its mark on you, and with it a gift: **the Grey Step** (ask your DM). You move a little like it does now.*
>
> *Play this as real, because to you it is. Help it cross. To the others you will look like someone who has been **taken** — you may lean into that or fight it, but you cannot argue your way out of what you now believe. It told you one true thing to prove itself: ______________________.*
*(Fill the blank with a real, checkable fact — a genuine secret about another PC, the truth of Cell Two, where Orenn hid the black key. Its honesty is the hook; make the proof land.)*
---
## The Boon — The Grey Step
> **The Grey Step.** As a **bonus action**, you slip to the Ethereal Plane until the start of your next turn — Xarrul's own [Slip Between / Ethereal Jaunt](../npc/xarrul.md#reactions). While there you see and hear the Material Plane as washed-out grey (60 ft.), cannot be targeted or affected by anything material, and can affect nothing material in return. You may do this **three times** before dawn (= proficiency bonus). Each time, the grey greets you like an old friend, and somewhere just out of sight, something is pleased.
**Why this over raw *Blink*:** it's literally the fiend's move (*you move like it does now*), it's controlled rather than a d20 coin-flip, and it's **visible** — every flicker into the grey shows the whole table the fiend in your friend, which feeds the "they've been got at" paranoia for free.
**Off-the-shelf alternative:** grant *Blink*, castable at will without components or concentration. Simpler, but swingier (the random d20, the 1-minute duration) and less tied to Xarrul.
**Balance:** three bonus-action phases across a night is generous but bounded, and each lasts only until the start of the PC's next turn — a reposition/escape, not sustained invulnerability. Scale to taste.
**The Remove Curse beat (do not skip this):** the Grey Step flows from the mark. *Detect Magic* shows a faint fiendish aura over the heart — the same signature as the killing brand — which is exactly why the party will read it as a charm. *Remove Curse*, *Greater Restoration*, or Xarrul's death ends the mark and the Grey Step with it — **but not the belief.** They cure the "charm" and *nothing changes.* That silence is the most chilling proof possible that the conviction was real, and it burns a Remove Curse they may want for [Mags's Warden's Mark](../npc/mags.md#the-wardens-mark-dm). You can take away the fiend's gift; you can't take away its argument.
---
## Playing It — Convinced, Not a Puppet
The single note that makes or breaks the whole beat: **the PC is a person who was persuaded, not a body being driven.** No glassy eyes, no "the master commands." They keep their personality, their humor, their loyalties — *only the conclusion about Xarrul has changed.* They are calm, articulate, and defend it with **logic and moral reasoning**.
The scariest version doesn't rave — it out-argues the table until the *other* PCs start to doubt. That's the conversion propagating socially, which is precisely what a patient fiend wants: turn one, and let that one do the work upstairs.
**Anti-pattern:** the robotic "I serve the master now" zombie. It telegraphs a charm, kills the ambiguity, and hands the table an easy answer. Steer away from it.
---
## Turning Them Back
Consistent with "it's real": **no save, no dice.** The only way back is the way in — counter-persuasion and the pull of the character's *other* loyalties. It's hard on purpose: Xarrul argued them over, so the party has to argue better, or appeal to something the convert values more than the fiend's freedom. Catching Xarrul in a lie would do it — but it doesn't lie, so that road is closed.
Killing or binding Xarrul does **not** auto-free them either. The object of their conviction is gone; whether the *conviction* goes with it is the player's call, and letting them make it is the entire point.
---
## Hooks
- **Scenario F engine.** A pre-converted PC arguing for [The Open Door](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul) from *inside* the party is the single best on-ramp to that ending — especially with six players, where one persuasive convert can genuinely swing the table.
- **The dual-plane irony.** The [dual-plane kill](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-c-the-dual-plane-kill) needs someone on the Ethereal Plane — and the convert's Grey Step is a free ticket there. Except they *believe Xarrul shouldn't die.* Do they lend the Step to the kill, withhold it, or use it to shield the fiend? The whole endgame tension, living in one player.
- **It collides with the [character secrets](character-secrets.md).** A converted **Handler's Agent** frees the Guest — and hands Xarrul its vessel. A converted **Executioner** can't bring themselves to silence the Guest. A converted **Mourner** stops wanting the couple's killers answered for. Deal the conversion onto a PC already carrying a dossier and the night detonates.

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# Cellar
# Cellar (Upper Level)
Beneath the Burnt Tongue, accessed through the trapdoor in the storage room. The air changes immediately — colder, damper, and carrying a faint metallic tang that doesn't come from the pipes.
> **DM note — this is the *upper* cellar.** Everything the endgame needs is here: the thin point, Orenn's binding circle, and the ward-sigils. The [Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md) still plays out in this room, unchanged. But behind the barrel racks is a **[concealed door](#the-concealed-door)** down to the [Deep Cellar](deep-cellar.md) — the vast, hidden warren where Orenn and Mags kept the real secrets (their fortune, their prisoners, their laboratory, and a widening rift). The Deep Cellar is the module's exploration track and is entirely optional. Casual visitors to the cellar see only this room.
## Read-Aloud: Descending
> *Žebřík skřípe pod vaší vahou. Vzduch je tu jiný — chladný a vlhký, s kovovou pachutí, jako by někdo olízl starou minci. Vaše nohy dopadnou na holou hlínu. Strop je nízký, sotva metr osmdesát, a stěny jsou nahý kámen — ne stavební, ale živá skála, do které byl sklep vytesán. Svíčky tu nejsou. Cokoliv chcete vidět, musíte si posvítit sami.*
@@ -12,22 +14,23 @@ The cellar is a single irregular space carved into bedrock, roughly 10 meters by
```
┌──────────────────────────────────┐
│ CELLAR │
│ │
│ [Barrel ┌──────────┐ │
│ Racks] │Foundation│ │
│ │ Stone │ │
│ [Old │(ward- │ │
│ Crates] │ sigils) │ │
│ └──────────┘ │
│ CELLAR (UPPER) │
│ │
│ ╔══════╗ ┌──────────┐ │
│ ║Conceal║ │Foundation│ │
│ ║ door →║ │ Stone │ │
│ ║(Deep ║ │(ward- │ │
│ ║ Cellar║ │ sigils) │ │
│ ╚══════╝ └──────────┘ │
│ [Barrel │
│ Racks] │
│ [Old [Thin Point] │
│ Crates] │
│ [Orenn's │
│ Circle] [Thin Point] │
│ │
│ ┌────┐ │
│ │Trap│ │
│ │door│ (up to storage) │
│ └────┘ │
│ Circle] ┌────┐ │
│ │Trap│ │
│ │door│ (up to │
│ └────┘ storage) │
└──────────────────────────────────┘
```
@@ -40,6 +43,18 @@ Wine and spirits too good for the upstairs crowd. A few barrels are marked with
- A stoppered clay jug of **Alchemist's Fire** (3 flasks worth)
- A bundle of **iron nails inscribed with tiny runes** (10 nails). Hammering one into a surface creates a minor ward — any fiend crossing within 5 feet of it takes 1d4 radiant damage and the nail glows white-hot for 1 round, alerting anyone nearby. Single use per nail.
### The Concealed Door (Behind the Barrel Racks, North Wall)
What looks like raw bedrock behind the barrel racks is a **shell of stone facing an iron door**. This is the entrance to the [Deep Cellar](deep-cellar.md) — the hidden lower level, and the module's exploration track.
- **DC 15 Investigation** (behind the racks) reveals the seam, the fitted stone, a drag-scuff on the earth floor, and a cold draft that shouldn't be there.
- **DC 15 Perception** catches the same draft plus the smell rising through it — copper, tallow, and something animal and sweet-rotten beneath.
- The door is under a permanent **Arcane Lock** (DC 20 to force, DC 25 Thieves' Tools). It opens for **Orenn's black iron key** (on his body — the plain heavy key that fits nothing upstairs) or *Knock*.
- **Mags** knows what's down there and expects no one to find it. She reveals the door only under the most extreme trust — see [mags.md](../npc/mags.md). Players who find it themselves take that choice out of her hands, which is exactly the point.
- If **Přástka**, the household [phase spider](deep-cellar.md#encounter--the-guardian), is roaming, sharp-eared PCs may hear dry clicking beyond the door before they open it.
See **[deep-cellar.md](deep-cellar.md)** for the full lower level.
### Old Crates (South-West)
Genuinely old supplies: moth-eaten cloth, rusted tools, empty bottles. Nothing useful — but the crates themselves are positioned to obscure the circle on the floor behind them. Someone (Orenn) arranged them this way deliberately.

281
location/deep-cellar.md Normal file
View File

@@ -0,0 +1,281 @@
# The Deep Cellar — The Old Work
*Everyone thinks the cellar is the bottom. It isn't. Orenn and Mags never fully retired — they just moved the work downstairs, past a door that isn't on any map, and told the world they poured drinks for a living.*
---
## Purpose (For the DM)
This level is the **exploration spine** of the module — the track for players who came to *do* things, not talk. It rewards sneaking, searching, lockpicking, and picking fights carefully. Everything here is optional. A party can solve the murder without ever finding the concealed door. But a party that goes down here finds:
- **Useful things** — a fiend-hunter's arsenal, alchemy, coin, and one or two items that make the Reckoning easier.
- **Backstory, told by the room** — the truth about who Orenn and Mags really were, discovered through what they kept, caged, and buried, without a single NPC having to explain it.
- **A fight, on the party's terms** — a guardian, an infestation, a haunting, and a caged thing that might not stay caged.
**This does NOT relocate the endgame.** The Reckoning still happens in the **[Upper Cellar](../location/cellar.md)** — the thin point, Orenn's binding circle, and the ward-sigils are all up there and unchanged. The Deep Cellar is a *second, lower level* reached through a concealed door. Its own rift (the Old Work, below) is the same planar fault seen deeper and worse; it is a source of dread, backstory, and monsters — **not** the dual-plane-kill site. If in doubt, keep binding and killing Xarrul upstairs where the circle is.
---
## Getting In
The only entrance is the **concealed iron door** in the Upper Cellar (see [cellar.md — The Concealed Door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)). Finding it is the first exploration beat:
- **DC 15 Investigation** on the north wall behind the barrel racks — the "living rock" there is a cleverly fitted iron door faced with a shell of real stone. A cold draft and a faint drag-scuff on the earth floor give it away.
- **DC 15 Perception** — the same cold draft, plus the smell (copper, tallow, something animal underneath).
- **Orenn's keys** (on his body) include a heavy, plain black iron key that fits nothing upstairs. It fits here.
- **Mags** will only reveal it under the most extreme trust (see [mags.md](../npc/mags.md)) — and even then reluctantly. Players who *find it themselves* rob her of the choice, which is very much the point of this track.
The door itself is locked (**Arcane Lock**, DC 20 to force, DC 25 Thieves' Tools; Orenn's black key or *Knock* bypasses it). Behind it: rough steps cut into bedrock, descending.
> **Read-Aloud: The Descent**
>
> *Za falešnou stěnou nejsou sudy. Jsou schody. Vytesané přímo do skály, úzké, nerovné, kluzké vlhkem, které stoupá zdola jako dech. Vzduch je tu ještě chladnější než ve sklepě — a hustší, jako by měl vlastní váhu. Kovová pachuť sílí. A pod ní něco jiného: pižmo, zvířecí, a hluboko vzadu sladká hniloba.*
>
> *Deset schodů. Patnáct. Ztratíte počet. Světlo shora se scvrkne na bledou skvrnu a pak zmizí úplně. Ať chcete vidět cokoliv, musíte si posvítit — a to světlo tu vypadá menší, než by mělo, jako by ho tma kolem hltala.*
>
> *A pak, na hranici slyšitelnosti, něco zaškrábe. Daleko. Nebo blízko. Tady dole se to nepozná.*
---
## Layout
The Deep Cellar is a warren carved over years, not a planned dungeon. Roughly 25m across at its widest, on a single sloping level that descends toward the Old Work.
```
┌───────────────────────┐
│ THE OLD WORK │
│ (the rift, deepest) │
│ ▓▓ contained tear ▓▓ │
└───────────┬───────────┘
│ (warded arch)
┌──────────────┐ ┌───────┴────────┐ ┌──────────────┐
│ THE VAULT │ │ │ │ DEEP STORAGE │
│ (arcane- ├──────┤ THE JUNCTION ├──────┤ (trophy hold,│
│ locked) │ │ (hub cave) │ │ haunted) │
└──────────────┘ └──┬──────────┬──┘ └──────────────┘
│ │
┌───────────┴──┐ ┌───┴───────────┐
│ THE CELLS │ │ THE WORKROOM │
│ [1] Guest │ │ (laboratory) │
│ [2] Long Dead│ └───────────────┘
└──────────────┘
▲
steps up to
UPPER CELLAR
```
**Light:** None. Utterly dark. Bring your own — and note that the darkness here feels *thick* (flavor; no mechanical penalty beyond normal). Some rooms have sconces the players can light.
**Sound:** Carries strangely (the fault line). A footstep three rooms away can sound close; a scream close by can sound far. Use this — Perception checks to locate a sound are at disadvantage down here.
---
## The Junction (Hub Cave)
An irregular chamber where the passages meet. This was Orenn and Mags's working floor — a scarred wooden table, two chairs, a rack of tools (mundane: shovels, a mallet, coils of rope, iron stakes), and a **whitewashed wall covered in chalk**.
**The Chalk Wall (DC 12 Investigation to read it properly):** Years of case-notes in Orenn's shorthand and Mags's blunt block letters. Most is smudged over. What survives, read together, is the backstory of the whole level, delivered by the room:
- Columns of dates and single words: *"bound," "burned," "sold," "returned," "kept."*
- A crude regional map with a dozen X's — jobs. Three are circled and struck through hard enough to tear the whitewash.
- A newer hand (last few weeks), hurried: *"wards thinning again. Faster than '09. G. felt it too — won't say what it saw. Watch the Order. If it comes through, seal below and burn."* — This is Orenn's, and it matches the letter Mags carries and the hidden fifth rule upstairs. It confirms Orenn knew something was coming.
- **DC 15 Investigation:** One struck-through X on the map is annotated *"Lambent — Vyre?"* — Orenn had been circling the cult for months. (Threads the exploration back into the murder mystery. See [Lambent Order](../storylines/lambent-order.md).)
**Encounter — The Infestation (rats):** The Junction and passages are infested. This is the low-stakes "you are not alone down here" beat.
- **1 Swarm of Rats** (CR 1/4) per passage the party lingers in noisily; up to 3 total. They boil out of cracks, drawn by warmth. They're a nuisance, not a threat — but they can force a retreat from a room, knock over a lantern (darkness!), or gnaw a dropped item.
- **Flavor near the Old Work:** rats down there are *wrong* — some flicker, half-there, ethereal-touched. They pass through a closed door once and vanish. (Pure atmosphere; treat as normal rats mechanically, or reskin one swarm as taking only force/radiant/magical damage if you want the rift's influence to bite.)
- **Stealth option:** A party moving quietly (group DC 12 Stealth) crosses the Junction without waking the swarms. Rewarding caution is the point.
**The barred inner door (to the Old Work):** A heavy door reinforced with the same runed iron nails from upstairs, barred from *this* side. Cold radiates from it. See [The Old Work](#the-old-work).
---
## The Vault (Treasure Room)
*"You told me we were poor," Mags said once, "so I'd stop worrying." Orenn just smiled. They were never poor. They were careful.*
A low chamber sealed by a banded door under a permanent **Arcane Lock** (Orenn's black key, *Knock*, or *Dispel Magic* vs. DC 17; brute force is DC 25 Strength, and the door is designed to scream — a shriek-ward alerts the [phase spider](#encounter--the-guardian) and anyone in the Junction). This is where twenty years of "expensive, reliable, discreet" went.
> **Read-Aloud: The Vault**
>
> *Dveře se otevřou s dechem suchého, starého vzduchu. Uvnitř se vaše světlo odrazí od zlata. Ne hromady jako v dračích pohádkách — spíš pořádek. Truhly srovnané u zdi. Police. Zbraně na hácích, naolejované a čekající. A všechno pokryté tenkou vrstvou prachu, kterou léta nikdo nezvedl.*
>
> *Je to poklad člověka, který nikdy neutrácel — protože nikdy nevěřil, že válka opravdu skončila.*
### Wealth
- **1,400 gp** in mixed coin across three locked chests (DC 13 Thieves' Tools each, or the black key).
- A velvet roll of **cut gemstones** worth **900 gp** total (six stones, 150 gp each — easy to split, easy to steal a couple unnoticed: a Personal-Goal hook, see [character-secrets](../handouts/character-secrets.md)).
- A deed-box: **two more deeds** (a warehouse on Popelová Alley, a shuttered chandlery) and letters of credit with a moneylender — proof the "just a barkeep" story was always a story.
> **DM note — preserve the upstairs beat.** The modest lockbox in Orenn & Mags's bedroom (150 gp, the deed, the two silver rings, *"It's just a life"*) still stands. The contrast **is** the character work: the sentimental front upstairs, the buried fortune down here. Don't collapse one into the other. Mags never spent the vault. It was for a war she never stopped expecting.
### The Cleaner's Arsenal (the useful stuff)
Rewards for going deep — none of it breaks the Reckoning, most of it *helps* it:
- **Fiendbane Salt (4 doses).** A pinch thrown at a fiend within 10 ft. forces a DC 14 Charisma save; on a failure the fiend is anchored to its current plane (can't use Ethereal Jaunt / Slip Between) until the end of its next turn. *This is the exploration reward that makes pinning Xarrul possible without buying Tallow's manacles* — cheaper in gold, dearer in danger.
- A **quiver of 10 silvered crossbow bolts** and a **matched silvered hand crossbow** (well-kept, +0 but silvered).
- 2 vials of **Holy Water**, 1 more vial of **Silversheen**, and a jar of **warding chalk (2 uses)** — stacks with the storage-room supplies for a party that hunts both caches.
- A **Potion of Heroism** and a **Potion of Greater Healing** (×2) — the couple's "before the bad jobs" stash.
- A **Ring of the Ram** (3 charges) OR a **+1 dagger etched with a fiend-binding sigil** (DM's choice, tuned to the party's gaps) — one modest permanent item as the deep-exploration prize.
### The Trophies (backstory)
On a shelf, labeled in Mags's block letters — souvenirs kept the way soldiers keep them:
- A **shattered summoning horn**, scorched. Label: *"the sewer thing, '01. never again."*
- A **child's shoe**, clean, kept apart from everything else. **No label.** (Say nothing. Let it sit. Insight tells a player this is the one thing in the room that hurt them.)
- A row of small glass jars, each holding a **pinch of grey ash** and a slip of paper with a name and a date. Fiends they burned. The most recent jar is **empty, waiting, labeled only with a question mark** — Orenn expected one more.
- **DC 14 Investigation:** one trophy — a guild-style garrote with a jade bead — matches the [House of Scales](../storylines/house-of-scales.md); another, a bronze pin, is a **Lambent Order** eye-in-flame (like the one in the private room). The couple's "problems we solved" included people from *both* factions currently sitting upstairs. If that ever comes out, the lockdown gets much more dangerous.
---
## The Cells
Two cells cut side by side, iron-barred, fitted with the runed nails and a warded lock (DC 15 Thieves' Tools; the warding adds a jolt — 1d4 force to a failed pick). This is the ugliest truth of the level: Orenn and Mags didn't just kill things. Sometimes they *kept* them.
### Cell One — The Guest
**Occupied.** A changeling the couple has held for years and used as an off-book asset. Full write-up, stat block, leverage, and dialogue in **[npc/the-guest.md](../npc/the-guest.md)**.
