murder-mystery-oneshot/npc/assassins.md

# The House of Scales — Assassins

*"We are not murderers. Murderers are sloppy, emotional, and cheap. We weigh a life, we name the wrong that forfeited it, and we close the debt with one clean cut. There is a difference, and the city has learned to be grateful for it."*
— Sevra

---

## The Guild

The **House of Scales** is the city's licensed-in-all-but-name assassins' guild — a court of last resort the city tolerates because it *works*. Blood feuds don't spiral here; vendettas end in one sealed death instead of three generations of ambushes. Their emblem is a hanging balance with one pan empty. Their motto, worn on a small lead token every blade carries: **"One death, weighed."**

They keep a codex, and they keep it like scripture:

- **Proof of grievance.** No contract without a real, demonstrated wrong. Fabricate one and *you* become the contract.
- **One warning.** Every target gets a single open, witnessed visit and a chance to settle. Roughly a third of contracts end here — the guild's proudest outcomes.
- **The clean kill.** Swift, painless, no collateral, no suffering, no terror-theatre.
- **The seal.** Every kill is claimed openly under the guild's mark within a day. No innocent hangs for their work.
- **The closing.** A sealed kill legally ends the blood-debt; retaliation is forbidden and the guild enforces the closing at its own expense. This is the clause that makes the city keep them.

The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding. The **Lambent Order** has been taking side jobs — messy, ritualistic kills that undercut the market and mock everything the codex stands for. Bodies turn up carved open, hearts missing, symbols cut into floorboards. Worse, someone inside the House has been *cooperating*.

Tonight, four named members are present, plus two unnamed blades.

> **The rot beneath the rot (DM).** Sevra thinks the guild's problem is a greedy traitor. It is — that's **Dace**. But there is a second, older wrongness in the House that no one has a word for yet, and it is sitting at this table too. **Thera** kills by the codex, flawlessly, and the souls of her marks do not go where souls are supposed to go. This is the "evil within the guild" the night can uncover — see [The House of Scales subplot](../storylines/house-of-scales.md). The two problems are braided: Dace's crude soul-trafficking to the cult is drawing exactly the attention Thera needs to stay buried, and she has come to this tavern to end him for it.

---

## Sevra — The Commander (the Loyalist)

*"I don't need you to like me. I need you to be honest with me. Those are very different requests, and one of them will keep you alive."*

### Stat Block

**Sevra** — Medium humanoid (human), lawful neutral
**AC** 16 (studded leather + DEX) | **HP** 52 (8d8+16) | **Speed** 30 ft.

| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 11 (+0) | 18 (+4) | 14 (+2) | 16 (+3) | 15 (+2) | 14 (+2) |

**Saving Throws** DEX +7, INT +6
**Skills** Stealth +7, Deception +5, Insight +5, Perception +5, Investigation +6
**Senses** passive Perception 15
**Languages** Common, Elvish, Thieves' Cant

**Assassinate.** During the first round of combat, Sevra has advantage on attacks against any creature that hasn't taken a turn yet. Any hit against a surprised creature is a critical hit.

**Sneak Attack (1/turn).** 3d6 extra damage when she has advantage or an ally is within 5 ft. of the target.

**Evasion.** Half damage on failed DEX saves, no damage on success.

### Actions

**Multiattack.** Two shortsword attacks.

**Shortsword.** Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d6+4) piercing damage.

**Hand Crossbow.** Ranged Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d6+4) piercing damage.

### Appearance & Personality

Mid-forties, lean, angular face, dark skin, close-cropped black hair. Every movement is deliberate. She sits with her back to the wall, eyes on every entrance. Wears practical dark clothing — no ornamentation, no vanity, but the lead scale-token hangs openly at her throat. A thin scar crosses it — someone tried to cut that throat years ago. The someone is dead.

