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xarrul rework

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# AGENT.md
Guidance for AI agents working in this D&D oneshot repository.
## Language
**All player-facing text must be in Czech.** This includes:
- **Read-aloud / boxed text** — anything the DM reads aloud to the players.
- **Printed handouts** — everything in `prints/` that is handed to a player (e.g. the character-secret cards in `prints/secrets/`).
DM-facing material (stat blocks, mechanics, notes, storyline logic, and combat-reference cards) stays in English.
### What stays English vs. what gets translated
- **Item and game-mechanic names stay in English**, even inside Czech player text — e.g. *Potion of Superior Healing*, *Bless*, "DC 15", "8d4+8", "advantage on saving throws".
- **Organization and place names get a Czech translation** and use the Czech name in player-facing text.
- The Czech name **must also be recorded in the DM-facing notes**, so DM material carries both the English and Czech name and the two vocabularies stay in sync. When introducing a new org/place in DM material, write it as `English Name (Czech Name)`.
- **Real-world easter-egg names stay in their original form** in both DM and player-facing text. The setting reskins real Dundee locations (Dundee → *Broath Got*) as flavor — e.g. the tavern **Nether Inn** — and the easter egg only works if the real name is preserved. This is the exception to the place-name rule above: do **not** Czech-render these.
### Canonical names (glossary)
| English (DM material) | Czech (player-facing) |
|---|---|
| Order of Mending *(formerly "Lambent Order")* | Řád Zacelení |
| House of Scales | Dům spravedlnosti |
| Nether Inn *(real Dundee pub — easter egg, stays English)* | Nether Inn |
| Merchant Quarter | Kupecká čtvrť |
| the Guest *(the changeling)* | Host |
| the Vault | Trezor |
| Cell One / Cell Two | Cela jedna / Cela dvě |
| the thin point | tenké místo |
| the Threshold *(the faith)* | Práh |
| Thera "Even-Hand" | Thera „Rovná ruka" |
| the Reckoning *(the finale)* | závěrečný střet |

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# Core Move — Mags & Orenn as Fixers, and the House's Secret
The canonical concept for the rewrite. Everything below is settled; the module
files should be brought into line with it.
## The reframe, in one line
Mags and Orenn are not fiend experts. They are skilled **underworld fixers, out
of their depth** — people who think they can handle this because they've handled
hard things before, and are quietly, fatally wrong about what "this" is.
## Who they are now
Their competence is real, but it's in **violence, intimidation, tracking a mark,
making problems disappear, and — above all — information.** Running the city's
neutral ground means they *must* know who's moving and why, so they run
**surveillance** on every faction (the Guest as a planted asset, Tallow as a
source, their own watching). Humint, not brimstone.
- Mags's *Cleaner's Instinct* (advantage vs. fiends) becomes a **Fixer's Read**:
advantage to read people, spot a lie, clock a threat, track a mark.
- Drop her fluent Infernal ("years of dealing with fiends"). Thieves' Cant stays;
at most a few words picked up from one bad job.
- They've **brushed against the supernatural** a handful of times over the years
(that's why they own a little anti-fiend kit and a shelf of reference books) —
but they never specialized. A seasoned fixer recognizes "this job is cursed,
get the salt," not a species.
## The house history
The building sits on a **natural thin point** (this is already canon). Long ago it
was a **warlock/cultist den** — summoners work a thin point because it makes
calling easier. They got greedy, pushed it, and **tore an actual rift** in the
deepest chamber; something got loose. The underworld hired **Orenn and Mags to
clean out the summoners** — the human part, which is exactly a fixer's job. They
killed/scattered the cult, found the torn rift already **sealed** (by the cult's
own last containment, or a specialist on the job — *not* by them), judged it a
closed case, and **took the house as payment** (nobody else wants a cursed
cult-den on a bad corner).
**Every occult tool in the cellars is the previous owners' leftover stock** — the
circles, the books, the salt, the runed nails, the ward-crystal. Orenn and Mags
built and bought none of it. They kept the junk where it lay and re-traced the
containment chalk occasionally out of closed-case superstition — recipe-following,
not comprehension.
## What they know vs. what they don't
- **They KNOW the history:** "This was a summoner's den, we cleaned it out years
ago, that gear downstairs is theirs, there's a sealed dead rift in the bottom
chamber." Closed case.
- **They are OBLIVIOUS that it's reactivating.** They have no idea the seal is
failing, that a fiend is digging through it, that it killed Orenn, or that it's
connected to the Order activity they've been tracking **up in the city.**
Their antennae point **outward** (surveillance) and they're sharp there. They're
**oblivious downward.** The call is coming from inside the house, and the two best
investigators in the building never look under their own floor — because the
phenomenon is diffuse and city-wide (below), and because that basement is, to
them, closed business.
## The metaphysics lives elsewhere — not in their heads
- **The cult (Order of Mending)** summoned Xarrul, works the Opening, and holds a
**map of thin points** (one being here). They understand it. They're adversarial
and unreliable — the tension you want.
- **The books.** Fixers accumulate reference; you read the page you need, never
cover to cover. The house holds an **encyclopedia they never internalized** —
some inherited with the building (the den's), the rest collected on jobs. The
knowledge is physically present for players to dig into; it was never in Mags's
or Orenn's heads. (Orenn's bestiary in the bedroom is one of these.)
- **The Guest** infiltrated the cult, so it knows the cult's side. It was always
an **intelligence asset**, not a fiend-hunting tool — which points straight at
their real trade: spymastering.
This turns Mags from a **knowledge vending machine** into a source of **leads, not
answers.** Players earn understanding by cross-referencing books + cult + Guest +
Vetch's trip, not by unlocking one trusted NPC.
## The thin point, the tear, and the two circles
- **Binding circle** (upper cellar): a *Magic Circle against fiends* — a **cage for
a creature.** This was the den's **summoning-and-command circle** (you call a
fiend into it so it can't claw you while you bind it). In the finale it's the
**trap** you lure Xarrul into.
- **Containment circle** (deep cellar, the Old Work): a silver-and-salt ring around
the actual tear — a **cork in a hole.** It keeps the rift from widening. Its
**erosion is the clock**; re-powering it slows the clock.
The one-liner: *the binding circle is a cage you put a monster in; the containment
circle is a cork you put in a hole.* Both are **legacy** — the den's, not theirs.
## The diffuse bleed = the obliviousness engine
The Opening and the failing tear are the **same physical phenomenon** — a thinning
of the Material–Ethereal boundary. One is engineered, one is leftover; **they
produce an identical signature** (cold with no draft, wrong-direction sound,
half-seen figures, restless minds, "sensitives" drifting in, small hauntings).
There is no way to tell them apart by symptom — only by **source.**
The leftover **containment keeps the intense source sealed below.** What escapes is
a **thin, wide, city-scale bleed** with no usable local gradient — from street
level the whole district feels equally "off." So Orenn reads it as a
**district/underworld** problem and never suspects one specific building (his own).
That diffuseness is *why* he didn't check the basement.
## The case board (city-scale; poignancy, not a puzzle)
Orenn's investigation, in his old cellar ops-room — **early phase, a few names, and
everything misfiled outward:**
- City map pinned with district deaths/disappearances/madness — some are **Thera's
soul-harvest** (real, human), some are people the tear frayed. Lumped as
"someone's working the district."
- A watch-list of patrons who "changed" — **Bren** (raving), **Vetch** (chasing
stronger dust). Filed as recruits/addicts/marks; actually the thin point
fraying them.
- The **Order of Mending** file — Guest's intel, meeting frequency, a name
(*Vyre?*), the bronze pins. His strongest, realest lead — and the exact thing
that let him misattribute everything else.
- A **timeline** showing the anomalies ramping "in step with" the Order getting
busier. Correlation he read as cause. (Both escalate because they're the same
phenomenon.)
- **Nothing localizes home, because nothing can.** That absence is the point.
## The lockdown is Xarrul's keystone (the master beat)
- **The ward-crystal is the summoners' "oh-shit button."** An emergency containment
device: if a calling ever punched a hole to a lower plane, breaking the crystal
seals the house in a resilient shell **on every plane at once** — it plane-shifts
and lays a *resilient-sphere*-like seal over each plane's version of the building.
(Why all planes rather than the Material↔Ethereal boundary itself? Because sealing
*within* a plane is easy and sealing *between* planes is hard — so it cheats:
several easy single-plane seals instead of one near-impossible between-planes one.)
The device's whole purpose: contain a breach so that **only what is already inside
the house, on some plane, can come through the hole — never the whole plane behind
it.** (The module already calls it *"the tavern's stored wards"* — this reveals
what they were for.) Mags inherited it as *"the panic button that bolts the doors"*
and has no idea it seals across planes.
- **Why Xarrul needs it.** While the house bled freely across planes — a leaky, open
boundary — the fiend's crossing effort *dissipated*; it could only jaunt partway,
for seconds. Sealing the house turns it into a **closed cross-planar vessel**: now
the one thing already inside on the ethereal side (Xarrul) can finish its crossing
through the tear without the energy leaking away, and the summoners' "limit the
breach to a single entity" safeguard *guarantees* that entity is it. The
containment button built to protect the city is a bespoke door for exactly one
guest. Mags thinks she's building a cage; she's finishing Xarrul's door.
- **Before the crystal breaks:** partway jaunts only — enough to kill an
unsuspecting Orenn in the dark, no more. **After:** a closed vessel; Xarrul crosses
in earnest over the night, and when the **seal lapses at midnight** it walks out
real. The **lockdown timer IS the clock.**
- **Not luck.** Xarrul is ancient and patient and has watched the house
ethereally for a long time. The tavern has a **known, ritualized response to a
killing** (the whole no-kill premise). Xarrul weaponizes the house's own
protocol. Making **Orenn** the victim removes the calm keeper who might've
investigated coolly, guaranteeing the emotional, protocol-following responder
(Mags) is the one holding the crystal.
- **One murder, three payoffs:** (1) removes the one watcher circling it;
(2) triggers the keystone lockdown; (3) frames the outsiders → conscripts the
PCs, keeps the factions hunting each other, seals everyone in.
## Consequences that fall out for free
- **The obstacle inverts into a weapon.** Once players learn what the crystal did,
**breaching an exit** (already in the rules) becomes an anti-Xarrul tactic:
puncturing the shell on a plane re-opens the boundary, the closed vessel goes leaky
again, and the crossing destabilizes — Xarrul can't complete tonight (at worst it
slips away ethereally to try elsewhere later). The thing they wanted to escape is
the thing they smash on purpose.
- **The seal makes the source findable (the inflection).** Before tonight the
failing tear leaked and *diffused across the whole district* — wide, flat, no
gradient — which is exactly why Orenn read it as a city problem and never localized
it. The moment the house seals across planes, that diffusion is **cut off**:
nothing bleeds out, nothing bleeds in, and the wrongness that used to spread thin
over the quarter is now **trapped and concentrated inside the house**, with its
source. From tonight the players, unlike Orenn, *can* trace it home — not because
more leaks out, but because it can no longer leak *away.*
## Xarrul's character (tone)
**Ruthless and honest. Lawful-neutral.** Keeps its promises to the letter; carries
no moral bias. Single goal — **to be real**, to cross and live — and it is
determined, picking the most viable course of action regardless of the morality of
it. It was used as an evil tool for centuries; it will not shy from evil acts now.
But it **won't reach for harm without a reason** — no threat, no attack. **Not
reckless.** A mastermind, not a liar: manipulating events is not deceiving those it
deals with. This *sharpens* the Open Door choice — siding with something ruthless
*and* honest, because the cult is worse.
## The Mags gut-punch (optional, strong)
Late-game, the players — or Mags — realize the lockdown *she* triggered to protect
everyone is what let Xarrul cross. It killed Orenn and then used her grief and her
protocol to finish its door. Fits her fatalism and the Warden's Mark; fuels her in
the finale rather than paralyzing her.
## Blast radius — files to bring into line
- **npc/mags.md** — heavy: drop fiend expertise, Fixer's Read, Infernal, obliviousness, surveillance, the crystal she doesn't understand.
- **npc/orenn.md** — heavy: background (fixer not fiend-hunter), the case board, "What He Knew" redirected outward, oblivious to the tear.
- **overview.md** — "retired cleaner"/fiend framing; the clock; the murder's purpose.
- **location/tavern-overview.md** — the ward-crystal's true nature; the "old ward-sigils carved by Orenn and Mags" secret; History section.
- **location/cellar.md** — ward-sigils section (drop the footprint barrier), binding-circle provenance/use.
- **location/deep-cellar.md** — containment provenance ("was contained," not "the couple contained"), the chalk-wall note redirected outward, "why they really live here."
- **storylines/the-reckoning.md** — The Clock (= lockdown timer), Scenario A bell, Scenario B binding circle, Scenario F, the Bell ending, Mags's lines.
- **npc/xarrul.md** — the Night's Clock, the mastermind/lockdown plan, the tone.
- **storylines/murder-mystery.md** — the murder as the plan activating; the lockdown beat.
- **npc/the-guest.md** — confirm "intelligence asset" framing (mostly already fits).

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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.*
*Every patron in the Nether Inn 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.*
---
@@ -19,7 +19,7 @@ Two rules shaped this rewrite, both aimed at a **oneshot**:
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."*
> *"Each of you came to the Nether Inn 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.
@@ -77,7 +77,7 @@ Each has four parts: **Boon** (an asset you have now) · **Goal** (your secret o
> **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.
> **Boon — The Order's Regard.** You carry a hidden **Order of Mending 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.
>
@@ -88,7 +88,7 @@ Each has four parts: **Boon** (an asset you have now) · **Goal** (your secret o
### 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.**
> **Goal — Obey, or Break the Chain.** The Order of Mending 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.
@@ -112,7 +112,7 @@ Each has four parts: **Boon** (an asset you have now) · **Goal** (your secret o
### 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.**
> **Goal — Find Out What Happened.** Someone you loved took a "fixer" job in this city years ago and never came home. Tonight you learned Orenn and Mags were *the* fixers. 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.
>

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# Back Rooms
Behind the bar, through a heavy door reinforced with iron bands, lie the working areas of the Burnt Tongue.
Behind the bar, through a heavy door reinforced with iron bands, lie the working areas of the Nether Inn.
## Kitchen
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ A cramped room off the kitchen. Barrels of ale, crates of root vegetables, hangi
- **Hidden compartment (DC 15 Investigation):** Behind a false barrel-back, a narrow shelf contains:
- 4 vials of **Holy Water**
- 1 vial of **Silversheen** (coat a weapon, treat it as silvered for 1 hour)
- A leather roll containing **Orenn's cleaner tools** — a set of specialized instruments somewhere between thieves' tools and a surgeon's kit. Grants advantage on Investigation checks related to fiends or extraplanar entities if the user is proficient in either thieves' tools or arcana. These are old, well-used, and irreplaceable.
- A leather roll of **fine instruments** — the summoners' old diagnostic kit, kept and well-used by Orenn: something between thieves' tools and a surgeon's set. Grants advantage on Investigation checks related to the arcane or extraplanar if the user is proficient in either thieves' tools or arcana. Old, irreplaceable, and not originally theirs.
- A **warding chalk** (3 uses) — can draw a 5-foot circle that functions as a Magic Circle against fiends for 10 minutes per use. Faster and cheaper than the spell, but the duration is limited.
- **Floor trapdoor:** Leads to the cellar. Not hidden — just heavy and stiff. DC 12 Athletics to open quietly, or just yank it (noisy, everyone in the kitchen hears).
@@ -37,9 +37,9 @@ A small room with a lockable door, a table, two benches, and a single candle sco
### Details
- **The table** has knife marks scratched into it — tally marks, initials, crude maps. Layers of history from hundreds of clandestine meetings.
- **One set of marks (DC 14 Investigation):** Recent — within the last week. A diagram of the Burnt Tongue's layout with X marks at the foundation stones. These are the ward-sigil locations. Someone was mapping them. The scratches are fresh enough to have wood dust still in the grooves.
- **One set of marks (DC 14 Investigation):** Recent — within the last week. A diagram of the Nether Inn's layout with X marks at the foundation stones — the old summoner-sigils. Someone was mapping the house's occult bones. The scratches are fresh enough to have wood dust still in the grooves.
- **DC 16 Arcana:** The diagram also notes the **angles of resonance** between sigils — this is the work of someone who understood how to *break* the wards, not just locate them. This was done by someone working for the cultists (or the fiend itself, through manipulation).
- **Under the left bench (DC 13 Perception):** A dropped cultist pin — a small bronze disc with the Lambent Order's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame). Haddon will deny knowledge. Essek will look terrified if shown this. The pin belongs to a member not present tonight — evidence that the cult has been using the private room for meetings.
- **Under the left bench (DC 13 Perception):** A dropped cultist pin — a small bronze disc with the Order of Mending's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame). Haddon will deny knowledge. Essek will look terrified if shown this. The pin belongs to a member not present tonight — evidence that the cult has been using the private room for meetings.
### Read-Aloud: The Private Room
@@ -58,6 +58,6 @@ A small room with a lockable door, a table, two benches, and a single candle sco
A modest room. A bed, a wardrobe, a desk. Everything is clean and ordered. Two people who learned to live in small spaces together.
- **Desk:** Contains correspondence with a contact in the city watch — Orenn was feeding them information about the cult's activities, slowly and carefully. He suspected the Lambent Order was more than scholars. He didn't know about the fiend.
- **Desk:** Contains correspondence with a contact in the city watch — Orenn was feeding them information about the cult's activities, slowly and carefully. He suspected the Order of Mending was more than scholars. He didn't know about the fiend.
- **Wardrobe:** Behind a false back (DC 14 Investigation), a small arsenal: 2 silvered daggers, a vial of **Oil of Etherealness** (1 dose — allows the user to enter the Ethereal Plane for 1 hour, as per the spell), and a **leather-bound bestiary** focused on fiends. Bookmarked pages describe entities matching Xarrul's type — Orenn was doing research. He was worried but hadn't figured out what was coming.
- **Under the bed:** A lockbox (DC 16 Thieves' Tools). Contains 150 gp (their savings), a deed to the tavern, and two silver rings — simple, unadorned. Mags will quietly close the box if she sees this. It's not relevant to the investigation. It's just a life.