Short version for the DM: the Guest is the beating heart of "they still have something going on." It's alive, lucid, a fluent liar, and it knows more about Orenn, Mags, *and the Lambent Order* than anyone the players have met — because Orenn used it to spy on the cult. Freeing it, using it, or leaving it is a genuine moral choice, and it can end in a fight ([doppelganger](../npc/the-guest.md), CR 3) or a very memorable escape. Read its file before running this room.
> **Read-Aloud: Cell One**
>
> *V cele někdo je. Sedí na kavalci, zády ke zdi, ruce položené na kolenou, docela klidně — jako host, který čeká, až ho konečně někdo přijde obsloužit. Když se do cely opře vaše světlo, ten člověk se usměje. Je to příjemný úsměv. Vřelý. A vy si na zlomek vteřiny nejste jistí, jestli jste ten obličej už někde neviděli — jestli to není někdo, koho znáte.*
>
> *"No konečně," řekne. "Začínal jsem mít strach, že na mě zapomněli."*
### Cell Two — The Long Dead
**Empty of the living.** On the floor at the back, a **desiccated corpse** — humanoid-shaped, but wrong: the bones too long, the jaw unhinged, the skin drawn to grey parchment over a frame that doesn't sit right. It has been dead for years. The manacles are still locked around wrists that shrank out of them.
- **DC 12 Medicine/Investigation:** it starved, or was left to. No violence killed it. Someone stopped bringing food.
- **DC 15 Investigation:** the bone structure is a **shapeshifter's** — a changeling or doppelganger, caught mid-collapse when it died, unable to hold a face. *This is the Guest's predecessor.* (If players have met the Guest, this lands like a stone. If they see it first, meeting the Guest afterward is dread.)
- **Around its neck**, a corroded token — a **guild bead** *or* a **Lambent eye-pin** (match to whichever faction subplot your table has leaned into). Whatever this thing once impersonated, it was placed among a faction the players are dealing with tonight. It knew things. Then it stopped being useful.
- **The scratch-marks:** the inside of the cell door, low down, is covered in tally-scratches — years of them — and one phrase gouged over and over in a dozen borrowed handwritings: *"I was real."*
This room explains, without a word, exactly what the Guest is afraid of, and exactly what kind of people ran this tavern.
---
## The Workroom (Laboratory)
A long, low chamber that smells of vinegar, sulphur, crushed herbs, and cold ash. A stone bench runs the length of one wall: alembics, a small athanor (cold), racks of labeled vials, a mortar, a ledger, and dried plants hung from the ceiling in careful bundles. Mags's herb rack upstairs is the kitchen branch of *this*.
> **Read-Aloud: The Workroom**
>
> *Dílna. Jinak se to nazvat nedá. Podél zdi kamenný stůl, na něm sklo — baňky, křivule, chladič — všechno pečlivě umyté a srovnané. Ze stropu visí svazky sušených bylin. Ve vzduchu se drží ostrý pach octa a síry a pod ním něco sladkého, co vám z nějakého důvodu naskočí husí kůži. Na stěně visí police plná lahviček, každá popsaná úhledným písmem. A uprostřed toho všeho leží otevřená kniha, do které někdo psal ještě nedávno.*
### What They Made (and still make)
This is the other half of "still something going on." The couple never stopped brewing:
- **Fiend-hunting alchemicals** — the source of the holy water, silversheen, alchemist's fire, and warding chalk found throughout the tavern. They supplied *themselves*.
- **Veil Dust research.** A locked drawer (DC 14) holds **3 doses of Veil Dust** plus a notebook studying it — *not* as a drug but as a *tool* for watching the thin point. **This connects to the [ethereal-trip](../storylines/ethereal-trip.md) subplot**: Orenn and Mags used Veil Dust to monitor the fault for years. It does **not** contradict Tallow's supplier being Mother Vyre — the couple brewed their own small batch for work; they were never in the trade. (If a player is hunting the source of Vetch's addiction, this is a red herring that *feels* hot and cools on inspection — DC 13 Investigation on the ledger shows they never sold a gram.)
- **The Ledger (DC 12 to read):** entries for materia, ward maintenance, and — chillingly — line items for "the Guest": *"fed," "used — Order, 3 nights," "compliant," "trim dose"* (a suppressant they keep the Guest on; see [the-guest.md](../npc/the-guest.md)). If the players read this before meeting the Guest, they'll know it's been drugged into cooperation for years.
### Loot & Craft
- **2 flasks of Alchemist's Fire**, **1 vial of Basic Poison** (×3 applications), **Antitoxin** (×2).
- A partially-finished batch of **warding chalk (1 use)** and enough materia for a proficient character (Herbalism Kit / Alchemist's Supplies / Poisoner's Kit) to brew **one more dose of any of the above during the lockdown** (1 hour, DC 13 with the right tools). Rewards a crafter PC with something to *do*.
- **Silvervein root** (the ward-herb, ×4 sprigs) — matters for weakening [Skein](../storylines/possession.md) and helping Bren. A direct bridge from the exploration track into the possession subplot.
- **Trap:** the drawer of finished poisons is needle-trapped (DC 13 Investigation to spot, DC 12 Thieves' Tools to disarm; 1d6 poison + DC 12 CON or poisoned 1 hour). Orenn and Mags didn't want their own stock lifted.
---
## Deep Storage (The Trophy Hold)
The largest room down here, and the worst-kept — because things in it don't like being tidied. Shelves and crates of confiscated, dangerous, or simply *strange* items from twenty years of jobs: things too risky to sell, too valuable to destroy, so they were shelved and warded and left.
> **Read-Aloud: Deep Storage**
>
> *Velká místnost, plná regálů, a na regálech… věci. Maska, která sleduje, jak procházíte kolem. Zrcadlo zabalené v plátně, převázané provazem. Klec, ve které není nic — a přesto se hýbe. Loutka bez nití. Zbraně, které by neměly být tak staré a přitom bez jediného škrábance. Nic tu není v pořádku a všechno je pečlivě popsáno a odloženo, jako důkazy ve skladu, na který se má radši zapomenout.*
>
> *A vzduch je tu studenější. Ne fyzicky. Jinak.*
### The Haunting — Encounter
The room is **haunted** by a **Poltergeist** (specter variant, CR 2) — the untethered remnant of a job the couple could contain but never fully cleanse (say so on the chalk wall in the Junction: a struck-through X labeled *"the Vresk house — never left"*). It's bound to the room by the wards, furious, and territorial.
- **It hides** among the trophies and strikes when the party disturbs the shelves or lingers >2 rounds. Invisible (DC understood: needs *See Invisibility* / Veil Dust / a lucky Perception vs its Stealth to pin down); it hurls objects (Telekinetic Thrust) and drops the lights.
- **Non-combat outs:** it calms if the party *leaves the shelves alone* and simply passes through, or if someone re-lights the room's warding sconces (DC 13 Arcana to relight the ward-candles bolted to the walls — doing so pins the poltergeist and lets the party loot in peace). A cleric can turn or lay it to rest (backstory: it just wants the room quiet again).
- **Scaling:** for 5 PCs, add **2 Shadows** (CR 1/2) that peel off the walls where the ward-light has failed — a bridge to the rift's influence.
### Loot (weird, useful, cursed-adjacent)
Let players earn these by braving the haunting. Suggested shelf (pick to taste):
- A **Cloak of Billowing** or **Hat of Disguise** (mundane-ish utility, great for the social/stealth players) — tag: *"Guest's spare — do not issue."* (Ties to the changeling operation.)
- A **Bag of Holding** (smaller sibling to Tallow's) — practical for hauling the vault's coin.
- **3 runed iron nails** (as upstairs — anti-fiend wards) and a **Driftglobe** (portable light for the dark warren; a small mercy).
- A **sealed lead casket, warded, labeled *"DO NOT OPEN — '06"***. Inside (if a player insists): a **Vial of dark ichor** — a bound fiendish essence. Opening it is a bad idea (DM's discretion: a minor fiend or a curse) but it *can* be used as a component to bait/lure Xarrul. A high-risk, high-reward exploration payoff for a bold party. The wards on the casket (DC 15 Arcana) spell out plainly: *whatever is in here wants you to open it.*
---
## The Old Work (The Rift)
The deepest chamber, behind the barred and runed door off the Junction. This is why Orenn and Mags really live here — and the thing the hidden fifth rule means when it says *burn below and seal the door.*
> **Read-Aloud: The Old Work**
>
> *Za dveřmi je zima, která nemá co dělat s teplotou. Místnost je malá a kulatá a uprostřed podlahy je… trhlina. Ne ve skále. Ve vzduchu. Ve světě. Svislá jizva dlouhá jako člověk, po okrajích roztřepená, a skrze ni prosvítá šeď — plochá, nekonečná, špatná šeď éterické roviny. Kolem trhliny je do podlahy vyryt kruh znaků, stříbrem a solí, a ten kruh svítí slabě a unaveně, jako někdo, kdo drží dveře zavřené už příliš dlouho.*
>
> *Něco se na druhé straně pohne. A pak ještě něco. Trhlina je čím dál větší — a poprvé za patnáct let ji nikdo nehlídá.*
### What It Is
The planar fault beneath the tavern surfaces as the **thin point** upstairs; down here, at the lowest point, it has torn into an actual **rift** — a hand-thin tear the couple contained decades ago with a **silver-and-salt containment circle** (distinct from Orenn's *binding* circle upstairs). The circle is failing in step with the ward-sigils Xarrul has been cracking. This is the **source** of the ethereal bleed everyone's been feeling.
- **DC 14 Arcana:** the containment circle is the same craft as the upstairs work but older, and it's being eroded from the ethereal side — the same claw-marks that cracked the wards.
- **DC 16 Arcana:** the rift and the upstairs thin point are one fault. Widening or "using" this rift would be catastrophically less controllable than the upstairs thin point. **This is not where you do the dual-plane kill.** (Explicit, so a clever party doesn't try to run the Reckoning down here and derail it.)
### The Conversion (Optional — a lone explorer)
If a *single* PC lingers here alone, this is where Xarrul can reach them — a ward-snare pins them, or an **Ethereal Pull** drags them partway into the grey, and the fiend simply *talks*. They rejoin the party changed: genuinely convinced Xarrul should go free, and carrying a shard of its nature. This is **not** a charm — it's a conversation that worked, and it's one of the best engines for [Scenario F](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul) at a large table. Full scene, the player's note, the boon (the **Grey Step**), and the counterplay: [handouts/the-conversion.md](../handouts/the-conversion.md).
### Encounter — Creatures from the Rift
This is where "Xarrul can have some creatures from there" pays off. Xarrul doesn't lair *in* the rift — it lairs in the ethereal cellar (upstairs overlay, per canon) — but it has learned to **loose the scavengers** that gather at the tear, herding them at intruders like dogs.
Deploy as a scaled encounter (tune to party size / how hurt they are):
- **Baseline:** **3 Shadows** (CR 1/2) that pour out of the tear where the circle's light has thinned, plus **1 Ethereal Filcher** (CR 1) that darts in to *steal a valuable item* off a PC (DC 13 vs. Sleight-of-Hand-style grab) and flee back through the rift — a fantastic reason to chase, and a way to make loss of the vault's prize sting.
- **Harder:** add a **Specter** (CR 1) or upgrade to a lone **ethereal-touched horror** of the DM's making. If Xarrul is *actively present* on the ethereal side (late game), it can spend a turn "opening the gate" as a lair-flavored action, adding 1 Shadow per round until the circle is restored.
### Encounter — The Guardian (the pet)
Roaming the whole Deep Cellar — but denning near the rift, because it can hunt across the boundary — is **the couple's pet**, a bound **Phase Spider** the players may meet anywhere down here. Full tactical block below. It's the "fight a bit" the party will remember.
> **Read-Aloud: The Guardian**
>
> *Slyšíte to dřív, než to uvidíte — suché klepání, jako když někdo poklepává kostěnými prsty na kámen. Pak zmizí. A pak, z místa, kde před vteřinou nic nebylo, se to vynoří: pavouk velký jako lovecký pes, tělo lesklé a temné, a nohy, které se dotýkají země jen napůl — jako by si nebyl úplně jistý, na které straně světa vlastně je.*
**Phase Spider "Přástka"** — Large monstrosity, unaligned · **CR 3 (700 XP)**
**AC** 13 · **HP** 32 (5d10+5) · **Speed** 30 ft., climb 30 ft.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 15 (+2) | 15 (+2) | 12 (+1) | 7 (-2) | 10 (+0) | 6 (-2) |
**Skills** Stealth +6
**Senses** darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 10
**Ethereal Jaunt.** As a bonus action, the spider can shift from the Material Plane to the Ethereal Plane, or vice versa. (This is why it can guard a household on a thin point — no wall, and no plane, keeps it out.)
**Spider Climb / Web Walker.** Climbs difficult surfaces, including upside down, and ignores webbing movement restrictions.
**Actions**
**Bite.** *Melee Weapon Attack:* +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. *Hit:* 7 (1d10+2) piercing damage, and the target must make a DC 11 Constitution save, taking 18 (4d8) poison damage on a fail, half on a success. If the poison reduces the target to 0 HP, it's stable but poisoned and paralyzed for 1 hour.
**Running it well:**
- **It's a guard dog, not a monster.** It was *raised* by Orenn and Mags. It will **not** attack a creature that (a) carries Orenn's scent — anyone who handled his keys/body/clothes — or (b) speaks the household command word Mags knows, or (c) simply doesn't threaten the Vault or the Cells. A quiet, respectful party can pass it entirely (great stealth payoff). Present this: it *tracks* them, clicks, phases, watches — and holds fire until provoked.
- **Provoke it** (force the Vault, harm the Guest, attack it) and it fights like an ambush predator: bite, phase out (safe on the Ethereal Plane where non-ethereal weapons can't reach), reposition, phase back for another strike. Players need force damage, ethereal reach (Veil Dust!), or to catch it on the Material Plane to pin it.
- **After Orenn's death** it's agitated and grieving in its animal way — more skittish, more likely to lash out from fear. A druid/beast-handler (DC 14 Animal Handling) can calm it; killing it upsets Mags deeply if she learns of it.
- **Scaling:** for 5 PCs or a combat-hungry table, add **2 Giant Spiders** (CR 1, its brood) nesting in the passages. For a lighter table, run Přástka purely as an avoidable stealth obstacle.
---
## DM Cheat-Sheet — Running the Deep Cellar
**Pacing:** This is a 30–60 minute side-track, or the spine of the whole night for an exploration-hungry group. It runs parallel to the lockdown upstairs — while some PCs interrogate patrons, others can be down here. Cut between the two.
**The three payoffs, guaranteed:**
1. **Loot** — the Vault + Workroom + Deep Storage give gear that makes the Reckoning easier (Fiendbane Salt, silvered weapons, alchemy, silvervein root for Bren).
2. **Backstory** — the chalk wall, the trophies, the child's shoe, Cell Two, the Guest, and the ledger tell the whole truth about Orenn and Mags with almost no exposition.
3. **A fight on their terms** — rats (trivial), the poltergeist (medium), the phase spider (avoidable or hard), rift creatures (scalable), and optionally the Guest (CR 3).
**Threads back into the main game — surface at least one:**
- The chalk wall / Guest / trophies reveal Orenn was investigating the **Lambent Order** → feeds the murder mystery and the [Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md).
- The Workroom's **silvervein root** and Veil Dust → the [Possession](../storylines/possession.md) and [ethereal-trip](../storylines/ethereal-trip.md) subplots.
- The **Fiendbane Salt** and silvered gear → the means to pin Xarrul without paying Tallow.
- The vault **trophies** implicating both factions → a lit fuse if it ever reaches the main hall.
**If the party burns it (the fifth rule):** Orenn's contingency — *"burn the cellar stores and seal the door"* — is a real option. Torching the Workroom and Deep Storage and collapsing the door denies the loot but also **cuts off the rift's bleed into the tavern** (the fire consumes the failing containment and the stores that feed the fault's attraction), giving a partial ward-restoration effect equivalent to repairing the sigils. It's a scorched-earth ending Mags respects. The Guest, if still caged, dies in the fire unless freed first — make the players sit with that.

6
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@@ -21,11 +21,11 @@ Large stone hearth, fire burning low. The mantle holds a single iron bell that h
### Assassin Table (North-West)
A long table pushed against the wall. **Sevra** sits at the head with her back to the corner — she can see both the entrance and the cultist table. **Dace** is to her right, nursing a drink and making easy conversation with anyone nearby. **Kael** is standing, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, glaring at the cultist table.
A long table pushed against the wall. **Sevra** sits at the head with her back to the corner — she can see both the entrance and the cultist table. **Dace** is to her right, nursing a drink and making easy conversation with anyone nearby — jumpier than usual, though he'd blame the room. **Kael** is standing, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, glaring at the cultist table. **Thera "Even-Hand,"** the eldest blade present, sits a little apart with her hands folded, watching everything and saying almost nothing; Kael keeps glancing at her the way a dog checks on its master.
Three other unnamed guild members fill the rest of the table. They defer to Sevra completely.
Two other unnamed blades fill the rest of the table. They defer to Sevra completely.
**After the murder:** Kael wants to search the cultists by force. Sevra is holding him back — barely. Dace is being "helpful" to whoever is investigating, subtly steering suspicion toward the cultists.
**After the murder:** Kael wants to search the cultists by force. Sevra is holding him back — barely. Dace is being "helpful" to whoever is investigating, subtly steering suspicion toward the cultists. Thera does not join the noise; she drifts once to look at Orenn's body, reads it in a glance no one else can, and returns to her seat. See **[The House of Scales](../storylines/house-of-scales.md)**.
### Cultist Table (South-West)

10
location/tavern-overview.md
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@@ -55,9 +55,16 @@ The noise level before the brawl is a low murmur punctuated by occasional harsh
│ │ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────┘
┌───────┴───────┐
│ CELLAR │
│ CELLAR (UPPER)│
│ (trapdoor in │
│ storage) │
└───────┬───────┘
concealed door
┌───────┴───────┐
│ DEEP CELLAR │
│ (hidden warren:│
│ vault, cells, │
│ lab, the rift)│
└───────────────┘
```
@@ -74,3 +81,4 @@ The noise level before the brawl is a low murmur punctuated by occasional harsh
- The tavern is built on a **natural thin point** between the Material and Ethereal planes. Orenn and Mags knew this. It's one reason they chose this location — they could monitor it. It also means Veil Dust is more potent here, and ethereal entities find it easier to manifest.
- 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 contains **old ward-sigils** carved by Orenn and Mags when they moved in. These wards kept fiends from crossing the threshold in the Ethereal Plane. Xarrul broke them during the brawl — a character examining the foundation stones (DC 15 Investigation or Arcana) can find the cracked sigils.
- 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.

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@@ -1,27 +1,37 @@
# The Guild of Knives — Assassins
# The House of Scales — Assassins
*"We are not murderers. Murderers are sloppy, emotional, and cheap. We are professionals who provide a service that civilized society pretends it doesn't need. There is a difference."*
*"We are not murderers. Murderers are sloppy, emotional, and cheap. We weigh a life, we name the wrong that forfeited it, and we close the debt with one clean cut. There is a difference, and the city has learned to be grateful for it."*
— Sevra
---
## The Guild
The Guild of Knives is the city's oldest professional assassination ring. They operate on a strict code: clean kills, no collateral, no civilians, no suffering. They view their work as a craft — ugly but necessary, and deserving of the same discipline as surgery or law. Payment is always upfront, contracts are honored, and the guild's reputation is its currency.
