SotM-2 · Pathfinder 2e

The Ledger of Hollow Coins

Book 2 of Sins of the Mirror — Greed

4–6 sessions · 2-level module at current APL

A merchant republic of canals and counting-houses at dusk. — Goldwake on the delta
1. Plaza of Fair Weight (A1, C3) — Ledgers read aloud. The vacant chair.
2. House Vell (A2) — The generous price.
3. Carrick (A3) — Humane sales.
4. The district on the prospectus (C3) — Remaining life, itemized.

Adventure background

Goldwake is a merchant republic on a wet delta. Everything is numbered. At dusk the ledgers are read in the Plaza of Fair Weight so no one can claim they were cheated. The readings have started taking longer than the day.

The currency is hollow coin: gold that spends perfectly and leaves the spender slightly less there. Years, names, memories, a night of courage — all have a price. Nothing is priceless. That is the city’s pride and its wound.

The Consortium of Open Hands calls itself philanthropic. House Vell wants to corner unlived life. House Carrick wants the buying of years made humane, which means they want to own the humanity. The Quiet Tithe steals from both and gives years back — to people they consider worthy.

Faces of the Court

Show these at the table. The Court has faces; use them.

House Vell

Saelis Vell

Wants. To corner unlived life. Markets are the last honest god.

Lever. He will pay well. He will own the well. Shame does not move him; inefficiency does.

House Carrick

Mother Carrick

Wants. The buying of years made humane — through her.

Lever. Sincere tears. Humanity as branding. She means both.

Thief of years

Isk of the Quiet Tithe

Wants. To give years back to the worthy.

Lever. Ask who is unworthy. That is the sermon they cannot finish without you.

Synopsis

Everyone hires the party. The job is never the job. They meet Knot, who sold a name that has been resold four times. Saelis Vell offers a clean, legal, horrible purchase they actually need. The Auditor’s chair is vacant. A neighborhood’s remaining life is about to be bought to fund a defense.

The conflict is not whether the party likes treasure. It is the one thing each character will not sell — and what happens when the city names a price anyway.

Getting started

Run this book at the APL and player count on Your Table. Every DC, creature, gold piece, and XP award on this page is already filled for that table.

Suggested pacing: level once in the middle of Part 2 and once when the seal breaks. Listed XP is Pathfinder 2e per-PC encounter XP (a moderate fight is 80 XP each, not divided).

Do not skip the Inward Gaze at the climax. If you are short on time, cut a fight, not the looking.

Give them a real shortage (time, a raise dead, a war in the next Court) before Vell’s offer. Do not moralize loot. Use the hunger under it.

Knot is a child who sold their name. Do not portrait them; play them as a function until a name is returned. Never harm them for a cheap beat.

Treasure this book (~2 levels): 110 gp for the table

Permanent items: one item of level 1, one of level 1, 4 consumables of level 1

Part 1: Fair Weight

Arrival, the plaza, Knot, and the first honest price.

A1. Plaza of Fair Weight

The plaza is a throat of brass scales. A clerk reads debts until the words lose meaning. Gulls are numbered. Someone laughs when you notice. “Metaphor,” they say, and charge you for the laugh.

Ledgers take the whole dusk. Anyone who leaves early is assumed to be hiding a purchase.

Knot cannot be addressed except as a job: the extra, the guide, the spare. They want the name back. It has four owners.

DC 15 (standard) — Society to follow a debt to its current holder
DC 15 (standard) — Perception to notice hollow coin — it spends, and you are slightly less there

Collectors of the Open Hands

low · 60 XP each

They pay well for a small piece of someone. If the party pays in coin only, the collectors are disappointed, not gone.

Debt-collector

standard 1

Humanoid

AC: 17
HP: 23
Perc: +7
Fort: +7
Ref: +4
Will: +10

Melee Strike +9, Damage 1d8+4

Ability DC 17

A hit can be bought off: lose a memory, a day, or 10% of this book’s minor treasure to treat it as a miss.

Ledger-rat × 3

minion -1

Humanoid, Minion

AC: 12
HP: 4
Perc: +5
Fort: +5
Ref: +8
Will: +2

Melee Strike +6, Damage 1d4+1

Ability DC 17

Treasure (minor): 6 gp.

A2. House Vell’s generosity

Saelis Vell does not sit on a throne. Thrones are inefficient. He sits at a table with too many empty cups, and the wine is excellent. “You need something,” he says. “I have priced it. The price is not gold. Gold would be vulgar.”

Name a real shortage from your table. Vell has it. The contract is clean, legal, and horrible — a year, a name, a mercy they have not used yet.

Taking it is not a sin mark yet. It is a hook. Note who signs.