Sevra is the senior *contract* blade present and the guild's institutional conscience in the room. She believes in the codex the way other people believe in a god — not sentimentally, but as the one thing standing between the city and chaos. She thinks of the House as a civic institution and of herself as something between a judge and a plumber: she keeps the city's violence flowing through one clean pipe. She's stretched thin — the mole, the war with the cult, now a murder — but would die before showing it.

**Key traits:**
- Utterly composed. Speaks in measured, precise sentences.
- Values honesty in a transactional sense — she keeps her word because her word has value.
- Pragmatic to the bone. She'll work with players if the math works out.
- Her blind spot is institutional pride: an accusation against one of the guild's *best* reads to her as slander until the evidence is procedural. **Win her with proof, not argument.**
- Suspects Dace is the traitor but needs proof. Moving on a guild member without evidence breaks the code and fractures the House.

### What She Knows

**Will share if players approach professionally (show competence, don't moralize):**
- The brawl started because Kael confronted the cultists about a contract kill in the Merchant Quarter — a noble found dead with ritual marks. It was the guild's contract, paid for and accepted. Someone else did the kill.
- The guild has a mole. Kills are being sold to outside buyers. Bodies are showing up wrong — missing parts, ritualistic damage.
- She didn't kill Orenn. The guild respected the rules. "Orenn was worth more alive to us than anyone in this room."

**Will trade for proof of the traitor's identity:**
- The guild will withdraw from the tavern peacefully — no faction war.
- She'll share everything she knows about the cultists' activities, including safe house locations.
- She owes the party a favour — one job, any target, with the codex in place.

### The Thing She Can't Name (DM — her arc)

Sevra carries an unease she has never spoken aloud, because she has no framework for it and it feels like heresy: **Thera's kills are too clean.** Perfectly warned, perfectly sealed, and yet in the last two years the families of Thera's marks grieve *wrong* — priests who couldn't find the dead to bless them, resurrections paid for and failed, a widow who swore her husband "never crossed over." Sevra has filed each as coincidence because the alternative is unthinkable: that the guild's most honoured blade is doing something the codex has no clause against because the founders never imagined it.

If the players bring her **proof of the rot** (the soulcoin, a marked victim, Thera caught marking someone), run her like a dam breaking:
1. **Denial.** Institutional pride. *"Thera has forty-one seals, none disputed. Bring me that again with something I can stand on."*
2. **The single crack.** One provable, physical thing she can't explain away — and she goes very still.
3. **Terrifying thoroughness.** Once she accepts *one* impossible fact, she follows the thread cold and fast, and she becomes the players' most capable ally against Thera. This is the loyalist turning on the rot — the emotional core of the whole subplot.

---

## Dace — The Traitor (the Marked)

*"Relax, friend. Drink? It's going to be a long night — might as well be comfortable."*

### Stat Block

**Dace** — Medium humanoid (human), neutral evil
**AC** 15 (studded leather + DEX) | **HP** 44 (8d8+8) | **Speed** 30 ft.

| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 12 (+1) | 16 (+3) | 12 (+1) | 14 (+2) | 10 (+0) | 18 (+4) |

**Skills** Deception +8, Persuasion +8, Stealth +5, Performance +6, Sleight of Hand +5
**Senses** passive Perception 10
**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant, Halfling

**Sneak Attack (1/turn).** 2d6 extra damage.

### Actions

**Shortsword.** +6 to hit, 1d6+3 piercing.
**Dagger (concealed).** +6 to hit, 1d4+3 piercing. Coated with **Essence of Ether** (DC 13 CON save or fall unconscious for 1 minute).

### Appearance & Personality

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.

**Key traits:**
- The most likeable person in the room. Friendly, warm, buys drinks, makes jokes.
- A clinical sociopath who learned charm as a professional skill.
- Will actively "help" the investigation — volunteering theories, offering to search rooms, being useful — while subtly steering suspicion toward the cultists.
- If cornered with evidence, his warmth evaporates instantly. The real Dace is cold, calculating, and willing to fight his way out.
- **He's jumpier than usual tonight.** He'll blame the murder, the lockdown, the tension. The truth is worse (below).

