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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 records surrounding Reiver's Right. The historical files document the severe blight affecting the site seven years ago, the closure and quarantine that followed, and the authorization allowing the camp to reopen roughly three years ago.

The older operating agreements also contain restrictions that are conspicuously absent from the documents used to reopen the camp. Most importantly, earlier charters include a Subsurface Reservation forbidding mining, tunneling, deep boring, and excavation beneath established root depth. The modern agreement references the same underlying rights but behaves as though that restriction never existed.

Lessa does not know why the language disappeared, who ordered its removal, or what is happening at Reiver's Right now. What troubles her is simpler: the record changes without containing the legal act that should have changed it. 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 Check Society, Legal Lore, or Mercantile Lore DC 18

At Karland's request, the party may investigate the ownership, closure, and reopening of Reiver's Right. Lessa produces old operating charters, property transfers, survey records, quarantine orders, and the agreement under which the camp resumed operation three years ago. Understanding what changed requires tracing references scattered across several generations of documents.

Critical Success The party reconstructs the relevant chain of agreements and identifies the exact discrepancy. Older versions of the Reiver's Right charter contain a Subsurface Reservation explicitly forbidding mining, tunneling, deep boring, and excavation beneath established root depth. The restriction is absent from the agreement used when the camp reopened three years ago, yet there is no surviving amendment, judgment, or authorization legally removing it. Lessa provides a certified copy of the older language and the corresponding section of the modern agreement.

Success The party confirms that the terms governing Reiver's Right changed when the camp reopened roughly three years ago. Older agreements contain restrictions on disturbing the ground beneath the logging claim that no longer appear in the current documents. The records do not explain who authorized the change.

Failure The party confirms the broad history: the blight was active seven years ago, the camp remained closed under quarantine for several years, and the current operation began roughly three years ago. The contractual differences are too scattered to reconstruct confidently.

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: Following the Financial Trail

Primary Check Society, Mercantile Lore, or Legal Lore DC 17

The records surrounding the reopening are technically public, but ownership passes through factors, representatives, holding agreements, freight accounts, and several companies whose names change from document to document. Tracing them requires treating the paperwork as a financial network rather than a single property record.

Critical Success The party establishes that several apparently unrelated companies involved in Reiver's Right ultimately answer to the same concealed financial interest in Kerse. They also notice that multiple contracts and transfer documents bear the same unusual private seal: a golden hand curved around a coiled serpent. The true investor's personal name remains absent from the local record.

Success The party traces the reopening to substantial outside financing associated with a wealthy interest in Kerse. Several companies involved in the transaction appear separate on paper but repeatedly use the same agents, accounts, and private seal: a golden hand curved around a coiled serpent.

Failure The party confirms that outside money from Kerse helped finance the reopening, but the ownership trail becomes lost among representatives, holding agreements, and commercial factors.

Critical Failure The financial structure is dense enough that several legitimate investors appear to be possible owners. Lessa warns the party that none can be responsibly named without further evidence.

Challenge 3: Identify the Seal

Primary Check Occultism DC 17

If the party discovers the recurring hand-and-serpent seal, they may attempt to identify it. The mark is obscure enough that ordinary commercial knowledge is not sufficient; recognizing it requires familiarity with occult symbolism, secret societies, or the less respectable religious currents circulating among Druma's wealthy interests.

A character may attempt Occultism DC 17. Relevant general Lore makes the identification easier: Druma Lore or Kalistocracy Lore DC 15. Highly specific Lore such as Mammon Lore, Infernal Cult Lore, or Golden Hand Lore uses DC 12.

Critical Success The character identifies the mark as the seal of the Golden Hand, a secretive circle associated with Mammon and wealthy interests in Druma. They also understand the ideological contradiction: orthodox Kalistocrats pursue wealth as part of the Prophecies of Kalistrade, while the Golden Hand embraces acquisition and dominion at any cost.

Success The character identifies the seal as belonging to the Golden Hand, an obscure secret society associated with Mammon and wealthy interests operating within Druma.

Failure The character recognizes infernal or occult elements in the imagery but cannot identify the organization that uses the seal.

Critical Failure The symbol appears to be nothing more than an unusual private merchant's seal or family device. The character cannot establish any occult significance.

Challenge 4: Accessing the Restricted Ledger

Primary Check Diplomacy, Society, or Legal Lore DC 18

Some of the supporting material connected to the reopening is stored in the Scriptorium's restricted stacks because it contains private financial instruments, disputed property claims, obsolete accounts, and records involving dissolved companies. 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 to the restricted stacks. The party finds invoices and freight declarations showing that Reiver's Right has been purchasing unusually large quantities of structural bracing, heavy chain, pulleys, lamp oil, ventilation canvas, drainage pipe, and hauling equipment—far more than its known surface operation appears to require. The records do not say what the equipment is being used for, but the pattern strongly suggests substantial work below ground. The party gains a +1 circumstance bonus to the next check made to investigate the hidden excavation or trace the financial interests behind Reiver's Right.

Failure Lessa refuses access without a formal petition from Karland or another recognized interested party. 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.