Moonlight Glitters upon Weregild
In some corners of the known world, people barter with lives as readily as they trade any other commodity. When a murderer in these lands kills a fellow, they aren’t hunted down and brought to justice. No, there is no great and terrible consequence to their actions so long as they pay their victim’s family the requisite price (it does vary, after all is the life of a peasant worth the same as a king’s life? Your moral reflex is to say yes, but can a peasant conscript a score of kings to go die in some asinine war?). This price is called the “weregild.” And if they have coins leftover, they don’t even think twice about continuing their spree. In these lands, those who you may call “serial killers” are just called “big spenders.”
Despite the name (the latter half of which derives from the word “gold”), weregild is typically paid in silver coins. Copper coins would be, frankly, insulting, and common murders don’t walk around with platinum pieces jangling in their pockets. Gold coins, however, are avoided in these places out of superstition, although folks don’t know the full of it. “Bad luck to trade gold for a life” is all that they’ll offer. But it is more than just bad luck. New falsehoods are fruitful and multiply when old truths are forgotten.
The sage they call Gondovald lives in a tall tower of smooth stone with no visible doors, only a large window at the top, where he can gaze out at the waves licking the cliffs below while he transcribes the scholarly tomes he saved from a burning monastery as a youth. Before he joined (and was expelled from) the priesthood, Gondovald apprenticed under an alchemist of some renown. All alchemists are alike in their desire to transmute gold, but each transmutes it in their own way. This alchemist was famed for his obsession with transmuting corpses into riches. If you had asked your grandparents’ grandparents before they passed beyond, they’d have told you that this alchemist even found some success, but so repugnant were his experiments that the townsfolk drug him out of his manor house, tortured and killed him, and burnt his papers. They didn’t destroy his gold, in the end, that they had no compunctions about taking. Alchemy is best practiced in secret.
If you meet Gondovald, ask him about weregild. He will tell you. He will tell you how it is a curse, not dissimilar from lycanthropy. His eyes will be misty as he tells you that his old master knew all there was to know of the curse and tried to reverse the process. Instead of turning coins into an undead monster, turning the dead into coins. Whatever his master learned is now surely forgotten, but weregild is still very much real.
When weregild is paid in gold coinage, a curse is laid upon the coins. Not each coin individually but the entire collection. It is easy to disrupt the curse: simply distribute the coins. If they are not all together during a full moon, nothing happens. But when all the coins are together and a full moon shines upon them, they cease to be coins at all. The gold transforms into an undead creature–reports are different, some say it becomes a shambling corpse with rotten skin that shimmers in the light while others say it is merely the incorporeal shadow of a trapped soul with the only light being two golden discs where its eyes would ordinarily be.
Whatever it is, it is violent, not mindless as undead so often are, and takes the form of the person who was murdered. This undead always knows the direction of its murderer and will make its way toward vengeance as quickly as it can. If its murderer is, by the passage of time or otherwise, no longer living, then the undead’s malice is not lessened, but just directed toward any person who has killed another in cold blood. If it can kill its murderer, then the undead reverts to a pile of gold. If it is unable to get this release, it kills and kills until it can be stopped.
You don’t need to take Gondovald’s word for it. Bingo Labingi, that braggadocious halfling you’ve probably met before in a tavern, will tell you all about weregild if you buy him a drink. He was once a member of an adventuring party, poor sods all, and he’s the last who remains to this day. They made the mistake of not checking the phase of the moon when they slew a dread dragon. As they celebrated their score, swimming in the piles of coins, gems, and jewelry, moonlight shone in from a crack in the cavern walls, created in the ensuing battle with the dragon. As the moonlight glittered upon the gold, the piles of loot shuddered and then burst into not one, not two, but five weregild, their curse triggered. Their murderers had long-since shuffled off into the next plane of existence. Bingo fled while all his friends perished, their blood spilling across the remaining treasure. For a second drink, Bingo’ll even show off the claw marks that run across his arm, the only attack the weregild landed on him before he escaped. “Lookit, you see? You see? Scar tissue streaked with gold, it is. Here, I’ll stand near to the hearth, you’ll see it clear as day, you will.”