### His Secret

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.

**Evidence linking Dace:**
- DC 16 Insight during conversation: Something about his helpfulness is *too* practiced. He's performing.
- Tallow (for a price) will confirm that Dace has been meeting "a scholar type" in the private room regularly.
- Kael, if asked privately, will say Dace was the last person to take a guild contract that ended up with ritual marks on the body. "He said he subcontracted the cleanup. Since when do we subcontract?"
- The cultist pin found in the private room — Dace pockets things. A DC 14 Investigation of his person finds a **second cultist pin** hidden in his boot, kept as insurance.

### The Mark on Dace (DM — the braid to Thera)

**Dace is already condemned, and he doesn't know it.** His dealings with the Lambent Order drew crude, public attention to soul-death in the city — the exact thing [Thera](#thera-even-hand--the-radical-the-rot) exists to keep invisible. She has decided he is a liability, and during the formal-seeming little courtesy she paid him earlier tonight (a hand on his shoulder, a coin turned on the table, a murmured word) **she marked him.** In nine days the mark ripens and something eats his soul; the codex will never know, because on paper Dace will simply have been found dead of guild justice or a knife in an alley.

The signs are on him now, hiding in plain sight behind his nerves:
- He sleeps poorly and doesn't know why (reads as guilt).
- At the candles, **his shadow falls a half-breath late** — DC 15 Perception if a PC watches him move near a flame.
- True sight, *Veil Dust*, Mags's cleaner's instinct, or a DC 15 Medicine/Arcana check up close reveals **a hairline seam of grey light at the base of his throat**, like a cracked glaze.

**Saving him** is possible before the mark ripens: consecration (holy water, *Consecrate*, a cleric or paladin's touch), *Remove Curse* / *Greater Restoration*, Thera's death, or — hardest — the genuine forgiveness of the grievance that named him, offered and *meant*.

**His fate is a fork the players tip (see the subplot).** Thera is still weighing recruit-or-silence. Expose Dace loudly and publicly and she lets the mark run (liability confirmed). Let him slip away quiet and useful and she may pull him inward instead — the guild's rot always did recruit the already-compromised.

### If Exposed

Dace tries to talk his way out first (Deception +8). If that fails, he turns violent — he'll grab the nearest person as a hostage (likely Vetch or Bren) and demand safe passage. If that fails, he fights. He's dangerous but not suicidal — at half HP, he surrenders.

Sevra's reaction to proof: cold fury. She won't kill him in the bar (the rules still matter to her, even now), but she will restrain him and promise that guild justice will follow. This is worse than a quick death and everyone knows it — **and it is, unknowingly, exactly what Thera wanted: Dace neutralised without a single question asked about *why* she wanted him gone.**

---

## Kael — The Hothead (the Witness)

*"I'm done talking. I've been done talking since they started poaching our work. Every day we sit here is a day they get bolder."*

### Stat Block

**Kael** — Medium humanoid (half-orc), lawful neutral
**AC** 15 (chain shirt + DEX) | **HP** 45 (6d8+18) | **Speed** 30 ft.

| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 16 (+3) | 14 (+2) | 16 (+3) | 10 (+0) | 11 (+0) | 12 (+1) |

**Skills** Intimidation +4, Athletics +6, Perception +3
**Senses** darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 13
**Languages** Common, Orc, Thieves' Cant

**Relentless Endurance.** Drops to 1 HP instead of 0, once per long rest.
**Savage Attacks.** Extra damage die on critical hits.

### Actions

**Multiattack.** Two handaxe attacks.
**Handaxe.** +6 to hit, 1d6+3 slashing. Can be thrown (20/60 ft.).

### Appearance & Personality

Big, scarred, half-orc with a shaved head and a permanent scowl. He's the guild's enforcer — the one they send when subtlety isn't required. His arms are a map of old fights and he wears them like medals. The scale-token at his throat is the most polished thing on him.

