The Watchtower Ledger
The Watchtower Ledger is a hostile accounting engine that treats every unauthorized footstep as a debt to be collected. It does not merely sound an alarm. It records intruders, brands them in ink, and commands the tower's shutters and weights to turn the room itself against them.
The Watchtower Ledger
Defenses
Detection
“A stone desk bolted into the watchtower floor sits beneath a hanging brass lamp. A swollen ledger of cracked black leather rests open on a slanted stand, its pages filled with cramped columns of names, shifts, debts, and sentences. Thin copper tubes run from the desk into the walls, and every so often a page turns on its own with a dry, papery snap.”
Standard Engagement
A creature that is not bearing the tower's seal, or that enters the chamber without speaking the passphrase, crosses the threshold of the ledger chamber.
On its initiative, the ledger turns one page and targets the loudest visible creature in the room, or the creature that last moved without speaking a password. The target takes Ink-Bleeding Entry. Then the tower mechanism triggers Shutter Clamp centered on a square the target occupies or adjacent to it. If no valid target is present, the hazard instead rings a sharp brass bell, alerting nearby creatures within 60 feet.
The ledger resets 10 minutes after it is disabled or after all creatures leave the chamber for 1 minute, whichever comes first. It re-inks its pages and restores any jammed shutters unless physically ruined.
The ledger bites into the intruder's name in a spatter of black ink. The target takes 2d6 persistent bleed damage as if the ink were cutting into the skin, and takes a -1 circumstance penalty to Stealth until the persistent damage ends.
Heavy shutters slam or a chain weight drops from the ceiling. Creatures in the hazard's area must attempt a DC 20 Reflex save. Success: unaffected. Failure: 1d8 bludgeoning damage and the creature is knocked prone. Critical failure: 2d8 bludgeoning damage, knocked prone, and pushed 5 feet in a direction chosen by the hazard if space allows.
Creatures that speak the passphrase, 'Filed and accounted for,' ignore the hazard's routine for 1 round unless they attack, cast a hostile spell, or deliberately vandalize the ledger.
While a creature is taking persistent bleed damage from this hazard, it is treated as having a fresh line item in the ledger. The hazard gains a +2 circumstance bonus to target that creature with its next routine.
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