DC 17 (hard) — Legal lore or Society to find the trap in the clause
DC 17 (hard) — Diplomacy to decline without becoming the next commodity

A3. Mother Carrick’s humane market

Carrick wants regulation. She weeps, sincerely, for the poor who sell years. Her bill would make the sales kinder and route them through her temple.

She will hire the party to audit Vell. The audit is real. So is the branding.

DC 15 (standard) — Religion to see humanity used as a trademark

A4. The Quiet Tithe

They steal years back. They give them to the worthy. Worth is a sermon. Their captain, Isk, will not apologize for choosing.

Isk can get the party into the Auditor’s vacant rooms. The price is a judgment: name someone who does not deserve their years.

DC 15 (standard) — Stealth or Underworld lore to move on the canals without a receipt

Optional — Tithe vs Consortium on the water

moderate · 80 XP each

Both sides offer to pay the party mid-fight. Record whether they take it.

House blade × 2

standard 1

Humanoid

AC: 17
HP: 23
Perc: +7
Fort: +7
Ref: +10
Will: +4

Melee Strike +9, Damage 1d8+4

Ability DC 17

Canal knife × 4

minion -1

Humanoid, Minion

AC: 12
HP: 4
Perc: +5
Fort: +5
Ref: +8
Will: +2

Melee Strike +6, Damage 1d4+1

Ability DC 17

Treasure (standard): 14 gp.

Part 2: Four owners

Knot’s name, the vacant chair, and the appetite that follows success.

B1. The first two owners

Owner one uses the name as a signature on cruelty. Owner two uses it as a pet. Neither will sell without taking something back.

Returning a fragment of a name does not complete Knot. It makes them more addressable. That is already a victory.

DC 17 (hard) — Diplomacy or Intimidation to buy a name without becoming its next holder

B2. The third owner

This one needs the name. Without it they cannot be promoted. The math is perfect, as presented.

A name with teeth

moderate · 80 XP each

The owner will sell if the party names a replacement commodity. That is the test.

Named-thing

elite 2

Incorporeal

AC: 19
HP: 40
Perc: +11
Fort: +8
Ref: +5
Will: +11

Melee Strike +13, Damage 1d12+6

Ability DC 20

At champion band, it can spend a PC’s name: that PC cannot be aided by name until they take it back.

Owner’s guard × 3

standard 0

Humanoid

AC: 15
HP: 17
Perc: +6
Fort: +9
Ref: +6
Will: +3

Melee Strike +6, Damage 1d6+2

Ability DC 17

Treasure (standard): 14 gp.

B3. The vacant chair

The Auditor’s seat is pale wood, unpadded. Everyone wants you to sit just for a moment. Sitting, you understand, is not owning. Sitting is a courtesy. The seal in the arm is still warm.

Whoever holds Fair Weight can rewrite a debt. The chair is vacant because the last Auditor sold the role and then could not remember why they had wanted it.

Sitting ‘for a moment’ is a Claimed hook. Note it.

DC 20 (very hard) — Will to sit and not rewrite a debt in your favor

B4. House war on the canals

Vell and Carrick stop pretending. Years can be withdrawn mid-fight at champion band and above.

At this band (mortal): Hired blades. Coin is coin.

Open Hands, closed

severe · 120 XP each

They will not sink the barges of grain. Those are already sold.

House champion

elite 3

Humanoid

AC: 21
HP: 54
Perc: +12
Fort: +12
Ref: +9
Will: +6

Melee Strike +15, Damage 1d12+8

Ability DC 22

Reaction: buy a hit. A PC may pay a year or a memory to cancel the Strike. The champion prefers they pay.

Ledger-rat × 4

minion -1

Humanoid, Minion

AC: 12
HP: 4
Perc: +5
Fort: +5
Ref: +8
Will: +2

Melee Strike +6, Damage 1d4+1

Ability DC 17

Part 3: The neighborhood sale

A perfect math. Someone loses something they cannot get back.

C1. The prospectus

An entire district’s remaining life, priced to fund Goldwake’s defense. The numbers work. The people in the district have mostly already agreed, which is the horror.

DC 17 (hard) — Society or Accounting to find the lie in the perfect math

C2. The fourth owner

Knot’s name is on the prospectus as a line item. Returning it now costs a piece of the sale. Vell will call that inefficient.

C3. Fair Weight

Brass scales, hollow coin, a vacant auditor’s chair. — A1 / C3. Plaza of Fair Weight
A. The chair — Sit just for a moment.
B. The clerk — The sale is a reading. Interrupt it.
C. Hollow stacks — They spend. You are less there.

The plaza is full. The clerk has a new script. If no one stops the reading, the neighborhood will be paid for before midnight, and Goldwake will be safer, and thinner.

Reckoned: stop or rewrite the sale without sitting as owners. Someone still loses; record what the PCs kept.