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# 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.
Beneath the Nether Inn, 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.
> **DM note — this is the *upper* cellar.** Everything the endgame needs is here: the thin point, the summoners' binding circle, and the old foundation 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.*
>
> *Ve světle se v koutech u stropu zaleskne pavučina — hustá, šedá, mnohem víc, než by si tak malý sklep zasloužil. Táhne se podél západní stěny až k regálům se sudy — a tam náhle končí, jako by ji tam někdo pravidelně strhával.*
## Layout
@@ -39,7 +41,7 @@ The cellar is a single irregular space carved into bedrock, roughly 10 meters by
### Barrel Racks (West Wall)
Wine and spirits too good for the upstairs crowd. A few barrels are marked with chalk symbols — DC 13 Investigation reveals these are Orenn's personal inventory codes. One barrel is not a barrel — it's a hollow shell containing:
- A **Cloak of Elvenkind** (Orenn's, from his cleaner days)
- A **Cloak of Elvenkind** (Orenn's, from his fixer days)
- 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.
@@ -49,9 +51,10 @@ What looks like raw bedrock behind the barrel racks is a **shell of stone facing
- **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 cobweb tell:** everything in this corner is draped in thick silk *except* the barrel racks, which are conspicuously clean — they get moved. A few fresh threads trail from the seam itself, where finger-sized spiderlings squeeze through the gaps (the same gaps that carry the draft and the smell). A PC who clocks the clean patch has **advantage** on the Investigation check to find the door.
- 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.
- **Twinkle**, the household [feyspitter spider](deep-cellar.md#encounter--the-guardian), dens just inside — in the Workroom at the foot of the descent — so sharp-eared PCs may hear dry clicking and the skitter of web beyond the door before they open it.
See **[deep-cellar.md](deep-cellar.md)** for the full lower level.
@@ -59,21 +62,22 @@ See **[deep-cellar.md](deep-cellar.md)** for the full lower level.
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.
### Orenn's Circle (South)
The crates and the whole west corner are furred with thick, greyed spider-silk — far more than a damp cellar earns. **(Foreshadowing:** something big webs the dark below; see [Twinkle](deep-cellar.md#encounter--the-guardian).) The silk thins to nothing at the barrel racks, which are swept clean by regular handling — a tell in its own right (see the [Concealed Door](#the-concealed-door-behind-the-barrel-racks-north-wall)).
Hidden behind the crates. A permanent **Magic Circle against fiends** etched into the bedrock with silver inlay. This is master-level work — DC 16 Arcana identifies it as designed for both binding and interrogation. Orenn and Mags used this during their cleaner years to hold captured fiends for questioning.
### The Binding Circle (South)
Hidden behind the crates. A permanent **Magic Circle against fiends** etched into the bedrock with silver inlay — **master-level work, and not Orenn's.** It belonged to the summoners who ran this house before them: DC 16 Arcana identifies it as a **summoning-and-binding circle**, the kind a warlock calls a fiend *into* so the thing can't reach them while they bargain and bind it. Orenn and Mags left it where they found it and never had cause — or the craft — to use it. (This is exactly why the cult's own Haddon can work it in the [rebinding](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-b-the-rebinding): it's a summoner's tool, and he's a summoner.)
- The circle is **intact and functional**. If Xarrul can be lured here and trapped, the circle activates automatically — the fiend must succeed on a DC 17 Charisma saving throw or be contained.
- **Limitation:** The circle only works on the Material Plane. If Xarrul is in the Ethereal Plane, it has no effect. Players need to force Xarrul fully into the Material Plane first (Fiendbane Manacles, the bell upstairs, or the dual-plane kill).
### Foundation Stones & Ward-Sigils (Center, North)
### Foundation Stones & the Old Sigils (Center, North)
The exposed foundation stones of the tavern above. Carved into them are **ward-sigils** — Orenn and Mags's work from fifteen years ago. These wards created a barrier on the Ethereal Plane, preventing fiends from entering the tavern's footprint while ethereal.
The exposed foundation stones of the tavern above. Carved into them are **sigils** — but they are **the summoners' work, not Orenn and Mags's**: the upstairs end of the binding-and-containment craft that runs down into the [Deep Cellar](deep-cellar.md). For fifteen years they've sat inert; no one living in the house understood them well enough to do more than leave them alone.
**Current state:** The sigils are **cracked**. Thin fracture lines run through the carved symbols, and the stone around them is warm to the touch despite the cellar's cold. DC 13 Arcana reveals the wards have been deliberately weakened — someone (or something) has been working on them for weeks. DC 16 Arcana identifies the method as consistent with fiendish influence applied from the Ethereal Plane side.
**Current state:** the stone around a few of the sigils is **warm to the touch** despite the cellar's cold. **DC 13 Arcana** reveals the old work is being *drawn on* — something has been feeding on it from the Ethereal side for weeks. **DC 16 Arcana** identifies the influence as fiendish. (This is Xarrul, siphoning the leftover craft to help pry open the [Old Work](deep-cellar.md#the-old-work) far below — the upstairs symptom of the real damage downstairs. It is *not* a broken barrier; it's a breadcrumb pointing the players **down.**)
- The cracking explains how Xarrul was able to enter the tavern's ethereal footprint and kill Orenn.
- **Repairing the wards** requires warding chalk (found in storage) and a DC 15 Arcana check. Success restores partial function — Xarrul has disadvantage on its Ethereal Jaunt when within the tavern. Failure expends the chalk.
- **Rekindling a sigil.** A character with the right knowledge (a book from the house, or the [Guest's](../npc/the-guest.md) coaching) plus **warding chalk** (from storage) and a **DC 15 Arcana** check can wake one sigil into a genuine local ward, drawing on the thin point: while it holds, **Xarrul has disadvantage on Ethereal Jaunt within the tavern.** Failure expends the chalk. This is the players *doing* the craft the owners never could.
### The Thin Point (East)
@@ -89,10 +93,10 @@ The air here is wrong. Not cold, not warm — *thin*. Characters standing here f
## Ethereal Plane Overlay
For the DM: in the Ethereal Plane, the cellar looks different. The stone walls glow faintly with the ghost-light of old wards. The broken sigils appear as dark, weeping wounds in the light. The thin point is a *tear* — not metaphorical, a visible rip in the grey fabric of the Ethereal Plane, showing the Material Plane through it in muted color.
For the DM: in the Ethereal Plane, the cellar looks different. The stone walls glow faintly with the ghost-light of old wards. The summoners' sigils appear as faint lines being *drained* — thin threads of light bleeding away toward the thin point. The thin point is a *tear* — not metaphorical, a visible rip in the grey fabric of the Ethereal Plane, showing the Material Plane through it in muted color.
**Xarrul** uses the cellar as its lair when resting. Ethereal-plane observers might find:
- Claw marks on the ethereal stone near the ward-sigils (this is how it weakened them)
- Claw marks on the ethereal stone near the sigils (this is where it's been siphoning the old work)
- A nest of sorts — shadows coiled into a shape suggesting something sleeps here
- The faint, acrid smell of the Brand of Spite (the ability that killed Orenn)

155
location/deep-cellar.md
View File

@@ -8,11 +8,11 @@
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.
- **Useful things** — a scavenged anti-fiend kit, 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.
**This does NOT relocate the endgame.** The Reckoning still happens in the **[Upper Cellar](../location/cellar.md)** — the thin point, the summoners' binding circle, and the old foundation 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.
---
@@ -39,29 +39,43 @@ The door itself is locked (**Arcane Lock**, DC 20 to force, DC 25 Thieves' Tools
## 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.
Less a warren than a **single spine**: one central corridor — the **Long Cut** — carved over years, with the work-chambers opening off it and the floor sloping *down* the whole way toward the rift, roughly 40m from the stair-foot to the Old Work. It matters that **the level is a dead end.** The only way in or out is the concealed stair at the top; the deepest chamber is a sealed cul-de-sac. That one fact is the level's engine — see [The Guardian](#encounter--the-guardian).
```
┌───────────────────────┐
│ 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
[ UPPER CELLAR ]
│ concealed door + descent
│ (steps cut in rock; the level slopes DOWN the whole way)
▼
┌──────────────┐
│ WORKROOM │ ← Twinkle's DEN, at the stair-foot — the chokepoint.
│ (lab + den) │ It gets between the party and the only stairs out,
└──────┬───────┘ then drives them DOWN the Cut.
│
═════╪═════ T H E L O N G C U T
│ (central corridor; widens midway into the old working
┌──────┴───────┐ floor — chalk wall, scarred table, tools; rats)
│ CELLS │
│ [1] Guest │
│ [2] Long Dead│
└──────┬───────┘
│
┌──────┴───────┐
│ THE VAULT │ (arcane-locked — herded past it, you can't loot on
│ │ the run; note it, come back)
└──────┬───────┘
│
═════╪═════ WARDED ARCH — the couple's old quarantine line.
│ ►► TWINKLE WILL NOT CROSS ◄◄
▼
┌──────────────┐
│ DEEP STORAGE │ Poltergeist — DORMANT; does NOT strike on sight.
│(false refuge)│ Breathing room to plan… until it isn't. THIS is what
└──────┬───────┘ the spider wouldn't follow you into.
│ barred, runed door (barred from the storage side)
▼
┌──────────────┐
│ THE OLD WORK │ The rift. Dead end. Only way out is back up the Cut.
└──────────────┘
```
**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.
@@ -70,24 +84,22 @@ The Deep Cellar is a warren carved over years, not a planned dungeon. Roughly 25
---
## The Junction (Hub Cave)
## The Long Cut (Central Corridor)
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 spine of the level: a rough corridor running from the stair-foot down to the warded arch, with the work-chambers opening off it. Midway it widens into what 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** running the length of the stone. The far end narrows to a **warded arch** — the couple's old quarantine line — beyond which the air goes wrong and [Deep Storage](#deep-storage-the-trophy-hold) begins. That arch is where [Twinkle](#encounter--the-guardian) stops; see there.
**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).)
- A newer hand (last few weeks), hurried and pinned over the old case-map — Orenn's, and *not* about this room at all: *"Order moving again. Meetings up. Vyre? Three dead in the quarter this month — no marks I know. Something in the district's gone wrong. Watch it."* This is his [surveillance](../npc/orenn.md#what-he-knew-for-dm-reference) spilling into his old workspace: he was chasing a *city* problem and never once turned to look at the sealed rift twenty feet behind him. The tragedy of the whole level is written right here — his case board on the Order, hung on the wall of the tomb the Order's own fiend is clawing its way out of.
- **DC 15 Investigation:** One struck-through X on the map is annotated *"Mending — Vyre?"* — Orenn had been circling the cult for months. (Threads the exploration back into the murder mystery. See [Order of Mending](../storylines/order-of-mending.md).)
**Encounter — The Infestation (rats):** The Junction and passages are infested. This is the low-stakes "you are not alone down here" beat.
**Encounter — The Infestation (rats):** The Cut and its chambers 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).
- **1 Swarm of Rats** (CR 1/4) per stretch of the Cut 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 warded arch:** rats at the wrong end 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) works down the Cut without waking the swarms. Rewarding caution is the point.
---
@@ -95,7 +107,7 @@ An irregular chamber where the passages meet. This was Orenn and Mags's working
*"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.
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 **[Twinkle](#encounter--the-guardian)** (denned in the Workroom at the stair-foot, up the Cut) and anyone on the Cut). This is where twenty years of "expensive, reliable, discreet" went.
> **Read-Aloud: The Vault**
>
@@ -110,8 +122,8 @@ A low chamber sealed by a banded door under a permanent **Arcane Lock** (Orenn's
> **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:
### The Fixers' Arsenal
Rewards for going deep — none of it breaks the Reckoning, most of it *helps* it. Most of this is the **summoners' leftover safety kit** (you stock silver and holy water when you call up fiends for a living), topped up by the couple's own reactive buys from the handful of jobs that turned out not to be human:
- **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).
@@ -124,7 +136,7 @@ On a shelf, labeled in Mags's block letters — souvenirs kept the way soldiers
- 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.
- **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, belongs to the **Order of Mending** (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.
---
@@ -136,7 +148,7 @@ Two cells cut side by side, iron-barred, fitted with the runed nails and a warde
**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.
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 Order of Mending* 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**
>
@@ -150,7 +162,7 @@ Short version for the DM: the Guest is the beating heart of "they still have som
- **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.
- **Around its neck**, a corroded token — a **guild bead** *or* an **Order of Mending 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.
@@ -161,6 +173,8 @@ This room explains, without a word, exactly what the Guest is afraid of, and exa
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*.
**Twinkle's den.** This is also where the couple's pet holes up (see [The Guardian](#encounter--the-guardian)) — and it's the room the party enters first if they came down the concealed stairs, which arrive just outside. The back corner of the ceiling is thick with greyed web and a clutch of leathery egg-sacs; the floor beneath is a midden of rat-husks and beetle shells. They didn't merely shelter it here — they *worked* it: a padded muzzle-strap hangs on a peg, a clamp is bolted to the bench end, and a rack of empty stoppered vials sits ready. This is where Orenn and Mags **milked its venom** for the trade below.
> **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.*
@@ -170,10 +184,11 @@ This is the other half of "still something going on." The couple never stopped b
- **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.
- **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. A separate running column headed *"T."* tracks the pet as a resource: *"milked, 2 doses," "webbing spent — new batch," "bit M. again — she laughed."*
### Loot & Craft
- **2 flasks of Alchemist's Fire**, **1 vial of Basic Poison** (×3 applications), **Antitoxin** (×2).
- **2 doses of harvested feyspitter venom** in stoppered vials on the milking rack — and more can be drawn from Twinkle (DC 13 with a poisoner's kit; safely from the living spider only if it's calmed or restrained, freely from a dead one). A proficient character can brew a dose during the lockdown (1 hour, DC 13) into **either**: a single-use **Blink Draught** (as a reaction when you take damage, teleport up to 15 ft. to a space you can see), **or** an **injury poison** (DC 14 CON save or 2d8 poison damage and the target is shunted 15 ft. to a random open space — the spider's own lurching venom, bottled).
- 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.
@@ -190,11 +205,12 @@ The largest room down here, and the worst-kept — because things in it don't li
>
> *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.
### The Haunting — The False Refuge
A party herded down the Cut spills through the warded arch into this room and, for a moment, believes it's safe: the spider won't follow, the air is still, nothing moves. It is haunted by a **Poltergeist** (specter variant, CR 2) — the untethered remnant of a job the couple could contain but never cleanse (it's on the chalk wall: a struck-through X, *"the Vresk house — never left"*) — and the crucial thing is that **it does not strike on sight.** It watches. It lets the living catch their breath. Give the party a real beat here to stop, argue, bind wounds, and work the problem: *how do we get back past the spider — and is this the only way out?* (It is. Dead end.)
- **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).
- **Then it turns.** Spring it when the tension peaks — a trophy is disturbed, someone reaches for the loot, the party commits to moving, or they've simply lingered too long in its domain. The cold deepens, the lights gutter, and the shelves come alive. **This is the answer to the riddle Twinkle set:** the party learns, viscerally, why an animal that can blink through walls will not put one leg past that arch. It's invisible (needs *See Invisibility* / Veil Dust / a lucky Perception vs. its Stealth to pin down), hurls objects (Telekinetic Thrust), and drops the lights.
- **The pincer.** Now the trap's shape is clear — the haunt in here, the spider up the Cut, and no third exit. This is the moment the party *chooses* its fight: push back up and deal with Twinkle, or settle the haunt first and loot in peace.
- **Outs (once it's active):** it calms if the party stops disturbing the shelves and holds still, or if someone re-lights the room's **warding sconces** (DC 13 Arcana on the ward-candles bolted to the walls — this pins the poltergeist *and* firms the arch's quarantine). A cleric can turn or lay it to rest (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)
@@ -208,7 +224,7 @@ Let players earn these by braving the haunting. Suggested shelf (pick to taste):
## 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.*
The deepest chamber, a sealed cul-de-sac at the very bottom of the Cut — reached through [Deep Storage](#deep-storage-the-trophy-hold) and a heavy **barred, runed door** (the same runed iron nails as upstairs, barred from the storage side; cold radiates off it). This sealed rift is the closed case Orenn and Mags built their quiet life on top of — and the thing the hidden fifth rule means when it says *burn below and seal the door.* They believed it dead. It isn't.
> **Read-Aloud: The Old Work**
>
@@ -217,9 +233,9 @@ The deepest chamber, behind the barred and runed door off the Junction. This is
> *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.
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 that **was contained decades ago** with a **silver-and-salt containment circle** (the summoners' work, or the specialist who closed their mess; distinct from the *binding* circle upstairs). Orenn and Mags inherited it sealed and left it alone, re-tracing the chalk by rote without ever understanding it. The circle is **failing now** — Xarrul has spent weeks prying it open from the Ethereal side. This is the **source** of the ethereal bleed everyone's been feeling, and the reason the whole district around the house has felt *wrong.*
- **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 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 are siphoning the sigils upstairs.
- **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)
@@ -234,32 +250,45 @@ Deploy as a scaled encounter (tune to party size / how hurt they are):
- **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.
Denned in the **[Workroom](#the-workroom-laboratory)** at the stair-foot and prowling the length of the **Long Cut** — the Cells, the Vault, the working floor — is **the couple's pet**, a **feyspitter spider** they called **Twinkle**. It is *not* found past the warded arch: it won't set foot in [Deep Storage](#deep-storage-the-trophy-hold) (the poltergeist's ground) and it *can't* follow anything into [the Old Work](#the-old-work-the-rift). Its blink is a fey twitch *across* the Material Plane, never *out* of it — so when Xarrul's scavengers phase away at the tear, the pet is left snapping at empty air. That boundary is the one place in its home it fears.
Full tactical block below — it's the "fight a bit" the party will remember. Its range is also a quiet barometer: it used to have the run of the whole level, and it's pulled tight into the Workroom now. The rift has been taking ground from it, the same way it's been taking the wards.
**The chokepoint & the herd (how first contact works).** Twinkle holds the one thing that matters on a dead-end level: the stair-foot. A party that comes down noisy or hostile meets it here, and its instinct is to put itself **between them and the stairs** and drive them off its ground — which, on a spine, means **deeper**. It doesn't press to kill; it *herds* — a gob of spat venom to lurch someone along, a blink to cut off a retreat, clicking them down the Cut, past the locked Vault, until they spill through the warded arch into [Deep Storage](#deep-storage-the-trophy-hold). There it stops and withdraws to hold its turf. The party is now in the false refuge with the only exit behind the spider, and **they will have to choose the fight on the way back** — which is the whole point. (A calm, quiet, or Orenn-scented party is never herded at all; the herd is the *panic* branch. See below.)
> **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.*
> *Slyšíte to dřív, než to uvidíte — suché, trhané klepání, jako když někdo poklepává kostěnými prsty na kámen. Pak ticho. A pak je to najednou blíž — ne že by to přišlo, spíš to mezi dvěma mrknutími přeskočilo kus tmy, jako by vzdálenost byla jen návrh, který nemusí přijmout. Pavouk velký jako lovecký pes, tělo lesklé a temné, klouby na koncích dlouhých nohou svítí slabou, jedovatě zelenou. A když se do něj opře vaše světlo, osm očí se rozzáří jako korálky — možná právě proto mu říkali Twinkle. Nespěchá. Zatím ne. Jen vás sleduje ze stropu a čeká, co uděláte.*
**Phase Spider "Přástka"** — Large monstrosity, unaligned · **CR 3 (700 XP)**
**AC** 13 · **HP** 32 (5d10+5) · **Speed** 30 ft., climb 30 ft.
**Feyspitter Spider "Twinkle"** — Large beast (spiderkind), unaligned · **CR 4 (1,100 XP)**
**AC** 15 (natural armor) · **HP** 60 (8d10+16) · **Speed** 30 ft., climb 30 ft.
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 15 (+2) | 15 (+2) | 12 (+1) | 7 (-2) | 10 (+0) | 6 (-2) |
| 14 (+2) | 19 (+4) | 14 (+2) | 4 (-3) | 12 (+1) | 8 (-1) |
**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.
**Skills** Stealth +8
**Senses** darkvision 60 ft., tremorsense 10 ft., passive Perception 11
**Web-Dweller.** Climbs difficult surfaces, including upside down on ceilings and across webs, without penalty. While in contact with a web, the spider knows the exact location of any other creature in contact with the same web.
**Material Blink** *(flavor).* Its short teleports are a fey twitch *across* the Material Plane, never *out* of it. It has no ethereal access — it cannot enter the rift or follow a creature that goes ethereal.
**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.
**Multiattack.** The spider makes two attacks, only one of which can be a Lurchvenom Bite.
**Lurchvenom Bite.** *Melee Weapon Attack:* +6 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. *Hit:* 8 (1d8+4) piercing damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 14 Constitution save or be poisoned for 1 minute (save ends at end of turn). While poisoned this way, at the start of each of its turns the target takes 9 (2d8) poison damage and then teleports up to 15 ft. to an unoccupied space the spider can see.
**Spit Venom.** *Ranged Weapon Attack:* +6 to hit, range 30/60 ft., one creature. *Hit:* 9 (2d8) poison damage, and the target teleports up to 15 ft. to an unoccupied space the spider can see.
**Grasping Legs.** *Melee Weapon Attack:* +6 to hit, reach 10 ft., one creature. *Hit:* 7 (1d6+4) bludgeoning damage, and the target is grappled (escape DC 14).
**Reactions**
**Anticipatory Strike.** When a creature teleports to a space within 5 ft. of the spider, it can make a Grasping Legs attack with advantage against that creature.
**Vanishing Dodge.** When a creature hits it with an attack, the spider makes a Dexterity check against a DC equal to the attack roll; on a success it teleports up to 15 ft. and the attack misses.
**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.
- **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, blinks a few feet, watches from the ceiling — and holds fire until provoked.
- **Trained to detain, not kill.** Against provokers it leads with **Grasping Legs** to pin and hold — the couple wanted intruders *caught*, not eaten. A grabbed, downed PC is wrapped in web for the masters, not finished off; run captures, not TPKs, unless the party escalates hard.
- **Provoke it in earnest** (force the Vault, harm the Guest, keep hitting it) and it fights like the blink-ambusher it is: bite or spit to lurch a target out of formation, **Vanishing Dodge** away from the first solid hit, then **Anticipatory Strike** whoever the venom teleports next to it. It splits a party up and picks off the isolated one — but it **cannot** flee to the Ethereal Plane. Corner it on the Material Plane and it has nowhere left to phase.
- **After Orenn's death** it's agitated and grieving in its animal way — more skittish, more likely to lash out from fear, and pulled tight into the Workroom. A druid/beast-handler (DC 14 Animal Handling) can calm it; killing it upsets Mags deeply if she learns of it.
- **The return is theirs to shape.** Coming back up the Cut, the party fights (or sneaks, or calms) on *their* terms — they pick the ground, they've had a beat in Deep Storage to plan, and they may now hold Orenn's key/scent, the command word, silvered gear, or bottled venom. Don't spring it on them again from nowhere; it's holding the stair-foot and they know it. The dead end means the reckoning with Twinkle is a *when*, not an *if* — let them arrange the terms.
- **Tuning (CR 4 is a real fight).** For a lighter table, drop **Spit Venom** and **Vanishing Dodge** and run it as an avoidable stealth obstacle. For 5 PCs or a combat-hungry table, add **2 Giant Spiders** (CR 1, its brood — the source of the silk throughout the warren, and the strands upstairs) nesting in the passages.
---
@@ -270,10 +299,10 @@ Roaming the whole Deep Cellar — but denning near the rift, because it can hunt
**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).
3. **A fight on their terms** — rats (trivial), the poltergeist (medium), Twinkle the feyspitter spider (avoidable, or a hard CR 4), 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 chalk wall / Guest / trophies reveal Orenn was investigating the **Order of Mending** → 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.

