The Guild of Five (Patreon)

Built 60 years ago by five moneylenders in the City of Copper Bowls, the Guild of Five was an informal “guild” to work against the puritanical governance of the city and legitimize their usurious ways. Officially a shrine to Belpheromas, a demon of gold and contracts, the structure helped legitimize their business and provided a single place where they could safeguard their securities and contracts.

But as the years went by, their “fake” subservience to the demon caught them in a curse – a trap where their contracts were enforced by fiendish rebukes. While this initially helped them to collect on loans that would otherwise have been lost, it also applied to their promises between themselves. They found themselves unable to break their promises to each other – promises often made with no intention of following through. Two of the money lenders found themselves unable to leave the structure at all, and the other three, unwilling to be similarly bound by false promises, fled the building and eventually the city, forced to return on occasion to collect on old contracts, but avoiding the two trapped within the guild house as much as possible.

The remaining two hate each other with a cold passion. One or the other can occasionally be seen standing on the second-floor gallery above the front entrance of the building. They both still offer the occasional loan to those who come calling, even competing with each other (to the extent allowed by their previous commitments) for the business. Both thieves’ guilds in town have blacklisted the building – things stolen here tend to carry heavy curses and the majority of things of interest are hidden away in extradimensional holding spaces.

This map was drawn in the middle of another map when CrimsonRockStar (a viewer of my mapping stream) asked how I would handle a five-sided structure in a city. Thanks to Olivier (who plays in some of my games and runs the Tuesday night D&D game I play in) for inspiration regarding the five moneylenders.

The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 6,000 pixels (20 squares) wide. To use this with a VTT you would need to resize the squares to either 70 pixels (for 5′ squares) or 140 pixels (for 10′ squares) – so resizing it to either 1,400 pixels wide or 2,800 pixels wide, respectively.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2022/05/23/the-guild-of-five/