Hammerhead Loans (Patreon)

Back to the shops along the intersection of Market & Random. Based on a Patreon request from Mark Clover, I’m drawing up individual floor plans for a number of shops, stores, vendors, and businesses along a single market block. As I draw these, I also have the overhead views drawn out on a map of the city block as I go, so when the series is complete you can use them on their own, or as a fully mapped out block of shops.

This is our fifth shop on the street, sitting on the west side of Market Street just south of the Golden Fish Market. Hammerhead Loans is a stout, flat-roofed, stone structure with heavy security features and a basement vault for storing valuables.

While the name of the establishment focuses on loans, the primary business here is money changing – converting gems to cash and dealing with converting coins from one denomination to another (at a 7% fee, of course). Hammerhead Loans will also keep a person’s wealth stored safely (no guarantees explicit or implied) at no charge if left for at least two months, otherwise at a 10% fee. Of course, this is to fund their loans business (at a 10% monthly interest rate) – loans of up to 10gp can be obtained without a security deposit (if the clerk feels the client is up for it), and larger loans require collateral valued at twice the loan amount.

There are two entrances into the building. The back door is barred and locked at all times and is used exclusively by staff – and even then it is preferred that they use the front door. All doors within the structure’s ground and basement levels are locked at all times. The front door leads to a security vestibule where a cleric is on guard behind a window who can unlock the door into the main antechamber. The main room is where clients interact with the obese and ancient clerk (a retired wizard with some reasonably useful magics for dealing with frauds and fakers).

The basement contains the vaults – a few larger vaults as well as a number of smaller locked coffers containing coins, gems, and other valuables. There may or may not be a few skeletons buried in the walls here…

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 6,600 x 7,800 pixels (22 x 26 squares). To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) – so resizing the image to 1,540 x 1,820 pixels.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2024/06/10/hammerhead-loans-banking/