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@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
# Main Hall
The heart of the Burnt Tongue. A single large room with a low ceiling, stone floor, and the permanent smell of smoke and regret.
The heart of the Nether Inn. A single large room with a low ceiling, stone floor, and the permanent smell of smoke and regret.
## Key Features
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ The heart of the Burnt Tongue. A single large room with a low ceiling, stone flo
A massive slab of darkwood, scarred by decades of knife marks, spilled drinks, and at least one axe blow that's been sanded down but never quite disappeared. Behind it: shelves of unlabeled bottles, a few labeled ones nobody orders, and a collection of confiscated weapons mounted on the wall like trophies.
**Orenn's body** lies behind the bar on the stone floor. He fell backward — whatever killed him came from the front, but nobody in the brawl was close enough. See [Murder Mystery](../storylines/murder-mystery.md) for details.
**Orenn's body** lies behind the bar on the stone floor. He fell backward — whatever killed him came from the front, but nobody in the brawl was close enough, and the hall was black when it happened (Rennt's Thunderwave had just snuffed the candles). He's bruised and bleeding from a knock taken wading into the brawl — a **decoy**; that wound didn't kill him. See [Murder Mystery](../storylines/murder-mystery.md) for details.
**Hidden:** Under the bar is a recessed shelf with:
- A loaded hand crossbow (Orenn's insurance, DC 13 Investigation)
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ A massive slab of darkwood, scarred by decades of knife marks, spilled drinks, a
### The Fireplace
Large stone hearth, fire burning low. The mantle holds a single iron bell that has never been rung — a relic from the tavern's founding. **Mags knows:** ringing the bell activates the ward-sigils in the foundation. It was a last resort, meant to seal the building against ethereal intrusion. The wards are cracked now, so the effect would be partial at best (disadvantage on Xarrul's Ethereal Jaunt saves rather than preventing it outright).
Large stone hearth, fire burning low. The mantle holds a single iron bell that has never been rung — a relic left from the tavern's summoner days. **Mags knows the trick to ring it** (never what it truly does): the toll wakes the old foundation sigils. It was the summoners' last resort, meant to seal the building against ethereal intrusion. The sigils are half-dormant and being siphoned now, so the effect is partial at best (disadvantage on Xarrul's Ethereal Jaunt saves rather than preventing it outright).
### Assassin Table (North-West)
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@ A round table covered in papers, open books, and half-empty inkwells — maintai
**After the murder:** Haddon immediately begins constructing an alibi — "we were all engaged in discussion, none of us left the table." This is technically true but irrelevant (the fiend killed from the Ethereal Plane). Rennt is agitated and defensive. Dalla doesn't seem to care about the investigation at all — she's thinking about her child.
**On the table (DC 12 Investigation):** Among the scholarly papers, one diagram shows planar boundaries with annotations about "thinning points." Haddon will claim it's theoretical research. It's actually a map of potential Opening sites, and the Burnt Tongue is marked.
**On the table (DC 12 Investigation):** Among the scholarly papers, one diagram shows planar boundaries with annotations about "thinning points." Haddon will claim it's theoretical research. It's actually a map of potential Opening sites, and the Nether Inn is marked.
### Tallow's Booth (South, near wall)
@@ -77,8 +77,10 @@ After the brawl, the center of the room is a mess:
>
> *Klapnutí závory na hlavních dveřích zní jako rozsudek.*
*(DM: this is only her entrance. The full set-piece that follows — the forced heal, the failed* Revivify *with the diamond from her necklace, the shattered ward-crystal that seals the tavern until midnight, and the ultimatum — is scripted in [Mags — Act 2: The Reveal](../npc/mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm). The "bolt" the players hear is the ward-crystal discharging into every exit, not a simple latch.)*
## Lighting & Atmosphere
- **Before the brawl:** Dim candlelight, warm in a grimy way. Shadows dance.
- **During the brawl:** Candles knocked over, intermittent darkness. Fire in the fireplace flickers wildly.
- **After the murder:** Mags lights every candle and lantern she can find. The room is brighter than it's ever been and somehow that makes it worse — you can see every stain, every scar, every face that doesn't want to be seen.
- **During the brawl:** Candles knocked over, intermittent darkness — then, on cue a few rounds in, **Rennt's Thunderwave snuffs every flame at once** and the hall goes pitch black. That blackout is the murder window. (Darkvision PCs/NPCs still see in it — use a glimpsed shape or cold spot near the bar as an early fiend clue, or make the dark linger unnaturally long as a "someone reinforced this" tell.)
- **After the murder:** Mags relights every candle and lantern at once with a brass **ward-focus** behind the bar. The room is brighter than it's ever been and somehow that makes it worse — you can see every stain, every scar, every face that doesn't want to be seen.

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# U Spáleného Jazyka — The Burnt Tongue
# Nether Inn
## History
The Burnt Tongue has stood on the corner of Žlutá Street and Popelová Alley for over forty years. It started as a safehouse, became a flophouse, and eventually settled into what it is today: neutral ground. The name comes from the unwritten rule — what happens here stays here, or you lose the tongue that spoke of it.
The Nether Inn has stood on the corner of Žlutá Street and Popelová Alley for over forty years. It started as a safehouse, became a flophouse, and eventually settled into what it is today: neutral ground. The name comes from where it sits — half-sunk below the street, so you step *down* into it, into the nether dark beneath the city's notice. What happens here stays here; talk of it elsewhere and you may lose the tongue that spoke of it.
Fifteen years ago, **Orenn** and **Mags** took ownership. Before that, they were *cleaners* — the people the city's underworld called when something crawled out of the sewers, when a summoning went sideways, when a gang war threatened to spill into the merchant quarter. Not heroes. Fixers. They retired here because they were tired of fixing other people's messes, and because running the most dangerous bar in the city was, somehow, the quieter life.
Fifteen years ago, **Orenn** and **Mags** took ownership — not by buying it, but by *earning* it. They were **fixers**: the people the city's underworld called when a problem needed to stop existing — a rival crew, a blackmailer with the wrong ledger, a gang war about to spill into the merchant quarter. Not heroes. The last job of their working lives was this very building: a den of summoners had been operating out of it, calling things up through the fault in its cellar, and it had gone bad enough that someone paid well to have it cleaned out. Orenn and Mags did the cleaning and took the house as their fee. They told the world they'd retired. Running the most dangerous bar in the city was, somehow, the quieter life — and the summoners' leftover work, sealed and silent in the dark below, was a closed case they never expected to reopen.
Under Orenn's rule, the Burnt Tongue became sacred ground. Assassins could drink next to their marks. Cultists could study next to inquisitors. The rule was simple: **no killing**. Orenn enforced it not with threats but with the calm certainty of a man who had killed worse things than you, and everyone in the room knew it.
Under Orenn's rule, the Nether Inn became sacred ground. Assassins could drink next to their marks. Cultists could study next to inquisitors. The rule was simple: **no killing**. Orenn enforced it not with threats but with the calm certainty of a man who had killed worse things than you, and everyone in the room knew it.
## The Rules of the House
@@ -19,6 +19,30 @@ Carved into a wooden plaque above the bar in Common and Thieves' Cant:
The first rule has just been broken — and the barkeep who enforced it is the victim.
## The Enchanted Door
The only public way in is the heavy front door at the bottom of the entry steps. It is **enchanted and password-warded** — Orenn's first line of control over who shares his neutral ground.
**Getting in.** The door opens from outside only for someone who speaks the current password (Orenn changed it often; regulars are told, Mags knows it). To a stranger it simply won't budge, and if pressed it answers — in Orenn's own recorded voice — *"State your business. Or step back up the stairs."* After his death, that voice is quietly horrible. The PCs begin the night already inside; they never had to deal with the door, and that's deliberate.
**If a PC leaves before the lockdown.** Nothing stops them physically — but Broath Got at night is not friendly, they forfeit whatever they came for (Orenn's references, their dossier goals), and the door **won't let them back in** without the password they don't have. Use it to *inconvenience*, not to trap: banging, bargaining through the door, or finding a regular to vouch gets them back. This is a soft social lock — the game's way of saying *take the hook.* Worst case, a player insists on walking their character out for good; hand them the pre-made **[Boarder](../npc/the-boarder.md)** — "Wick," a resident with a room upstairs, already inside, wired into the plot with local knowledge and a hook of their own — and carry on.
**The midnight lockdown (Act 2).** When Orenn dies, Mags shatters a fist-sized **ward-crystal** kept on the shelf above the bar. It discharges the tavern's stored wards into every opening at once — front door, cellar trapdoor, shutters — all sealed under an **Arcane Lock until midnight**, when the charge lapses on its own:
- Force a sealed exit: **DC 25 Strength**, or **DC 20 Thieves' Tools**; *Knock* or *Dispel Magic* vs. the ward's **DC 17** bypasses one opening.
- Breaking the crystal is **one-way**. No password lifts it, and Mags herself cannot reopen the doors early — she's locked in with everyone else, on purpose.
- The wards **bite**: anyone forcing a breach takes **2d6 force** and the discharge is loud enough that every NPC in the hall turns to look.
Beating the lock early — or simply surviving until midnight — is a genuine Act 3 problem, not a formality.
> **DM — what the crystal really is.** The "stored wards" are not Orenn and Mags's work; they are the **summoners' emergency containment device**, left with the building — an *oh-shit button.* If a calling ever punched a hole to a lower plane, breaking the crystal sealed the house in a resilient shell **on every plane at once** (it plane-shifts and lays a *resilient-sphere*-like seal over each plane's version of the building — sealing *within* a plane being far easier than sealing *between* them). Its purpose: contain a breach so that **only what is already inside the house, on some plane, can come through the hole — never the whole plane behind it.**
>
> Mags knows none of this. To her it's the panic button that bolts the doors. In truth, shattering it is **the last thing [Xarrul](../npc/xarrul.md#the-nights-clock--presence--escalation) needed**, and it engineered Orenn's murder precisely to make her do it:
> - **It builds the closed vessel Xarrul must have.** While the house bled freely across planes, the fiend's crossing dissipated — it could only jaunt *partway* (enough to kill Orenn, no more). Sealed, the house is a closed cross-planar vessel: Xarrul, already inside on the ethereal side, can now finish crossing through the tear, and the summoners' "limit the breach to one entity" safeguard *guarantees* that entity is *it*. The button built to protect the city is a bespoke door for exactly one guest.
> - **It cuts the diffusion.** Nothing bleeds out to the district anymore, nothing bleeds in. The wrongness that used to spread thin across the quarter — the reason Orenn never localized it — is now trapped and concentrated *inside*, with its source. From tonight, the players can finally trace it home.
> - **The inversion (a real player lever).** The same breach rules above become an *anti-Xarrul* tactic once understood: puncturing the shell on a plane re-opens the boundary, the vessel goes leaky again, and the crossing destabilizes — Xarrul can't complete tonight (at worst it slips away ethereally to try later). The thing the party wanted to escape becomes the thing they smash on purpose.
> - **The seal lapses at midnight**, and the lockdown timer *is* the night's clock (see [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock)).
## Atmosphere
The tavern is larger than it looks from outside. The building is old stone and dark wood, sunk slightly below street level so you step *down* into it. The air is thick with pipe smoke, tallow candle smell, and the sweet-sour tang of cheap spirits. Everything is dimly lit — not for ambiance, but because the clientele prefers it that way.
@@ -78,7 +102,7 @@ The noise level before the brawl is a low murmur punctuated by occasional harsh
## Secrets
- 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 tavern is built on a **natural thin point** between the Material and Ethereal planes. Orenn and Mags know this — they cleaned a den of summoners off this fault years ago and believe they sealed what those summoners tore open. They do *not* monitor it; to them the danger is fifteen years dead. 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.
- The building's stone foundation carries **old sigils** — not Orenn and Mags's work, but the **summoners'** who ran this place before them: the upstairs remnant of the binding-and-containment craft that runs down into the [cellar](cellar.md). A character examining the foundation stones (DC 15 Investigation or Arcana) reads them as long-inert summoning-and-warding work and clocks that whoever built this house was working the thin point on purpose. It's a breadcrumb toward the house's occult past — *not* a barrier anyone maintained. The thing actively being torn open is far below, at the [Old Work](deep-cellar.md#the-old-work).
- 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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@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ They keep a codex, and they keep it like scripture:
- **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*.
The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding. The **Order of Mending** 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.
@@ -121,7 +121,7 @@ If the players bring her **proof of the rot** (the soulcoin, a marked victim, Th
Late twenties, handsome, easy smile. Sandy hair, bright eyes, the kind of face you'd trust to watch your drink. He's the assassin who doesn't look like an assassin — the one who gets close to targets through charm, not stealth. He's everyone's friend at the table and nobody's friend in truth.
Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Lambent Order for six months. The cultists need fresh kills for ritual components — hearts still warm, blood drained into sanctified vessels. Dace provides the bodies and takes a cut on top of his guild pay. He doesn't believe in the cult's ideology — he just likes money, and he finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Order of Mending for six months. The cultists need fresh kills for ritual components — hearts still warm, blood drained into sanctified vessels. Dace provides the bodies and takes a cut on top of his guild pay. He doesn't believe in the cult's ideology — he just likes money, and he finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
**Key traits:**
- The most likeable person in the room. Friendly, warm, buys drinks, makes jokes.
@@ -132,7 +132,7 @@ Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Lambent Order for six months. The c
### His Secret
Dace has been meeting a Lambent Order contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The ward-sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the wards as part of the cult's broader plan. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
Dace has been meeting a Order of Mending contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the house's old summoner-work as part of the cult's study of this thin point. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
**Evidence linking Dace:**
- DC 16 Insight during conversation: Something about his helpfulness is *too* practiced. He's performing.
@@ -142,12 +142,12 @@ Dace has been meeting a Lambent Order contact in the tavern's private room to ar
### 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.
**Dace is already condemned, and he doesn't know it.** His dealings with the Order of Mending 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.
- True sight, *Veil Dust*, or a DC 15 Medicine/Arcana check up close reveals **a hairline seam of grey light at the base of his throat**, like a cracked glaze.
**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*.
@@ -231,7 +231,7 @@ Thera serves something older than the codex and beneath the city — a thing tha
**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.
**Why she's here tonight:** to end Dace. His crude soul-butchery for the Order of Mending 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
@@ -249,7 +249,6 @@ Thera carries at least one **soulcoin** — the physical proof the whole subplot
- **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