The **House of Scales** is the city's licensed-in-all-but-name assassins' guild — a court of last resort the city tolerates because it *works*. Blood feuds don't spiral here; vendettas end in one sealed death instead of three generations of ambushes. Their emblem is a hanging balance with one pan empty. Their motto, worn on a small lead token every blade carries: **"One death, weighed."**
The guild has been in quiet conflict with the Lambent Order for months. The cultists have been taking side jobs — messy, ritualistic kills that undercut the guild's market and damage its reputation. Worse, someone within the guild has been *cooperating* with them.
They keep a codex, and they keep it like scripture:
Tonight, three named members are present, plus three unnamed guild soldiers.
- **Proof of grievance.** No contract without a real, demonstrated wrong. Fabricate one and *you* become the contract.
- **One warning.** Every target gets a single open, witnessed visit and a chance to settle. Roughly a third of contracts end here — the guild's proudest outcomes.
- **The clean kill.** Swift, painless, no collateral, no suffering, no terror-theatre.
- **The seal.** Every kill is claimed openly under the guild's mark within a day. No innocent hangs for their work.
- **The closing.** A sealed kill legally ends the blood-debt; retaliation is forbidden and the guild enforces the closing at its own expense. This is the clause that makes the city keep them.
The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding. The **Lambent Order** has been taking side jobs — messy, ritualistic kills that undercut the market and mock everything the codex stands for. Bodies turn up carved open, hearts missing, symbols cut into floorboards. Worse, someone inside the House has been *cooperating*.
Tonight, four named members are present, plus two unnamed blades.
> **The rot beneath the rot (DM).** Sevra thinks the guild's problem is a greedy traitor. It is — that's **Dace**. But there is a second, older wrongness in the House that no one has a word for yet, and it is sitting at this table too. **Thera** kills by the codex, flawlessly, and the souls of her marks do not go where souls are supposed to go. This is the "evil within the guild" the night can uncover — see [The House of Scales subplot](../storylines/house-of-scales.md). The two problems are braided: Dace's crude soul-trafficking to the cult is drawing exactly the attention Thera needs to stay buried, and she has come to this tavern to end him for it.
---
## Sevra — The Commander
## Sevra — The Commander (the Loyalist)
*"I don't need you to like me. I need you to be honest with me. Those are very different requests, and one of them will keep you alive."*
### Stat Block
**Sevra** — Medium humanoid (human), lawful evil
**Sevra** — Medium humanoid (human), lawful neutral
**AC** 16 (studded leather + DEX) | **HP** 52 (8d8+16) | **Speed** 30 ft.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
@@ -49,15 +59,16 @@ Tonight, three named members are present, plus three unnamed guild soldiers.
### Appearance & Personality
Mid-forties, lean, angular face, dark skin, close-cropped black hair. Every movement is deliberate. She sits with her back to the wall, eyes on every entrance. Wears practical dark clothing — no ornamentation, no vanity. A thin scar crosses her throat — someone tried to cut it years ago. The someone is dead.
Mid-forties, lean, angular face, dark skin, close-cropped black hair. Every movement is deliberate. She sits with her back to the wall, eyes on every entrance. Wears practical dark clothing — no ornamentation, no vanity, but the lead scale-token hangs openly at her throat. A thin scar crosses it — someone tried to cut that throat years ago. The someone is dead.
Sevra is the senior guild member present. She's holding the guild together through sheer authority while dealing with the mole, the territorial dispute with the cultists, and now a murder investigation. She's stretched thin but would die before showing it.
Sevra is the senior *contract* blade present and the guild's institutional conscience in the room. She believes in the codex the way other people believe in a god — not sentimentally, but as the one thing standing between the city and chaos. She thinks of the House as a civic institution and of herself as something between a judge and a plumber: she keeps the city's violence flowing through one clean pipe. She's stretched thin — the mole, the war with the cult, now a murder — but would die before showing it.
**Key traits:**
- Utterly composed. Speaks in measured, precise sentences.
- Values honesty in a transactional sense — she keeps her word because her word has value.
- Pragmatic to the bone. She'll work with players if the math works out.
- Suspects Dace is the traitor but needs proof. Moving on a guild member without evidence breaks the code and fractures the guild.
- Her blind spot is institutional pride: an accusation against one of the guild's *best* reads to her as slander until the evidence is procedural. **Win her with proof, not argument.**
- Suspects Dace is the traitor but needs proof. Moving on a guild member without evidence breaks the code and fractures the House.
### What She Knows
@@ -69,11 +80,20 @@ Sevra is the senior guild member present. She's holding the guild together throu
**Will trade for proof of the traitor's identity:**
- The guild will withdraw from the tavern peacefully — no faction war.
- She'll share everything she knows about the cultists' activities, including safe house locations.
- She owes the party a favor — one job, any target, with the usual code in place.
- She owes the party a favour — one job, any target, with the codex in place.
### 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.
If the players bring her **proof of the rot** (the soulcoin, a marked victim, Thera caught marking someone), run her like a dam breaking:
1. **Denial.** Institutional pride. *"Thera has forty-one seals, none disputed. Bring me that again with something I can stand on."*
2. **The single crack.** One provable, physical thing she can't explain away — and she goes very still.
3. **Terrifying thoroughness.** Once she accepts *one* impossible fact, she follows the thread cold and fast, and she becomes the players' most capable ally against Thera. This is the loyalist turning on the rot — the emotional core of the whole subplot.
---
## Dace — The Traitor
## Dace — The Traitor (the Marked)
*"Relax, friend. Drink? It's going to be a long night — might as well be comfortable."*
@@ -108,6 +128,7 @@ Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Lambent Order for six months. The c
- A clinical sociopath who learned charm as a professional skill.
- Will actively "help" the investigation — volunteering theories, offering to search rooms, being useful — while subtly steering suspicion toward the cultists.
- If cornered with evidence, his warmth evaporates instantly. The real Dace is cold, calculating, and willing to fight his way out.
- **He's jumpier than usual tonight.** He'll blame the murder, the lockdown, the tension. The truth is worse (below).
### His Secret
@@ -119,21 +140,34 @@ Dace has been meeting a Lambent Order contact in the tavern's private room to ar
- Kael, if asked privately, will say Dace was the last person to take a guild contract that ended up with ritual marks on the body. "He said he subcontracted the cleanup. Since when do we subcontract?"
- The cultist pin found in the private room — Dace pockets things. A DC 14 Investigation of his person finds a **second cultist pin** hidden in his boot, kept as insurance.
### The Mark on Dace (DM — the braid to Thera)
**Dace is already condemned, and he doesn't know it.** His dealings with the Lambent Order drew crude, public attention to soul-death in the city — the exact thing [Thera](#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) exists to keep invisible. She has decided he is a liability, and during the formal-seeming little courtesy she paid him earlier tonight (a hand on his shoulder, a coin turned on the table, a murmured word) **she marked him.** In nine days the mark ripens and something eats his soul; the codex will never know, because on paper Dace will simply have been found dead of guild justice or a knife in an alley.
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*, Mags's cleaner's instinct, 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*.
**His fate is a fork the players tip (see the subplot).** Thera is still weighing recruit-or-silence. Expose Dace loudly and publicly and she lets the mark run (liability confirmed). Let him slip away quiet and useful and she may pull him inward instead — the guild's rot always did recruit the already-compromised.
### 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.
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.
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.**
---
## Kael — The Hothead
## Kael — The Hothead (the Witness)
*"I'm done talking. I've been done talking since they started poaching our work. Every day we sit here is a day they get bolder."*
### Stat Block
**Kael** — Medium humanoid (half-orc), chaotic evil
**Kael** — Medium humanoid (half-orc), lawful neutral
**AC** 15 (chain shirt + DEX) | **HP** 45 (6d8+18) | **Speed** 30 ft.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
@@ -154,15 +188,16 @@ Sevra's reaction to proof: cold fury. She won't kill him in the bar (the rules s
### Appearance & Personality
Big, scarred, half-orc with a shaved head and a permanent scowl. He's the guild's enforcer — the one they send when subtlety isn't required. His arms are a map of old fights and he wears them like medals.
Big, scarred, half-orc with a shaved head and a permanent scowl. He's the guild's enforcer — the one they send when subtlety isn't required. His arms are a map of old fights and he wears them like medals. The scale-token at his throat is the most polished thing on him.
Kael is loyal to the guild with the fervor of someone who found a family after a lifetime without one. The cult's disrespect enrages him on a personal level — they're not just poaching contracts, they're mocking the guild's code, the only code Kael has ever believed in.
Kael is loyal to the House with the fervour of someone who found a family after a lifetime without one. The *code* is the only law he has ever believed in, and the cult's disrespect enrages him personally — they're not just poaching contracts, they're mocking the one sacred thing in his life.
**Key traits:**
- Aggressive but not stupid. He reads rooms badly but reads people well.
- Fiercely loyal to Sevra. He'll follow her lead even when he disagrees.
- Honest to a fault. He cannot and will not lie convincingly. If asked direct questions, he answers directly. This makes him the easiest assassin to talk to, despite his hostility.
- He didn't kill Orenn. He's the most vocally angry about the death, not because of Orenn personally, but because killing in neutral ground is a violation of everything he believes in.
- He didn't kill Orenn. He's the most vocally angry about the death — killing on neutral ground violates everything he believes in.
- **He idolises Thera.** She was kind to him when he was a nobody aspirant. He would take a blade for her without thinking. This is exactly why what she is will break him.
### What He Knows
@@ -170,8 +205,112 @@ Kael is loyal to the guild with the fervor of someone who found a family after a
- He suspects Dace — "Too smooth. Nobody's that nice in this business." But Kael is biased (he's suspicious of everyone personable) and Sevra has told him to drop it without evidence.
- He saw Bren acting strangely during the brawl — "The crazy one went rigid. Stiff as a board. Staring at the bar. Not at the fight. At the *bar*." This is because Bren/Skein was watching Xarrul kill Orenn.
### The Witness Who Doesn't Know What He Saw (DM)
Kael is the party's unwitting key to the rot — the honest man who blurts the true thing without understanding it. He can't lie and he doesn't hedge, so a player who simply *asks him about Thera* gets the unvarnished unease he's never dared examine:
> "Thera? Best of us. Cleanest blade in the House. …Why?" *(beat)* "It's nothing. Just — you hear things. A mark of hers, up in the Kettle district. Family paid good coin for a raising and the priest couldn't *find* him. Said there was nothing there to call back. Cleric of the Threshold, mind, not some hedge-mumbler. I don't — that's not our business. We close the debt, the gods handle the rest." *(he clearly does not believe the gods handled it)*
He will resist any suggestion that Thera is dirty — right up until the players put physical proof in front of him, at which point Kael is the most dangerous ally they could have, because betrayal by the one blade he worshipped turns his loyalty into something incandescent.
---
## Unnamed Guild Members (3)
## Thera "Even-Hand" — The Radical (the Rot)
Use **Spy** stat block (MM p.349) for all three. They stay quiet, defer to Sevra, and watch the room. If combat starts, they fight as a unit with Sevra. None of them have useful information — they're muscle.
*"The Scales sell death to whoever brings a grievance and a fee. I have never once taken coin. Every name I've closed deserved the closing. Tell me, honestly — which of us is the mercenary?"*
### Who She Appears To Be
Late fifties. Silver hair in a neat braid, a plain grey coat, hands folded when she isn't using them. She is the most decorated blade in the room and the least threatening to look at — she has the stillness of a chapel and the warmth of a favourite teacher. Aspirants adore her. Sevra respects her. Kael would die for her. When she speaks it is quietly, courteously, and people lean in to listen. She buys no drinks and tells no jokes, and somehow that reads as dignity rather than coldness.
She is, on the surface, the codex made flesh: forty-one seals, none disputed, every warning delivered, every kill clean, every debt closed. She is the House's proof that a killer can be a good and lawful person.
### What She Actually Is (DM)
Thera serves something older than the codex and beneath the city — a thing that mints souls and calls the killing a *tithe*. Her kills are codex-perfect on the surface and monstrous underneath: hidden inside the mandatory warning visit are three small gestures — a touch of the doorframe, a coin turned once on the table, a word of an old tongue breathed under a farewell — and the marked die genuinely clean while their souls go *down* instead of on, folded cold into a coin. She believes, sincerely, that she is not a murderer but an administrator of a debt the city owes and refuses to look at, and that reserving death for the deserving makes her *more* righteous than the guild she hides inside. She has never taken coin. That, to her, settles the question.
**Do not name the entity, the pact, the ledgers, or the wider cell at the table.** The oneshot's payload is a feeling, not a lecture: *this guild of clean, principled killers has something inside it that turns people into currency, and its finest member is the one doing it.* Everything the players need to feel that is physical — a coin, a seam of grey light, a blade who is too perfect. The rest is a thread for another campaign.
**Why she's here tonight:** to end Dace. His crude soul-butchery for the Lambent Order is dragging soul-death into public view — the one thing that could get people *looking*. She has already marked him and is deciding whether he dies or gets recruited. She is also quietly appalled by the cultists on principle: amateurs, desecrating something sacred for spell components.
### The Tells
- **The gestures.** A PC who watches her greet or part from someone — including the moment she "comforted" Dace earlier — may catch the doorframe-touch, the single turn of a coin on the table, the murmured word (DC 16 Perception; DC 14 Insight to sense it was deliberate, ritual, *rehearsed into the courtesy*). Meaningless now. Unforgettable later.
- **Animals and small wrongnesses.** No dog will settle near her. Milk left by her cup sours. A marked person in her presence sleeps badly and doesn't know why.
- **The read.** DC 16 Insight: her warmth is entirely real and entirely surface, and underneath it she looks at people the way a butcher looks — gently — at livestock. She is *appraising*.
- **The brand.** If the players get her near Orenn's body or ask her opinion of the killing, she reads it fluently where no one else can: *"That isn't a wound. That's a withdrawal — someone drew him out through the chest."* Then, half to herself, with something almost like professional distaste: *"…not our coin, though. Cruder. Whatever did this was hungry."* This makes her a natural murder suspect (she plainly *knows* soul-death). It is a dead end for the murder — Xarrul killed Orenn — and a live wire for the world: **why does the guild's finest blade recognise the unmaking of a soul on sight?**
### The Soulcoin (the gut-punch)
Thera carries at least one **soulcoin** — the physical proof the whole subplot is built to deliver. Retrieving it is hard (she is a top blade; pickpocketing her is a DC 20 Sleight of Hand, and she notices), but she may use one (see her stat block), and one turns up on her body if she falls.
> 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.
- **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.
- **If destroyed with charge remaining, the soul escapes** — a freed spirit that may thank its liberator, testify to what was done to it, or, if it died screaming, turn on the nearest living thing. A cracked, spent coin left behind is inert evidence.
### Stat Block
**Thera "Even-Hand"** — Medium humanoid (human), lawful evil
**AC** 17 (studded leather +1, DEX) | **HP** 84 (13d8+26) | **Speed** 30 ft.
**Proficiency** +3
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 12 (+1) | 18 (+4) | 14 (+2) | 15 (+2) | 16 (+3) | 15 (+2) |
**Saving Throws** DEX +7, WIS +6
**Skills** Stealth +10, Deception +5, Insight +6, Perception +6, Persuasion +5, Religion +5
**Damage Resistances** necrotic
**Senses** passive Perception 16
**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant, and one tongue no one at the table can place
**Assassinate.** In the first round, she has advantage on attacks against any creature that hasn't acted, and any hit against a surprised creature is a critical hit.
**Sneak Attack (1/turn).** 4d6 extra damage when she has advantage or an ally is within 5 ft. of the target.
**Evasion.** Half damage on failed DEX saves, none on a success.
**Unweighed (divination-blank).** Thera has advantage on saving throws against divination magic, and spells that would detect her alignment, read her thoughts, or locate/scry her automatically fail. A diviner who notices a *suspicious blank spot* where a person should read has, in fact, found her.
### Actions
**Multiattack.** Thera makes two attacks with the Even Hand, or two with her hand crossbow.
**The Even Hand.** *(a slim, utterly silent blade — it makes no sound leaving the sheath, striking, or being drawn free)* Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d6+4) piercing damage plus 7 (2d6) necrotic damage.
**Hand Crossbow.** Ranged Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d6+4) piercing damage.
**The Marking (1/day).** Thera weaves the mark into a touch or a courteous gesture toward one creature she can reach. The target must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or be *marked*: for the next hour it has vulnerability to Thera's necrotic damage, can't regain hit points, and a hairline seam of grey light shows at the base of its throat. Consecration or *Remove Curse* ends it early. *(Out of combat, this is the marking from the journal — a nine-day, savable death sentence, and it is what she has already done to Dace.)*
### Reactions
**Uncanny Dodge.** When an attacker she can see hits her, she halves the damage.
### 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.
*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.*
### If Exposed or Cornered
Thera does not panic and does not run at first. She reframes:
> "You've found a coin and decided you understand it. You don't." *(the warmth never leaves her voice)* "This city is in debt, and the debt is real, and it will be paid by *someone* — in order, by the deserving, by my hand — or in a single terrible hour, by everyone, including the child asleep over your head. I chose the mercy that keeps the lights on. When you're older you'll understand the arithmetic. Most of us do, eventually."
- **If Sevra is convinced** (proof, not argument — see Sevra's arc), Thera's cover is gone and the loyalists turn: Sevra and, brokenly, Kael side with the party. Thera fights or flees.
- **If Sevra is in denial**, the players face Thera without the guild — and possibly *against* Kael, who won't believe it until it's too late. Deadlier, and tragic.
- She would rather kill Dace than let him be questioned about *why* she wants him gone; if the players are about to wring a confession out of him that could expose soul-work, she moves on Dace herself.
### The Campaign Seed (light touch)
However the night ends, Thera is a splinter of something larger and older in the House that outlives this tavern. If she escapes, the rot walks out the door. If she dies, a cracked coin and a horrified Sevra remain — and somewhere a ledger the players never saw is short one collector. Leave it there. The players should go home unsettled, not briefed.
---
## Unnamed Blades (2)
Use the **Spy** stat block (MM p.349). They stay quiet, defer to Sevra, and watch the room. In a fight they act as a unit — normally at Sevra's side, but if Thera is exposed and Sevra is still in denial, one may hesitate, unsure who to follow. None of them know anything useful; they're muscle.

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- Has not processed Orenn's death and will not during this session. She's running on professional autopilot. The crash comes later, when the doors open and the night is over.
- She knows fiends. When players bring evidence of fiendish involvement, something changes in her — the grief hardens into something older: the *work*.
## The Warden's Mark (DM)
Mags carries a **dormant [Brand of Spite](xarrul.md#actions)** over her heart — the same hand-shaped mark that killed Orenn, only fainter and cold. Xarrul branded both wardens: it killed Orenn and *held* Mags in reserve (two dead wardens at once would raise the alarm too soon, and a living Mags keeps the room in line). **She knows.** She has felt the cold hand on her chest for weeks, told no one — not even Orenn — and it is part of why she is so fatalistic. When she says *"Orenn and I could have taken it. One of us isn't here,"* the truth underneath is that she no longer believes she is a whole one of herself.
**Discovery (a mid-game presence beat):** the players can find the mark through [Orenn's silver mirror](orenn.md#items-on-his-person) (the distortion sits over her heart, like the thin point), a DC 14 Medicine or DC 15 Arcana check up close, or Bren reacting to it. It tells them, without a word, that Xarrul is already *inside* the house — inside *her*.
### The Compromised Statline (Finale)
Full-power Mags (AC 16, 65 HP, two attacks at +8) will either solo Xarrul or steamroll a party that turns on her — neither of which you want. So when it matters, **Xarrul triggers the mark** (Visions of Spite through the brand), and Mags fights *compromised*:
- **HP 39** (she has been bleeding vitality to the brand for weeks).