Kael is loyal to the House with the fervour of someone who found a family after a lifetime without one. The *code* is the only law he has ever believed in, and the cult's disrespect enrages him personally — they're not just poaching contracts, they're mocking the one sacred thing in his life.

**Key traits:**
- Aggressive but not stupid. He reads rooms badly but reads people well.
- Fiercely loyal to Sevra. He'll follow her lead even when he disagrees.
- Honest to a fault. He cannot and will not lie convincingly. If asked direct questions, he answers directly. This makes him the easiest assassin to talk to, despite his hostility.
- He didn't kill Orenn. He's the most vocally angry about the death — killing on neutral ground violates everything he believes in.
- **He idolises Thera.** She was kind to him when he was a nobody aspirant. He would take a blade for her without thinking. This is exactly why what she is will break him.

### What He Knows

- The brawl started because he found out about the Merchant Quarter kill. He lost his temper. He'll admit this.
- He suspects Dace — "Too smooth. Nobody's that nice in this business." But Kael is biased (he's suspicious of everyone personable) and Sevra has told him to drop it without evidence.
- He saw Bren acting strangely during the brawl — "The crazy one went rigid. Stiff as a board. Staring at the bar. Not at the fight. At the *bar*." This is because Bren/Skein was watching Xarrul kill Orenn.

### The Witness Who Doesn't Know What He Saw (DM)

Kael is the party's unwitting key to the rot — the honest man who blurts the true thing without understanding it. He can't lie and he doesn't hedge, so a player who simply *asks him about Thera* gets the unvarnished unease he's never dared examine:

> "Thera? Best of us. Cleanest blade in the House. …Why?" *(beat)* "It's nothing. Just — you hear things. A mark of hers, up in the Kettle district. Family paid good coin for a raising and the priest couldn't *find* him. Said there was nothing there to call back. Cleric of the Threshold, mind, not some hedge-mumbler. I don't — that's not our business. We close the debt, the gods handle the rest." *(he clearly does not believe the gods handled it)*

He will resist any suggestion that Thera is dirty — right up until the players put physical proof in front of him, at which point Kael is the most dangerous ally they could have, because betrayal by the one blade he worshipped turns his loyalty into something incandescent.

---

## Thera "Even-Hand" — The Radical (the Rot)

*"The Scales sell death to whoever brings a grievance and a fee. I have never once taken coin. Every name I've closed deserved the closing. Tell me, honestly — which of us is the mercenary?"*

### Who She Appears To Be

Late fifties. Silver hair in a neat braid, a plain grey coat, hands folded when she isn't using them. She is the most decorated blade in the room and the least threatening to look at — she has the stillness of a chapel and the warmth of a favourite teacher. Aspirants adore her. Sevra respects her. Kael would die for her. When she speaks it is quietly, courteously, and people lean in to listen. She buys no drinks and tells no jokes, and somehow that reads as dignity rather than coldness.

She is, on the surface, the codex made flesh: forty-one seals, none disputed, every warning delivered, every kill clean, every debt closed. She is the House's proof that a killer can be a good and lawful person.

### What She Actually Is (DM)

Thera serves something older than the codex and beneath the city — a thing that mints souls and calls the killing a *tithe*. Her kills are codex-perfect on the surface and monstrous underneath: hidden inside the mandatory warning visit are three small gestures — a touch of the doorframe, a coin turned once on the table, a word of an old tongue breathed under a farewell — and the marked die genuinely clean while their souls go *down* instead of on, folded cold into a coin. She believes, sincerely, that she is not a murderer but an administrator of a debt the city owes and refuses to look at, and that reserving death for the deserving makes her *more* righteous than the guild she hides inside. She has never taken coin. That, to her, settles the question.