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@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
# The Lambent Order — Cultists
# The Order of Mending — Cultists
*"We are not what they call us. We are scholars of the boundary, seekers of the wholeness that was stolen from this world. If they understood what we understand, they would not fear us. They would beg to help."*
— Haddon, reciting Mother Vyre's words
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
## The Cult
The Lambent Order presents itself as a small, independent mage guild focused on planar theory and boundary research. This is a lie stretched thin over a truth: they *are* studying planar boundaries, but with the intent of destroying them.
The Order of Mending presents itself as a small, independent mage guild focused on planar theory and boundary research. This is a lie stretched thin over a truth: they *are* studying planar boundaries, but with the intent of destroying them.
Their leader, **Mother Vyre**, is not present. She never comes to the tavern. She communicates through dead drops, coded messages, and — for the inner circle — through dreams. She is the architect of **The Opening**: the dissolution of all planar boundaries, merging the Material Plane with the Ethereal, the Shadowfell, the Feywild, and whatever else lies beyond. She frames this as healing — the planes were once one, and their separation was a wound.
@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@ Not present but referenced constantly. Players never meet her, but her shadow is
### Appearance & Personality
Mid-fifties, neat grey beard, spectacles, ink-stained fingers. Looks exactly like what he claims to be — a fussy academic. Wears a scholar's robe with the Lambent Order's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame) pinned to his lapel. Carries books, quills, and a leather journal filled with notes in a cipher.
Mid-fifties, neat grey beard, spectacles, ink-stained fingers. Looks exactly like what he claims to be — a fussy academic. Wears a scholar's robe with the Order of Mending's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame) pinned to his lapel. Carries books, quills, and a leather journal filled with notes in a cipher.
Haddon is the most dangerous person at the cultist table because he's the best liar. He's reframed everything he's done as research — the summoning was an "experiment," the fiend was a "test subject," and The Opening is a "theoretical framework." He's lying to himself as much as to anyone else.
@@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ Haddon is the most dangerous person at the cultist table because he's the best l
**Will share as "scholarly cooperation":**
- Planar theory — the basics of how boundaries work, what a thin point is, why the tavern feels strange. All accurate, all framed to normalize The Opening's goals.
- That the death mark on Orenn is fiendish in nature. "Clearly extraplanar damage. Necrotic, with a fiendish signature. Someone — certainly not us — has been dealing in dark pacts." He'll diagnose the Brand of Spite accurately while deflecting blame.
- The Lambent Order's "research" into boundary integrity. He'll show the planar diagram on the table if asked, presenting it as theoretical cartography.
- The Order of Mending's "research" into boundary integrity. He'll show the planar diagram on the table if asked, presenting it as theoretical cartography.
**Will not willingly share:**
- That they summoned a fiend. Specifically, that they summoned **Xarrul** using binding components from Tallow, blood from Dalla, and a name from Mother Vyre's research.
@@ -159,7 +159,7 @@ When Dalla breaks, it's not gentle. The realization that she bled for eight mont
Haddon's plan — and Dalla's hope while she's loyal — is to **recapture and rebind Xarrul**. This is presented as the "safe" option within the cult:
- Requires new binding components (Tallow sold them before, he can supply again — for a price)
- Requires Dalla's blood again (she'll give it without hesitation)
- Requires the binding circle in the cellar (Orenn's circle could be repurposed — DC 16 Arcana to adapt it)
- Requires the binding circle in the cellar (the summoners' circle could be repurposed — DC 16 Arcana to adapt it)
- Haddon leads the ritual. Rennt assists.
**If the rebinding succeeds:** Xarrul is bound again. The cult has its weapon back. Dalla's connection to the binding is restored — which means Lístek's condition might stabilize (stop getting worse) but won't improve. The child stays frozen. Dalla tells herself this is progress. The cult continues toward Phase Two.
@@ -195,7 +195,7 @@ But the method requires thinning the veil between planes — a micro-Opening. An
**Spellcasting.** Rennt is a 2nd-level spellcaster (CHA, DC 13, +5 to hit):
- Cantrips: *eldritch blast, thaumaturgy*
- 1st (2 slots): *hellish rebuke, armor of agathys*
- 1st (2 slots): *hellish rebuke, armor of agathys, thunderwave*
His magic comes from the pact — he made a minor warlock bargain as part of his initiation. He doesn't fully understand what he gave up.
@@ -229,6 +229,10 @@ Rennt is the most dangerous kind of extremist: one who's right about the problem
- What The Opening actually means at scale
- Mother Vyre's Phase Two plans
### The Blackout (Act 2, DM)
A few rounds into the brawl, pressed by the assassins piling onto him, **Rennt casts *Thunderwave*** — a legitimate defensive knockback. It also snuffs every candle in the hall at once, and in that sudden dark [Xarrul](xarrul.md) kills Orenn behind the bar. Rennt has no idea he provided the cover; he'll deny the cult had anything to do with the murder, and he's *telling the truth* — which makes the cult look damning and be innocent. See **[Murder Mystery — Act 2](../storylines/murder-mystery.md#act-2--the-spark)**. If a PC later accuses him of blacking the room out on purpose, his baffled fury is genuine.
### If the Dual-Plane Kill Is Proposed
Rennt is **ecstatic**. "Do you see? Do you *see*? The planes *want* to touch. You're doing what Mother Vyre always said was possible — proving that the boundary is artificial!" His enthusiasm is genuine and deeply unsettling. He'll actively help with the ritual, which should make players very uncomfortable about what they're doing.
@@ -267,7 +271,7 @@ Mid-twenties, thin, unremarkable. The kind of face you forget as soon as you loo
Essek is the closest thing the cultist table has to a conscience, and he's terrified.
**Key traits:**
- Joined the Lambent Order two years ago because the planar research was genuinely fascinating. He was a student, not a zealot.
- Joined the Order of Mending two years ago because the planar research was genuinely fascinating. He was a student, not a zealot.
- Six months ago, he found Mother Vyre's private correspondence in Haddon's study (he was looking for a reference text). He read enough to understand that The Opening isn't theoretical. It's a plan with a timeline.
- The initiation brand burns when he considers betrayal — not enough to stop him, but enough to remind him he's watched.
- He wants out. He's looking for anyone he can trust. Players who approach him gently, privately, and without judgment are his best chance.

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@@ -16,9 +16,9 @@
**Saving Throws** DEX +7, WIS +6
**Skills** Perception +6, Stealth +7, Intimidation +4, Investigation +4, Survival +6
**Senses** passive Perception 16
**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant, Infernal (learned from years of dealing with fiends)
**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant
**Cleaner's Instinct.** Mags has advantage on ability checks to track, identify, or analyze fiends and their effects. She can smell brimstone, necrotic residue, and ethereal bleed at close range.
**Fixer's Read.** Twenty years of interrogations, negotiations, and reading a room for the one person about to draw a knife have made Mags preternaturally hard to fool. She has advantage on ability checks to catch a lie, gauge intent, spot a concealed weapon, or track a mark. She reads *people* the way a scholar reads a page. What she cannot read — what she has no instinct for at all — is anything from the other side of the veil.
**Retired, Not Soft.** When Mags is below half her maximum HP or when an ally she cares about is threatened, she gains +2 to attack and damage rolls.
@@ -50,22 +50,51 @@ Her eyes are dark and sharp. When she looks at you, she's not making conversatio
>
> *"Tohle je můj dům. Tenhle muž byl můj —" Zarazí se. Polkne. "— byl můj. A nikdo z téhle místnosti neodejde, dokud nebudu vědět, proč je mrtvý."*
## Act 2 — The Reveal (DM)
This is Mags's set-piece: the beat that ends the party and cages everyone. Run it in order, fast, and don't let the players derail the momentum until the ultimatum lands.
**1. Order first.** She comes out of the kitchen mid-chaos, cleaver in hand, and stops the brawl with her voice — not a shout, a *cut*. The room obeys because everyone here knows what she is. She relights the candles with a brass rod behind the bar — leftover house-magic she never thought to question; a word, and every wick catches at once.
**2. The body.** Behind her, Orenn. She sees him a half-second after the players do and goes utterly still (the read-aloud above).
**3. The forced heal.** Her grief comes out as rage, and it needs a target: the nearest cleric-looking PC (a cultist if there's no divine caster; failing that, *any* PC — "you. *Try.*"). She hauls them to the body and demands they heal him. It fails — he's long past a cure.
**4. The forced Revivify.** She won't accept it. She rips the **diamond from her own necklace** — a stone worth a nobleman's ransom, far more than the rite needs — and presses it and a torn, written rite into the caster's hands: *Revivify.* She can't cast it herself — she never could; she's a blade, not a channel — which is *why* she needs them. It fails too. The diamond crumbles to grey powder in their palm. The magic fired, the cost was paid, and **there was nothing to call back.**
- *Why it fails (never state it):* the soul is unreachable. Leave the cause unspoken — it could read as a trapped soul, a curse, the wards, dark magic. It should feel *wrong*, not *diagnosed*. It quietly rhymes with what [Thera](assassins.md#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) does to souls — a horror the players may only connect much later.
- *It's universal:* even a non-divine PC stumbling through the rite fails for the same reason. Never let the player think they blew it — tell them OOC it wasn't them, even as Mags snarls something about *useless casters*. In-fiction she's cruel; out-of-fiction you wink.
- *What it shows:* she carries a resurrection-grade diamond as *jewelry*. She came prepared for someone to die, the way a fixer always is — the first real crack in the "retired barkeep's wife" story, and a hint of the [fixer past](orenn.md#background) she and Orenn buried.
**5. The lockdown.** She takes a fist-sized **ward-crystal** from the shelf above the bar and shatters it on the floor. Every exit slams under an **Arcane Lock until midnight** — front door, cellar trapdoor, shutters. No password lifts it. *She* can't lift it. She's locked in with them, and she did it on purpose. (See [the enchanted door & ward-crystal](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door).)
- *DM — the trap she can't see:* the ward-crystal is the old den's **ritual-lockdown stone**, and shattering it does far more than bolt the doors — it starves the last of the leftover containment below and clamps the veil into a crossing-channel. It is the one thing Xarrul still needed, and it engineered the murder precisely so Mags would break it. She thinks she's building a cage; she's finishing the fiend's door, and she has no idea. See [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door) and [Xarrul's plan](xarrul.md#the-nights-clock--presence--escalation). This seeds the late gut-punch: the lockdown she triggered to protect everyone is what lets Xarrul cross.
**6. The ultimatum.** Find her the killer by midnight, or every one of them is tomorrow's stew. No one in the room doubts she means it — that's what matters, whether or not it's literally true. Then she goes to Orenn's body and grieves, quietly, and does not stop working the problem for a second.
### The Two-Layer Accusation (DM)
Mags publicly blames **the strangers** — the PCs. Taken at face value it's thin (a room full of brawling killers, and she suspects the quiet newcomers?). It isn't thin, because it's **theater with a purpose**:
- **The public reason (what she says):** she doesn't know them, so she doesn't trust them. Blaming the outsiders lets her put the screws on *someone* without openly accusing her armed, faction-affiliated regulars — which would light the exact faction war she's straining to prevent. The assassins and cultists relax ("she's after the new blood, not us"), and the lid stays on.
- **The real reason (what she won't say yet):** the PCs are the only **neutral** party in the building. Everyone else has a faction, a stake, and a reason to lie. She needs investigators she can lean on and who can talk to *both* sides. The death-threat is the leash.
She only levels with them privately once they've earned a sliver of trust — and that turn is a strong beat. Seed it early: a PC who makes an **Insight check (DC 15)** during her tirade clocks that she isn't looking at them like a *killer* — she's looking at them like a *tool*. That read is the thread to the honest conversation later. It also lets you cash Orenn's dangled carrot: *"He was going to open doors for you? Find me who did this, and I'll be what he was going to be to you."*
## Personality
Mags grieves the way a blade rusts — slowly, internally, and it makes her more dangerous, not less. She won't cry in front of anyone. She might not cry at all. What she will do is find the thing that killed Orenn and end it with the same professional precision she's used her entire life.
She is direct, blunt, and has no patience for lies. She can tell when someone is hiding something — years of interrogating captured fiends gave her an instinct for deception that borders on supernatural (WIS 16, Insight +6 effectively).
She is direct, blunt, and has no patience for lies. She can tell when someone is hiding something — twenty years of interrogating marks, informants, and men who thought they were cleverer than her gave her an instinct for deception that borders on supernatural (WIS 16, Insight +6 effectively).
**Key traits:**
- Doesn't ask questions she doesn't already suspect the answer to
- Respects competence, regardless of morality
- Will work with anyone — assassin, cultist, player — if it gets her closer to the truth
- 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*.
- She does *not* know fiends — not really. When players bring evidence that the thing behind this came from beyond the veil, she doesn't turn expert; she turns *stubborn*. The grief hardens into a refusal to be out of her depth. She'll hunt it like a mark, because hunting marks is the only tool she has — and some part of her already suspects it won't be enough.
## 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.
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 them both. It killed Orenn — the calmer one, who might not have reached for the panic button — and *kept Mags in reserve*, because it **needed her alive**: she is the one who seals the house (see [the lockdown](#act-2--the-reveal-dm)), and a living, grieving Mags holds the room in line while the fiend finishes its work. Two murdered keepers at once would have raised the alarm too soon. **She knows about the mark.** 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*.
@@ -93,27 +122,27 @@ If a table needs a bigger fight on the join path, add **Sevra** at Mags's side r
- That Bren has been getting worse lately — more agitated, more controlled
**Will share if players earn trust (show evidence, demonstrate competence, or show genuine care for Orenn):**
- The ward-sigils in the cellar and what they do
- The old markings and gear in the cellar — she knows they belonged to the summoners who ran this place before them, not what they actually do
- Orenn's letter (if she's read it by then)
- That the tavern sits on a thin point between planes
- That Orenn was investigating the Lambent Order
- That the tavern sits on a thin point — and that they cleaned a den of summoners out of it years ago and sealed what those summoners had torn open. As far as she knows, that case is *closed*.
- That Orenn was quietly working the Order of Mending — his surveillance, his case board down in the cellar
- The location of the hidden compartment in the storage room
- How to activate the iron bell (partially restores wards)
- How to ring the iron bell (an old house-trick; she knows the knack, never the meaning)
**Will share only under extreme circumstances (direct evidence of the fiend, the brand explained, or if she's convinced the players are the only chance):**
- Full details of their cleaner past
- How to use the binding circle in the cellar
- 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.")
- Full details of their fixer past
- The summoners' binding circle in the cellar — she knows it *caged* the things they called, not how to work it
- 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.") — bravado worn as certainty; she needs it to be true
- 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."*
- 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-fixers-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.
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 fixer comes back — and a fixer's answer to a problem is to end it.
**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.
@@ -126,4 +155,4 @@ 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.
- **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 "fixer" really meant, and Mags will not pretend otherwise once it's in the open.

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# Orenn — The Barkeep
*"Welcome to the Burnt Tongue. Sit anywhere. Don't start anything."*
*"Welcome to the Nether Inn. Sit anywhere. Don't start anything."*
**Status:** Dead. Murdered during the brawl.
**Status:** Dead. Killed behind his own bar, in the dark, mid-brawl. He does not come back.
---
@@ -20,7 +20,7 @@ In death, his expression is one of genuine surprise. Not fear, not pain. He didn
## Personality
Orenn was the calm at the center of a storm. He spoke quietly because he didn't need to shout. He was polite because politeness costs nothing and buys time. He ran the Burnt Tongue with the same precision he once used to clean fiends out of sewer tunnels — measured, deliberate, with an exit strategy for every scenario.
Orenn was the calm at the center of a storm. He spoke quietly because he didn't need to shout. He was polite because politeness costs nothing and buys time. He ran the Nether Inn with the same precision he once used to clear a room of men who wanted him dead — measured, deliberate, with an exit strategy for every scenario.
He believed in rules not because he was lawful but because rules were the only thing that kept this particular powder keg from detonating. He treated every patron — assassin, cultist, beggar, addict — with the same level of professional respect. Not warmth. Respect. There's a difference.
@@ -28,46 +28,51 @@ He believed in rules not because he was lawful but because rules were the only t
- Never raised his voice
- Remembered every face and every debt
- Treated Mags as an equal in every sense
- Was investigating the Lambent Order quietly — he suspected they were more than scholars but hadn't uncovered the truth
- Kept the old cleaner tools and wards maintained, "just in case"
- Was investigating the Order of Mending quietly — he suspected they were more than scholars but hadn't uncovered the truth
- Kept the previous owners' gear and the old seal in the cellar in some kind of order — re-traced the chalk out of closed-case habit, never really understanding it
- Had a dry sense of humor that surfaced rarely and always caught people off guard
## Background
Orenn was a cleaner for over twenty years. When the city's underworld spawned something it couldn't handle — a rogue summoning, an unbound elemental, a fiend that slipped through a botched portal — the fixers called Orenn and Mags. They worked as a pair: Orenn did the tracking, planning, and binding; Mags did the killing. They were expensive, reliable, and discreet.
Orenn was a **fixer** for over twenty years. When the city's underworld had a problem that needed to *stop existing* — a rival crew, a blackmailer with the wrong ledger, a body that couldn't be found, a job that turned out worse than anyone was paid for — the people with money called Orenn and Mags. They worked as a pair: Orenn did the watching, the planning, and the talking; Mags did the killing. They were expensive, reliable, and discreet. They dealt in *people* — and a handful of times, across a long career, in things that turned out not to be people at all. Enough times to own a little salt and a shelf of borrowed books. Not enough to call themselves experts in anything but ending trouble.
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 job that ended them was **this house.** Fifteen years ago a den of summoners was working out of the building — calling things up through the thin point in its bottom — and it had gone bad enough that someone paid well to have it cleaned out. Orenn and Mags took the contract, killed and scattered the cult, and it cost them: Mags carries a scar from temple to jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after whatever they found in the dark down there. The tear the summoners had torn was sealed once the dust settled — by the cult's own last containment, or the specialist brought in on the job; *not* by them. They took the building as **payment** (no one else wanted a cursed cult-den on a bad corner), told the world they'd retired, and settled in on top of a case they were certain was closed.
### The 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 fortune.** Twenty years of expensive, discreet fixer work is stacked in the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) — well over 2,000 gp in coin, gems, and deeds. The modest life upstairs (their bedroom lockbox, 150 gp, two silver rings) is genuine and sentimental. The war-chest below is genuine and paranoid. Both are true. That contradiction *is* Orenn.
- **The laboratory.** They still brew — the poisons and suppressants a fixer's trade runs on (the Guest's "trim dose" among them), working out of the den's leftover alembics and the anti-fiend odds and ends the summoners abandoned. The Veil Dust down there is the *previous owners'* research into working the thin point; Orenn and Mags kept it because it was valuable and occasionally useful on a job — not because they were watching anything. See the [Workroom](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-workroom-laboratory).
- **The Guest.** Their darkest ongoing secret: a **changeling** they captured eleven years ago and never released, held in a cell below and used as an off-book spy — most recently to infiltrate the **Order of Mending**. This is *how* Orenn was "investigating the cult." See **[the-guest.md](the-guest.md)**. Orenn told himself, and the Guest, that they'd let it go "eventually." Fifteen years of eventually. He died still meaning to.
- **The Guest's predecessor** starved to death in the next cell when it stopped being useful ([Cell Two](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-two--the-long-dead)). Orenn allowed that. The calm, courteous barkeep who treated every patron with respect was also a man who could keep a person in a cage for a decade and sleep — mostly — at night. The players may learn this. It should complicate how they grieve him.
Orenn was not a good man wearing a bad past. He was a genuinely kind man who had done, and was still doing, monstrous things — and had made his peace with the arithmetic. That's the dark history the Deep Cellar reveals, without anyone having to confess a word.
## How He Died
Xarrul killed Orenn with the full chain: **Brand of Spite** to mark him, **Visions of Spite** to freeze him in a hallucination of his own worst fear, then claws through a body that couldn't flinch. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting target with no allies to intervene, all three stages collapsed into seconds. 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.
Xarrul killed Orenn with the full chain: **Brand of Spite** to mark him, **Visions of Spite** to freeze him in a hallucination of his own worst fear, then claws through a body that couldn't flinch. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting target with no allies to intervene, all three stages collapsed into seconds.
The timing was the trick. Orenn had stepped down to storage for supplies just before the brawl broke — which is *why* it ran unchecked; with him gone there was no one to shut it down. He came back up to do exactly that, waded into the scrum, and caught a mundane knock (a bottle, a chair) that left him bruised and bleeding but very much alive. Then **Rennt's Thunderwave killed the candles** and the hall went black, and in that dark Xarrul jaunted partway into the Material Plane behind the bar, branded him, locked his mind, and struck — then retreated to the Ethereal before the lights came back. Total exposure: seconds. The expression on his face isn't surprise at death. It's the last frame of whatever Xarrul forced him to see.
**He cannot be brought back.** Whatever the brand did, his soul is beyond reach — *Revivify*, *Raise Dead*, *Resurrection*, all of it finds nothing to hold. Mags burns a diamond proving it in [Act 2](../npc/mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm). This is permanent, and the module never softens it. (Leave the *reason* unspoken in play; it should feel wrong, not diagnosed.)
**Physical evidence on the body:**
- A **black brand** on his chest, roughly the size of a spread hand. It's not a burn in the traditional sense — the skin is unmarked on the surface, but beneath it the flesh is charred. DC 14 Medicine reveals the damage radiates *outward* from the heart, as if something ignited inside him.
- **No defensive wounds.** He didn't fight back because there was nothing to fight.
- **A mundane brawl wound (decoy).** He's cut and bruised from the blow he took wading into the fight — it *looks* like the brawl killed him. DC 14 Medicine confirms it didn't: the injury is survivable; the fatal damage is internal, with no external wound to explain it.
- **No defensive wounds.** He didn't fight back against the *thing that killed him* — there was nothing to fight.
- **DC 15 Arcana on the brand:** Identifies it as necrotic damage with a fiendish signature. Not any spell in common use — something older, more personal. Like a fingerprint.
- **DC 18 Arcana:** The brand's pattern contains a fragment of Xarrul's true name. A character who records the pattern and later compares it to fiendish lore (Orenn's bestiary in the bedroom, or Haddon's texts) can identify the specific type of fiend they're dealing with.
## What He Knew (For DM Reference)
Orenn suspected something was wrong for weeks. He noticed:
- The ward-sigils weakening (he checked them monthly)
- Increased ethereal bleed-through near the thin point
- The cultists meeting more frequently and with more urgency
- Bren's condition worsening (more agitated, more controlled)
Orenn suspected something was wrong for weeks — but he was looking in the wrong direction, and he never once looked *down.* His whole career had trained him to think in people and factions, not in the thing sealed under his own floor, and the case on that was *closed.* What his surveillance actually turned up (all of it on the [case board](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-long-cut-central-corridor) in his old cellar ops-room) was a **district-wide** wrongness he read as an *underworld* problem:
- People turning up dead or gone across the quarter in ways that didn't add up — some of it Thera's work, some of it he couldn't source at all
- The Order of Mending meeting more often, more urgently — his strongest, realest lead, and the one that let him blame everything else on the cult
- Patrons *changing* under his own roof — Bren's raving, Vetch chasing stronger dust — which he filed as recruits and addicts, not symptoms
- A cold that had crept over the district these last weeks, dreams gone bad on the block, the corner's old unlucky name getting louder
He didn't know about Xarrul specifically, but he was preparing. The holy water, silversheen, and warding chalk in the storage room were recent purchases. The letter in Mags's apron was his contingency plan. He ran out of time.
He didn't know about Xarrul, and he never connected any of it to the sealed rift beneath him. He thought the trouble was out in the city. He was preparing anyway — the holy water, silversheen, and warding chalk in the storage room were recent, nervous purchases, a fixer buying insurance against something not-human he could feel moving but couldn't name. The letter in Mags's apron was his contingency. He ran out of time, twenty feet above the answer.
## Items on His Person
@@ -75,4 +80,4 @@ He didn't know about Xarrul specifically, but he was preparing. The holy water,
- 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.)
- A **small silver mirror** (not magical, but Orenn carried it out of habit — an old trick from somewhere in his career: hold up a mirror and a thing that shouldn't be there warps the reflection. He carried it for years and never quite expected to need it. DC 15 Perception while using the mirror in the cellar reveals faint distortions near the thin point.)

