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npc/assassins.md

@@ -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.

npc/mags.md

@@ -63,6 +63,27 @@ She is direct, blunt, and has no patience for lies. She can tell when someone is
 - 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.

npc/orenn.md

@@ -38,6 +38,17 @@ Orenn was a cleaner for over twenty years. When the city's underworld spawned so
 
 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.)

npc/tallow.md

@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ He smiles easily but the smile never reaches his eyes. When he laughs, count you
 
 ## 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.

npc/the-guest.md

@@ -0,0 +1,123 @@
+# 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.

npc/xarrul.md

@@ -6,11 +6,13 @@
 
 ## 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)