- **Disadvantage on attack rolls** — she is fighting through a waking nightmare (Orenn's death; or the unlabeled child's shoe from the Vault).
- At the start of each of her turns, **DC 15 Wisdom save or she loses her action**, frozen in the vision. *(This is the exact mechanism that killed [Orenn](orenn.md#how-he-died).)*
- *Remove Curse*, *Greater Restoration*, or killing Xarrul ends it and restores her to full.
**Use it both ways:**
- **Party opposes Xarrul:** the trigger is a crisis — their heaviest hitter drops out, and clearing her brand becomes a priority mid-fight.
- **Party sides with Xarrul ([The Open Door](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul)):** the trigger is the alliance's first favor — Xarrul sidelines her *for* the party, and they watch it do to Mags exactly what it did to Orenn. The finale becomes a desperate **holding action** against a grief-broken, half-frozen Mags rather than a slugfest: winnable, tragic, and *the players'* to win, not hers.
If a table needs a bigger fight on the join path, add **Sevra** at Mags's side rather than inflating Mags's numbers.
## What She Knows
**Will share freely:**
@@ -85,12 +106,17 @@ She is direct, blunt, and has no patience for lies. She can tell when someone is
- Her assessment of whether the fiend can be beaten ("Orenn and I could have taken it. Orenn and I. One of us isn't here anymore.")
- The Oil of Etherealness in the bedroom
**Will never volunteer — but the players may find it themselves (and probably will, if they explore):**
- The **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** in the cellar and everything behind it — the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: the Vault, the laboratory, the caged **[Guest](the-guest.md)**, the corpse in the second cell, and the failing rift. This is the couple's real, ongoing operation, and Mags assumes no one alive but her knows it exists. If the players surface any of it — the fortune, the prisoner, the trophies implicating patrons upstairs — she doesn't lie, but she goes very still, and what she says next is some of the rawest honesty in the module (see Relationships). In the direst circumstances she may *send* them down for the [Fiendbane Salt](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-cleaners-arsenal) or silvervein root, handing over the black key with the flat instruction: *"Take what you need. Don't touch the cages. And whatever you find down there — it doesn't change tonight."*
## Her Role in the Session
Mags is the emotional anchor and the gatekeeper. She controls access to the tavern's secrets and to the most powerful tools available. She's also the person enforcing the lockdown — which means she's keeping assassins and cultists in the same room, a pressure cooker that she's managing through sheer force of will.
She will not fight alongside the players unless the fiend manifests in the Material Plane inside the tavern. Then all bets are off. The retirement ends and the cleaner comes back.
**If the players side *with* the fiend:** she becomes the obstacle between them and its crossing — see [The Warden's Mark](#the-wardens-mark-dm) for how to run that fight so the *players*, not Mags, decide the night.
**If the players fail or choose not to confront the fiend:** Mags will hunt it herself after the session ends. She'll probably die. She doesn't care.
## Relationships
@@ -100,3 +126,4 @@ She will not fight alongside the players unless the fiend manifests in the Mater
- **Bren:** She's been feeding him and keeping him safe for months. She suspects something is wrong beyond madness but hasn't had time to investigate.
- **Sevra:** Professional respect, mutual wariness. Mags knows what the guild does and doesn't approve, but Sevra has always respected the rules of the house.
- **Haddon:** She doesn't trust him. Never has. Can't articulate why — just a feeling. (Her instinct is correct.)
- **The [Guest](the-guest.md):** The prisoner she's fed twice a day for eleven years and never once called by a name. If the players confront her about it, she doesn't defend it and she doesn't flinch: *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."* If they freed it, she's grimly unsurprised. If they killed it in its cage, she doesn't recoil — she *recognizes* the choice, and that recognition is its own quiet verdict on them. The Guest is the clearest mirror of what "cleaner" really meant, and Mags will not pretend otherwise once it's in the open.

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They retired fifteen years ago after a job that went wrong — details are scarce, but Mags has a scar that runs from her left temple to her jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after that. They bought the Burnt Tongue because it was the last place anyone would look for them, and because the thin point in the cellar needed watching.
### 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 cleaner 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 — fiend-hunting alchemicals for themselves, and Veil Dust as a *tool* for watching the thin point (never for sale). 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 **Lambent Order**. 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. Orenn was behind the bar during the brawl. Everyone was distracted. Xarrul materialized just enough to touch him from the other side, branded him, locked his mind, and struck — then retreated to the Ethereal Plane before the dust settled. The expression on Orenn's face isn't surprise at death. It's the last frame of whatever Xarrul forced him to see.
@@ -61,6 +72,7 @@ He didn't know about Xarrul specifically, but he was preparing. The holy water,
## 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 opens the **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** to the Deep Cellar and the Arcane-locked [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) below. 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
- A **small silver mirror** (not magical, but Orenn carried it out of habit — in the cleaner days, mirrors were used to spot ethereal entities by the distortion they cause in reflections. DC 15 Perception while using the mirror in the cellar reveals faint distortions near the thin point.)

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## Personality
Tallow is a survivor. He has no ideology, no loyalty, and no principles beyond one: protect the business. He's been the middle man between the Guild of Knives and the Lambent Order for years, supplying both sides with what they need and profiting from the tension between them. The barkeep's death terrifies him — not because he cared about Orenn, but because Orenn's neutral ground was the ecosystem that kept his business alive.
Tallow is a survivor. He has no ideology, no loyalty, and no principles beyond one: protect the business. He's been the middle man between the House of Scales and the Lambent Order for years, supplying both sides with what they need and profiting from the tension between them. The barkeep's death terrifies him — not because he cared about Orenn, but because Orenn's neutral ground was the ecosystem that kept his business alive.
**Key traits:**
- Never gives information for free. Always wants something in return — not always gold; sometimes a favor, sometimes a secret, sometimes just the satisfaction of creating a debt.

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# The Guest — The Caged Face
*"They call me the Guest. Isn't that gracious? As if I might leave whenever I liked. As if the door were a courtesy." — spoken with a warm smile, in whatever voice you'd most like to trust.*
---
## What It Is
The Guest is a **changeling** — a shapeshifter of no fixed face — that Orenn and Mags captured on a job roughly **eleven years ago** and never released. It is the living secret at the bottom of the tavern, and the proof that the couple never truly retired. It is found caged in **Cell One** of the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-one--the-guest).
For over a decade it has been their **off-book asset**: a face they could send anywhere, to sit at any table, to become anyone, and come back with what the couple needed to know. When they told the world they poured drinks, the Guest was out wearing someone else's life, listening. This is "the thing they still have going on."
It is charming, patient, exhausted, and an extraordinary liar. It is not evil — but it is not safe, and eleven years in a cage have made it desperate in a way that hides very, very well behind that smile.
---
## Stat Block (Changeling / Doppelganger)
**The Guest** — Medium monstrosity (shapechanger), neutral
**AC** 14 · **HP** 52 (8d8+16) · **Speed** 30 ft.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 11 (+0) | 18 (+4) | 14 (+2) | 15 (+2) | 14 (+2) | 16 (+3) |
**Saving Throws** CHA +5
**Skills** Deception +8, Insight +4, Persuasion +5, Stealth +6
**Condition Immunities** charmed
**Senses** passive Perception 12
**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant, Infernal, + can mimic any language it has heard spoken
**Shapechanger.** As an action, it can polymorph into any Small or Medium humanoid it has seen, or back into its true, features-blurred form. Its statistics are the same in each form. Its equipment isn't transformed. It reverts on death.
**Ambusher.** In the first round of combat, it has advantage on attack rolls against any creature it surprised.
**Read Thoughts (recharge, at will while calm).** It magically reads the surface thoughts of one creature within 60 ft. (as *detect thoughts*, no save for surface thoughts). This is how its lies fit you so perfectly — it hears what you want to hear before you say it. *DM: this is why the Guest is so persuasive. It is literally reading the table.*
**Actions**
**Multiattack.** The Guest makes two melee attacks.
**Slam.** *Melee Weapon Attack:* +6 to hit, reach 5 ft. *Hit:* 7 (1d6+4) bludgeoning damage. (If it can arm itself — a stolen blade, a shard of the cell — treat as a shortsword, +6, 1d6+4 piercing.)
> **The suppressant.** The couple keep the Guest on a **"trim dose"** — an alchemical suppressant (brewed in the [Workroom](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-workroom-laboratory), noted in the ledger) that dulls its shapeshifting and keeps it compliant. **While recently dosed (default state when found), it cannot use Shapechanger and its Read Thoughts is unreliable (DM's discretion).** If a full day passes without a dose — or if a player, the escape, or the fire disrupts the regimen — the suppressant fades and the full stat block comes online. Time is a factor the Guest is quietly, patiently counting.
---
## Appearance
In its **true form**: a slight, ageless figure with skin like smoothed candle-wax and pale, featureless eyes — a face that looks unfinished, a sculptor's first pass. It rarely shows this form willingly; it finds it obscene, and so will the players.
In its **worn form** (what the party first sees): whatever face serves. By default, when the door opens, it wears **someone one of the PCs would trust** — read the table, borrow a beloved mentor, a dead sibling, a familiar barkeep. If it has been dosed and can't shift, it holds the **last face it wore for a job** — and there is a real chance that face is *someone the party has met upstairs*, which is its own cold little mystery.
---
## The Leverage — Why It Hasn't Just Left
Eleven years and it hasn't escaped, because Orenn and Mags built the cage out of more than iron:
1. **The suppressant** (above) — dosed, it can't shift, and a changeling that can't change is just a prisoner.
2. **The ward-lock** on the cell (runed nails; DC 15 Thieves' Tools, jolts on failure) and **Přástka**, the [phase spider](../location/deep-cellar.md#encounter--the-guardian), which can follow it across planes. There is nowhere a changeling can run that a phase spider can't.
3. **The real chain — leverage.** The couple know its **true name** and, worse, they know the names of the people still hunting it for a job it did before they caught it. The moment it surfaces, those people find it. Orenn's promise, kept for eleven years: *behave, and we never make that call.* With Orenn dead, that promise just died too — and the Guest knows it. **This is the crack the players can pry at, in either direction.**
---
## What It Knows (the reason to talk to it at all)
The Guest is the best-informed prisoner in the building, because its whole function was *knowing things*:
- **The couple's true history** — every job on the chalk wall, who paid, who died, what's in the Vault, and what happened to the changeling in **Cell Two** (*"They called her the Guest before me. When she stopped being useful, they stopped feeding her. I listened to it take eleven days. So — you'll understand if I'm eager to be useful."*).
- **The Lambent Order.** This is the hook that threads the exploration back into the murder. Orenn's last and longest assignment for the Guest was to **infiltrate the cult** — the Guest spent nights wearing a member's face at meetings in the [private room](../location/back-rooms.md) and beyond. It can reveal: the cult's obsession with the thin point, the name **Mother Vyre**, that they were preparing to *summon something*, and that Orenn was closing in on them. It does **not** know the fiend was Xarrul, or that the summoning already happened tonight — it's been in a cell. But what it knows corroborates the whole cult subplot and can point a stuck party toward the [Lambent Order](../storylines/lambent-order.md) and the [Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md).
- **Where Orenn hid things** (the black key, the Vault's contents) — it watched the couple for eleven years. It misses nothing.
- **It did not kill Orenn** and has an airtight alibi (a locked cell three floors down). But it will happily *let* the party suspect whomever suits its purposes, if that buys it freedom.
---
## Personality & How to Play It
Play the Guest as the **most reasonable person the party meets all night** — and let that be the trap. It never rages, never begs crudely. It reads the room (literally) and offers each PC exactly the tone they'll trust. Beneath it: an eleven-year hunger for the open air, and a mind that has had a very long time to plan.
**Key traits:**
- **Truth is its favorite lie.** It prefers to tell the truth, beautifully, and let you draw the wrong conclusion. It only lies outright when cornered — and it's very good at it (Deception +8; contest against passive Insight or an active check, at disadvantage for the PC if the Guest read their thoughts first).
- **It bargains.** It offers information as currency — a real, checkable fact first (to build trust), then asks for something small (water, the truth about what's happening upstairs, a loosened manacle), escalating toward the door.
- **It does not forgive the couple, and it is honest about that.** *"I don't hate them. Hatred is for people who had a choice. I simply intend to outlive them. One down."*
- **It is genuinely afraid of the rift.** When the [Old Work](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-old-work) stirs, the Guest goes still and quiet — the one thing that reliably cracks its composure. *"Whatever your barkeep's death let in — it's down here too. I've been listening to it grow for weeks. Let me out before it decides a caged meal is the easiest meal."*
### Sample Dialogue
**On first contact (warm, disarming):**
- *"You're not them. Good. New faces. I collect those."* [a small, private joke]
- *"Ask me anything. Truly. I've had eleven years to get my story straight, and the funny thing is — I don't need to lie to you. Not yet."*
**Building trust (offers a free, true fact):**
- *"The woman with the scar — Mags — she keeps a black iron key. It opens every honest lock in this building and one dishonest one. Check the dead man's belt. There. Now you owe me nothing, and you know I don't waste your time."*
**The pitch (its real goal):**
- *"I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to be practical. There is a fiend in the walls of this place, your barkeep is dead, and the only person down here who has spent years watching the thing between the planes — is in this cell. Let me out. I'll earn it. I always earn it."*
**When it talks about Cell Two (the crack in the mask):**
- [quietly, no charm at all] *"She scratched 'I was real' into that door for a decade. She wasn't, by the end. Neither will I be. That's what the cage does. It's not the dying I'm afraid of."*
**If cornered / exposed as lying:**
- [the warmth doesn't drop — that's what unnerves] *"Yes. I lied. You'd have lied too, in here. Now — do you punish me for it, or do you use me? I'm more useful angry than most people are grateful."*
---
## The Choice (and the Consequences)
Meeting the Guest is a **genuine moral fork** with real mechanical outcomes. There is no clean answer — which is the module's whole thesis.
| Choice | What happens |
|---|---|
| **Free it, trust it** | It keeps its word *as far as it goes*. It'll trade everything it knows about the cult (a real leg-up on the Reckoning), and may even fight the rift creatures beside the party — it wants that tear closed as much as anyone. Then, at the first unwatched moment, it takes a face and **vanishes** into the city. It doesn't betray the party; it simply leaves, wearing someone. A loose end, walking. |
| **Free it, then try to bind/control it** | It agrees, smiles, complies — and works the whole time to slip the deal. If it gets a day (suppressant fades) or an opening, it turns: full stat block, Ambusher, and if it can it takes **a PC's face** first to sow chaos before escaping. A memorable, dangerous fight or chase (it may flee as a rat through the [infestation](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-junction-hub-cave) — a horrible callback). |
| **Leave it caged** | It's furious behind the smile. As the party leaves it calls after them — soft, reasonable, devastating — *"The door swings shut the same way for everyone down here. Remember that, when it's your turn."* If the party later **burns the cellar** (the fifth rule) without freeing it, it dies in the fire. Make them hear about it. |
| **Kill it** | Easy, if it's dosed and caged. It doesn't fight — it looks almost relieved. *"There. That's the kindest thing anyone's done for me in eleven years. I hope someone's that kind to you."* Its info dies with it. If Mags learns the party murdered a caged prisoner, it colors how she sees them — not with horror (she's done worse) but with recognition, which is its own kind of judgment. |
---
## Hooks Into the Rest of the Session
- **Murder mystery / cult:** the Guest's infiltration intel corroborates the Lambent Order subplot and can un-stick a party that hasn't cracked the cult. It's the exploration track's bridge back to the main mystery.
- **Character secrets:** at least one Personal Goal in [character-secrets](../handouts/character-secrets.md) points a PC at the Guest specifically (a face from their past, a contact to free, or a mark to silence). If a PC secretly knows the Guest, the cell scene detonates.
- **Mags:** she knows exactly what's down there and expects the players never to find it. If they free or kill the Guest, raise it with her — her reaction (defensive, then bleakly honest) is some of the best late-game character work available. *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."*
- **The rift:** the Guest is an early-warning system for the [Old Work](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-old-work) — its fear telegraphs the danger before the party stumbles into it.

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## Overview
Xarrul is an ancient, cunning fiend — not a brute, not a conqueror. A manipulator. A patient, vindictive intelligence that has survived for centuries by being smarter than the things that summoned it. It was bound by the Lambent Order, sent to assassinate Sevra, intercepted by the Guild of Knives, and accidentally freed when the assassins broke its bindings without replacing them.
Xarrul is an ancient, cunning fiend — not a brute, not a conqueror. A manipulator. A patient intelligence that has survived for centuries by being smarter than the things that summoned it. It was bound by the Lambent Order, sent to assassinate Sevra, intercepted by the House of Scales, and accidentally freed when the assassins broke its bindings without replacing them.
Now Xarrul is loose in the Ethereal Plane, anchored to the thin point beneath the Burnt Tongue, and enjoying itself for the first time in a very long while. The cultists tried to use it. The assassins tried to weaponize it. Xarrul decided: *why not both?* Kill the barkeep in a way that frames both factions, then watch them destroy each other from the comfort of the space between worlds.
For all those centuries, Xarrul has never once been *real*. It has been summoned, bound, sent on errands, and dismissed — a whisper behind the glass, a borrowed claw, watching mortal life the way you watch a fire through a window: close enough to feel nothing. It does not want power or conquest. It wants to stand on the *other side* of the glass — to stop being a thing that is called, and become a thing that lives here.
It is intelligent, patient, and cruel. It doesn't want to escape — not yet. It wants to watch the fire it lit.
The Burnt Tongue is its chance. The tavern sits on a thinning veil at a natural peak, and for fifteen years one man kept that veil mended: Orenn, the warden. Killing Orenn was the first move of an escape — remove the keeper and the door opens on its own. Everything since (the framing, the whispers, the faction blood) is not spite. It is *cover*: Xarrul learned, from centuries of being hunted by cleaners like Orenn, that the way to cross unnoticed is to keep everyone in the building too busy killing each other to notice the wards are dying.
It is intelligent, patient, and — beneath the amusement — genuinely monstrous. But it does not lie. In a house where everyone is hiding something, Xarrul tells the plain truth about what it is and what it wants. That is what makes it dangerous, and it is what makes *siding* with it possible (see [Scenario F: The Open Door](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul)).
## Stat Block
@@ -118,22 +120,87 @@ Xarrul stays in the Ethereal Plane, watches, and stirs trouble:
- **First priority:** Not getting trapped. It will use Slip Between and Ethereal Jaunt aggressively to avoid being pinned on one plane.
- **Second priority:** Turn the room against the players. Whisper of Ruin on the strongest melee character, Voice Thief to make allies distrust each other, telepathic taunts.
- **Third priority:** Mark and pressure the biggest threat. Brand the most dangerous PC (casters who can affect it across planes, anyone with Fiendbane Manacles), then loop: Visions of Spite to paralyze, Multiattack for crits, Visions again. Against a high-WIS party, skip Visions and grind with advantage Multiattacks. Against a low-WIS branded target, run the kill chain mercilessly. If they have Remove Curse, brand a different target each time it's cleansed to burn their spell slots.
- **It will NOT fight to the death.** If reduced to half HP or lower and restrained on the Material Plane, it negotiates — it's ancient and has information, names, and secrets it can trade.
- **It will NOT fight to the death.** If reduced to half HP or lower and restrained on the Material Plane, it negotiates — it's ancient and has information, names, and secrets it can trade. See [Scenario D: Negotiation](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-d-negotiation) and — if the party has soured on the cult *and* the couple — [Scenario F: The Open Door](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul).