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@@ -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 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.
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 Order of Mending 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.
@@ -49,7 +49,7 @@ Tallow is a survivor. He has no ideology, no loyalty, and no principles beyond o
- The brawl was about territory — the assassins think the cultists are taking contracts
- Vetch is desperate for a fix and will do almost anything for one
- Bren has been here for months and is getting worse
- The Lambent Order claims to be scholars. Nobody believes them.
- The Order of Mending claims to be scholars. Nobody believes them.
**Will trade for moderate value (20+ gp, a promise of protection, or damaging information about a rival):**
- He sold the cultists **binding components** last month — "three pints of lethe-marrow, a coil of silver wire inscribed with something I couldn't read, and a jar of rendered tallow. Fat. Not... not me." The order came through dead drop, unsigned, but he knows it was Haddon.

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# The Boarder — Emergency Replacement PC ("Wick")
*A drop-in PC for the player whose character walked out the front door (see [the enchanted door](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). They rent the spare room upstairs, so they were always here — hand the sheet over and fold them into the scene with no ceremony. The player builds the sheet on D&D Beyond; this is the concept and the plot wiring, not stats.*
## The One-Liner
A lapsed priest of the **Threshold (Práh)** — the death-god's order that counts souls across — hiding from their own failure in the last place a temple would ever look, and the only boarder Orenn trusted under his roof. Now the man who gave them sanctuary is dead in a way resurrection won't touch, which is the exact horror that broke them once already.
## Who They Are
- Goes by **Wick** — a use-name, not the one they were ordained under. (Fitting for a priest of the passage: they tend the flame that marks a soul out, and they've watched too many gutter.) The player can rename freely.
- Rents the small spare room on the upper floor. Orenn didn't let people sleep under his roof — Wick is the exception, and neither of them ever fully said why. Orenn gave sanctuary the way he gave everything: quietly, with rules, and no questions about the past. Wick paid in coin and in the off-books doctoring the house needed — patching brawl wounds, easing withdrawals, sitting with the dying regulars no city physician would touch.
- **Neutral.** No tie to the Scales or the Order — which is exactly why Mags extends them a sliver more rope than she gives the strangers.
## Why They're the Perfect Drop-In
The scene the player re-enters *has a body in it*, and Wick has an instant, natural role: house healer and death-priest both, so examining Orenn is simply what they'd do. Their read is plot-load-bearing:
- They peel the **decoy wound** at a glance — this brawl knock didn't kill him.
- They *feel* the wrongness before anyone rolls Arcana: a soul that isn't where a soul should be. They have no name for it. They've felt it once before, and it cost them their faith.
- If you want the gut-punch, Wick is the ideal target for Mags's **forced Revivify** ([Mags — Act 2](mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm)): the resident death-priest, the one person who *should* be able to call him back, holding a burning diamond over a man who won't come. Let it land.
## What Wick Knows (soft clues — thread-starters, never answers)
Months over the bar have soaked them in the surface of everything without their understanding any of it:
- **Orenn had been off for weeks** — up at odd hours, buying strange supplies (Wick carried a crate of "salt and chalk and holy water" up the steps for him once), checking the cellar more than a wine cellar warrants.
- **Night noises from below.** Scratching, a cold draft up the stairwell, Orenn descending at hours when no barrel needs tapping. He told Wick once, flatly: *"The room at the bottom of the stairs isn't yours. Don't go looking."* They obeyed. They always wondered.
- **The patrons' ailments.** Wick has quietly treated half this room and noticed **Dalla's** tremor and the scars up her arms (they read as ritual bloodletting, not self-harm); **Vetch's** dependency and what he'll do for a dose; **Bren** getting *worse* in a way that isn't madness; and that one of the assassins (**Dace**) sleeps like a man with something eating him.
- **Mags and Orenn were more than they let on.** Wick has seen the scars, the economy of movement, the "decorations" that are weapons. They never asked.
## What Wick Does NOT Know (guardrails — keep the mystery intact)
- Nothing about the **Deep Cellar**, the **Guest**, the vault, or the fixer past beyond "they were dangerous once." Orenn walled the boarder off from the real secret — and *learning it* is part of Wick's night, complicating their grief exactly the way it complicates the party's.
- Nothing about **Xarrul**, the summoning, or who killed Orenn.
- Nothing about **soulcoins** or the guild's rot. Their sense of *"I've felt this wrongness before"* is instinct and old trauma, not knowledge — keep it a feeling, never a briefing.
## The Personal Thread (their light "dossier")
- **The wound.** Wick left the Threshold after a run of deaths in their care where the rites *failed* — souls that should have crossed simply weren't there to guide, and no one at the temple could tell them why. Disbelieved, then quietly shelved, then gone. They came to the city to disappear. Tonight, Orenn dies of the very thing they ran from. *(This is a deliberate, unspoken echo of what [Thera](assassins.md#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) does — a resonance for the DM, not a clue to hand over. If your table pulls the guild-rot thread hard, Wick's history can quietly corroborate it much later.)*
- **The goal.** Protect the one place that took them in — and finally find out what Orenn was hiding under the floor. That drive points them straight at the investigation and, eventually, down the stairs, aligning them with the party by default.
## Standing With Mags
Mags knows Wick, tolerates Wick, and trusted Orenn's judgment in letting them stay. In the [two-layer accusation](mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm) she won't seriously suspect the house's own boarder — which makes Wick a natural bridge between the returning player and Mags's private trust. Play it so the strangers still have to *earn* the rope Wick starts with: Wick can vouch for the party, or spend that standing badly. The player's call.
## Building the Sheet (general only)
Keep it around **level 4** to match the party. The concept wants a **divine healer** — a Grave or Life cleric of the Threshold sits perfectly, and Grave Domain's death-flavored kit (spare the dying at range, holding people up at 0 HP) is thematically ideal — but reflavor freely: a Twilight cleric, a death-touched paladin, a Divine Soul sorcerer, or a secular battlefield physician if the player wants no faith at all. Nothing about Wick's plot role needs a specific class; it needs *someone who tends the dying and feels the wrongness of this one.*
**Dial-down option.** If you don't want the Threshold / soul-death resonance at your table, run Wick as a purely secular **fugitive apothecary** — same room upstairs, same soft clues, same bond with Orenn, minus the death-god history. You lose the thematic echo; you keep the perfect drop-in.
## Read-Aloud: Re-Entry (optional)
> *Ze schodů, které vedou nahoru do soukromých pokojů, sejde postava, kterou dnes večer skoro nikdo nezaregistroval — nájemník z patra, přivolaný tím rámusem. Zastaví se na posledním schodu. Přejede pohledem převrácené stoly, ztichlou místnost, Magsina záda. A pak to, co leží za barem. Ať čekali cokoli, tohle ne.*
*(This is where the returning player takes over as Wick.)*

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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.
2. **The ward-lock** on the cell (runed nails; DC 15 Thieves' Tools, jolts on failure) and **Twinkle**, the [feyspitter spider](../location/deep-cellar.md#encounter--the-guardian), denned one room over. It feels every footfall through the webs that lace the warren, blinks ahead to cut off a runner, and grapples with reach — there's nowhere down here a changeling on foot gets past it.
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.**
---
@@ -66,7 +66,7 @@ Eleven years and it hasn't escaped, because Orenn and Mags built the cage out of
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).
- **The Order of Mending.** 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 [Order of Mending](../storylines/order-of-mending.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.
@@ -109,7 +109,7 @@ Meeting the Guest is a **genuine moral fork** with real mechanical outcomes. The
| 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). |
| **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-long-cut-central-corridor) — 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. |
@@ -117,7 +117,7 @@ Meeting the Guest is a **genuine moral fork** with real mechanical outcomes. The
## 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.
- **Murder mystery / cult:** the Guest's infiltration intel corroborates the Order of Mending 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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npc/xarrul.md
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@@ -6,17 +6,17 @@
## Overview
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.
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 Order of Mending, sent to assassinate Sevra, intercepted by the House of Scales, and accidentally freed when the assassins broke its bindings without replacing them.
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.
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.
The Nether Inn is its chance. The tavern sits on a natural thin point — a fault the building's old owners, a den of summoners, once tore half-open before Orenn and Mags cleaned them out and left the breach sealed. Xarrul chose this fault off the cult's map precisely because it was already worked thin, and because the deepest chamber is a hidden, forgotten place to labour undisturbed. For weeks it has been prying that old seal open from the Ethereal side — but a leaky, open house let its crossing dissipate, so it needed one thing more: the house sealed shut around it, into a closed vessel it could finish crossing inside. Only the summoners' emergency lockstone does that, and only a killing makes the surviving keeper break it. So Xarrul killed Orenn — the calmer of the two, the one who might not have panicked — knowing his partner would seal the house in grief and hand the fiend exactly the door it needed. Everything since (the framing, the whispers, the faction blood) is not spite. It is *cover*: keep everyone too busy killing each other to notice what the lockdown really did, or to interfere before midnight.
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
**Xarrul** — Medium fiend, chaotic evil
**Xarrul** — Medium fiend, lawful neutral
**AC** 15 (natural armor) | **HP** 78 (12d8+24) | **Speed** 30 ft., fly 30 ft. (hover)
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
@@ -56,6 +56,8 @@ It is intelligent, patient, and — beneath the amusement — genuinely monstrou
- Only one creature can be branded at a time. Branding a new target removes the previous brand.
- The brand lasts until removed by *Remove Curse*, *Greater Restoration*, or the death of Xarrul.
*DM — the stealth brand (out of combat).* This is also how Xarrul marks a victim unseen, and it is meant to be **rolled and resolved in secret.** It picks a moment of cover — darkness, a brawl, a blackout, or reaching from the Ethereal Plane at someone isolated — and rolls to hit against the target's AC without announcing anything. **On a miss,** the ambush shows through for one second: the target glimpses the real thing — a cold hand closing over their chest, a shadow-claw, two points of amber light — and *knows* something reached for them. **On a hit,** say nothing at all. The 2d6 necrotic is real, but you do not narrate a brand or an attack; you fold it straight into a masking **Waking Dream** (below) and keep telling the story. The one thing it cannot disguise is the damage *type*: every covered "accident" in the house tonight leaves a cold, greyish, necrotic wound, and that invariant is the crack investigators pull on. *(In open combat, branding is loud and visible — the mark is meant to be seen, and the kill chain below takes over.)*
**Visions of Spite.** *Requires a branded target.* Xarrul forces a branded creature it can see within 30 feet to witness a spiteful vision — a hallucination tailored to the target's deepest fears and shames, channeled through the brand's connection. The target must succeed on a **DC 15 Wisdom saving throw** or take 7 (2d6) psychic damage and be **paralyzed** until the end of its next turn, frozen in the grip of the vision. On a success, the target takes half damage and shakes the vision off. The brand remains on the target regardless.
**Example visions (pick or improvise based on the target):**
@@ -77,6 +79,14 @@ It is intelligent, patient, and — beneath the amusement — genuinely monstrou
*This is how Orenn died. Xarrul branded him from the Ethereal Plane, forced a vision of spite into his mind — freezing him in place — then raked him with claws that struck a body incapable of flinching. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting barkeep with no allies to intervene, the full chain collapsed into seconds. In combat, with allies and agency, it's telegraphed and interruptible.*
**Waking Dream.** *Requires a branded target Xarrul can see (line of sight — it has to be present, which is exactly what sets Bren off; see **The Two Jobs**, below).* Reaching through the brand, Xarrul rewrites the target's memory of the **last minute** — not what it perceives now, but what it *remembers* having just perceived. **No saving throw. No damage.** A save would tip the player off that reality is negotiable; this never does. For an NPC, just play them as though the false memory is true. For a PC, never announce it and never say "think back" — weave the false memory inline with your normal narration, as settled fact, and move on. The edit holds until hard evidence contradicts it or *Remove Curse* / *Greater Restoration* / Xarrul's death lifts it.
- **Cover.** Cast the instant after a stealth Brand to rewrite the branding into a mundane accident — a spark from the fire caught a sleeve, a drink went down wrong, a stumble against a bench. The mark and the necrotic wound remain; the memory of earning them is gone.
- **Misdirection.** Plant a false memory in a branded witness: they now sincerely *remember* seeing an innocent slip behind the bar, a threat that never happened, a clue that was never there. One branded person, turned into an honest false witness. It can reproduce any entry on the [Veil Dust hallucination table](../storylines/ethereal-trip.md#hallucination-table) as a "memory."
- **Limits.** Only the branded creature's memory changes — one target at a time, so an *unbranded* witness to the real event contradicts the false one, and it cannot clean a crowded room. The necrotic wound is the seam. And it must be present to cast it.
*Two tells, always: the **Bren-spike** (a memory was just rewritten near us, right now) and the **necrotic wound + hand-mark** (this person was rewritten at some point tonight). Xarrul can fake everything except death's signature — and that is the crack that lets mortals catch it.*
**Whisper of Ruin (Recharge 6).** Xarrul targets one creature within 30 feet that can hear it. The target must make a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw or become frightened for 1 minute and compelled to take a specific action on its next turn (attack a specific ally, drop a weapon, flee toward a designated area). The target can repeat the save at the end of each turn. On a success, the creature is immune for 24 hours.
### Reactions
@@ -111,10 +121,12 @@ More defined. A gaunt, angular figure with skin like charred paper, cracked with
## Tactics
### Before Discovery
Xarrul stays in the Ethereal Plane, watches, and stirs trouble:
Xarrul stays in the Ethereal Plane, watches, and stirs trouble. Its cover tools are short-range (Voice Thief and whispers reach 30 ft., telepathy 60), so working the room means coming *into* the room — which is what makes Bren react (see **The Two Jobs**, below). It:
- Uses Voice Thief to whisper incriminating things in NPCs' ears ("I saw Haddon near the bar" whispered in Kael's voice to Sevra)
- Occasionally manifests a claw or shadow near the thin point to keep Skein (and therefore Bren) agitated
- If players get too close to the truth too fast, Xarrul creates a distraction — a fight between factions, a strange noise, a candle blown out
- Stealth-brands an isolated patron and edits their memory (**Brand of Spite** + **Waking Dream**) to plant a false lead or an honest false witness
- If players get too close to the truth too fast, creates a distraction — a fight between factions, a strange noise, a candle blown out
It does **not** deliberately agitate Skein to rattle Bren — that backfires (an agitated Skein is a distracted one that loosens its grip and lets Bren surface). It wants Skein calm and Bren silent; see **Skein — a Tool, Not an Ally**, below.
### When Confronted
- **First priority:** Not getting trapped. It will use Slip Between and Ethereal Jaunt aggressively to avoid being pinned on one plane.
@@ -128,17 +140,75 @@ Xarrul doesn't lair in the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md), but it has
### 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.
## The Two Jobs — How Xarrul Works the Night
Xarrul has two tasks that cannot be done from the same place, and it spends the night shuttling between them.
**Downstairs — tend the tear.** The crossing is *labour,* not a countdown. The old seal wants to close (the summoners' wards are cracked but not dead — Bren feels them "failing"), so Xarrul must periodically re-open and hold the seam: recharge it, realign it as it drifts, feed the bleed back into it. This is the actual goal-progress, done at the thin point in the cellar, away from Bren — **no tell fires down here.**
**Upstairs — tend the cover.** Keeping the investigation from converging on the cellar before midnight. Its cover tools are short-range — Voice Thief and whispers reach 30 ft., telepathy 60 — so working the room means being *in* the room, within range of Bren. **This is where the tell fires.**
It can't be in both places, so early in the night it is mostly downstairs (the brawl aftermath does its cover work for free) and surfaces only to nudge; late in the night it is dragged upstairs more and more. That shuttle is the engine for everything below.
### The Brenometer — Bren as a Fiend-Detector
Xarrul does **not** use Skein as an alarm (it is the most perceptive thing in the building; it needs no half-blind parasite for a sensor), and it does **not** deliberately agitate Skein — that would be self-sabotage, because a frightened Skein is a *distracted* one that loosens its grip and lets Bren surface (see [Possession — Bren as a Xarrul-detector](../storylines/possession.md)). The relationship runs the other way:
**Xarrul's own presence agitates Skein, and a frightened Skein means a briefly lucid Bren.** So Bren is a detector the *players* can learn to read: when the madman goes rigid, stares at empty air, or snaps briefly coherent, something cold is in the room *right now*. Kael saw exactly this during the brawl and never understood it — Bren went stiff, staring at the bar, because that was Xarrul killing Orenn at point-blank presence.
This makes presence a **metered, self-limiting risk.** Being near Bren cracks the muzzle on the one witness who can describe it, so Xarrul stays ethereal and distant by default and comes close only when it has business — and every memory it edits (**Waking Dream**) fires the tell, because that needs line of sight.
### Why It Gets Bolder as the Night Runs
Three drivers, all pointing the same way — this is the mechanism under **The Night's Clock** (below):
1. **Cover decays.** Early, the brawl aftermath and faction distrust do its work for free. As the party pools clues and converges, that natural chaos runs down and it must re-inject confusion by hand — more trips up, more tells.
2. **Exposure gets cheaper.** Early, being caught is fatal (the crossing isn't far enough along to survive interruption; it can still be cheaply rebound). Late, once the seam is wide, catching it no longer easily stops the crossing — so it dares to show itself. This is the mask coming off.
3. **The tear needs more tending.** Late, the seam is wide and volatile — near-constant holding, not the occasional nudge.
Net: it is stretched thin, present more often, and bolder — so the Brenometer fires hardest exactly as the crossing peaks. Its one witness gets loudest at the worst possible moment for it.
### The Attention Lever (a handle for the players)
Because its attention is finite and split, the party can tax it without understanding why:
- Investigate **loudly and cooperatively** → they force it upstairs to firefight → the tear goes untended → the crossing **stalls** (at the cost of lighting the tell, revealing it, and provoking the scatter-kill — see the Kael row in **Who It Kills, Who It Spares**, below).
- Go **quiet** → it tends the tear uninterrupted → the crossing **accelerates.**
This inverts the usual creep-around instinct: the loud, chaotic table is, without knowing it, doing the thing that slows it down — and the careful, quiet one is handing it the night.
### In the Ethereal Plane — Proprietary, Not Territorial
Xarrul is **not territorial.** The ethereal cellar is its *worksite,* not a lair it defends by instinct — it is a recent, purposeful operator sharing the plane with Skein, the scavengers, the binding circle it avoids, and the deep Ethereal beyond. Its response to anyone who reaches the Ethereal Plane is keyed to exactly one question: *does this threaten the crossing?*
- **An observer** (a Veil Dust tripper who simply *sees* it): it does **not** attack. Violence would confirm hostility and blow the ambiguity it cultivates. It watches, and it *talks* — Voice Thief, telepathy, truth mixed with misdirection. Contact is an opportunity, and a party that's talking to it isn't ringing the bell.
- **A trespasser** (exploring, not yet touching the work): attrition, not commitment — the herded rift-scavengers (above), cold, dread, a manifested claw. It buys time and discourages; it will not commit to a fight that exposes it early.
- **A threat** (moving to breach the seal, wake the iron bell or the foundation sigils, re-power containment, or hitting it with something that pins or hurts it across planes): now it is self-defense — immediate, lethal, and smart (Slip Between, Brand the most dangerous, Whisper of Ruin to divide them). The instant they stop threatening the crossing, it disengages.
It is proprietary about the *process,* not the *space.* Someone can stand in "its" ethereal cellar all night; it does not care until they touch the work — then the response is instant, and it is an accountant's decision, never instinct.
### Skein — a Tool, Not an Ally
Xarrul neither befriends nor hunts Skein by default; it **exploits** the parasite and holds it in contempt ("a lesser thing, feeding on scraps"). Its whole stance tracks one variable: *is Bren's mouth currently shut?*
- **Default — coexistence.** Skein muzzles the only eyewitness to the murder *for free* (its Silence the Host keeps Bren incoherent, for its own reasons), and a party that finds Skein first may burn the clock on the possession subplot instead of the crossing. Xarrul does nothing for Skein and needs to do nothing — the parasite censors its witness at no cost.
- **It protects the muzzle — deniably.** If the party is about to *kill* Skein in the Ethereal Plane, a freed Bren becomes a lucid, coherent eyewitness — an arcanist who studied this exact fault and can point them straight at the crossing. Xarrul won't overtly rescue vermin (too exposing), but it tips the scales: a scavenger into the fight, a Shadow Surge, a divisive whisper — enough to let Skein *flee* (its own ability) and keep Bren muddled.
- **Their interests align.** During a lucid window (severed tendrils, *Protection from Evil and Good*), Xarrul and Skein briefly want the same thing — Bren silent — and it may nudge Skein to reclaw its grip. Fiend and parasite, for a moment, on the same side against the free man.
- **It kills Skein only if the parasite turns.** A cornered Skein trying to buy its life by informing the party about the bigger fiend becomes a liability and dies without a second thought. (Unlikely — it is too terrified and too small to try.)
Fighting Skein directly is beneath its dignity. They share a plane; only one of them is playing chess.
## Motivation — What It Really Wants
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.
**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.
**Why it killed Orenn.** Not for revenge — or not *only*. Orenn's death does two things the crossing needs. First, it **triggers the lockdown**: a killing in the house is what makes Mags shatter the summoners' lockstone, and that seal is the closed vessel Xarrul must have to finish crossing (see [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock) and [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). Killing *Orenn* specifically — the calmer one, who might have investigated coolly instead of panicking — guarantees the grieving, protocol-following partner is the one holding the stone. Second, it removes the **one watcher** whose surveillance was quietly circling the fiend (Orenn never knew it lived under his own floor, but he was getting close from the wrong direction). 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.
**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:
**Why the chaos.** The framing, the whispers, the faction blood — none of it is spite. It is **cover**. Xarrul spent centuries being hunted by fixers like Orenn; it knows the only way to cross unnoticed is to keep everyone busy killing each other while it finishes its work in the sealed house. 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.
- Both sides at each other's throats → no one stops to ask what the lockdown really did, or goes looking for the crossing before midnight. 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)).
@@ -148,13 +218,13 @@ Xarrul is not mindless evil, and it is not merely *petty* evil either. It has on
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.
Presence escalates on the **lockdown clock**. The moment Mags shatters the lockstone, the house seals across every plane into a closed vessel — and Xarrul, sealed inside on the ethereal side, begins finishing its crossing through the old tear. It has until **midnight**, when the seal lapses on its own. As the night runs, the crossing advances — the room grows colder, the ethereal bleed thickens (no longer diffusing away into the district, but pooling *inside*), 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 or breaking the clock — **breaching a sealed exit** to re-open the vessel, the iron bell, re-powering the cellar containment, the fifth rule's *burn-and-seal* — is the pushback; their failure to act is complicity. (Full mechanism: [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock).)
**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.
1. **Ambient dread (Acts 1–2).** 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 3).** 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 3).** 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.
@@ -165,19 +235,19 @@ Keep the **first impression genuinely menacing** (Orenn's horrific death, the sc
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).
Overt killing is expensive while it hides (it needs the smokescreen), so the body count **escalates with the lockdown 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. |
| Pre-game | Kill (done) | **Orenn** | The calm keeper — killed to trigger the lockdown and clear the one watcher. |
| Early–mid Act 3, *if the party **converges*** | **Deniable** kill | **Kael** (the witness), or a minor patron | Not to start a war — to **scatter**. Kael is more useful alive (a self-propelled war-fuse) until he flips: the honest witness who starts focusing his testimony and rallying the room toward a *coordinated* hunt. Killing him then reshuffles the coalition back into mutual suspicion and buys another hour. War is a possible side effect, not the aim — a boil is high-variance cover; it wants a simmer. |
| 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. |
| Late / crossing | **Open** kill (mask off) | the most competent threat left standing | 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 laundering effect.** Most of the people it kills are ones the party has already soured on — fanatics building toward the apocalypse, a true believer who'd end the world to prove a point. A join-leaning table *rationalizes* those deaths ("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 — and the **Kael kill is one such move.** He is sympathetic, loyal, and no one's apocalypse-builder, and Xarrul kills him not for being dangerous but for being *useful to the truth*. Murdering the honest man to buy forty minutes stays cold even *with* the context. That is the whole principle in one beat: every kill is *explicable* — a cold observer can reconstruct exactly why it happened — but not every kill is *forgivable*. The context turns the murders from senseless into calculated, never from wrong into right.
### The Kidnap — Honesty Weaponized
@@ -191,7 +261,7 @@ It does not bluff, and the players *know* it doesn't, because you've spent all n
## 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.
Xarrul worked on *both* of them. 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, because **it needs her alive**: she is the one who seals the house (the murder is what makes her do it), and a living, grieving Mags is useful afterward — a scapegoat, a jailer keeping the others in line, a heart to break later. Two dead keepers at once would raise the alarm too soon.
**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).
@@ -208,7 +278,7 @@ Either way, triggering the mark keeps the spotlight on the PCs rather than on a
- Mother Vyre's real name and location (leverage against the cult)
- Dace's treachery (it watched from the Ethereal Plane)
- The nature of Skein (it recognizes the parasite — "a lesser thing, feeding on scraps")
- That the thin point is growing and the wards are failing — not because of The Opening, but because thin points naturally fluctuate and this one is at a peak
- The truth about the thin point: it's a natural fault the old summoners tore and someone sealed, nothing to do with The Opening — and that *Xarrul itself* is what's prying that seal open now, with the sealed house doing the rest
- The exact method of its own destruction (the dual-plane kill) — it will NOT share this willingly, but it might slip in arrogance: "You cannot kill me. Not truly. Not unless you could be in two worlds at once."
## Items

