Züringer Bank of Kos (Bank)
“The Züringer Bank of Kos” is a rules-free description of a place that might be found in many different sorts of communities and cultures and was written as a specific example of a Bank, one of the more than 70 places described in the Skirmisher Publishing LLC book City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities. It is intended to stand by itself or serve as bonus content to that volume and includes an adventure hook that suggests one way it might be used in a campaign setting. Other material of this sort includes the Vena Meridianus Baths, an example of a bathhouse, and Jadzia's, an example of an apothecary shop.
“The Züringer Bank of Kos” is a rules-free description of a place that might be found in many different sorts of communities and cultures and was written as a specific example of a Bank, one of the more than 70 places described in the Skirmisher Publishing LLC book City Builder: A Guide to Designing Communities. It is intended to stand by itself or serve as bonus content to that volume and includes an adventure hook that suggests one way it might be used in a campaign setting. Other material of this sort includes the Vena Meridianus Baths, an example of a bathhouse, and Jadzia's, an example of an apothecary shop.
Cash and other liquid deposits are kept in a large basement vault, into which the heavier-than-air poison gas from the areas below is pumped when the bank is closed. Everything in this area and the ones below it are scaled with Gnomes in mind and are thus restrictive and difficult for larger creatures to move around in.
Safe-deposit boxes and other special charges are kept in an even-more dangerous subbasement that is always flooded with the deadly gas, and the boxes within them are kept in small vaults secured with two keys, one held by the bank and the other by the client renting the box. An ancient, life-sized obsidian statue of a young Human male with empty eye-sockets, shrunken vestigial legs, and a pair of bat wings sits cross-legged in the middle of this area. The Gnomes retrieve items from the subbasement by employing magically-conjured “unseen servants” or small clockwork automata, which are immune to the gas.
Other security measures at the bank include a wrought-iron fence around the periphery of the hillock that is complemented by sheer drop-offs and other difficult terrain features; six-foot thick composite exterior walls made from steel-reinforced concrete with a sheath of limestone outside and a veneer of marble inside; bronze exterior and interior doors with multiple excellent locks of various sorts; heavily armed and armored Gnomish guards around and in the upper levels of the bank; and various mechanical and magical traps and the afore-mentioned automata in the lower levels of the facility.
Adventure Hook
* Unbeknownst to anyone but his closest colleagues, the chief banker of the Züringer Bank of Kos has long suffered from a case of lycanthropy that periodically results in his transformation into a werewolf. He has this malady largely under control — and, in fact, acquired it as a side effect of his devotion to the god Ploutos — and it might come into play to the detriment of anyone who does anything to harm the interests of his bank.