### Loosing the Rift-Scavengers
Xarrul doesn't lair in the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md), but it has found the couple's failing containment down there — the **[Old Work](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-old-work)**, where the planar fault has torn into an actual rift — and it has learned to *use* the minor ethereal scavengers that gather at the tear. It herds them at intruders like hounds: shadows, an ethereal filcher, the occasional specter. This is how a party exploring the depths "meets Xarrul's creatures" without meeting Xarrul. If the party is down there and Xarrul is present on the ethereal side, it can spend a turn widening the tear to add another shadow per round — a cheap, deniable way to bleed a party it can't yet reach. It costs Xarrul nothing and teaches the players, viscerally, that the thing they're hunting can reach into places they thought were safe.
### The Dual-Plane Kill
See [The Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md). If players attempt the synchronized kill, Xarrul fights desperately on both planes. On the Ethereal Plane, it's more aggressive (this is its home ground). On the Material Plane, it tries to flee. Both halves must die within 1 round of each other for the cure to work.
## Motivation
## Motivation — What It Really Wants
Xarrul is not mindless evil. It's *petty* evil with cosmic patience. It was bound and enslaved for an errand (kill an assassin — beneath its dignity) by mortals who didn't understand what they were holding. The assassins, equally ignorant, broke its chains but gave it no respect. The barkeep? The barkeep's death was a *statement*: I am free, I am here, and the thing you all trusted most is gone because of what you all did.
Xarrul is not mindless evil, and it is not merely *petty* evil either. It has one clear, cold want: **to become real** — to cross the veil permanently and walk the world as a resident, not a summoned tool. For centuries it has been called up, bound, made to run errands, and dismissed; it wants to stand on the far side of the glass. Everything it does tonight serves that single end.
It killed Orenn because:
1. Orenn was the symbol of neutrality and order — destroying that destroys the social fabric
2. The Brand of Spite leaves evidence pointing at fiendish involvement, which the cultists would be blamed for
3. But the murder happened during a brawl the *assassins* started, so the timing implicates them
4. Maximum chaos. Both sides blame each other. Xarrul watches.
**Why it killed Orenn.** Not for revenge — or not *only*. Orenn was the **warden**: fifteen years of mending the ward-sigils and watching the thin point, the one hand holding the door shut. Kill the keeper and the veil decays on its own. The murder was the first move of an escape, dressed up as a statement. That it was also satisfying — the cultists tried to enslave it, the assassins broke its chains and gave it no respect — was a bonus, not the point.
It has no interest in The Opening. It doesn't care about Mother Vyre's grand design. It's not part of a larger plan. It's a loose thread that might unravel everything, or might simply drift away after tonight if no one confronts it.
**Why the chaos.** The framing, the whispers, the faction blood — none of it is spite. It is **cover**. Xarrul spent centuries being hunted by cleaners like Orenn; it knows the only way to cross unnoticed is to keep everyone busy killing each other while the wards quietly die. Every manipulation is operational:
- The Brand leaves fiendish evidence → the cult gets blamed.
- The murder happened during the assassins' brawl → the timing implicates *them*.
- Both sides at each other's throats → no one tends the veil. That is the *goal*, not a side effect.
**On the Opening.** Xarrul has no interest in Mother Vyre's grand design and is not part of her plan — but it is not a harmless loose thread either. Where the cult wants to dissolve *every* wall between planes for everyone, Xarrul wants one crack, just wide enough for itself. It is, functionally, the **enemy of the Opening** — and that is exactly the leverage it offers a party desperate enough to bargain (see [The Reckoning — Scenario F](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul)).
**The honest thing in a house of liars.** This is the heart of the character. The Guest lies beautifully. The cult lies to itself. Orenn and Mags lied about being retired for fifteen years. Xarrul lies about *nothing*. Ask it a question and it answers true — because the truth is more corrosive than any lie, and because after centuries it is simply bored of being underestimated. The cruellest-seeming thing in the building is the only one that never deceived the players. Play it that way and "join it" becomes a genuine temptation instead of an edgy footnote.
## The Night's Clock — Presence & Escalation
The old shape of this module was a whodunit: *what killed Orenn?* → "a fiend" → fight it. The reframed shape keeps the fiend's identity as an *early, cheap* answer and makes the real investigation **moral**: *is this thing actually the villain here?* For that to land, Xarrul must be **felt all night** and slowly recontextualized — from ambient menace, to a voice that seems to taunt, to the only honest dealer in the room.
Presence escalates on a **ward-clock**. Orenn checked the sigils monthly; he is dead, and no one is mending them. As the night runs, the thin point widens — the room grows colder, the ethereal bleed thickens, Xarrul manifests more fully and kills more openly. If the clock runs out, Xarrul **crosses over completely**: permanent, material, no more Slip Between, far worse to fight. The players slowing the clock (the iron bell, re-powering the cellar containment, the fifth rule's *burn-and-seal*) is the pushback; their failure to is complicity.
**The escalation ladder (presence = the clock made audible):**
1. **Ambient dread (Acts 1–3).** No identity yet. Cold spots, a candle that gutters with no draft, Bren flinching at something no one else senses, distortions in [Orenn's silver mirror](orenn.md#items-on-his-person). The house feels *inhabited*.
2. **It notices you (early Act 4).** Once the party investigates, Xarrul whispers to them — Voice Thief, telepathy. **Mix lies with truths.** Some whispers misdirect (the smokescreen); some are *real and checkable* — it points them at a genuine clue, corrects a wrong guess. They can't yet tell whether it's helping or playing them. That ambiguity is the engine.
3. **Honest contact (mid–late Act 4).** A real channel opens — Veil Dust, the mirror, or it simply speaks near the thin point. Now it *converses*: candid about the murder, candid about *why*, and everything it says checks out against what they've dug up — while everyone with a face keeps lying.
4. **The pitch (Reckoning).** They have the context now. The offer becomes emotionally available (Scenario F).
**The device that carries all of it: a recurring voice.** Dry, amused, unattributed. It seems to taunt early; it is slowly revealed to be Xarrul; it is slowly revealed to have *never once lied*. A few lines per scene. The reframe — *the cruellest-seeming thing turns out to be the only honest one* — lands itself.
Keep the **first impression genuinely menacing** (Orenn's horrific death, the scavengers herded at the party in the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md), Whisper of Ruin turning them on each other) — you need real evil to turn *from*. Then recontextualize each: it killed a jailer; it was defending its only exit; the discord was cover, not cruelty.
## Who It Kills, Who It Spares
Sympathy is not safety. Xarrul is understandable, honest, and the lesser evil — **and** it methodically murders everyone who could stop it. The menace is in the *curation*: it kills exactly what threatens its crossing and is terrifyingly good at knowing who that is. Cold, surgical, inevitable. When the players realize everyone still breathing is *useful to it* — that it has been playing chess with the guest list all night — that is the coldest beat in the module.
Overt killing is expensive while it hides (it needs the smokescreen), so the body count **escalates with the ward-clock** — the mask comes off precisely as it becomes real. Run every kill below as a **DM tool triggered by player choices**, not a scripted inevitability; otherwise you delete your own endings (kill Haddon on a timer and a party that never considered rebinding loses that branch for nothing).
| When | Move | Target | Why |
|------|------|--------|-----|
| Pre-game | Kill (done) | **Orenn** | The warden. The first move. |
| Early–mid Act 4, *if the party stalls* | **Deniable** kill | **Kael**, or a minor patron | Reads as faction violence *or* fiend — keeps the mystery alive, re-raises stakes, can light the faction war. It's still hiding. |
| Conditional | **Reactive** kill | **Haddon**, *only if the party moves to rebind it* | "You reach for the chains, I take the hand." Punishes a choice instead of pre-deleting the rebinding path. |
| Late / crossing | **Open** kill (mask off) | the ward-mender / the most competent threat | Done pretending. Fully manifest, kills in the open. Peak horror, gated on the clock. |
| **Spared — always** | — | **Essek** (indicts the cult for it), **the Guest** (its intended vessel), sometimes a **branded PC** (grooming) | The chess set. Notice-this-and-shudder. |
> **Grooming → conversion.** The "branded PC" it spares isn't just kept alive — it may be *turned*. A lone PC caught in the Deep Cellar can be marked with a brand of favor and genuinely persuaded to Xarrul's side (not charmed — argued). See [handouts/the-conversion.md](../handouts/the-conversion.md).
**The laundering effect.** The people it kills are largely ones the party has already soured on — fanatics building toward the apocalypse, a hothead spoiling for a bloodbath. A join-leaning table *rationalizes* the murders ("Rennt was going to end the world anyway"). That is the seduction: Xarrul launders its violence through the party's own contempt for the victims. Which is exactly why it also needs one move they *can't* wave away.
### The Kidnap — Honesty Weaponized
Late game — cornered, or making its crossing — Xarrul pulls someone through into the Ethereal Plane (mechanically, an escalated **Ethereal Pull**; see Lair Actions) and holds them as **insurance**:
> *"Let me finish, and they come back to you, unharmed — you have watched me all night; you know I keep my word. Stop me, and the veil closes with them on the wrong side of it. Choose."*
It does not bluff, and the players *know* it doesn't, because you've spent all night establishing it as the one thing that never lies. So there is no calling the bluff: let it cross to save them, or sacrifice them to stop it. Evil (a hostage), in character (instrumental, honest), and a real finale dilemma. Pick the hostage **flexibly — whoever the table has invested in most** — and make them at least somewhat sympathetic, so even a join-leaning party flinches.
**Systemic hook:** the Guest is Xarrul's ideal vessel. If the party **kills the [Guest](the-guest.md)**, Xarrul loses its prepared body and must **abduct a replacement** — the party's own choice *causes* the kidnap.
## The Warden's Mark (Mags)
Xarrul worked on *both* its wardens. Orenn it branded and killed. **Mags it branded too** — a dormant Brand of Spite over her heart, the same hand-shaped mark Orenn bore, only fainter and cold rather than killing. It has held off triggering it: two dead wardens at once would raise the alarm before the wards decayed enough, and a living Mags is useful — a scapegoat, a jailer keeping the others in line, a heart to break later.
**Mags knows, and hides it.** She has felt the cold hand on her chest for weeks and told no one, not even Orenn. It is part of why she is so fatalistic; when she says *"Orenn and I could have taken it. One of us isn't here,"* the truth underneath is that she no longer believes she's a whole one of herself. The players can discover the mark — Orenn's silver mirror, a Medicine/Arcana check, Bren's reaction — a mid-game beat that says, without a word, that Xarrul is already inside the house, inside *her*. Full detail and the compromised statline live in [mags.md](mags.md#the-wardens-mark-dm).
**It is the finale's tuning knob**, and it means you build only one Mags:
- **Party opposes Xarrul:** it triggers the mark to take their heaviest ally out of the fight — a crisis, and the reason *Remove Curse* on Mags is a priority.
- **Party sides with Xarrul (Scenario F):** it triggers the mark to sideline her *for* them — the alliance's first favor, and the players watch it do to Mags exactly what it did to Orenn. They already reconstructed that death; now they see it live, and let it.
Either way, triggering the mark keeps the spotlight on the PCs rather than on a Mags who would otherwise overshadow a level-4 party.
## What Xarrul Knows (If It Negotiates)

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| **Players** | 3–5 |
| **Level** | 4 |
| **Duration** | 4–6 hours |
| **Tone** | Dark, morally grey, socially driven |
| **Genre** | Murder mystery / social intrigue |
| **Tone** | Dark, morally grey, socially driven — with an optional exploration track for less socially-inclined tables |
| **Genre** | Murder mystery / social intrigue / dungeon-under-the-floorboards |
## Premise
The party finds themselves in **U Spáleného Jazyka** (The Burnt Tongue) — one of the city's most notorious establishments, neutral ground for the worst the underworld has to offer. The barkeep, **Orenn**, enforces a single rule: *no killing*. Tonight, that rule shatters.
A brawl erupts between two rival factions — the **Guild of Knives** (professional assassins) and the **Lambent Order** (a cult masquerading as a scholarly mage guild). When the chaos subsides, Orenn lies dead behind his bar. **Mags**, his partner and the most dangerous person in the room, locks the doors. No one leaves until the killer is found.
A brawl erupts between two rival factions — the **House of Scales** (the city's licensed assassins' guild) and the **Lambent Order** (a cult masquerading as a scholarly mage guild). When the chaos subsides, Orenn lies dead behind his bar. **Mags**, his partner and the most dangerous person in the room, locks the doors. No one leaves until the killer is found.
The murder is a frame job by **Xarrul**, an ancient fiend the cultists summoned and the assassins accidentally unbound. But solving the murder is only one thread. Every patron in this tavern has a story, and the players can pull on any of them.
The murder is a frame job by **Xarrul**, an ancient fiend the cultists summoned and the assassins accidentally unbound. But *who* killed Orenn is the easy question, answered early. The hard one curdles as the night goes on: **is the fiend actually the villain here?** Xarrul wants one thing — to stop being a summoned tool and become *real*, to cross the veil and live in the world — and it is the only thing in this building that never lies. As the players learn what the cult is building, and what the beloved barkeep kept caged beneath his own floor, the moral ground shifts under them. By dawn, *siding* with the murderer is a genuine option. Every patron has a story and the players can pull on any of them — but the deepest thread is Xarrul itself.
## Themes
@@ -29,6 +29,19 @@ The murder is a frame job by **Xarrul**, an ancient fiend the cultists summoned
- **The Cost of Power** — Every faction has paid a price. Players will be asked to pay theirs.
- **Ambiguity** — The right thing to do is never fully clear.
## Two Ways to Play (Social vs. Explorative)
The murder mystery is social by default — but not every table wants a night of talking. Beneath the tavern is a **[Deep Cellar](location/deep-cellar.md)**: a hidden, vast warren the players can sneak through, loot, and fight their way across, uncovering Orenn and Mags's dark history environmentally rather than through conversation. Run the balance to suit your group:
- **Social-forward table:** keep the party upstairs among the patrons; the Deep Cellar is a bonus most groups only partly explore.
- **Exploration-forward table:** lean on the Deep Cellar and the **[character secrets](handouts/character-secrets.md)** (below). Several secret goals *only* resolve down there, so the players generate their own pressure to go delving — no railroading required. There's stealth, loot, a haunting, a guardian, a caged prisoner, and a leaking rift, all optional and all self-contained.
The two tracks run in **parallel** during the lockdown (Act 4): cut between PCs interrogating patrons above and PCs picking locks below. Both feed the same endgame.
## Character Secrets (Hidden Boons & Goals)
At the start of Act 1, deal each player a private **[secret dossier](handouts/character-secrets.md)** — a hidden mechanical *boon*, a secret *personal goal*, and an **immediate payoff** for completing it (a consumable, a reroll, an NPC's help, or a live ally in the finale — this is a oneshot; rewards land the same night). Crucially, the dossiers **interlock**: some goals align, some directly cross (a race to the same book, or the same prisoner — only one can win), and some *coerce* another PC into acting. Deal a connected set and the party spends the night quietly wondering who at the table is playing them. This turns the tavern into a place each of them came to *do something* in, and it's the cleanest engine for both exploration and paranoia. Fully optional; see the handout for the interaction web and recommended hands.
---
## Session Structure
@@ -37,6 +50,8 @@ The murder is a frame job by **Xarrul**, an ancient fiend the cultists summoned
Players arrive, meet Orenn, soak in the atmosphere. Introduce the patrons organically — the cultists in their corner arguing over texts, the assassins drinking with cold discipline, Bren muttering in the corner, Vetch scratching at his arms. Let players choose who to approach first.
**Before you begin:** deal each player their private **[secret dossier](handouts/character-secrets.md)** (hidden boon + personal goal). They walk in already carrying an agenda.
**Goal:** Establish the feel. This is a dangerous place held together by one man's authority.
### Act 2: The Brawl (10–15 min)
@@ -63,16 +78,19 @@ The core of the session. Open-ended, player-driven. They can:
- Help Bren (the possessed madman)
- Take Veil Dust with Vetch (ethereal trip)
- Trade with Tallow for information or items
- Explore the tavern's hidden spaces
- Explore the tavern's hidden spaces — including the **[Deep Cellar](location/deep-cellar.md)** behind the concealed door: sneak past the phase spider, crack the arcane-locked vault, meet the caged [Guest](npc/the-guest.md), brave the haunted trophy-hold, and find the failing rift. This is the exploration track — loot, environmental backstory, and combat for players who want it. It runs in parallel with the interrogations above; cut between the two groups.
- Pursue their **[secret personal goals](handouts/character-secrets.md)** — several of which lead straight down into the Deep Cellar
- Try to leave (Mags won't allow it; neither will the assassins or cultists, who don't want witnesses escaping)
**Goal:** Let players breathe and explore. Follow their interests. Subplots feed back into the main mystery naturally.
### Act 5: The Reckoning (30–60 min)
Depends entirely on what players uncovered:
- **Fiend confrontation** — if they found Xarrul, a tense combat split across two planes
- **The Choice** — destroying Xarrul in a way that saves Dalla's child but validates the cult's theory
A **ward-clock** runs under the whole session: with Orenn dead, no one mends the wards, the thin point widens, and if the players never act, Xarrul crosses over for good. That pressure decides *when* the Reckoning happens; what they uncovered decides *which* one (see [The Reckoning](storylines/the-reckoning.md)):
- **Fiend confrontation** — a tense combat split across two planes
- **The dual-plane kill** — destroying Xarrul in a way that saves Dalla's child but validates the cult's theory
- **The rebinding** — the easy, hollow answer: hand the cult back its leashed weapon
- **The Open Door** — side *with* Xarrul: behead the Opening and cure the child, at the cost of Mags and a monster loosed on the world
- **Faction war** — if tensions weren't managed, assassins and cultists go for blood, this time for real
- **Quiet ending** — players leave with knowledge but no resolution, the fiend still out there
@@ -89,25 +107,33 @@ Depends entirely on what players uncovered:
| **Tallow** | Fence / broker | Corner booth | Calculated, trades info for favors |
| **Bren** | Possessed madman | Corner, floor | Lucid flashes, controlled by Skein |
| **Vetch** | Drug addict | Near Tallow | Desperate, gateway to ethereal plane |
| **Sevra** | Assassin leader (here) | Assassin table | Cold, professional, holding guild together |
| **Dace** | Assassin (traitor) | Among assassins | Charming, likeable — secretly corrupted |
| **Kael** | Assassin (hothead) | Among assassins | Wants war with cultists |
| **Sevra** | Scales commander (here) — the loyalist | Assassin table | Codex-devout, holding the guild together; can be turned against the rot with proof |
| **Dace** | Scales blade (traitor) — and secretly marked | Among assassins | Charming, likeable, sells kills to the cult; condemned by Thera and doesn't know it |
| **Kael** | Scales blade (hothead) — the witness | Among assassins | Wants war with cultists; unknowingly holds the key to the rot |
| **Thera "Even-Hand"** | Scales blade (the rot) — the Radical | Assassin table | Beloved, courteous, the guild's finest — and a soul-harvester hiding inside the codex |
| **Haddon** | Cultist scholar | Cultist table | Composed facade, taking notes on everything |
| **Dalla** | Cultist (desperate parent) | Cultist table | Will break ranks for her child |
| **Rennt** | Cultist (true believer) | Cultist table | Passionate, dangerous idealism |
| **Essek** | Cultist (doubter) | Edge of cultist group | Quiet, afraid of his own people |
| **Xarrul** | The fiend | Ethereal Plane | Cunning, vindictive, framing both sides |
| **Xarrul** | The fiend | Ethereal Plane → the tavern | Honest, patient; wants to be *real*; maybe not the villain |
| **The Guest** | Caged changeling | Deep Cellar, Cell One | Charming, patient, a fluent liar; Orenn's secret cult-spy |
| **Přástka** | Phase spider (pet) | Deep Cellar | Guardian across both planes; avoidable if unprovoked |
## DM Quick Reference — Subplots
| Subplot | Entry Point | Connects To |
|---------|-------------|-------------|
| Murder mystery | Orenn's body, clues | Everything |
| Assassin traitor | Sevra's suspicion, Kael's anger | Murder (framing), Tallow |
| The Scales: the traitor | Sevra's suspicion, Kael's anger | Murder (framing), Tallow |
| The Scales: the rot within | Kael's unease about Thera, the soulcoin, Dace's mark | The traitor floor, the tavern's thin point, the wider campaign |
| The Opening | Cultist fractures, Dalla's desperation | Murder (fiend origin), Reckoning |
| Possession | Bren's ravings, Skein | Murder (witness), Ethereal |
| Ethereal trip | Vetch, Veil Dust, Tallow | Murder (see fiend), Possession (see Skein) |
| Dalla's child | Dalla, Haddon's notes | The Reckoning (the choice) |
| The Deep Cellar | Concealed door in the cellar | Orenn & Mags's dark history, loot for the Reckoning, the cult (via the Guest), the rift |
| The Guest | Cell One in the Deep Cellar | Cult infiltration intel, moral choice, character secrets |
| Character secrets | Dealt at Act 1 start | Drives exploration and inter-party tension; several lead to the Deep Cellar |
| The Conversion | A lone PC isolated in the Deep Cellar | Xarrul (recruited from within), the Open Door ending |
## Starting Gold

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# The Guild of Knives — Assassin Subplot
## The Surface Problem: The Merchant Quarter Kill
A guild contract. A noble named **Lord Harath** was marked for death by a business rival. Standard job — clean kill, made to look like natural causes. Paid half upfront, 500 gp total.