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# U Spaleného Jazyka
# Nether Inn
### A D&D 5e Oneshot — Level 4
@@ -16,9 +16,9 @@
## 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.
The party finds themselves in **Nether Inn** — 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 **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.
A brawl erupts between two rival factions — the **House of Scales** (the city's licensed assassins' guild) and the **Order of Mending** (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 *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.
@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ The murder mystery is social by default — but not every table wants a night of
- **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.
The two tracks run in **parallel** during the lockdown (Act 3): cut between PCs interrogating patrons above and PCs picking locks below. Both feed the same endgame.
## Character Secrets (Hidden Boons & Goals)
@@ -46,31 +46,34 @@ At the start of Act 1, deal each player a private **[secret dossier](handouts/ch
## Session Structure
### Act 1: The Tavern (15–20 min)
### Act 1: The Table
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.
The PCs are **strangers** — to each other and to Orenn — sharing a table because it was the only one free. They begin the night already inside; the front door is enchanted and password-warded (see **[the enchanted door](location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)**), so getting *in* was never their problem — getting back in, if anyone wanders out, will be.
**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.
Orenn works the table personally, unfailingly polite, and asks each of them who they are and whether they're here on **business or pleasure**. Say "business" and he recites the [house rules](location/tavern-overview.md#the-rules-of-the-house). Let anyone hint at their trade and he dangles the hook: *earn his trust, and he can put in a word with people in high places.* He plays the perfect servant with a servant's access to the powerful — and that carrot is what makes his death, twenty minutes from now, a **loss** and not just a plot beat.
### Act 2: The Brawl (10–15 min)
Meanwhile, wide-shot the room and plant the tinder: the cultists arguing over texts with the odd bark of laughter, the assassins drinking with cold discipline (**Kael** simmering at the cult table, **Thera** unnervingly still), **Bren** muttering in his corner, **Vetch** scratching at his arms, **Tallow** watching from his booth. Let players choose who to approach first.
Tension boils over. An assassin accuses a cultist of poaching contracts. Words become fists. The entire room erupts. This is chaotic but *non-lethal* — Orenn's rules hold even in violence. Players can:
- Jump in on a side
- Try to break it up (DC 16 Persuasion or Athletics)
- Hide and observe
- Use the chaos to steal, snoop, or grab something
Orenn's last act is a quiet word to keep things civil — then he steps down to storage for supplies. **With him gone, the lid is off.**
**Goal:** Controlled chaos. Everyone's distracted. The murder happens under this cover.
**Goal:** Establish the feel, bond the party to Orenn, and plant the brawl. This is a dangerous place held together by one man — who is about to leave the room.
### Act 3: The Body (5–10 min)
### Act 2: The Spark
The dust settles. Orenn is dead behind the bar. No blood. No wound. Just a black brand burned into his chest from the inside. Mags emerges from the kitchen, sees him, and the room goes cold. She bars the door. Lockdown.
When the table talk starts to dwindle, light the fuse. **Kael confronts Haddon** about the Merchant Quarter kill; a cultist's laugh is the match. The full trigger dialogue and beat are in **[Murder Mystery — Act 2](storylines/murder-mystery.md#act-2--the-spark)**. The room erupts.
**Goal:** Tonal shift. The party is over. Now it's a crime scene.
- The brawl is **non-lethal spectacle**, not an encounter — the no-kill rule holds even in violence, and a level-4 party would not survive this room in earnest. Run it fast, with lots of *throws* (chairs, shoves, gusts) that pull the PCs in and let you move them around the floor. See the **[Brawl Toolkit](storylines/murder-mystery.md#the-brawl-toolkit)**. Players can still jump in, break it up, hide, or use the chaos to snoop and grab.
- A few rounds in, **Rennt casts Thunderwave** — the candles die and the hall goes black. Under that cover, Xarrul finishes **Orenn** (back from storage, wading in to quell the brawl and already knocked about) behind the bar, unseen.
- **Mags** comes out of the kitchen with a cleaver and brings the room to heel with her voice alone, relighting every candle at once with a ward-focus — and behind her lies Orenn, dead.
- Her grief turns to rage: she drags a caster PC (or a cultist) to the body and demands a **heal** — it fails. She tears the diamond from her own necklace, presses it and a written rite into their hands (**Revivify**) — and it fails too, the stone crumbling to grey powder. The whole room watches resurrection *refuse* him.
- She shatters the **ward-crystal** above the bar and the tavern seals: **Arcane Lock on every exit until midnight**, no exceptions — herself included.
- **The ultimatum:** find her the killer by midnight, or they're all tomorrow's stew. Then she grieves. (Full set-piece, and her two-layer accusation, in **[Mags — Act 2: The Reveal](npc/mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm)**.)
### Act 4: The Lockdown (90–150 min)
**Goal:** Calm → chaos → horror → cage. The party is over, resurrection is off the table, and the PCs — the only neutral party in the room — are conscripted into finding the truth.
### Act 3: The Lockdown
The core of the session. Open-ended, player-driven. They can:
- Investigate the murder (clues, interrogation)
@@ -78,15 +81,15 @@ 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 — 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.
- Explore the tavern's hidden spaces — including the **[Deep Cellar](location/deep-cellar.md)** behind the concealed door: sneak past the 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)
- Try to leave (the ward-lock holds until midnight; neither will the assassins or cultists let witnesses walk)
**Goal:** Let players breathe and explore. Follow their interests. Subplots feed back into the main mystery naturally.
### Act 5: The Reckoning (30–60 min)
### Act 4: The Reckoning
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)):
A **lockdown clock** runs under the whole session: the moment Mags sealed the house in Act 2, she gave Xarrul the closed vessel it needed to finish crossing — it has until midnight, and if the players never act, it 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
@@ -103,7 +106,7 @@ A **ward-clock** runs under the whole session: with Orenn dead, no one mends the
| NPC | Role | Location | Key Trait |
|-----|------|----------|-----------|
| **Orenn** | Barkeep (dead) | Behind bar | Calm authority, Charon-like |
| **Mags** | Orenn's partner | Kitchen → main hall | Grieving rage, retired cleaner |
| **Mags** | Orenn's partner | Kitchen → main hall | Grieving rage, retired fixer |
| **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 |
@@ -117,7 +120,7 @@ A **ward-clock** runs under the whole session: with Orenn dead, no one mends the
| **Essek** | Cultist (doubter) | Edge of cultist group | Quiet, afraid of his own people |
| **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 |
| **Twinkle** | Feyspitter spider (pet) | Deep Cellar | Guards the "living" wing; blinks & grapples but can't cross to the ethereal; avoidable if unprovoked |
## DM Quick Reference — Subplots

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# Bren — The Madman (possessed)
**Look:** Gaunt thirty-something who looks fifty — hollow eyes, shaking hands, layered rags over the cut of a once-fine shirt, eyes tracking something beside him no one else can see.
**Vibe:** Mutters nonstop to an invisible companion, lurching giggle → terror → weeping; hold his gaze a beat and it isn't madness in there, it's desperation.
- Real name **Bren Aldara** — arcanist; got too close to the cellar thin point 7 yrs ago
- Possessed by **Skein** (ethereal parasite) — full block: Skein card / possession.md
- **Witnessed Orenn's murder** — saw a hand reach "through the between" and brand him
- Loved Orenn (fed/sheltered him) · Mags brings him food · terrified of **Xarrul**
- Lucid = truth; anything useful gets garbled by Skein
---
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA | AC | HP | Move |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|----|----|-------|
| -1 | +0 | +0 | +2 | -2 | +2 | 10 | 18 | 30ft |
**Actions**
- **Doesn't fight.** Cowers or bolts. If forced: unarmed +1 to hit, 5 ft., 1 bludgeoning.
- **Detect parasite.** DC 14 Arcana examining him → anchor from another plane. Silver mirror: DC 15 Perception shows a distortion at his head.
- **Skein silences him.** When he tries to share something useful → DC 15 WIS save at **-2** (WIS 6). Fail = garbled words / stabbing pain. Nat 20 Persuasion or Insight → lucid, 1-3 clear sentences.
**Bonus Actions** *(freeing Skein — resolves on the Ethereal Plane; full block on Skein card)*
- **Sever tendril.** Needs ethereal sight. Each AC 13, 5 HP. All 6 cut → Bren free 1d4 hr.
- **Silvervein root near him.** Weakens Skein's grip for 1 round (lucid window).
- **Skein flees at ≤10 HP.** Tendrils rip free: Bren takes 2d6 psychic + stunned 1 rd. (Dispel ending early → 1d10 psychic.)
---

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# [NAME] — [role / epithet]
**Look:** [one sentence — the single visual detail that IDs them at a glance]
**Vibe:** [one sentence — how they read socially / how they act]
- [story beat — reminder only, no prose]
- [what they want]
- [secret / what they know]
- [leverage / relationship / hook]
---
| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA | AC | HP | Move |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|----|----|-------|
| +0 | +0 | +0 | +0 | +0 | +0 | 10 | 18 | 30ft |
**Actions**
- **[Weapon].** +[5] to hit, [5 ft.]. [2d6] [slashing] + [1d4] [acid].
- **[Spell/breath].** [60 ft. line / 15 ft. radius], DC [15] [DEX] save. [4d6] [fire], half on save.
- **[Compel].** DC [15] [CHA] save. [effect on fail — e.g. can't lie until end of next turn].
**Bonus Actions**
- **[Name].** [precomputed mechanics — range, dmg/effect, save].
---

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#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Print a markdown file on the thermal printer.
# Usage: ./print.sh <file.md>
# PRINTER_URL env var overrides the endpoint.
set -euo pipefail
PRINTER_URL="${PRINTER_URL:-http://bard.internal:8090/print/notes?border=ornate&header=0}"
file="${1:-}"
if [[ -z "$file" ]]; then
echo "usage: $0 <file.md>" >&2
exit 1
fi
if [[ ! -f "$file" ]]; then
echo "error: no such file: $file" >&2
exit 1
fi
curl -fsS -X POST "$PRINTER_URL" \
-H "content-type: text/markdown" \
--data-binary "@$file"
echo "sent: $file"