**Do not name the entity, the pact, the ledgers, or the wider cell at the table.** The oneshot's payload is a feeling, not a lecture: *this guild of clean, principled killers has something inside it that turns people into currency, and its finest member is the one doing it.* Everything the players need to feel that is physical — a coin, a seam of grey light, a blade who is too perfect. The rest is a thread for another campaign.

**Why she's here tonight:** to end Dace. His crude soul-butchery for the Lambent Order is dragging soul-death into public view — the one thing that could get people *looking*. She has already marked him and is deciding whether he dies or gets recruited. She is also quietly appalled by the cultists on principle: amateurs, desecrating something sacred for spell components.

### The Tells

- **The gestures.** A PC who watches her greet or part from someone — including the moment she "comforted" Dace earlier — may catch the doorframe-touch, the single turn of a coin on the table, the murmured word (DC 16 Perception; DC 14 Insight to sense it was deliberate, ritual, *rehearsed into the courtesy*). Meaningless now. Unforgettable later.
- **Animals and small wrongnesses.** No dog will settle near her. Milk left by her cup sours. A marked person in her presence sleeps badly and doesn't know why.
- **The read.** DC 16 Insight: her warmth is entirely real and entirely surface, and underneath it she looks at people the way a butcher looks — gently — at livestock. She is *appraising*.
- **The brand.** If the players get her near Orenn's body or ask her opinion of the killing, she reads it fluently where no one else can: *"That isn't a wound. That's a withdrawal — someone drew him out through the chest."* Then, half to herself, with something almost like professional distaste: *"…not our coin, though. Cruder. Whatever did this was hungry."* This makes her a natural murder suspect (she plainly *knows* soul-death). It is a dead end for the murder — Xarrul killed Orenn — and a live wire for the world: **why does the guild's finest blade recognise the unmaking of a soul on sight?**

### The Soulcoin (the gut-punch)

Thera carries at least one **soulcoin** — the physical proof the whole subplot is built to deliver. Retrieving it is hard (she is a top blade; pickpocketing her is a DC 20 Sleight of Hand, and she notices), but she may use one (see her stat block), and one turns up on her body if she falls.

> A coin the size of a crown, warm to the touch though it's touched nothing warm. It has a face stamped on neither side — just a worn blankness that your eye keeps trying to resolve into features and failing. Held to the ear in a quiet room, it *whispers*, in a voice folded very small. Held longer, you get the unbearable sense it is not whispering. It is *listening*.

- **What it is:** a person, minted. Not destroyed — folded, cold, and (while the coin holds charge) *recoverable*.
- **Detection:** Mags smells the necrotic residue instantly and goes grey; a cleric or paladin *feels* the trapped soul; *Veil Dust* or true sight shows it glowing wrong; DC 15 Arcana reads it as necrotic with a personal, fingerprint-like signature.
- **Warmth dates the kill:** soulcoins cool over a season. A warm coin is a *recent* kill — and can be matched to a recent sealed contract on the guild's rolls, tying Thera to a specific death.
- **If destroyed with charge remaining, the soul escapes** — a freed spirit that may thank its liberator, testify to what was done to it, or, if it died screaming, turn on the nearest living thing. A cracked, spent coin left behind is inert evidence.

### Stat Block

**Thera "Even-Hand"** — Medium humanoid (human), lawful evil
**AC** 17 (studded leather +1, DEX) | **HP** 84 (13d8+26) | **Speed** 30 ft.
**Proficiency** +3

| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
| 12 (+1) | 18 (+4) | 14 (+2) | 15 (+2) | 16 (+3) | 15 (+2) |

**Saving Throws** DEX +7, WIS +6
**Skills** Stealth +10, Deception +5, Insight +6, Perception +6, Persuasion +5, Religion +5
**Damage Resistances** necrotic
**Senses** passive Perception 16
**Languages** Common, Thieves' Cant, and one tongue no one at the table can place

**Assassinate.** In the first round, she has advantage on attacks against any creature that hasn't acted, and any hit against a surprised creature is a critical hit.

