Kolkorn

Sovereign of World and Wealth.

Lore pending

This page carries Kolkorn’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of his faith — his guilds, his market-shrines, his clergy, his place among the Sovereigns — has not been written yet. What is here is complete and canon; it is simply not the whole page.

Kolkorn is served on the road and settled in the ledger.

His traditions divide along the work their peoples do. Among humans and gnomes he makes merchants: they keep a buyer or a fence in every market they have ever walked into, they run their goods along routes worn smooth by years of use, and they borrow from the guild on nothing but a name. Among the dwarves he makes miners: they read ore in a hillside from a day’s walking, find silver through a hand’s breadth of rock with a forked stick, and know what a seam is worth before it is opened. His spells are a caravan’s spells — Allure to strike the bargain, Magic Lock to secure the goods, and Winged Flight, Protection from Temperature, Safe Travels, and Level Water to carry them across a world that would rather they did not arrive.

Wealth, to Kolkorn, is not a hoard. It is a thing that moves — dug out, carried across, sold on — and every stage of that passage is a promise that the next man will be paid. A follower who breaks that promise needs no punishing from Kolkorn. Her name shuts every market it once opened, and the guild that lent to her on the strength of it sends men to collect.

Traditions that teach him: the Archaist and the Dwarven Forgepriest alike, and — asking more — the Gnomish Iconologist.

His worship day is Zol, market day, when the week’s accounts fall due and every ledger is squared. He shares Zol with Vulkoor, and among the dwarves and gnomes with Dolazur — for the day debts come due is also the day men are betrayed over them.

Strictures

Kolkorn’s traditions ask different measures of their followers. Find your own tradition below; it tells you what it adds to those above it.

Archaist and Dwarven Forgepriest

• A follower of Kolkorn must always display a holy symbol of Kolkorn somewhere on her person when in public.
• A follower of Kolkorn must reckon her accounts each day, setting down in a ledger everything she has taken and given, owes and is owed. Reckoning requires one hour (6 turns). On Zol, Kolkorn’s holy day, she must settle every account that can be settled and say aloud what she still owes and to whom — to the man himself where he stands within reach, and to the page where he does not. The Zol reckoning takes two hours (12 turns).
• A follower of Kolkorn must acknowledge every debt she incurs and carry it openly in her ledger. On every second Zol a debt stands unsettled, it accrues interest, and that interest is a debt like any other.
• A follower of Kolkorn must never give false weight, false measure, or false coin, nor take what she has not paid for.

Gnomish Iconologist

An iconologist of Kolkorn keeps everything asked of an Archaist or a Dwarven Forgepriest above, and further:

• A follower of Kolkorn must abide the judgment of the merchant guild in any dispute of account, and where no guild sits, the judgment of the eldest of her tradition.
• A follower of Kolkorn stands in debt for everything given her that she did not pay for: the favor done, the passage granted, the gift offered, the kindness she never asked for. She may accept nothing she cannot repay.

The reckoning

Kolkorn does not forbid profit. He forbids the false price. A follower of Kolkorn may drive as hard a bargain as her counterpart will meet, and grow as rich as the world allows.

A debt is discharged by payment in kind, by coin at a true price, or by service the creditor accepts as full settlement.

It is no sin to owe. It is a sin to owe and not write it. What interest a debt bears, Kolkorn does not say — not for coin, and least of all for a favor, a passage granted, or a kindness done unasked. The follower must reckon it honestly, set it down, and expect that her creditor holds a figure of his own. Where the two disagree, that is a dispute of account like any other.

A debt that cannot be paid must be carried before the merchant guild — or the eldest of her tradition, where no guild sits — and there extended or forgiven. A forgiveness granted is set down like any other transaction. A debt hidden, denied, or left out of the ledger is theft, and Kolkorn knows no difference between a thief and a debtor who will not write.

Spoil is not theft. What is taken from an enemy in open battle, or won from the dead who left no heir to claim it, is the fortune of the field and no debt at all. Kolkorn’s law binds dealings between those who deal; it does not follow a sword into a ruin, nor make a creditor of a monster.