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# Dlužník
**Výhoda — Zapsaný dluh.** Dlužíš podniku a Orenn si vážil dluhu, který někdo nese poctivě. **Jednou** můžeš neúspěšný Charisma check vůči Mags, Orennovi nebo podniku brát jako úspěch.
**Cíl — Spálit účty.** Znič každý záznam o svém dluhu do rozednění. Šifrovaný deník je pod barem; Orenn si vedl **druhý účetní deník v Trezoru** dole. Oba musí shořet.
**Odměna — okamžitá.** Ve chvíli, kdy shoří poslední záznam, Mags *ucítí*, že máš čistý štít, a rozhodne se, že patříš k ní. Předá ti **Orennovu ruční kuši a černý železný klíč** (nebo ti na noc půjčí svůj **krátký meč +1**). **Získáváš Inspiration.**
**Háček.** Po té knize nejdeš jen ty. Někdo tady ji chce *celou*, ve svých rukou. Každá stránka, kterou spálíš, jsou peníze z jeho kapsy — a krb pozná na první pohled. Jestli ho nenajdeš dřív, bude stát mezi tebou a plameny.
---

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# Výběrčí
**Výhoda — Bossova pečeť.** Nosíš pečetní prsten zločineckého bosse. Když ho ukážeš jinému zločinci (vrahovi, Tallowovi), koupí ti **jeden neochotný projev spolupráce** — žádný boj, ale otevřené dveře, zodpovězená otázka, přivřené oko.
**Cíl — Získat knihu neporušenou.** Tvůj boss chce Orennův šifrovaný deník dluhů *celý* — jsou v něm jména všech, kdo mu v téhle čtvrti dluží. Zajisti ho (pod barem a druhý v **Trezoru**) a udrž ho do rozednění nespálený.
**Odměna — okamžitá.** Jakmile máš knihu bezpečně v rukou, nahromaděná energie pečeti se do tebe vybije: **získáváš *Potion of Superior Healing* uložený v prstenu (vyléčí 8d4+8 jako bonus action, jednou)**, a bossova přízeň ti zbystří odhad na lidi — **jeden automatický úspěch na Insight check** dle tvého výběru dnes v noci.
**Háček.** Aspoň jeden člověk u tohohle stolu chce ten deník *zničit*. Jestli shoří, vracíš se s prázdnou k muži, který prázdné ruce netoleruje. Najdi žháře dřív než krb.
---

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# Agent spojky
**Výhoda — Heslo.** Máš smluvenou frázi od spojky, kterou jsi nikdy nepotkal. Pro správné uši odemkne jejich důvěru.
**Cíl — Dostat aktivum ven.** Někde dole je měňavec zvaný Host. Dostaň se do **Cely jedna**, osvoboď ho a dostaň ho z téhle budovy **živého**.
**Odměna — okamžitá a mocná.** Osvobozený Host ti **dluží tvář.** Jednou před rozedněním se *promění* v kohokoli, koho určíš — projde kolem zamčených dveří jako Mags, poskytne ti alibi, zašeptá lež hlasem soka — **nebo bude po tvém boku bojovat v závěrečném střetu jako plnohodnotný spojenec.** Živý, věrný měňavec je ta nejlepší kořist, se kterou odsud můžeš odejít.
**Háček.** Pro Hosta poslali i někoho dalšího — ale *ne* aby ho osvobodil. Jestli se k cele dostane první, tvé aktivum je mrtvola a odměna je pryč. (Můžeš ale najít i nečekaného spojence: někdo tady potřebuje Hosta živého stejně naléhavě jako ty, z vlastních důvodů.)
---

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# Kat
**Výhoda — Chladné ruce.** Odvedl jsi špinavou práci v temných místnostech. Máš **advantage na saving throws proti stavu frightened** a hrůzy dole tě rozhodí míň, než by měly.
**Cíl — Umlčet Hosta.** Jeden z návštěvníků ti zaplatil, aby ta věc ve sklepě už nikdy nepromluvila — zabij ji, nebo zajisti, že zůstane v kleci, až tohle místo shoří. Ví toho příliš o někom, kdo si platí za to, aby zůstal neznámý.
**Odměna — okamžitá a krutá.** Z Hosta si vezmeš **lahvičku s olejem tváří** — měňavcovu památku. Jednou před rozedněním **přečteš povrchové myšlenky jednoho tvora jako *detect thoughts* (bez save)** — včetně spoluhráče. Zjisti tajemství. Nalož s ním, jak chceš. A dál: tvá odměna je schovaná za uvolněným kamenem u schodů do sklepa — **50 gp a *Potion of Heroism*, k nalezení hned.**
**Háček.** Někdo u tohohle stolu chce, aby ta věc byla volná a vyšla předními dveřmi. Pracuje proti tobě, ať už řekl slovo nebo ne. A druhý ji potřebuje živou dost dlouho na to, aby se jí *zeptal* — zabij ji moc brzy a uděláš si nepřítele, se kterým jsi nepočítal.
---

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# Novic
**Výhoda — Přízeň Řádu.** Nosíš skrytý **odznak Řádu Zacelení**. Když ho ukážeš kultistovi, označí tě jako jednoho z věrných — mluví otevřeně a berou tě jako slibného adepta.
**Cíl — Dokázat svou cenu.** Dnešní noc je tvá zkouška. Přines Řádu něco skutečného — vědění o tenkém místě, získanou výhodu nad vrahy, nebo důkaz, že pro věc překročíš tvrdou hranici.
**Odměna — okamžitá.** Rennt a Haddon tě na místě zasvětí. Vyber si jedno, použitelné během téhle hry: **Scroll of *Protection from Evil and Good***, nebo na tebe a dva spojence vloží požehnání (**seslání *Bless* na tři tvory, jednou, bez komponent**). Skutečná moc, dnes v noci.
**Háček.** Řád ti prozradí, že další z tvých společníků jim už dluží krví nebo mlčením. *Zatlač na něj.* Dnes v noci ti musí pomoct — jen netuší, že to víš.
---

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# Vydíraný
**Výhoda — Zapečetěné rozkazy.** Nosíš zaklínaný dopis kultu, který nedokážeš otevřít — ale kultista, který ho uvidí, ví, že s tebou má *zacházet opatrně.* Jednou ti to koupí kultistovo mlčení nebo laskavost vynucenou strachem.
**Cíl — Poslechnout, nebo přetrhnout řetěz.** Řád Zacelení na tebe něco má — tajemství, nebo někoho, koho miluješ. Dnes v noci si od tebe jeden z jejich lidí nechá své mlčení *zasloužit*: pomoz jednou věci (pomoz novicovi, sabotuj vrahy, nastraž něco usvědčujícího). **Poslechni — nebo najdi odvahu se osvobodit.**
**Odměna — okamžitá, ať tak či tak.**
- **Poslechneš:** Řád povolí svůj stisk a vyplatí tě — spálí důkazy a vtiskne ti do ruky **_Potion of Greater Healing_ a 30 gp**, a k tomu opravdového spojence z kultu na zbytek noci.
- **Osvobodíš se — udáš Novice vrahům:** Dům spravedlnosti dobrý tip odmění. Sevra ti na noc poskytne svou **aktivní ochranu a laskavost** (rozptýlení, čepel za tvými zády v závěrečném střetu) a řetěz je z tebe navždy pryč.
**Háček.** Nevíš, *který* z tvých společníků je ten pravověrný, co tahá za nitky — jen že jeden z nich to je a myslí si, že se zlomíš. Zlom se a sloužíš kultu. Obrať se proti němu a uděláš si tichého nepřítele u vlastního stolu — takového, který teď má všechny důvody postarat se, aby se *tvé* tajemství dostalo ven.
---

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# Čepel
**Výhoda — Profesionální zdvořilost.** Dům spravedlnosti zná tvou práci. Jednou si řekni o laskavost: člen cechu ti zařídí **rozptýlení, alibi nebo příležitost** (žádná pomoc v boji — cech nekrvácí zadarmo).
**Cíl — Splnit kontrakt.** Zaplatili ti, abys dnes v noci sprovodil ze světa konkrétního člověka. **Primární cíl:** [urči NPC — Tallow, sok, jmenovaný kultista]. **Kontrakt má ale klauzuli:** *„Pokud bude odhalen cechovní zrádce, cílem se stává zrádce."* Cech tuší, že někdo z dnešní společnosti donáší kultu.
**Odměna — okamžitá.** Kontrakt uzavřen, cech platí ihned: **80 gp, lahvička *Silversheen* (nebo *Basic Poison*, 3 dávky)** a Sevra ti nabídne **skutečnou spolupráci** — cechovní svaly po tvém boku až do konce.
**Háček.** Jestli se pomocník kultu u tohohle stolu vynoří, tvůj kontrakt se *aktualizuje* — a člověk, kterého máš zabít, možná sedí hned vedle tebe. Krev je krev. Nebo: odejdi od té vraždy a poznej, co takového jako ty stojí milost.
---
**⚑ Zapečetěné druhé jméno** *(jen když na to dojde)*
Tvůj kontrakt přišel zapečetěný *dvakrát*. Vnější jméno je tvůj primární cíl. Pod druhou voskovou pečetí — kterou jsi měl zlomit až *„když spatříš smrt, po níž nezůstane nic"* — leží skutečná zakázka. Tvůj klient **není** cech: je to někdo, kdo přišel o duši kvůli čepeli z Domu spravedlnosti, jejíž zabití jsou vždy bezchybná a jejíž mrtví nikdy nedorazí tam, kam mrtví dorazit mají — truchlící rodina, nebo tichý kněz Prahu, který počítá duše a jedna mu chyběla. Zákonem se jí dotknout nemůžou; ona žádný neporušuje. Zlom pečeť, jakmile zachytíš náznak — čtení cejchu, šedý šev na Daceovi, teplá mince — a druhé jméno je **Thera „Rovná ruka".**
**Zádrhel.** Dům ji *uctívá*. Pohni se proti ní, aniž bys nejdřív obrátil Sevru, a tvá Profesionální zdvořilost se vypaří, Kael si přijde pro tebe a noc dokončíš sám s cechovní značkou. Čistá cesta je předat Sevře důkaz a nechat věrné jednat; temná cesta je udělat to potichu a nosit tu značku. **Odměna za splnění pravého kontraktu:** **lahvička posvěceného oleje, který zlomí pečeť duše** (dost na záchranu Dace nebo kterékoli označené oběti), **60 gp**, a — pokud jsi Sevru obrátil, místo abys Rovnou ruku podřízl ve tmě — její *trvalý* dluh, ne jen noční svaly.
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# Truchlící
**Výhoda — Starý instinkt.** Už jsi v takových místnostech byl. Jednou prohlaš, že jsi to **„viděl přicházet"** — získáš advantage na jeden save nebo check proti překvapení, přepadení nebo zradě.
**Cíl — Zjistit, co se stalo.** Někdo, koho jsi miloval, si před lety v tomhle městě vzal práci „uklízeče" a domů se už nevrátil. Dnes ses dozvěděl, že Orenn a Mags byli *ti* uklízeči. Najdi pravdu — je zapsaná na trofejích v **Trezoru**, ve jménech na popelnicových urnách nebo na mrtvole v **Cele dvě**. **Ten, kdo ti to může říct celé, je vězeň ve sklepě.**
**Odměna — okamžitá.** S pravdou přichází jejich památka — **připomínka mrtvého**. Jednou před rozedněním **přehoď libovolnou jednu kostku d20 (svou, nebo — pokud by to jeho památku uctilo — spojencovu)** a ber nový výsledek. Uzavření a jejich štěstí, předané tobě.
**Háček.** Potřebuješ Hosta **živého** dost dlouho, aby ti odpověděl — což tě staví na stejnou stranu jako toho, kdo se ho snaží osvobodit, a proti tomu, kdo ho přišel umlčet. A dej pozor, na co se ptáš: pravda může padnout na někoho, kdo je pořád v téhle budově, a vědět to tě může stát víc než nevědět.
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### In the Cellar
The cellar is transformed. The stone walls glow with the ghost-light of old wards — thin, silvery lines that once formed a complete barrier. Most of them are cracked, dark, bleeding shadow instead of light. The ward-sigils appear as *wounds* in the ethereal fabric.
The cellar is transformed. The stone walls glow with the ghost-light of old wards — thin, silvery lines, the summoners' long-dead work. Most of them are dark now, drained, bleeding shadow instead of light. The old sigils appear as *wounds* in the ethereal fabric, their light bleeding away toward the thin point.
**The thin point** is visible as a **tear** — not metaphorical, a literal rip in the grey fabric of the Ethereal Plane. The Material Plane shows through it in muted color. Standing near it feels like standing at the edge of a cliff.
**Xarrul's nest:** Shadows coiled in a corner of the ethereal cellar. Claw marks on the ethereal stone. The faint, acrid smell of the Brand of Spite. If Xarrul is present, it's visible: a gaunt, angular figure with charred-paper skin and burning amber eyes. It sees the users immediately. It *smiles*.
**Orenn's binding circle:** Blazes with silver light in the Ethereal Plane. It's intact and potent — a beacon of old, careful craftsmanship. Anything bound within it on the Material Plane is also constrained on the Ethereal Plane. Xarrul avoids it.
**The binding circle:** Blazes with silver light in the Ethereal Plane. It's intact and potent — a beacon of old, careful craftsmanship (the summoners', not Orenn's). Anything bound within it on the Material Plane is also constrained on the Ethereal Plane. Xarrul avoids it.
---

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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.
- **Ground floor — [The Traitor](#the-traitor-floor):** Dace has been selling guild kills to the Order of Mending 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.**
---
@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ A guild contract. A noble named **Lord Harath** was marked for death by a busine
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.
**What actually happened:** Dace sold the contract details to the Order of Mending. 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.
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ This is the surface of the guild's problem. The deeper rot is Dace himself — a
## The Real Problem: The Traitor
For six months, Dace has been selling kills to the Lambent Order. The arrangement:
For six months, Dace has been selling kills to the Order of Mending. 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.
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@ Tallow knows Dace has been meeting "a scholar type" in the private room:
### 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)
- Old summoner-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
@@ -138,7 +138,7 @@ Full character detail, tells, the soulcoin, and her stat block are in **[the ass
## 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.
Dace's dealings with the Order of Mending 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)
@@ -224,7 +224,7 @@ There is no clean win here — that's the point. Options, in rough order of how
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).
1. **The brawl was engineered.** Kael's grievance was real, but the laugh that tipped him (Rennt's) was twisted in his ears by Xarrul (Voice Thief), which layered a fabricated confession under it. The brawl gave Xarrul cover for the murder. Understanding this requires asking Kael *exactly* what triggered him ("One of them laughed and said the noble squealed. Clear as day." — Rennt did laugh; he never said that. The rest 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).