Before the guild could act, Harath turned up dead. But not cleanly — his body was found in his study with ritual burns on his chest, his heart removed, and symbols carved into the floorboards. The city watch called it "cult activity." The guild's client wants a refund. The guild says the contract was accepted, the fee stands.
**What actually happened:** Dace sold the contract details to the Lambent Order. The cultists needed a specific type of kill — a death performed at a ley line intersection (Harath's study was on one) with the heart preserved as a binding component. Dace arranged access. The cultists performed the kill. Dace got paid twice.
This is the surface of the guild's problem. The deeper rot is Dace himself.
---
## The Real Problem: The Traitor
For six months, Dace has been selling kills to the Lambent Order. The arrangement:
1. Dace identifies guild contracts where the target's death could serve a dual purpose — the client gets their kill, the cult gets ritual components.
2. Dace passes target details, location, and schedule to Haddon through dead drops and meetings in the tavern's private room.
3. The cultists perform the kill using ritual methods. The body yields what they need.
4. Dace collects payment from both the guild (his cut) and the cult (a separate fee).
5. The guild's reputation suffers because the kills are sloppy and ritualistic — the opposite of the guild's code.
**Why Dace does it:** Money. That's it. He has no ideological alignment with the cult. He finds their beliefs ridiculous. He simply saw an opportunity for double income and took it.
**Why it matters:** The guild's code is everything. Clean kills, no suffering, no collateral. Dace's arrangement produces the opposite — bodies carved open, hearts removed, ritual desecration. Every botched kill damages the guild's reputation, which is its only real asset.
---
## Entry Points for Players
### Through Sevra (Direct)
Sevra suspects a mole but needs proof. If players approach her with professionalism and competence:
- **DC 14 Persuasion** to get her to discuss the guild's internal problems
- She won't name Dace as a suspect unprompted — she suspects him but moving on a guild member without evidence violates the code and would fracture the group
- She'll describe the pattern: "Three contracts in six months where the kill was done before we acted, or the body showed up... wrong. Missing parts. Ritual marks."
- She'll ask players to investigate quietly — "If it is one of ours, I need proof. Not suspicion. Proof."
### Through Kael (Emotional)
Kael is the easiest assassin to talk to because he's honest and angry:
- He'll volunteer his suspicion of Dace without being asked much
- "That smooth bastard was the last one assigned to the Harath job. He said the cultists must have intercepted us. Convenient."
- He can't prove anything. His evidence is gut feeling and coincidence.
- He saw Bren go rigid during the brawl and stare at the bar — this is useful for the murder investigation
### Through Tallow (Transactional)
Tallow knows Dace has been meeting "a scholar type" in the private room:
- Won't volunteer this — it's worth money
- **Price:** 20+ gp, or information about the cult that Tallow can leverage
- "Your friendly assassin, the charming one? He's been having private meetings. Regular. With someone who reads too many books."
### Through the Private Room (Physical Evidence)
The private room contains:
- Ward-sigil diagram scratched into the table (DC 14 Investigation, DC 16 Arcana to understand)
- A dropped cultist pin under the bench (DC 13 Perception)
- Faint traces of ritual chalk on the floor (DC 15 Investigation) — from when Haddon demonstrated binding patterns to Dace
### Through Dace Himself (Dangerous)
Dace is actively helping the investigation — steering it toward the cultists. A perceptive player might notice:
- **DC 16 Insight:** His helpfulness is performative. He volunteers theories but never evidence.
- **DC 14 Perception:** When the cultists are mentioned, Dace watches Haddon — not with suspicion, but with the careful attention of someone checking if their business partner is holding up under pressure.
- **DC 14 Investigation of his person** (requires proximity or a reason to search): A second cultist pin in his boot. Why would an assassin have a cult's symbol?
---
## Confrontation: Exposing Dace
When players have enough evidence to accuse Dace:
### Presenting Evidence to Sevra
She needs at least **two pieces** of concrete evidence (the pin, Tallow's testimony, the private room meetings, or a confession). With two:
> Sevra goes still. Not angry-still — *cold*-still. The temperature at the assassin table drops ten degrees.
>
> "Dace," she says. Just the name. Nothing else.
>
> And Dace's smile dies.
### Dace's Response
**Stage 1 — Denial** (Deception +8):
"That's absurd. I've been loyal to the guild since I was seventeen. You're going to take the word of [whoever provided evidence] over mine?"
**Stage 2 — Deflection** (if denial fails):
"Even if I met with them — which I'm not saying I did — it was intelligence gathering. I was trying to find the mole. Working alone because I didn't want to tip anyone off."
**Stage 3 — Violence** (if cornered):
Dace grabs the nearest vulnerable NPC (Vetch, Bren, or a player who isn't watching him) as a hostage. He has a concealed dagger coated in Essence of Ether (DC 13 CON save or unconscious for 1 minute). He demands safe passage out of the tavern.
**Resolution options:**
- Let him go — Sevra won't allow it. The guild's justice requires an answer.
- Talk him down — DC 18 Persuasion. Possible if players offer genuine protection from Sevra's justice (but can they really?).
- Fight him — Dace is dangerous one-on-one but outmatched against multiple opponents. At half HP, he surrenders.
- Cleverness — Players might use Whisper Chalk, Tallow's goods, or social manipulation to expose him without a direct confrontation.
### Aftermath
**If Dace is exposed and captured:**
- Sevra restrains him. Guild justice will happen after the lockdown ends. It won't be quick.
- The guild withdraws from active hostility toward the cultists — the immediate cause of the brawl is resolved.
- Sevra is in the players' debt. She offers: one favor. "Within reason. Don't ask me to go clean."
- Kael actually *thanks* the players. Awkwardly, sincerely. This might be the first time he's thanked anyone.
**If Dace escapes:**
- Sevra is furious — at Dace, at herself, at the players for letting him slip.
- The guild remains hostile and unstable. The faction war threat is still live.
- Dace becomes a loose thread for beyond the oneshot.
---
## Connecting to the Main Plot
The assassin subplot feeds into the murder mystery through:
1. **The brawl was engineered.** Xarrul whispered to Kael using Voice Thief to push him over the edge. The brawl gave Xarrul cover for the murder. Understanding this connection requires talking to Kael about *exactly* what triggered him ("I heard one of them laughing about it. Clear as day." — but no cultist was actually laughing. It was Xarrul).
2. **Dace's meetings map the wards.** The diagram in the private room was made during a Dace/Haddon meeting. The cult was mapping the wards — which Xarrul was also breaking. The cult weakened the tavern's defenses on both sides simultaneously: Haddon from the inside (mapping), Xarrul from the Ethereal Plane (scratching).
3. **The guild intercepted Xarrul.** The fiend was originally sent by the cult to kill Sevra. The guild's people caught it in transit, broke the binding, and thought the problem was solved. They didn't know what they unleashed. Sevra knows about this — she'll share it if the fiendish angle is confirmed and she trusts the players.

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# The House of Scales — Assassin Subplot
This subplot has two floors. Sevra thinks she's hunting a traitor; she's right, but she's standing on top of something worse. Let the players climb down at their own pace — most tables will crack the traitor and feel finished, and only the ones who keep pulling will find the rot underneath. Both floors are optional; the traitor floor is a clean, satisfying subplot on its own, and the rot floor is the "evil within the guild" the night is built to reveal.
- **Ground floor — [The Traitor](#the-traitor-floor):** Dace has been selling guild kills to the Lambent Order for money. Mundane, provable, resolvable. This is what Sevra can see.
- **Basement — [The Rot](#the-rot-floor):** Thera "Even-Hand," the guild's most honoured blade, harvests the souls of her marks for something beneath the city. Invisible, because she breaks no rule of the codex. This is what Sevra is missing — and what braids the two floors together: **Dace's crude soul-trafficking is drawing exactly the attention Thera needs to keep buried, so she has come to end him.**
---
# THE TRAITOR FLOOR
## The Surface Problem: The Merchant Quarter Kill
A guild contract. A noble named **Lord Harath** was marked for death by a business rival. Standard job — clean kill, made to look like natural causes. Paid half upfront, 500 gp total.
Before the guild could act, Harath turned up dead. But not cleanly — his body was found in his study with ritual burns on his chest, his heart removed, and symbols carved into the floorboards. The city watch called it "cult activity." The guild's client wants a refund. The guild says the contract was accepted, the fee stands.
**What actually happened:** Dace sold the contract details to the Lambent Order. The cultists needed a specific type of kill — a death performed at a ley line intersection (Harath's study was on one) with the heart preserved as a binding component. Dace arranged access. The cultists performed the kill. Dace got paid twice.
This is the surface of the guild's problem. The deeper rot is Dace himself — and, deeper still, the thing that has taken an interest in Dace.
---
## The Real Problem: The Traitor
For six months, Dace has been selling kills to the Lambent Order. The arrangement:
1. Dace identifies guild contracts where the target's death could serve a dual purpose — the client gets their kill, the cult gets ritual components.
2. Dace passes target details, location, and schedule to Haddon through dead drops and meetings in the tavern's private room.
3. The cultists perform the kill using ritual methods. The body yields what they need.
4. Dace collects payment from both the guild (his cut) and the cult (a separate fee).
5. The guild's reputation suffers because the kills are sloppy and ritualistic — the opposite of the codex.
**Why Dace does it:** Money. That's it. He has no ideological alignment with the cult. He finds their beliefs ridiculous. He simply saw an opportunity for double income and took it.
**Why it matters:** The guild's code is everything. Clean kills, no suffering, no collateral, every death sealed and closed. Dace's arrangement produces the opposite — bodies carved open, hearts removed, ritual desecration. Every botched kill damages the guild's reputation, which is its only real asset.
---
## Entry Points for Players
### Through Sevra (Direct)
Sevra suspects a mole but needs proof. If players approach her with professionalism and competence:
- **DC 14 Persuasion** to get her to discuss the guild's internal problems
- She won't name Dace as a suspect unprompted — she suspects him but moving on a guild member without evidence violates the code and would fracture the group
- She'll describe the pattern: "Three contracts in six months where the kill was done before we acted, or the body showed up... wrong. Missing parts. Ritual marks."
- She'll ask players to investigate quietly — "If it is one of ours, I need proof. Not suspicion. Proof."
### Through Kael (Emotional)
Kael is the easiest assassin to talk to because he's honest and angry:
- He'll volunteer his suspicion of Dace without being asked much
- "That smooth bastard was the last one assigned to the Harath job. He said the cultists must have intercepted us. Convenient."
- He can't prove anything. His evidence is gut feeling and coincidence.
- He saw Bren go rigid during the brawl and stare at the bar — useful for the murder investigation.
- **Ask him about Thera and he opens the trapdoor to the basement floor without meaning to** (see below).
### Through Tallow (Transactional)
Tallow knows Dace has been meeting "a scholar type" in the private room:
- Won't volunteer this — it's worth money
- **Price:** 20+ gp, or information about the cult that Tallow can leverage
- "Your friendly assassin, the charming one? He's been having private meetings. Regular. With someone who reads too many books."
### Through the Private Room (Physical Evidence)
The private room contains:
- Ward-sigil diagram scratched into the table (DC 14 Investigation, DC 16 Arcana to understand)
- A dropped cultist pin under the bench (DC 13 Perception)
- Faint traces of ritual chalk on the floor (DC 15 Investigation) — from when Haddon demonstrated binding patterns to Dace
### Through Dace Himself (Dangerous)
Dace is actively helping the investigation — steering it toward the cultists. A perceptive player might notice:
- **DC 16 Insight:** His helpfulness is performative. He volunteers theories but never evidence.
- **DC 14 Perception:** When the cultists are mentioned, Dace watches Haddon — not with suspicion, but with the careful attention of someone checking if their business partner is holding up under pressure.
- **DC 14 Investigation of his person** (requires proximity or a reason to search): A second cultist pin in his boot. Why would an assassin have a cult's symbol?
---
## Confrontation: Exposing Dace
When players have enough evidence to accuse Dace:
### Presenting Evidence to Sevra
She needs at least **two pieces** of concrete evidence (the pin, Tallow's testimony, the private room meetings, or a confession). With two:
> Sevra goes still. Not angry-still — *cold*-still. The temperature at the assassin table drops ten degrees.
>
> "Dace," she says. Just the name. Nothing else.
>
> And Dace's smile dies.
### Dace's Response
**Stage 1 — Denial** (Deception +8):
"That's absurd. I've been loyal to the guild since I was seventeen. You're going to take the word of [whoever provided evidence] over mine?"
**Stage 2 — Deflection** (if denial fails):
"Even if I met with them — which I'm not saying I did — it was intelligence gathering. I was trying to find the mole. Working alone because I didn't want to tip anyone off."
**Stage 3 — Violence** (if cornered):
Dace grabs the nearest vulnerable NPC (Vetch, Bren, or a player who isn't watching him) as a hostage. He has a concealed dagger coated in Essence of Ether (DC 13 CON save or unconscious for 1 minute). He demands safe passage out of the tavern.
**Resolution options:**
- Let him go — Sevra won't allow it. The guild's justice requires an answer.
- Talk him down — DC 18 Persuasion. Possible if players offer genuine protection from Sevra's justice (but can they really?).
- Fight him — Dace is dangerous one-on-one but outmatched against multiple opponents. At half HP, he surrenders.
- Cleverness — Players might use Whisper Chalk, Tallow's goods, or social manipulation to expose him without a direct confrontation.
### Aftermath
**If Dace is exposed and captured:**
- Sevra restrains him. Guild justice will happen after the lockdown ends. It won't be quick.
- The guild withdraws from active hostility toward the cultists — the immediate cause of the brawl is resolved.
- Sevra is in the players' debt. She offers: one favour. "Within reason. Don't ask me to go clean."
- Kael actually *thanks* the players. Awkwardly, sincerely. This might be the first time he's thanked anyone.
- **DM — the quiet horror:** the players have just delivered Dace to exactly the fate Thera engineered. He is restrained, condemned, and marked. Nobody will ever ask *why* Even-Hand wanted him gone. If the players later learn what the mark is, this beat curdles retroactively — they helped tie off her loose end.
**If Dace escapes:**
- Sevra is furious — at Dace, at herself, at the players for letting him slip.
- The guild remains hostile and unstable. The faction war threat is still live.
- Dace becomes a loose thread. **DM:** a Dace who slips away quiet and useful is a Dace Thera may pull *inward* rather than kill — see [the fork](#daces-fork-recruit-or-silence).
---
# THE ROT FLOOR
*The evil within the guild. Optional, and best kept subtle until the players earn it. The goal is a feeling delivered through physical things — a coin, a seam of grey light, a blade who is too perfect — not an exposition dump. Do not name the entity, the pact, or the wider conspiracy at the table.*
## What's Really Wrong
**Thera "Even-Hand" harvests souls.** She is the House's most decorated blade — forty-one seals, none disputed, every warning delivered, every kill clean and sealed and closed. And every one of her marks dies genuinely well while their soul goes *down* instead of on, folded cold into a coin, paid toward a debt beneath the city that she believes is real and righteous. She has never taken money for a kill in her life. In her own mind that makes her the only honest killer in a guild of mercenaries.
She is invisible because **she breaks no rule of the codex.** The founders wrote laws against choosing your dead, against cruelty, against leaving debts open — but no clause against a clean, warned, sealed kill that quietly damns the soul, because they never imagined one of their own would want to. Dace is a criminal and easy to catch. Thera is a model member and nearly impossible to — which is the whole horror of her, delivered in one night.
Full character detail, tells, the soulcoin, and her stat block are in **[the assassins roster](../npc/assassins.md#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot)**.
## Why She's Here Tonight
Dace's dealings with the Lambent Order have dragged soul-death into public view — ritual kills, missing hearts, city-watch whispers about "cult activity." That's the one thing that gets people *looking* at what happens to souls in this city, and looking is the only thing Thera fears. She has come to resolve the Dace problem, and she has **already marked him** (see [The Mark on Dace](../npc/assassins.md#the-mark-on-dace-dm--the-braid-to-thera)). She is also privately disgusted by the cultists — amateurs desecrating something she considers sacred.
## The Trail Down (how players find the basement)
No single clue explains it; the horror is in assembling small wrong things until the shape appears. Seed these across the night for tables that keep digging:
1. **Kael, asked about Thera** (the trapdoor). Honest to a fault, he repeats the unease he's never let himself examine: a mark of hers whose family paid for a raising, and *"the priest couldn't find him. Said there was nothing there to call back."* He doesn't know what it means. He hates that he said it.
2. **The gestures.** A PC watching Thera greet or part from someone catches the doorframe-touch, the coin turned once, the murmured word (DC 16 Perception; DC 14 Insight to feel it was ritual). She did all three to Dace earlier, "comforting" him. Meaningless now; unforgettable in hindsight.
3. **The read.** DC 16 Insight: her warmth is real and skin-deep, and underneath she is *appraising* people, gently, like livestock.
4. **The brand.** Ask her about Orenn's body and she reads the soul-withdrawal fluently — *"That isn't a wound, it's a withdrawal… not our coin, though. Cruder."* She becomes a murder suspect (a dead end — Xarrul did it) and a much larger question (why does she know this on sight?).
5. **The mark on Dace.** His shadow falls a half-breath late at the candles (DC 15 Perception); true sight / *Veil Dust* / Mags / DC 15 Medicine or Arcana up close shows the grey seam at his throat. He is condemned and doesn't know it.
6. **The soulcoin** — the proof (below).
## The Soulcoin (the gut-punch)
The single object that makes the whole thing land. Thera carries at least one. Getting it off her is hard — DC 20 Sleight of Hand and she'll notice — but she may spend one in a fight (**Soulcoin Surge**), and one is on her body if she falls.
