Old Macridi E.8

Old Macridi Locations

The Veridical Scriptorium

Contracts, Trade Records, and the Exact Price of Everything

The noise of Old Macridi seems to vanish the moment the heavy brass-bound doors close behind you. Rows of narrow desks fill a vaulted chamber lined with darkwood filing cabinets, each drawer marked with tiny ivory numerals. White-gloved clerks scratch away with black quills in almost perfect silence. Brass rails divide visitors from the working floor, and small trays slide contracts, coins, and identification papers across the gap without requiring anyone to touch anyone else.

At the far end of the chamber, beneath an enormous set of gilded scales, a severe-looking woman examines three ledgers at once. She glances up only briefly.

"If you have suffered injury, breach, theft, inconvenience, contamination, depreciation, insult with measurable commercial consequence, or death, take a numbered tile. If you are merely curious, curiosity is billed by the quarter hour."

The Veridical Scriptorium is Old Macridi's administrative heart: part archive, part courthouse, part accounting house. Every logging claim, commercial contract, property dispute, shipping manifest, and legally recognized Blood Price in the district eventually passes across one of its desks.

The office is overseen by Senior Veridicator Lessa Marr (LN female human investigator), a relentlessly precise civil clerk whose devotion is not to any merchant house but to the integrity of the record itself. Lessa has little patience for adventurers, gossip, or dramatic accusations—but a discrepancy in a ledger can hold her attention for hours.

Lessa has noticed something strange in the historical records surrounding Reiver's Right. The outpost has been closed, reopened, reassigned, and refinanced several times across generations, but several older entries reference compensation payments and land restrictions that do not appear in the modern contracts.

She does not know what happened at Reiver's Right, and she will not speculate without evidence. What troubles her is simpler: someone deliberately removed context while leaving the financial totals intact. To Lessa, that is almost sacrilege.

Bureaucratic Services

Certified Contract Copy — 5 sp
Historical Property Search — 1 gp per hour of archival research
Blood Price Assessment — 2 gp plus any required appraisal fees
Notarized Witness & Official Seal — 5 sp
Expedited Filing — 3 gp, accompanied by visible resentment from everyone who did not pay it

Scriptorium Challenges

Challenge 1: Auditing the Reiver's Right Records

Primary CheckSociety, Legal Lore, or Mercantile Lore DC 18

At Karland's request, the party may search the Scriptorium for previous claims involving Reiver's Right. Lessa produces several decades of logging contracts, survey reports, casualty assessments, and property transfers—but understanding them requires tracing references scattered through multiple volumes.

Critical Success The party reconstructs the entire chain of ownership and discovers that an older version of the Reiver's Right contract contained a restriction forbidding excavation beneath several sections of the river bluff. The restriction vanished when the property was later reassigned. The party receives a certified copy of the original survey and gains a +2 circumstance bonus to one Recall Knowledge or investigation check involving the ruins beneath Reiver's Right.

Success The party finds repeated references to unexplained ground collapses, missing workers, and temporary closures at Reiver's Right. None prove anything supernatural, but the camp's current disappearance is clearly not the first serious incident associated with the site.

Failure The party becomes buried beneath generations of amendments, property transfers, and contradictory filing numbers. They confirm only that Reiver's Right has changed ownership many times.

Critical Failure The party follows a similarly numbered logging claim belonging to an entirely different stretch of Profit's Flow. Lessa eventually notices the error, quietly removes the documents, and charges them 5 sp for unnecessary archival handling.

Challenge 2: Accessing the Restricted Ledger

Primary CheckDiplomacy, Society, or Legal Lore DC 18

The most useful historical material is stored in the Scriptorium's restricted stacks because it contains unresolved Blood Price claims involving deceased parties, dissolved companies, and disputed wilderness boundaries. Lessa cannot simply hand it over. The party must establish a legitimate legal interest in the records.

Critical Success The party frames Karland's investigation as protection of an active commercial asset whose potential loss could create cascading liability throughout Old Macridi. Lessa approves full supervised access and issues the party a Writ of Investigative Standing. For the remainder of Act 1, they gain a +1 circumstance bonus to Diplomacy or Society checks when invoking official authority with Macridi clerks, merchants, or contracted workers.

Success Lessa grants one hour of supervised access. The party learns that at least one historical Blood Price connected to Reiver's Right was never formally marked as paid—only transferred to an obsolete account.

Failure Lessa refuses access without a formal petition from Karland or another recognized property holder. The party may return later with additional evidence or authorization.

Critical Failure The party's argument accidentally implies they are acting as Karland's legal representatives. Lessa immediately produces six pages of liability disclosures and asks them to sign. Unless they retreat from the claim, Karland is extremely confused when copies arrive at his mill.

Sidequest

While researching Reiver's Right, Lessa quietly shows the party a logging permit submitted three days ago under a perfectly valid Scriptorium seal. The permit authorizes timber harvesting from a narrow parcel along the Palakar Forest boundary.

There is only one problem: the merchant whose signature appears on the contract died eleven years ago.

Objective: Determine who submitted the forged permit and recover the matching seal impression before an unauthorized logging crew enters protected forest territory.
Complication: The signature is forged, but the official seal is genuine. Someone has access to municipal documents they should not possess.
Reward: Lessa pays the party 15 gp and issues each character a Certificate of Verified Standing. Once during their time in Macridi, the party may present the certificate to gain immediate access to a normally restricted municipal record or receive a +2 circumstance bonus to a check made to contest a bureaucratic obstruction.

Play the Scriptorium as a dungeon where every locked door is a regulation. The clerks are not corrupt caricatures—they are frighteningly competent people operating inside a system that believes anything can be quantified. Violence, lost time, damaged property, embarrassment, and even death can all become entries in a ledger.

The unsettling part is that the system usually works. The mystery begins when the numbers still balance even though the truth underneath them does not.

The Veridical Scriptorium

Records, Seals & Assessments

Scriptorium Challenges

Challenge 1: Auditing the Reiver's Right Records

Challenge 2: Accessing the Restricted Ledger

The Impossible Contract