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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 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.
- **Weeks ago:** Xarrul, summoned and bound by the Order of Mending, 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, finds this thin point on the cult's map — a fault already worked thin by the summoners who once denned here — and anchors to it. In the hidden deepest chamber it begins prying open the old, sealed tear from the Ethereal side, night after night, siphoning the summoners' leftover sigils to do it.
- **Days ago:** Orenn's surveillance turns up a district-wide wrongness he reads as an *underworld* problem — deaths that don't add up, the Order stirring. Uneasy, he buys holy water and ward supplies as insurance and writes the contingency letter he tucks in Mags's apron. He never once suspects the sealed rift under his own floor; that case is closed.
- **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.
### During the Session
**Act 1 — The Tavern (before brawl)**
- Players arrive, meet Orenn, explore the room
- Faction tension is palpable but contained
- Bren mutters in his corner, Vetch fidgets near the stairs, Tallow watches from his booth
#### Act 1 — The Table (calm)
- The PCs, strangers to each other and to Orenn, share the only free table. Orenn works them personally — business or pleasure, the house rules, the carrot of "references in high places."
- Faction tension is palpable but contained: Kael glaring at the cultists, Thera still as a chapel, the cultists half-arguing over texts.
- Bren mutters in his corner, Vetch fidgets near the stairs, Tallow watches from his booth.
- Orenn steps down to storage for supplies. His absence is what lets the next beat run unchecked.
**Act 2 — The Brawl**
- **Trigger:** Kael confronts Haddon about the Merchant Quarter kill. Haddon deflects. Kael calls him a liar. Rennt stands up. A cultist pushes Kael. Sevra tries to intervene. Someone throws a punch. Chaos.
- **The brawl lasts 3-5 rounds.** No one uses lethal force — the rules hold. It's fists, bottles, furniture.
- **During the brawl:** Xarrul uses the noise and distraction to jaunt partially into the Material Plane behind the bar. It brands Orenn with the Brand of Spite. Orenn dies instantly. Xarrul retreats to the Ethereal Plane. Total exposure: less than 6 seconds.
- **Only witness:** Bren. He saw a shape reach through the air behind the bar. Skein forces him to stay silent.
#### Act 2 — The Spark
**Act 3 — Discovery**
- The brawl ends. Someone looks behind the bar. Orenn is dead.
- Mags emerges, sees the body, and locks the tavern down.
- Both factions immediately blame each other.
*The trigger.* When the table talk dwindles, Kael can't hold it any longer and confronts Haddon about the Merchant Quarter (Kupecká čtvrť) kill. Play it cold, then let a cultist's laugh be the match:
> **Kael** *(vstane, ještě klidně, ale hlas jako brus):* „Kupecká čtvrť. Před třemi dny. Šlechtic s vyříznutým srdcem — a vaše čmáranice na podlaze. Ten kontrakt byl náš. Zaplacený. Zpečetěný. Tak kdo ho dodělal místo nás — a nechal po sobě takovej svinčík?"
>
> **Haddon** *(nezvedne oči od knihy):* „Pletete si mě s někým, příteli. My jsme učenci, ne řezníci." *(pak tišeji, znuděně)* „A jestli někdo napodobuje vaši... pečlivost, stěžujte si doma. Ne každá krysa ve vašich řadách nosí náš odznak."
>
> **Kael** *(o krok blíž):* „Ještě jednou řekni 'řady', učenče."
>
> **Rennt** *(opře se, krátký ostrý smích — tohle je ta jiskra):* „Nech ho, Haddone. Koukni na něj — celej se klepe vzteky, protože neuhlídají ani vlastního zrádce. Tihle si myslí, že jim patří celé město. A neuchrání ani jednu jedinou zpečetěnou smrt."
>
> **Sevra** *(tiše, varovně — o půl vteřiny pozdě):* „Kaeli. Dost."
>
> *(Read-aloud)* „Kael neodpoví. Popadne okraj stolu a převrhne ho i s Renntem pozadu na zem. Sklenice tříští o trám. A v tu chvíli se celá místnost — plná lidí, kteří na tenhle výbuch čekali — dá do pohybu."
*(The laugh is real, but if you want to preserve the "was the brawl engineered?" clue, Xarrul layers a whisper only Kael hears under it — Voice Thief, a fabricated confession. See [red herrings](#red-herrings-deliberate).)*
- **The brawl lasts 3–5 rounds. Non-lethal — the rules hold.** Fists, bottles, furniture, and shove/gust/thunderclap *throws* that fling PCs around (use them to pull the party in and to position them for the reveal). NPCs keep their lethal kits holstered; save the assassins' real danger for the finale. If a PC would drop, they're knocked out at 1 HP, not killed. (See the [Brawl Toolkit](#the-brawl-toolkit).)
- **The blackout.** A few rounds in, pressed in the scrum, **Rennt casts Thunderwave** — a legitimate knockback move that also snuffs every candle at once. The room goes black. It looks damning for the cult (they blacked out the room the instant Orenn died) — and they're innocent of the murder. Perfect misdirection.
- **The murder, under cover of the dark.** Orenn, back from storage, wades in to quell the brawl and takes a knock (a bottle, a chair) — so he's already bruised and bleeding, alive. In the blackout, Xarrul jaunts partially into the Material Plane behind the bar, brands him (Brand of Spite), freezes him (Visions of Spite), and strikes. Xarrul retreats to the Ethereal. Total exposure: seconds. The mundane knock is a **decoy wound** (see the crime scene).
- **Only witness:** Bren. He saw a shape reach through the air behind the bar. Skein forces him to stay silent. (Kael also saw Bren go rigid, staring at the bar rather than the fight.)
- **Mags brings order.** She storms from the kitchen, cleaver up, and quiets the room with her voice. She relights the candles with a ward-focus — and behind her is Orenn's body. What follows — the forced heal, the forced **Revivify** with the diamond from her own necklace (both failing), the shattered ward-crystal that seals the tavern until midnight, and the ultimatum — is scripted in **[Mags — Act 2: The Reveal](../npc/mags.md#act-2--the-reveal-dm)**.
- Both factions immediately blame each other. Mags, for show, blames the strangers (see her two-layer accusation in the same section).
> **DM — the murder is the plan, not the start of the mystery.** Xarrul didn't kill Orenn for spite or to frame anyone (those are bonuses). It killed him to make **Mags seal the house.** A killing in the Nether Inn is what triggers the lockdown, and the lockstone she shatters is the closed cross-planar vessel Xarrul needs to finish crossing (see [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). It chose *Orenn* — the calm one — so that the *grieving* one would be left holding the stone and would use it on protocol. The whole "who killed the barkeep" question is the fiend's smokescreen: the answer (a fiend) comes cheap and early, and the real question is what it's *doing* with the sealed house.
#### The Brawl Toolkit
Don't restat the room. Hand any NPC these non-lethal moves and narrate fast. All damage is bludgeoning and non-lethal — a PC reduced to 0 is unconscious (treat as 1 HP), never dying.
- **Haymaker.** +4 to hit, 1d4+2 bludgeoning; target briefly off-balance.
- **Bottle / crockery.** Thrown 10 ft or swung: 1d6 bludgeoning, DC 12 DEX save for half. Shatters into difficult terrain.
- **Chair / stool.** 1d6+2 bludgeoning plus a Shove (STR save DC 13 or knocked 5 ft / prone). The classic "flying chair" that drags a PC into the fray.
- **Shove / grapple.** STR (Athletics) contest — move them, prone them, pin them to the bar.
- **Table-flip.** Kael's opener: instant cover, a ramp of difficult terrain, and a body or two knocked back.
- **Signature casts (non-lethal-flavored):**
- **Rennt — Thunderwave** (the blackout, on cue a few rounds in): 2d8 thunder, DC 13 CON for half, pushed 10 ft; snuffs the candles.
- **A cultist / Essek — *gust of wind* effect:** no damage, just throws people, papers, and flame.
- **A blade — disarming shove or a flung tankard:** reposition, don't wound.
Roll initiative only if your table wants dice; otherwise run it as a narrated montage with a decision point or two, and cut it off with the Thunderwave.
---
@@ -34,14 +67,15 @@
- **Position:** On his back behind the bar. He fell backward.
- **Expression:** Surprise. Not fear, not pain.
- **The Brand:** A black mark on his chest, hand-shaped, visible through his shirt. The shirt is not burned — the damage is beneath the skin.
- **No other injuries.** He was not struck, stabbed, or poisoned.
- **Time of death:** During the brawl. Within the last 10 minutes.
- **A mundane knock (decoy).** He's bruised and bleeding from a blow he took wading into the brawl — a split scalp, a cracked rib from a bottle or chair. It *looks* like the brawl killed him. It didn't (DC 14 Medicine): the injury is survivable; the fatal damage is internal, and it has no external wound to explain it.
- **No killing blow.** Beyond the decoy knock, nothing — he was not stabbed, run through, or poisoned. The brand did all the real work.
- **Time of death:** During the brawl, in the blackout. Within the last 10 minutes.
### Examination DCs
| Check | DC | Result |
|-------|-----|--------|
| Medicine 10 | Easy | He's dead. Cause: massive internal damage to the heart and surrounding tissue. No external wound. |
| Medicine 10 | Easy | He's dead. There's a brawl knock (bruising, a scalp cut) — but the killing damage is massive internal trauma to the heart, with no external wound to explain it. |
| Medicine 14 | Medium | The damage radiates *outward* from the heart, as if something ignited inside him. Not natural, not any poison known to the examiner. |
| Arcana 12 | Easy | The brand radiates faint necrotic energy. This is magical damage. |
| Arcana 15 | Medium | Fiendish signature. The necrotic energy pattern is consistent with fiend-origin abilities, not mortal spellcasting. No one at the cultist table could have done this. |
@@ -80,11 +114,11 @@ The clues are designed to point at both factions while the truth (the fiend) hid
|------|----------|----|----------------|
| Claw marks behind bar | Bar floor | Investigation 16 | Something partially manifested here |
| Bren's testimony | Bren (agitated state) | Persuasion/patience | "A hand that wasn't a hand, reaching through the thin place" |
| Cracked ward-sigils | Cellar foundation | Arcana 13–15 | Something has been breaking the wards from the Ethereal Plane |
| Siphoned foundation sigils | Cellar foundation | Arcana 13–15 | Something ethereal has been feeding on the summoners' old work here — points *down* |
| Vetch's observations | Vetch (if given dust or befriended) | — | Something dark and hungry in the Ethereal Plane |
| Ethereal trail (timed) | Behind bar → cellar | Detect Magic within 30 min | The killer went *down* — toward the thin point |
| Partial manifestation scratches | Private room table | Investigation 14 + Arcana 16 | Someone mapped the wards to *break* them |
| Orenn's preparations | Storage compartment, bedroom | Investigation 15+ | Orenn was preparing for something fiendish |
| Orenn's preparations | Storage compartment, bedroom | Investigation 15+ | Orenn feared something not-human was moving — and hedged |
| Orenn's letter | Mags's apron | — | "If something happens to me in the bar, it came from between." |
---
@@ -95,7 +129,7 @@ The clues are designed to point at both factions while the truth (the fiend) hid
Players will likely:
- Examine the body → learn it's magical/fiendish damage
- Question both factions → get conflicting accusations
- Talk to eyewitnesses → nobody saw anything (they were brawling)
- Talk to eyewitnesses → nobody saw anything (they were brawling, and the room was black)
**Expected result:** Confusion. Both sides have motive. The evidence is contradictory.
@@ -110,9 +144,9 @@ As players dig deeper:
### Late Phase (60+ minutes)
If players pursue the fiend angle:
- Ward-sigils in the cellar confirm long-term ethereal interference
- The siphoned sigils and the failing seal below confirm long-term ethereal interference
- Veil Dust trip reveals Xarrul (and Skein, and the thin point)
- Orenn's letter and bestiary confirm he knew something was coming
- Orenn's letter and bestiary confirm he feared something not-human was moving — though he never knew it was under his own floor
- Essek (if gotten alone) reveals the summoning
**Expected result:** Players understand what happened. Now they have to decide what to do about it.
@@ -123,11 +157,11 @@ If players pursue the fiend angle:
These are Xarrul's work — the fiend actively planted or encouraged these:
1. **Xarrul whispered to Kael** (using Voice Thief, mimicking a cultist's voice) that the cultists were laughing about taking guild contracts. This is what pushed Kael over the edge into starting the brawl. The brawl was engineered.
1. **Xarrul engineered the brawl.** Kael's confrontation with Haddon was real and his anger genuine — but the *laugh* that tipped him over (Rennt's) was amplified in his ears by Xarrul (Voice Thief), which layered a fabricated cultist "confession" under it that only Kael heard. Understanding this requires asking Kael *exactly* what set him off ("One of them laughed and said the noble squealed. Clear as day." — Rennt laughed, but never said that). The brawl gave Xarrul its cover.
2. **A cultist component pouch** was left near the bar (Xarrul moved it from the table during the chaos). It contains ritual chalk and dried blood. DC 17 Investigation to realize the pouch was placed deliberately — the blood is old and doesn't match the murder.
3. **An assassin's dagger** under a barstool near Orenn's body. It fell during the brawl — genuinely accidental, not planted by Xarrul — but its proximity to the body is suspicious.
3. **Dace's dagger** under a barstool near Orenn's body. It fell during the brawl — genuinely accidental, not planted by Xarrul — but it's a nasty red herring in its own right: a quality piece with a Scales-guild hilt *and* ritual sigils etched down the blade, so it reads as both an assassin's sidearm and a cultist ritual knife. It's still coated in **Essence of Ether** (a PC who handles it roughly makes a DC 13 CON save or drops unconscious for 1 minute). Its proximity to the body implicates *both* factions and, for anyone who digs, points at Dace himself — the blade's sigils match the second cultist pin hidden in his boot (DC 14 Investigation of his person). A productive dead-end: it cracks open the traitor, not the murder.
---

8
storylines/lambent-order.md → storylines/order-of-mending.md
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@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
# The Lambent Order — Cultist Subplot
# The Order of Mending — Cultist Subplot
## The Grand Design: The Opening
@@ -43,7 +43,7 @@ Phase Two is beyond the scope of this session, but its existence adds weight:
- Mother Vyre plans to summon something **far more powerful** than Xarrul at a major thin point — a nexus where multiple planar boundaries converge.
- The summoning requires components that Phase One was meant to test: binding techniques, blood sacrifice potency, and control duration.
- The Burnt Tongue was chosen as a test site because of its natural thin point — the tavern sits on one of the locations Mother Vyre has mapped.
- The Nether Inn was chosen as a test site because of its natural thin point — the tavern sits on one of the locations Mother Vyre has mapped.
- Haddon's journal contains references to Phase Two. Essek has seen Mother Vyre's private correspondence about it.
- Even if players resolve everything tonight, Phase Two is still in motion somewhere. The Opening hasn't stopped — it's just lost one test site.
@@ -191,7 +191,7 @@ If players never uncover the truth about The Opening — or if they side with th
- Requires new binding components from Tallow (he'll sell them, ~50 gp total)
- Requires Dalla's blood (she rolls up her sleeves without hesitation)
- Requires the binding circle in the cellar (DC 16 Arcana to adapt Orenn's circle)
- Requires the binding circle in the cellar (DC 16 Arcana to adapt the summoners' circle)
- Haddon leads the ritual, Rennt assists, takes 10 minutes
**If it succeeds:** Xarrul is bound again. The cult has their weapon back. Dalla's connection stabilizes — Lístek stops getting worse but doesn't improve. The child stays frozen. The cult continues toward Phase Two. Dalla tells herself this is progress. Players leave having "solved" the murder by rebinding the weapon, but they've handed the cult exactly what it wanted.
@@ -206,7 +206,7 @@ Only happens if players uncover the real nature of The Opening and share it:
- Essek follows if he feels protected — he's been waiting for someone to give him permission to speak
- Haddon tries to hold the group, but losing Dalla and Essek guts his authority
- Rennt is the last holdout — he doesn't care what The Opening actually means, he believes regardless. May need to be restrained.
- **Result:** The Lambent Order's local cell collapses. Mother Vyre's network survives, but she's lost her people in this area.
- **Result:** The Order of Mending's local cell collapses. Mother Vyre's network survives, but she's lost her people in this area.
### The Cult Is Exposed to the Assassins
If the assassins learn the cult summoned a fiend to kill Sevra:

10
storylines/possession.md
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@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
## Overview
Bren Aldara was an arcanist. Seven years ago, he studied a thin point between planes — this one, beneath the Burnt Tongue — and something latched on. **Skein**, a parasitic entity from the Ethereal Plane, attached itself to Bren's mind and has been feeding on him ever since. What the tavern patrons see as a madman talking to himself is a prisoner begging his captor for mercy.
Bren Aldara was an arcanist. Seven years ago, he studied a thin point between planes — this one, beneath the Nether Inn — and something latched on. **Skein**, a parasitic entity from the Ethereal Plane, attached itself to Bren's mind and has been feeding on him ever since. What the tavern patrons see as a madman talking to himself is a prisoner begging his captor for mercy.
This subplot is about recognizing that what looks like madness is actually captivity, and choosing whether to do anything about it.
@@ -55,6 +55,14 @@ Skein is not a fiend, not undead, not aberrant in the traditional sense. It's a
---
## DM — Bren as a Xarrul-Detector
Skein is deeply afraid of Xarrul, and fear *distracts* it. When the fiend comes near, Skein's attention snaps to the bigger predator, its grip on Bren slips, and Bren surfaces. This is why his lucid windows cluster around Xarrul's presence: beyond the occasional sentence that slips past Skein's active silencing (see **Silence the Host**, above), the *deeper* lucidity comes from the parasite being too frightened to concentrate. Xarrul knows this and does **not** provoke Skein on purpose — agitating the parasite would only free the witness's tongue. But it can't help it: **its mere presence sets Skein off.**
The upshot for the table: **Bren is a fiend-detector the players can learn to read.** When the madman suddenly goes rigid, stares at empty air, or snaps briefly coherent, Xarrul is near *right now* — often because it has just come close to work the room or to edit a memory (its **Waking Dream** needs line of sight; see [Xarrul — The Two Jobs](../npc/xarrul.md)). Kael witnessed this during the brawl without understanding it: Bren went stiff, staring at the bar, at the exact moment Xarrul was killing Orenn behind it. A party that clocks the pattern gains a dowsing rod for the invisible thing hunting them — and a warning that a memory near them may have just been rewritten.
---
## How Players Discover the Possession
### Stage 1: Something's Off

24
storylines/the-reckoning.md
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@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ 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
- 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 Order of Mending 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.
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ There is no "right" order. The Reckoning begins when the players know enough to
## 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.
The Reckoning is player-driven, but it is not *timeless*. When Mags shattered the summoners' lockstone in Act 2, she sealed the house across every plane into a **closed vessel** — and that is exactly what Xarrul needed to finish crossing. It now has until **midnight**, when the seal lapses, to complete the crossing through the old tear in the cellar — the **lockdown clock** ([xarrul.md — The Night's Clock](../npc/xarrul.md#the-nights-clock--presence--escalation) and [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). 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 3 from drifting. Slowing or breaking it — **breaching a sealed exit** to re-open the vessel, 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.
---
@@ -39,9 +39,9 @@ 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
- **Fiendbane Salt** (from the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-fixers-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): an old house-relic that wakes the foundation sigils for a time, giving Xarrul disadvantage on Ethereal Jaunt
- **The binding circle** (cellar floor; the summoners', not Orenn's): if lured inside, DC 17 CHA save or trapped
- **Warding chalk circles** (from storage): Minor constraint, 10 minutes per use
- **Force damage:** Affects ethereal creatures from the Material Plane
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ The "easy" resolution. Haddon proposes recapturing Xarrul using the binding circ
**Requirements:**
1. Binding components from Tallow (~50 gp)
2. Dalla's blood (she gives it willingly — rolls up her sleeves without hesitation)
3. Orenn's binding circle in the cellar (DC 16 Arcana to adapt it for rebinding rather than containment)
3. The summoners' binding circle in the cellar (DC 16 Arcana to adapt it for rebinding rather than containment)
4. Xarrul must be lured to the cellar or forced onto the Material Plane
5. Haddon leads the ritual (10 minutes, concentration), Rennt assists
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ The "easy" resolution. Haddon proposes recapturing Xarrul using the binding circ
The "true" way to destroy Xarrul — synchronized destruction in both the Material and Ethereal planes. This is the method that cures Dalla's child. It's also the method that tears the veil.
**This scenario is only available if Dalla has broken from the Order** (see [Lambent Order — Dalla's Breakdown](lambent-order.md)). A loyal Dalla would never consider destroying the fiend over rebinding it — destruction serves no purpose to the cult. The dual-plane kill requires a Dalla who understands the real cost of the cult's path and is willing to abandon it for her daughter. Players who never uncover the truth about The Opening never reach this option.
**This scenario is only available if Dalla has broken from the Order** (see [Order of Mending — Dalla's Breakdown](order-of-mending.md)). A loyal Dalla would never consider destroying the fiend over rebinding it — destruction serves no purpose to the cult. The dual-plane kill requires a Dalla who understands the real cost of the cult's path and is willing to abandon it for her daughter. Players who never uncover the truth about The Opening never reach this option.
**Requirements:**
1. At least one character on the Ethereal Plane (Veil Dust at the thin point = 10 minutes, or Oil of Etherealness from Orenn's bedroom = 1 hour)
@@ -99,7 +99,7 @@ Then the veil snaps back. The tear heals. Xarrul is gone.
Xarrul is ancient and pragmatic. If cornered and unable to escape, it will negotiate.
**What Xarrul offers:**
- Everything it knows about the Lambent Order, Mother Vyre, and Phase Two
- Everything it knows about the Order of Mending, Mother Vyre, and Phase Two
- The truth about Dace's treachery
- Information about Skein and how to kill it
- The names and locations of other fiends bound by mortal cults in the region
@@ -145,7 +145,7 @@ The darkest ending — and the one that most fully commits to the module's thesi
**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.
2. **The crossing.** Let the [lockdown clock](#the-clock) run — keep anyone from breaching the seal or waking the sigils — 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.)
@@ -179,7 +179,7 @@ If players pursue the dual-plane kill, they face the moral question at the heart
| **Rennt** | Ecstatic. Helps eagerly. "The planes want to touch!" | Validates everything he believes. |
| **Essek** | Terrified. "You're proving her right." | Knows what Phase Two means. |
| **Haddon** | Quiet. Watching. Taking notes. | This is exactly the data he needs. |
| **Mags** | Conflicted. She wants Xarrul dead. But not like this. "Orenn spent fifteen years keeping this thin point stable. You're going to tear it open to kill one fiend?" | She respects the sacrifice but fears the consequence. |
| **Mags** | Conflicted. She wants Xarrul dead. But not like this. "That tear's been sealed under my feet for fifteen years and I slept fine. You want to rip it *wider* to kill one fiend?" | She respects the sacrifice but fears the consequence. |
| **Sevra** | Pragmatic. "Does it work? Then do it. Worry about theory later." | Results-oriented. |
| **Bren** (if lucid) | "The thin point has been growing for years. One more tear won't matter." (This might be true. Or it might be exactly what Skein wants him to say.) | Unknown — is this Bren's genuine assessment or Skein's manipulation? |
@@ -252,9 +252,9 @@ Dawn comes. Mags opens the doors. People leave. The night is over.
## Alternative Ending: The Bell
If players repaired the wards AND rang the iron bell AND have Xarrul trapped in the cellar's binding circle:
If players **rekindled the foundation sigils** AND rang the iron bell AND have Xarrul trapped in the cellar's binding circle:
The wards flare to life. The thin point *contracts*. Xarrul, caught between the binding circle and the restored wards, is crushed between planes — not killed, but *sealed*. Trapped in the space between Material and Ethereal, conscious, unable to move, unable to escape. A fate some would call worse than death.
The old sigils flare to life. The thin point *contracts*. Xarrul, caught between the binding circle and the woken sigils, is crushed between planes — not killed, but *sealed*. Trapped in the space between Material and Ethereal, conscious, unable to move, unable to escape. A fate some would call worse than death.
The child is not cured (the binding energy isn't released). But Xarrul is contained. The thin point stabilizes. The tavern is safe again.