Nether Inn

History

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—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 killed and scattered the owners; Haddon and Mother Vyre, then legitimate planar scholars, handled the failing containment afterward. During that work Haddon entered a collapsing circle and took its living-anchor binding from Orenn, saving his life at permanent cost to his left arm. They took the house as their fee and 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 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

Carved into a wooden plaque above the bar in Common and Thieves' Cant:

No killing. Brawling is permitted. Death is not.
No magic that harms. Cantrips for comfort, fine. Anything with intent, take it outside.
Debts are honored. If you owe the house, you pay the house.
The barkeep's word is final.

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 — "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 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).

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.

The noise level before the brawl is a low murmur punctuated by occasional harsh laughter from the assassin table and quiet scholarly debate from the cultists. After the murder, it's oppressive silence broken by whispers.

General Layout

                    ┌──────────────────────────────────┐
                    │          UPPER FLOOR              │
                    │     (Orenn & Mags quarters)       │
                    │        [locked, private]          │
                    └──────────────────────────────────┘

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                        MAIN HALL                             │
│                                                              │
│  [Assassin     ┌─────────┐              ┌──────────────┐    │
│   Table]       │Fireplace│              │     BAR      │    │
│                └─────────┘   [Bren's    │  (Orenn's    │    │
│                               Corner]   │   domain)    │    │
│  [Cultist                               └──────┬───────┘    │
│   Table]       [Center tables,                  │            │
│                 stools, debris]        ┌────────┴────────┐   │
│  [Curtained                            │ Door to Kitchen │   │
│   Booth]       [Vetch, near stairs]    └────────┬────────┘   │
│                                                 │            │
│  ┌──────┐                              ┌────────┴────────┐   │
│  │ENTRY │                              │   BACK ROOMS    │   │
│  │(down │                              │ Kitchen/Storage/ │   │
│  │steps)│                              │ Private Room     │   │
│  └──────┘                              └────────┬────────┘   │
│                                                 │            │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────┼────────────┘
                                          ┌───────┴───────┐
                                          │ CELLAR (UPPER)│
                                          │ (trapdoor in  │
                                          │   storage)    │
                                          └───────┬───────┘
                                          concealed door
                                          ┌───────┴───────┐
                                          │  DEEP CELLAR  │
                                          │ (hidden warren:│
                                          │ vault, cells, │
                                          │ lab, the rift)│
                                          └───────────────┘

Read-Aloud: Entering the Tavern

Schody vedou dolů. Tři kamenné stupně, vyšlapané generacemi bot, které sem raději nechtěly být viděny vcházet. Těžké dveře se za vámi zavřou s tupým úderem, který zní nepříjemně definitivně.

Vzduch uvnitř je hustý — směs tabákového kouře, levné kořalky a starého dřeva nasyceného desítkami let rozlitého piva. Místnost je větší, než jste čekali. Nízký strop podpírají masivní dubové trámy, zčernalé od sazí. Svíčky v železných držácích vrhají neklidné stíny po zdech pokrytých starými výčepními tabulemi, kde některá jména byla záměrně vyškrábnuta.

Zvuk se změní, když vstoupíte — ten sotva znatelný pokles hlasitosti, když místnost plná nebezpečných lidí zaregistruje někoho nového. Několik párů očí vás změří. Většina se vrátí ke svému. Jeden pár — ten za barem — ne.

Secrets

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 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. 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.
Behind the barrel racks in the cellar, a concealed door leads down to the Deep Cellar — 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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