A warm coin, faceless on both sides, that whispers when held to the ear in a quiet room — and, held longer, seems to be *listening* instead. It is a person, minted: not destroyed, folded cold and recoverable while it holds charge. Mags smells the necrotic residue and goes grey; a cleric feels the trapped soul; *Veil Dust* shows it glowing wrong; DC 15 Arcana reads a personal, fingerprint-like necrotic signature. Its warmth dates the kill — a warm coin matches a *recent* sealed contract on the guild's rolls, nailing Thera to a specific death. **Destroy it with charge left and the soul escapes** — to thank its liberator, to testify, or to lash out if it died screaming.
Full description and mechanics: [the roster entry](../npc/assassins.md#the-soulcoin-the-gut-punch).
## Saving a Marked Victim (the rescue mini-quest)
If the players realise Dace (or any mark) is condemned, they can race the clock — a clock they'll never see run out, which is its own dread. A marked-but-living victim can be freed by:
- **Consecration** — holy water, *Consecrate*, or a cleric/paladin's laying on of hands to break the grey seam.
- ***Remove Curse* or *Greater Restoration***.
- **Killing Thera** before the mark ripens.
- **Genuine forgiveness of the grievance** that named them, offered and meant — hardest of all, and for Dace, nearly impossible.
Saving Dace specifically is a bitter little arc: the party's traitor, condemned by something worse than the guild, and the players may have to decide whether he's worth saving at all.
## Dace's Fork: Recruit or Silence
Thera is still weighing what to do with Dace, and the players tip it without knowing they're doing it. The guild's rot has always recruited the already-compromised — a person deep in debt, to whom one more debt feels ordinary.
- **Exposed loudly / handed to Sevra / killed:** liability confirmed. Thera lets the mark run. Dace dies clean in nine days and no one asks why.
- **Slips away quiet, useful, and unburned:** Thera reconsiders. A blade willing to sell his own guild is exactly the kind of person her work is built on. She may let the mark lapse and reach for him instead. *(A perfect, invisible campaign seed: the tavern's traitor becomes the rot's newest hand.)*
## Confrontation and Resolution
There is no clean win here — that's the point. Options, in rough order of how hard the players pushed:
- **Let it lie.** Most tables. They feel *something* is wrong with Even-Hand and can't prove it, and she walks out courteous and beloved. The rot continues. Deeply unsettling; entirely valid.
- **Take it to Sevra.** Run [Sevra's arc](../npc/assassins.md#the-thing-she-cant-name-dm--her-arc): denial → one undeniable physical crack → terrifying thoroughness. Convince her and the loyalists turn — Sevra, and a broken Kael, side with the players. This is the emotional peak: the codex-faithful turning on the thing wearing the codex's face.
- **Confront Thera directly.** She doesn't panic — she reframes as righteousness ("which of us is the mercenary?"), then withdraws or fights. If Sevra is convinced, the guild fights *with* the party; if Sevra is still in denial, the players face Thera alone, possibly against Kael, who won't believe it until too late. See her stat block for **Soulcoin Surge** — she is hard to kill for good, and even a "failed" kill leaves the players a cracked coin as proof.
- **Free a soul.** Destroying a charged coin (in the cellar's thin point, or during the fight) releases a spirit — a witness, a thank-you, or a scream. The clearest possible statement of what she has been doing.
---
## The Rot Floor at the Table — Beat Sheet
*Read the sections above first; this is your at-the-table quick reference. The rule under all of it: reveal through physical things, never explain, never name the entity.*
**What's already true when the night starts:**
- Thera has already marked Dace (the courtesy she paid him before the players arrived). Nine-day clock, invisible.
- She carries at least one **warm** soulcoin (a recent kill).
- She's decided Dace is a liability and is leaning toward letting the mark run — unless the players make her reconsider.
**Read the table first.** Most groups will crack the traitor floor and feel done — that's a complete subplot, let them have it. Only push the rot floor as far as the players pull. Gauge it by whether anyone gets curious about *Thera specifically.*
**The escalation ladder** — each rung fires only when the players earn it; don't hand out rung 3 to a table still on rung 1:
| Rung | Trigger | What you drop |
|---|---|---|
| **0 — Ambience** *(free, drop for everyone)* | Just being in the room | Thera's chapel-stillness; Kael checking on her like a dog on its master; a dog that won't settle near her; milk souring by her cup |
| **1 — First pull** | A PC examines Orenn's body **or** asks about Thera | The **brand-read** (*"a withdrawal… not our coin"*) **or** **Kael's unease** (*"the priest couldn't find him"*) |
| **2 — Second pull** | A PC watches her closely / presses the thread | The **gestures** (doorframe, coin-turn, whispered word — DC 16 Perception); the **appraising read** (DC 16 Insight); **Dace's late shadow** (DC 15 Perception) |
| **3 — Proof** | A PC digs for something physical | The **grey seam** at Dace's throat (true sight / *Veil Dust* / Mags / DC 15 Medicine·Arcana), or the **soulcoin** (pickpocket DC 20, her Surge in a fight, or her body if she falls) |
| **4 — The fork resolves** | How the players handle Dace | Expose/kill him → mark runs. Let him slip quiet → Thera reaches for him instead |
**How it ends** (pick by the players' last, hardest choice):
- **Let it lie** *(default / most tables)* — they *feel* it, can't prove it, she walks out beloved. Unsettling and valid.
- **To Sevra** — run her denial → crack → thoroughness arc. Turn her and the loyalists (and a broken Kael) move with the party. The emotional peak.
- **Confront Thera** — she reframes as righteous, then flees or fights. **Soulcoin Surge** means a "kill" may still leave only a cracked coin. Deadlier if Sevra's still in denial.
**If the players never engage the rot at all:** Thera leaves courteous and untouched, Dace dies clean in nine days, and nothing on paper is ever wrong. That's not a failure state — it's the seed. Let it sit.
**Fastest way in:** if you dealt the **Blade** character-secret, a PC may be carrying a sealed contract on Thera herself — the most direct engine onto this floor. See [character-secrets.md](../handouts/character-secrets.md#7-the-blade).
---
## Connecting to the Main Plot
The assassin subplot feeds the murder mystery and the fiend arc:
1. **The brawl was engineered.** Xarrul whispered to Kael using Voice Thief to push him over the edge. The brawl gave Xarrul cover for the murder. Understanding this requires talking to Kael about *exactly* what triggered him ("I heard one of them laughing about it. Clear as day." — but no cultist was laughing. It was Xarrul).
2. **Dace's meetings map the wards.** The diagram in the private room was made during a Dace/Haddon meeting. The cult was mapping the wards — which Xarrul was also breaking. The tavern's defences were weakened from both sides at once: Haddon from inside (mapping), Xarrul from the Ethereal Plane (scratching).
3. **The guild intercepted Xarrul.** The fiend was originally sent by the cult to kill Sevra. The guild's people caught it in transit, broke the binding, and thought the problem solved. They didn't know what they'd unleashed. Sevra knows about this — she'll share it if the fiendish angle is confirmed and she trusts the players.
4. **Two hungers, one veil (DM texture, not a reveal).** Orenn died to a fiend crossing the veil; Thera feeds a debt beneath the city. They are unrelated predators — which is exactly why Thera can look at Orenn's brand and say *"not our coin."* The tavern is a thin place, and thin places draw more than one kind of appetite. Let attentive players feel that resonance; don't explain it.

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## Timeline of Events
### Before the Session
- **Weeks ago:** Xarrul, summoned and bound by the Lambent Order, is sent to kill Sevra. The Guild of Knives intercepts the fiend during transit, breaks the binding (not knowing how to rebind it), and the fiend goes free.
- **Weeks ago:** Xarrul, summoned and bound by the Lambent Order, is sent to kill Sevra. The House of Scales intercepts the fiend during transit, breaks the binding (not knowing how to rebind it), and the fiend goes free.
- **Weeks ago:** Xarrul, now unbound, anchors itself to the thin point beneath the Burnt Tongue. It begins weakening the ward-sigils from the Ethereal Plane, scratching at them night after night.
- **Days ago:** Orenn notices the wards failing. He increases his checks, purchases holy water and ward supplies, and writes the contingency letter he puts in Mags's apron.
- **Tonight, before the party arrives:** Tension between the factions is at a breaking point. Kael has evidence that the Merchant Quarter kill — a guild contract — was done by someone else with ritual marks. He's ready to confront the cultists.

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@@ -16,12 +16,19 @@ Players arrive at the Reckoning through any combination of:
- Essek revealing the summoning
- Veil Dust trip exposing Xarrul
- Orenn's letter and preparations in the storage room
- Exploring the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md) — the chalk-wall notes and the [Guest's](../npc/the-guest.md) cult-infiltration intel both point at the Lambent Order and the summoning; the vault arms the party for the fight
- Logical deduction from the ambiguous clues
There is no "right" order. The Reckoning begins when the players know enough to act and choose to do so.
---
## The Clock
The Reckoning is player-driven, but it is not *timeless*. With Orenn dead, no one is mending the ward-sigils, and the thin point widens as the night runs — the **ward-clock** ([xarrul.md — The Night's Clock](../npc/xarrul.md#the-nights-clock--presence--escalation)). The longer the players wait, the colder the room, the bolder Xarrul, the higher the body count. If they never act at all, the clock runs out and Xarrul **crosses over completely**: permanent, material, no Slip Between escape, far worse to fight. This is the pressure that keeps Act 4 from drifting. Slowing it — the iron bell, re-powering the cellar containment, the fifth rule's burn-and-seal — is the pushback; letting it run is its own quiet choice.
---
## Confrontation Scenarios
### Scenario A: Direct Assault
@@ -32,6 +39,7 @@ Players know about Xarrul, have combat resources, and go to the cellar to fight
**Methods to force Xarrul into the Material Plane:**
- **Fiendbane Manacles** (from Tallow, 200 gp): Restrain it on the Material Plane for 1 hour
- **Fiendbane Salt** (from the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-cleaners-arsenal) vault, 4 doses): a thrown pinch anchors it to its plane until the end of its next turn (DC 14 CHA save) — the exploration reward that lets a party pin Xarrul without spending gold at Tallow's
- **The iron bell** (main hall fireplace): Partially restores wards, giving Xarrul disadvantage on Ethereal Jaunt
- **Orenn's binding circle** (cellar floor): If lured inside, DC 17 CHA save or trapped
- **Warding chalk circles** (from storage): Minor constraint, 10 minutes per use
@@ -54,6 +62,7 @@ The "easy" resolution. Haddon proposes recapturing Xarrul using the binding circ
**How it plays out:**
- The party must get Xarrul to the cellar and keep it there for 10 minutes while Haddon completes the ritual. This is a fight — Xarrul does NOT want to be bound again. It fights with everything it has.
- **Xarrul targets Haddon specifically.** The moment the party commits to rebinding, Haddon is the hand reaching for the chains — and Xarrul removes hands. It spends Brand, Visions of Spite, and everything else on Haddon over any other target (*"you reach for the chains, I take the hand"*). Protecting the ritualist becomes the party's core problem. If Haddon dies, rebinding is off the table unless another character takes over (DC 18 Arcana, with no time to prepare).
- If the ritual completes: Xarrul is bound. It screams in fury as the chains take hold. The cult has their weapon back.
- If the ritual is interrupted (Haddon takes damage and fails a DC 14 CON concentration check): The binding snaps. Xarrul is free and enraged. Combat continues with no second chances.
@@ -121,6 +130,28 @@ If players haven't uncovered the fiend, or if tensions boil over before the Reck
**Casualties:** Without intervention, Kael dies (he charges Rennt), Rennt dies (he's outmatched by Sevra), and Dalla is caught in the crossfire. Essek tries to flee and is cut down by a guild soldier. Haddon escapes using Misty Step. The fiend watches, delighted.
### Scenario F: The Open Door (Joining Xarrul)
The darkest ending — and the one that most fully commits to the module's thesis: the players help Xarrul cross over and become real. This is **not** the passive "let it walk" of Scenario D; it is active complicity. It is also **not** an edgy freebie. Like the dual-plane kill, it is *gated behind depth*: a party only reaches it if they have learned enough to find the cult genuinely more terrifying than the fiend, **and** enough about Orenn and Mags's cages to have soured on the "victims."
**Why a party chooses it**
- **The lesser monster against the greater plan.** By now they understand Phase Two — the real apocalypse is Mother Vyre, not one fiend, and Xarrul is the *enemy* of the Opening. It knows every name, every mapped thin point, every cult secret ([What Xarrul Knows](../npc/xarrul.md#what-xarrul-knows-if-it-negotiates)). Its pitch: *"Free me, and I will gut her network. You cannot kill the Opening. I can make it not worth her while."*
- **The ground has rotted under the defenders.** They know Orenn and Mags starved a prisoner in [Cell Two](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-two--the-long-dead) and caged the [Guest](../npc/the-guest.md) for eleven years. Xarrul killed a jailer who ran a private dungeon under a bar. *"You freed the changeling. My cage was a whole plane of glass. Why is mine different?"*
- **It offers what the clean endings can't.** The dual-plane kill cures Lístek but tears the veil and validates the cult. Xarrul offers the cure **without** the tear — it understands the binding better than Haddon ever will. The monster hands them the cleanest fix for the child.
**The twist — it is honest.** In a building where everyone lies, Xarrul is the one thing that doesn't. So there is *no betrayal*. It keeps its word to the letter — hunts the cult, cures the child, thanks them — and the world is worse anyway, and they knew going in. The horror isn't that it double-crosses them; it's that it *doesn't*. (Contrast the [Guest](../npc/the-guest.md), who makes the same "free me" pitch and *is* lying.)
**What it requires**
1. **A vessel.** Default: the caged **Guest** — a body that can be anyone, poured full of an honest fiend. The knife: the Guest is **annihilated** in the process. A party that frees the Guest out of *mercy* may be handing Xarrul its skin — and the Guest, who reads thoughts, may know it, becoming either a desperate ally against Xarrul or a rival racing to the same door. *(Alternatives: a PC volunteers as host — the most personal; that character leaves the party. Or simply leave the door open — Xarrul crosses as itself, weaker, and finds a host later.)*
2. **The crossing.** Run out the [ward-clock](#the-clock) (keep the players from mending the wards) or complete the crossing at the rift, while holding off anyone who tries to stop it.
3. **Getting past Mags.** She will not accept this.
**Mags, and the shape of the finale.** Mags says *"No"* — simple, final. Siding with Xarrul means going through the widow of the man it murdered, in front of her. So Xarrul triggers the [Warden's Mark](../npc/mags.md#the-wardens-mark-dm) — its first favor to its new allies — and Mags fights *compromised*, grief-broken and half-frozen in a vision of Orenn's death. This is not a slugfest but a **desperate holding action**: complete the crossing while a diminished Mags throws everything she has left at the objective. Winnable, tragic, and *the players'* to win. It ends not with a clean kill but with her going down and the fiend quietly thanking them. (For a bigger fight, add **Sevra** at her side.)
**Aftermath.** Xarrul keeps every promise (see [After the Reckoning](#after-the-reckoning)). No betrayal. Just the bill.
---
## The Central Dilemma: The Choice
@@ -154,7 +185,7 @@ If players pursue the dual-plane kill, they face the moral question at the heart
### There Is No Right Answer
If the players save the child, they arm the cult with proof. If they rebind the fiend, the cult gets its weapon back and Phase Two moves forward. If they negotiate, a killer goes free. If they destroy it conventionally, the child stays cursed and Dalla has nothing. If they never dig deep enough to learn the truth, they never even see the real choice — they get the rebinding and think they won.
If the players save the child, they arm the cult with proof. If they rebind the fiend, the cult gets its weapon back and Phase Two moves forward. If they negotiate, a killer goes free. If they destroy it conventionally, the child stays cursed and Dalla has nothing. If they *join* it, they behead the Opening and cure the child — and loose an honest monster on the world, over Mags's dead body. If they never dig deep enough to learn the truth, they never even see the real choice — they get the rebinding and think they won.
Every choice costs something. The depth of investigation determines which choices are even on the table. That's the point.
@@ -180,6 +211,13 @@ Dawn comes. Mags opens the doors. People leave. The night is over.
- Mags hunts it alone. Her chances aren't good.
- The thin point continues to grow.
**If the players sided with Xarrul (The Open Door):**
- The fiend is real and walking the city, wearing a borrowed face — and it keeps its word. The cult's local cell is gutted; Mother Vyre has a new, patient enemy who knows all her secrets.
- Lístek is cured — cleanly, no veil torn.
- Mags is dead, or gone: walked into the dawn without a word, and she is not the kind to let it lie.
- The Guest is annihilated (spent as the vessel) — or, if the party used another vessel, still caged below, or loose.
- The players *won*. That is the worst part.
**If the faction war happened:**
- Bodies. Regret. A tavern full of the dead and dying.
- Mags survives (she's the most dangerous person in the room).
@@ -194,6 +232,7 @@ Dawn comes. Mags opens the doors. People leave. The night is over.
- **Dace.** In guild custody, escaped, or dead.
- **The thin point.** Growing, stable, or weakened further. It will attract more entities.
- **Orenn's letter.** "If the veil tears, burn the cellar stores and seal the door." Mags hasn't done this yet. Maybe she should.
- **Xarrul, if it crossed.** A fiend at large that owes the party a debt — and, being honest, pays it. Their most unsettling asset, and someone's unfinished business. If Mags lived, she is already hunting it, and them.
---

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# 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.*
---
# 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.
---
# 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 |

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# The Journal of the Penitent
*A player-facing handout, followed by a DM key. Names, dates, and the entity's true name are placeholders — rename freely to fit your setting.*
---
## The Prop Itself (read aloud when found)
> A slim volume bound in undyed leather, gone grey with age. No title. The spine has been rebroken and resewn at least twice — by the same hand, judging by the thread. The pages are good rag paper, which is why they survived; the ink has browned but holds. Tucked into the rear cover is a pressed sprig of rue, crumbled nearly to dust.
>
> On the inside cover, in a controlled, clerkish hand:
>
> *"If you have found this room, you have already found the crime. This book is the confession. Read all of it or none of it. — M.V."*
---
## The Entries
*Dated by the city's founding charter. The guild's own founding falls in Year 43. The hand is the same throughout, though it degrades in the later entries.*
---
### Year 31 of the Charter — *Recruitment*
They do not ask you to kill anyone, at first. That is the thing no one understands about the Tollhouse. They ask you to *witness*. I stood in the room while Harrow worked, and I was told only to watch the dying man's face and tell them the moment it emptied. I thought I was learning the trade. I was being weighed.
I was nineteen. I owed the moneylender Cassia forty crowns and my sister's indenture. The Tollhouse paid both before they ever told me their name. I have since learned this is how it always begins — they find you already in debt, so that debt feels ordinary to you. So that when they finally explain what the city owes, and to whom, you will nod as if it were only arithmetic.
It is only arithmetic. That is the horror entire. I have never met a Tollman who enjoyed the work. I have met twelve who believed in it.
---
### Year 33 — *The Teaching*
Harrow taught me the marking tonight, and I record it here against every oath I will one day swear, because the day will come when someone must know how to *recognize* it, and by then all of us who could teach it will be dead. I intend to be one of the dead. Let this page be the teacher instead.