**Sneak Attack (1/turn).** 4d6 extra damage when she has advantage or an ally is within 5 ft. of the target.

**Evasion.** Half damage on failed DEX saves, none on a success.

**Unweighed (divination-blank).** Thera has advantage on saving throws against divination magic, and spells that would detect her alignment, read her thoughts, or locate/scry her automatically fail. A diviner who notices a *suspicious blank spot* where a person should read has, in fact, found her.

### Actions

**Multiattack.** Thera makes two attacks with the Even Hand, or two with her hand crossbow.

**The Even Hand.** *(a slim, utterly silent blade — it makes no sound leaving the sheath, striking, or being drawn free)* Melee Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d6+4) piercing damage plus 7 (2d6) necrotic damage.

**Hand Crossbow.** Ranged Weapon Attack: +7 to hit, range 30/120 ft., one target. Hit: 7 (1d6+4) piercing damage.

**The Marking (1/day).** Thera weaves the mark into a touch or a courteous gesture toward one creature she can reach. The target must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or be *marked*: for the next hour it has vulnerability to Thera's necrotic damage, can't regain hit points, and a hairline seam of grey light shows at the base of its throat. Consecration or *Remove Curse* ends it early. *(Out of combat, this is the marking from the journal — a nine-day, savable death sentence, and it is what she has already done to Dace.)*

### Reactions

**Uncanny Dodge.** When an attacker she can see hits her, she halves the damage.

### Soulcoin Surge (the escape / the foreshadow)

The first time Thera is reduced to 0 HP, if she still carries a charged soulcoin, she does not die. With a whispered word the coin in her pocket **cracks and spends a life in place of hers**: she drops instead to 1 HP, becomes briefly half-real (misty, silent), and takes the Disengage and Dash actions as a free move, slipping toward the nearest exit or the thin point in the cellar. She leaves behind a **cracked, cooling coin** — the party's first physical proof of what she is, whether or not they ever catch her.

*Use this to keep her from dying anticlimactically to a lucky crit, and to leave the players holding evidence even if she gets away. A blade of the rot is hard to kill for good — that's the point.*

### If Exposed or Cornered

Thera does not panic and does not run at first. She reframes:

> "You've found a coin and decided you understand it. You don't." *(the warmth never leaves her voice)* "This city is in debt, and the debt is real, and it will be paid by *someone* — in order, by the deserving, by my hand — or in a single terrible hour, by everyone, including the child asleep over your head. I chose the mercy that keeps the lights on. When you're older you'll understand the arithmetic. Most of us do, eventually."

- **If Sevra is convinced** (proof, not argument — see Sevra's arc), Thera's cover is gone and the loyalists turn: Sevra and, brokenly, Kael side with the party. Thera fights or flees.
- **If Sevra is in denial**, the players face Thera without the guild — and possibly *against* Kael, who won't believe it until it's too late. Deadlier, and tragic.
- She would rather kill Dace than let him be questioned about *why* she wants him gone; if the players are about to wring a confession out of him that could expose soul-work, she moves on Dace herself.

### The Campaign Seed (light touch)

However the night ends, Thera is a splinter of something larger and older in the House that outlives this tavern. If she escapes, the rot walks out the door. If she dies, a cracked coin and a horrified Sevra remain — and somewhere a ledger the players never saw is short one collector. Leave it there. The players should go home unsettled, not briefed.

---

## Unnamed Blades (2)

Use the **Spy** stat block (MM p.349). They stay quiet, defer to Sevra, and watch the room. In a fight they act as a unit — normally at Sevra's side, but if Thera is exposed and Sevra is still in denial, one may hesitate, unsure who to follow. None of them know anything useful; they're muscle.