xarrul rework

npc/assassins.md

@@ -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