Abbathor's Ledger

A tattered book recovered in Session 6 from beside a dead dwarf in the temple’s south passage, and read by Sage, who carries it. It is written in an older dialect than she is fluent in, but legible enough.

It is a ledger: page after page accounting the gold, gems, and offerings laid before Abbathor across generations of priests.

What it says

• The offerings thin out. Year over year, the entries get smaller.
• The tone gets defensive. Alongside the shrinking numbers, the priests start justifying themselves — “Abbathor will be pleased with our investments.” Whether that pleading was aimed at the god or at each other, it did not work: the avalanche came, and the priests became jellies.
• It describes a room. A sacrifice chamber: dark, flanked by two statues. In Session 7 the party opened a sealed round chamber behind the rubble holding exactly that — two pedestals, two statues — and emptied it. Whether it is the room the ledger means is inference: nothing in the chamber identified itself.
• It never says where the wealth went. Not one entry accounts for the hoard leaving the temple, and nothing the party has dug through so far comes close to matching the totals on the page.

Why it matters

Two of the party are now carrying pieces of Abbathor’s temple — Rut the necklace that reads “This is what happens to those who displease me,” Hamish the holy symbol that reads “Greed is good” — and one of them is holding a book that catalogues exactly what happens to people who take from this god and give too little back.

The party lied to their partners about the haul and kept the coffer that same day. One of those partners was dead on the road within a week.