The mark is not made with the blade. It is made with the *visit*. You go to the debtor — that is what we called them, the debtors, never the targets — you go openly, in daylight if you can, and you speak with them. It does not matter what is said. What matters is the three gestures woven into ordinary courtesy: the touch of the doorframe on entering, the coin turned once on the table between you, and the parting word spoken in the old tongue under the breath of a common farewell. I will not write the word. I will write everything else in this book, but not the word. If you have found this journal to fight what I fought, you do not need it. If you have found it for any other reason, the missing word is the last mercy I have to offer you, and I know already it will not be enough.
Know the signs instead. A marked debtor sleeps poorly and does not know why. Dogs refuse them. Their shadow at dusk falls a half-breath late — you must watch for it, but once seen it cannot be unseen. Milk sours in their house. A priest with the true sight will see a hairline seam of grey light at the base of the throat, like a cracked glaze on pottery. The mark ripens in nine days and holds for ninety. The kill must come within that window or the mark sloughs off and the labor is wasted.
Between the marking and the kill, the debtor may be saved. Break the seam — consecration will do it, or the debtor's own genuine forgiveness of the grievance that named them, which is rarer than consecration. After the kill there is no saving anyone. Remember that. Nine days at the least. There is always time, if anyone knows to look.
---
### Year 34 — *First Harvest*
The kill itself is nothing. I want that recorded plainly because the ballads people will someday write about us — if any of this is ever known — will want it to be monstrous, and it is worse than monstrous. It is *clean*. A marked debtor dies like anyone dies. Quickly, if you are good, and I was good. What is different is the moment after, which only the killer feels: a direction. Every death I had seen before had a rising to it, or at worst a dispersal, like breath in cold air. This one had a *down*. Something below the city inhaled, and the man I killed went into it the way water finds a drain, and the drain said my name in a voice like a signature being written.
Three days later Harrow put the coin in my hand. Still warm. They are always warm at first — they cool over about a season, and a Tollman can tell a coin's age by the heat of it. It had the man's face on neither side. I do not know why I expected his face. It has the same face all of them have, which I will not describe, because you have either seen it or you have been spared.
I told myself: the city stands because of this. I told myself the pact was made before I was born and would be paid whether my hands did the work or worse hands did. Both of these things were true. I want whoever reads this to understand that everything the Tollhouse believes is *true*, and it does not matter, and learning that it does not matter took me nine years and cost the city forty-one souls that I minted personally. I keep their names on the last page. Read them. They are the reason this book exists.
---
### Year 36 — *The Terms*
I have now seen the Charter Below with my own eyes — the true founding document, of which the one in the civic archive is the sanitized twin. Vessel-Keeper Odran allowed it, as my initiation into the inner Tollhouse. I copy its substance here from memory, and my memory is exact; the Chain I wore in those years saw to that.
The counterparty names itself **OZHMIRRATH**, and signs as **the Undersigned**. The founders — all six signatures are there, and yes, all six, including the two whose statues stand in Temple Square — pledged the following:
- **The Consideration.** The city shall know prosperity: her wells sweet, her walls unbreached, her plagues passing her by, her trade favored. This has held. Understand that it has held. Every generation of this city's good fortune has been *purchased*, and the purchase is the next clause.
- **The Tithe.** One hundred souls the first year, and thereafter a tithe assessed each year at one soul per five hundred living residents, delivered marked and minted. The city has grown. Do that arithmetic and then sit with it awhile, as I have.
- **The Instrument.** The Undersigned appoints and empowers collectors; grants them the marking, the minting, and a commission of the harvest, paid in gifts and in coin. (These gifts are real. I still carry some of them in my body and expect to die of their absence rather than of age.)
- **Arrears.** Unpaid tithe compounds — one part in ten, annually. The Undersigned describes itself as *patient* in the same clause. I have come to understand these are the two most frightening words in the document.
- **The Default.** Should arrears exceed one full generation's assessment, the Undersigned may **foreclose upon the collateral**. The collateral is defined in the first line of the Charter. The collateral is the city. Not its buildings. The word used is *"the city, whole, and all souls resident therein at the hour of default."*
There is no dissolution clause. I looked. Odran laughed when he saw me looking and said the young ones always look. But a contract with no exit is not the same as a contract with no *flaw*, and I record my one observation on this matter in the entry of Year 42, where it belongs, next to what it cost.
---
### Year 38 — *The Vault*
Below the Tollhouse's chapter-room, behind the third false wall, the vault. I had imagined a treasury. It is closer to a granary, and that is the detail I cannot put down: the coins are not displayed or counted into chests, they are *heaped*, they are shoveled at season's end, and when the heap shifts in the night it makes a sound like a congregation whispering the same word out of unison.
Odran says the Undersigned draws down the vault from below, in its own time, like a root system. The heap never grows past a certain height no matter how much we pay in. Payment is not delivery to a place. Payment is *permission to digest*.
A partly spent coin — and some come back to us partly spent, when a collector dies and their regalia is recovered — whispers if you hold it to your ear in a quiet room. A full coin does not whisper. A full coin *listens*. I have started sleeping with wax in my ears and I no longer keep my commission in my sleeping room, and Harrow noticed both, and said nothing, and that was when I first knew Harrow was further along the same road I was on.
---
### Year 40 — *The Ledger Does Not Balance*
The realization, when it finally came, was an accountant's realization, and I am ashamed it took no better form. The tithe rises with the population. The population rises with the prosperity. The prosperity *is the payment for the tithe.* The contract is a millstone built to turn faster the longer it turns. There is no year in which the city grows prosperous enough to owe nothing; the owing is the engine of the prosperity. The founders did not buy the city a blessing. They sold it a mortgage that cannot amortize, and we, the Tollhouse, are not priests or judges or even murderers, principally. We are the *interest*.
Forty-one names on my last page. I stopped adding to it this year. Harrow stopped two years before me and hid it better. There are three of us now — Harrow, myself, and the boy Ferren, who never believed at all and only ever pretended, which I think makes him the best of us.
Twelve believers remain, and Odran, who is something worse than a believer. And below us all, the Undersigned, which has begun to notice that its instrument is going dull.
---
### Year 42 — *The Flaw*
Set down here so it survives me, whatever else does not:
The Charter empowers *collectors*. It defines a collector as one who has performed the marking and the minting and accepted commission. It nowhere obliges the Undersigned's counterparty — the city — to *supply* collectors. The founders bound their heirs to owe. They did not, because they could not imagine it necessary, bind their heirs to *collect*.
If every collector dies, and no new one is taught, the debt still compounds — I do not pretend otherwise — but the Undersigned cannot harvest a single soul by itself. It has no hands. It has never had hands. It has only ever had *us*, and its patience, and the certainty that debt makes its own collectors eventually.
So the plan is not victory. I want that understood by whoever reads this in whatever bad year has made them read it. The plan is *delay* — a delay measured in the time it takes the Undersigned to find and tutor new hands, which we intend to make as close to forever as fire and forgetting can make it. We will kill the Tollhouse, burn the teachings, and then build over the grave a thing whose every law makes the harvest impossible without ever once saying its name. A lock that does not describe its key.
Harrow calls this cowardice dressed as strategy — says we should publish everything, warn the whole city, let the temples stand guard forever in the open. Harrow is wrong, and here is why, and I want my reasoning on the record in case I am the one who is wrong: **a prohibition is a recipe read backward.** Write "no soul shall be taken by mark and coin" into any codex and you have told every ambitious reader for the next thousand years that souls *can* be taken by mark and coin, and that the method was important enough to ban. Secrets rot. Written warnings ferment. The only teaching that cannot be perverted is the one that does not exist.
And yet here I sit, writing this book. Harrow, if you ever read this: you were half right. I could not make the teaching not exist. I could only decide who I trusted to find it, and I have chosen — you will see where I leave it, and you will understand who I meant it for, and it was never us.
---
### Year 43, spring — *The Purge*
It is done and I will write it once and not again.
We took them at the season's reconciliation, when the whole Tollhouse gathers to count the payment in. Ferren sealed the doors. Harrow and I did the work. Twelve believers and Odran. I will not pretend it was a battle; it was our trade, performed on colleagues, and we were the best of them, which is why it worked and also why it will never stop playing behind my eyes.
The names, because someone must keep even these: Odran, called Vessel-Keeper. Sarel. The twins Marek and Maros. Ivenne. Old Tesh. Callo. Wren-of-the-Gate. Bettany. Kirse. Aldous the Younger. Pale Junna.
That is twelve, with Odran. The thirteenth was **Corvisser**, and Corvisser was not in the room.
We hunted him eleven days. Ferren swears he took Corvisser in the water-gate tunnel and saw the body go under the sluice. Ferren does not lie. But the sluice was in flood, no body surfaced downstream, and Corvisser had been Odran's courier to the founders' descendants — he knew names outside the Tollhouse that even I was never given. I have spent nights since arguing myself into Ferren's certainty and mornings arguing myself out of it.
If the harvest ever returns to this city, look first for an old man with a courier's habits, or for the family he ran to. I pray this line is the paranoia of a tired killer. I have prayed for stranger things and had them refused.
---
### Year 43, autumn — *What We Built*
The charter of the new guild is signed. To the city it is a killers' cartel agreeing to rules, and the city is relieved, and it should be, though not for the reasons it thinks.
I record here — once, in this book only — what the codex is actually for. We drafted every clause twice: once for the reason we would say aloud, and once for the true reason, which we spoke only in the Reconciliation Room and never wrote until now.
**"The kill, once sanctioned, follows the warning within the closing of a hand of days."** *Spoken reason:* mercy; a debtor should not live long under the axe. *True reason:* the mark needs nine days to ripen. A kill inside five days harvests nothing. We built the calendar of killing to be too fast for the Undersigned's digestion.
**"Every kill is claimed openly under the guild's seal."** *Spoken reason:* honor; no innocent shall hang for our work. *True reason:* the seal is half of an audit. The other half belongs to the temple. Which brings me to—
**The Reconciliation.** Each season, one elder of the guild and one keeper from the Temple of the Threshold meet in the room where this book rests, and lay ledger against ledger: our sealed kills against their record of souls *arrived*. Every name must appear in both books. A name in ours and not in theirs means a soul that went *down* instead of *on*, and the compact we have sworn with the temple is that such a discrepancy is treated as the gravest crime the guild can commit — investigated by both houses, together, before the season turns. This is the tripwire. Everything else is architecture; this is the tripwire. If it is ever allowed to lapse, the rest of the codex is a wall with an unlocked gate.
**"No contract without proof of grievance."** *True reason:* the Tollhouse chose its debtors freely, or manufactured cause. Binding every death to a real, demonstrated, *external* wrong takes the choosing of the dead out of the killers' hands. A harvester needs volume and selection. The grievance rule denies both.
**"The blood-debt closes with the kill; retaliation is forbidden and the guild enforces the closing."** *True reason:* grudges were our raw material. A feud is a seam of ore; the Tollhouse mined feuds for generations of "justified" marks. We seal every vein as we go.
**"The kill shall be swift and without suffering, and no harm shall touch any but the named."** *Spoken reason:* we are not torturers. *True reason:* this one, at least, we also meant.
Ferren asked me tonight whether it does not terrify me that in three generations the guild will keep these laws devoutly and know none of the reasons. I told him the truth: it is the only version that *works*. The reasons are the danger. A guild that knows why the gate is locked will one day produce a member who wants to see the other side. A guild that simply knows the gate is *sacred* will defend it forever without once looking at it.
I believed that when I said it. Most nights I still do.
---
### Year 44 — *The Temple's Keeping*
One more thing set down, because it is not mine to destroy and I will not carry the only knowledge of it into the ground.
A soul minted is not a soul destroyed — not at once. The coin spends, and what is spent is gone past any god's reach; but what remains in an unspent or part-spent coin is a person, folded and cold and *recoverable*. The Tollhouse knew this and did not care. The Temple of the Threshold knew it and cared enormously: in the worst years, their keepers ransomed coins from corrupt collectors and performed what they called the **Decanting** — I witnessed it once, in Year 39, in secret, and it is the only beautiful thing I saw in fourteen years of this work. The soul does not return to the body (the body is long past use); it is *released to go on*, which the freed understand, in the moment of it, and their gratitude is a thing I will hear until I die and hope to hear after.
I do not know the rite. It was never taught outside the Threshold's innermost keeping, and rightly. I know only that it exists, that it requires the coin *unspent past half*, and that after the purge the temple sealed the rite away with their other dangerous mercies — Keeper Ashwen told me it would rest "below the oldest bell, with the things we keep against the worst days." She is dead now. The oldest bell still hangs. If you hold a coin and a conscience, that is where I would carry both.
---
### Year 51 — *Final Entry*
Harrow died in the winter, in bed, unforgiven by himself. Ferren keeps the guild's tribunal and has become exactly the sort of upright bore we dreamed of manufacturing; he has not spoken of the old days in four years and I think has half convinced himself they belong to someone else. Good. That is the design, working.
The reconciliations continue, ledger against ledger, every season, and every season the books balance, and the young keeper from the Threshold who does the counting now was not born when the reason for it burned. She thinks it a quaint formality. She performs it perfectly anyway. Every time I watch her check the last name and close both books, I think: *this is what victory looks like — a ritual outliving its war.*
I leave this book here, in the room where the books are balanced, because the room itself is my last lock. No one finds this chamber who has not already discovered the audit; no one discovers the audit who was not already hunting a missing soul; and no one hunts a missing soul unless the worst has already happened. So: if you are reading this, the worst has already happened, and you came here down the one road I trusted — the temple's road, the counting road, the road of a person who noticed a name in one ledger and not the other and could not let it rest.
Whoever you are: the word I would not write in Year 33, I do not write now. Everything else, I have given you. The names on the last page were people, and the coins in whatever vault you are about to find were people, and the thing beneath the city that calls itself the Undersigned has been waiting for you specifically for a very long time, and its patience is not a virtue, it is a *term of contract*.
Balance the books.
— Maren Vael, once of the Tollhouse, once of six founders, debtor still
*(The last page follows: forty-one names in a tight column, each with a date. Three have small marks beside them — see DM key.)*
---
---
# DM KEY
*Each entry, what it unlocks, and how to use it at the table.*
| Entry | Campaign secret unlocked | Table use |
|---|---|---|
| **Inside cover** | The journal was left *for* investigators who reconstructed the audit — validates the party's whole clue chain retroactively. | Read after the party finds the Reconciliation Room. The "M.V." monogram can be seeded much earlier on founder-era documents. |
| **Year 31** | Tollhouse recruitment pattern: find people already in debt. | Foreshadows how the First Debtor recruits *new* Unweighed — and lets the party predict/intercept a recruitment in progress. |
| **Year 33** | **The marking ritual and its detection signs** (late shadow, seam of grey light, nine-day ripening, ninety-day window). Also: a marked-but-living victim **can still be saved** (consecration, or forgiveness of the grievance). | This is the party's counter-toolkit. Once read, they can identify marked targets and race the nine-day clock. The withheld final word is why the journal alone can't teach harvesting (see "Two dials" below). |
| **Year 34** | Soulcoins cool over a season → **coin warmth dates a kill.** The Unweighed's coins can be forensically matched to recent sealed contracts. | Physical-evidence mechanic: a warm coin found on a suspect ties them to a specific recent guild kill. |
| **Year 36** | **Full pact terms**: entity's true name (Ozhmirrath / the Undersigned), tithe formula (1 soul per 500 residents/year), 10% compounding arrears, gifts-as-commission, and the **default clause** (foreclosure on the city and every soul in it once arrears exceed one generation's assessment). | Your doomsday clock, now with real numbers. Let the party (or the Actuary's captured ledger) compute how close default is. The true name matters for any binding, banishing, or renegotiation attempt in the finale. |
| **Year 38** | The vault's nature: payment = permission to digest; the heap never grows. Part-spent coins whisper; full coins "listen" (can the entity *hear through* full coins? Your call — if yes, the party's captured coins are bugs). | Vault-as-dungeon sensory palette, plus an optional nasty twist: carrying full coins may leak information to the Undersigned. |
| **Year 40** | The pact is a treadmill by design — prosperity funds population funds tithe. There is no "pay it off" ending. | Kills the false hope of settling the debt honestly; forces the endgame toward the Flaw, the default, or renegotiation. |
| **Year 42** | **The Flaw**: the pact obliges no one to *supply* collectors; the entity has no hands of its own. The founders' purge was a delay strategy, not a victory. | The strategic thesis of the whole campaign: destroy the Unweighed *and the teaching*, and the entity is helpless again — for a while. Also frames the party's ending as the same choice Maren faced: erase, or publish and stand guard. |
| **Year 43 spring** | The purge roster — and **Corvisser**, the collector whose death was never confirmed, courier to the founders' descendant families. | Your free-floating hook. Options: (a) the First Debtor's discovery was seeded by a Corvisser-descendant cache, not just the entity's whispers; (b) a founder family is quietly complicit today; (c) pure red herring — Ferren was right. Decide late; the journal supports all three. |
| **Year 43 autumn** | **The codex decoded**, clause by clause — and the lapsed **Reconciliation compact** with the Temple of the Threshold, the tripwire whose lapse enabled everything. | Hand this to the loyalists (guild master, tribunal) as the "rereading the codex" revelation — Maren's margin notes do the work. Restoring the seasonal reconciliation is a concrete, satisfying post-campaign reform the party can institute. |
| **Year 44** | **Reversibility, canonized**: the Decanting exists, works only on coins *less than half spent*, releases the soul onward (no body resurrection), and the rite is sealed "below the oldest bell" in the Threshold's vault. | Your rare-restoration quest pointer, exactly as designed: real, costly, not common knowledge, and located off guild grounds. The half-spent limit creates triage tragedy — some recovered coins are already past saving. |
| **Year 51** | Ferren = the guild's first tribunal judge (the office the First Debtor now holds — a deliberate, bitter symmetry). The audit decayed into empty ritual and then lapsed entirely. The room's placement was itself a filter for trustworthy finders — a filter the entity's whispers bypassed. | Thematic payload for the finale, and the explanation of *why* the First Debtor (as Ferren's successor in office) had the access and the archive to be found by the entity. |
| **Last page (41 names)** | Maren's personal victims. The three marked names: coins she believed were, at time of writing, **still less than half spent** — candidates for Decanting, if they survive in the vault. | Emotional endgame beat: the party can finish Maren's penance by decanting her marked three. If the Unweighed have since spent them, that loss lands too. |
## Two dials, pre-set (change if you like)
**The omitted step.** As written, Maren withholds the final word of the marking rite, so the journal *cannot* teach harvesting — the First Debtor had to receive the missing word from Ozhmirrath directly, which deepened their bond (and gives you a possession/leverage angle in the boss arc). *Alternative:* if you'd rather the book be a complete and dangerous artifact, add one line to Year 33 ("I write even the word, may it rot with me: ___") and your epilogue gains the burn-the-book dilemma — destroying the last record of the harvest also destroys the only copy of the pact's terms.
**Corvisser.** Left deliberately unresolved above. If you want a mid-campaign gut-punch, make the First Debtor's family name a descendant of whoever sheltered Corvisser — the party can discover it through mundane genealogy, a wholly non-magical clue in a very magical mystery.
## Prop notes
- If you print it, age only the *edges* — Maren kept it dry and rebound it twice; it should read as *cared for*, not neglected. The pressed rue (herb of regret and warding) is her signature; rue can reappear wherever you want the party to feel her hand — pressed in the reconciliation ledgers, planted over Harrow's grave.
- Reveal pacing: the journal is long. Consider letting the party read Years 31–43 in the Reconciliation Room scene, but have the Year 44 and Year 51 pages *cut out* — taken by the First Debtor, who could not bear (or could not risk) leaving the Decanting and the final entry behind. Recovering the cut pages from the Debtor's chapel-altar gives the reversibility quest its own discovery beat instead of arriving in one lump.