Claimed: take the Auditor’s seal and make the math theirs. The city eats. Book 8 remembers the signature.

Bloodied: burn the ledgers and leave. Trade continues in the ash, worse.

The sale, defended

extreme · 160 XP each

Killing Vell does not stop a signed sale. The reading does. Interrupt the clerk or take the chair.

The vacant math

solo 3

Incorporeal, Unique

AC: 21
HP: 54
Perc: +12
Fort: +9
Ref: +6
Will: +12

Melee Strike +15, Damage 1d12+8

Ability DC 22

Each round it offers a PC a perfect price for a hit, a spell, or a friend. Paying is a free action. Refusing is the looking.

Consortium guard × 3

standard 1

Humanoid

AC: 17
HP: 23
Perc: +7
Fort: +10
Ref: +7
Will: +4

Melee Strike +9, Damage 1d8+4

Ability DC 17

Treasure (major): 20 gp plus a permanent item of level 1.

Conclusion

Update the roster to new levels. Hollow coin still in a pack is a Sin Mark: it spends, and they are less there, until they give it away without receipt.

How this Court ends

Pick the ending the table actually reached. Victory breaks the Seal of Greed. Defeat and walking away do not. Then update the roster to the new levels.

Echoes to record

Did any PC spend hollow coin?
Who got their name back?
Did the party walk out richer?
Who owns Goldwake now?

Bible notes for this Court

Working title: The Ledger of Hollow Coins

The Court: Goldwake, a merchant republic on the delta

Seal: Greed

Suggested length: 4–6 sessions

Greed is not “the party likes treasure.” Greed is the moment wanting becomes the only way you know you are still here.

Core theme

More is a feeling, not a number. Goldwake has learned to sell things that are not things: years, names, memories, the last hour of a dying mother’s voice, a child’s potential, a soldier’s courage for one night.

Nothing in Goldwake is priceless. That is the city’s pride and its wound.

Main conflict

The Consortium of Open Hands — a council of houses who call themselves philanthropists — has begun buying pieces of people. The poor sell years. The desperate sell memories of being loved. The ambitious sell their future mercy.

The currency is hollow coin: gold that spends perfectly and leaves the spender slightly less there.

House Vell wants to corner the market on “unlived life.” House Carrick wants regulation, which means they want to own the regulation. A third force, the Quiet Tithe, steals from both and gives the years back — but only to people they consider worthy, which is its own greed.

The party is hired, of course. Everyone in Goldwake is hiring. The job is never the job.

The conflict: what is the one thing each character will not sell — and what happens when the city names a price for it anyway?

How this book forces the characters to look inward

Goldwake is excellent at making greed look like prudence. Insurance. Preparation. Providing for your own. “We’ve earned this.”

Give the party a real shortage — time, spell components, a raise dead they cannot afford, a war brewing in the next Court — and then put a clean, legal, horrible purchase in front of them.

The Inward Gaze:

What have you already taken and called it earned? What would you take tonight if no one you love ever found out?

Do not moralize treasure. Pathfinder characters loot. This book is about the appetite under the loot: the fear that without more, they are nothing.

A generous paladin can be greedy for saint-hood. A druid can be greedy for a wild that never includes people. Use the actual hunger.

The Court as a place

Goldwake is canals, counting-houses, wet gold light. Everything is numbered. Even the gulls are taxed (there is a man whose job is to deny this is a metaphor).

At dusk the ledgers are read aloud in the Plaza of Fair Weight so no one can claim they were cheated. The readings have started taking longer than the day.

Key faces

Saelis Vell — charming, exact, believes markets are the last honest god. Will pay the party well. Will own the well.
Mother Carrick — old, devout to a goddess of thresholds, wants the buying of years made “humane.” Humanity as branding.
Knot — a child who sold their name and now cannot be addressed except as a function. They want it back. The name has been resold four times.
The Auditor — not a person. A role. Whoever holds the seal of Fair Weight can rewrite a debt. Currently vacant. Everyone wants the party to sit in the chair “just for a moment.”

Climax

A sale is about to go through that would buy the remaining life of an entire neighborhood to fund a “defense” of Goldwake. The math, as presented, is perfect.

The party can stop the sale, take the Auditor’s seal, burn the ledgers, or join the Consortium and make the math theirs.

Whatever they do, someone loses something they cannot get back. Record what the PCs kept.

Echoes to record

Did any PC spend hollow coin?
Who got their name back?
Did the party walk out richer?
Who owns Goldwake now?

Scaling

Low: street-level debt, one neighborhood, duels with hired blades. Mid: house war, magic that literally withdraws years in combat. High: the market has become a demiplane of appraisal; enemies offer to buy hits off the PCs mid-fight.