Changeling and Moneylenders

[Primus Beno]

My PC has gotten clever. She's playing a changeling and after we'd been adventuring a while, the party needed some money. Actually, a lot of money. So, she impersonated a slimy duke, stole a signet ring, put some lands of for collateral at a lending house and pulled a bunch of money out. It was full of role play, worked with her character concept and was fun

Now, she's targeting unscrupulous money lenders who loanshark the poor and she's bleeding them dry. She's pretty good at it, but she's starting to target the same ones again and sooner or later, they will talk to each other in the guild...

I'm looking for some creative ideas the loan sharks might put into place to hamper the efforts. I don't mind her being successful, but the NPC's should be reacting appropriately and with increasing resistance as she bamboozles them. Plus, I'd like to throw a bit of challenge her way to keep it from being boring.

Any ideas?

[prabe]

My PC has gotten clever. She's playing a changeling and after we'd been adventuring a while, the party needed some money. Actually, a lot of money. So, she impersonated a slimy duke, stole a signet ring, put some lands of for collateral at a lending house and pulled a bunch of money out. It was full of role play, worked with her character concept and was fun

Now, she's targeting unscrupulous money lenders who loanshark the poor and she's bleeding them dry. She's pretty good at it, but she's starting to target the same ones again and sooner or later, they will talk to each other in the guild...

I'm looking for some creative ideas the loan sharks might put into place to hamper the efforts. I don't mind her being successful, but the NPC's should be reacting appropriately and with increasing resistance as she bamboozles them. Plus, I'd like to throw a bit of challenge her way to keep it from being boring.

Any ideas?

Biological samples, taken before the money is handed over. They can be used to track the person no matter what shapechanging magics or abilities are being used. In a world where there are Changelings, I'd be shocked if this wasn't already standard practice.

[Sparky McDibben]

Hiring a group of bounty-hunting amoral wizards who will start using divination and abjuration. Pull inspiration from the Lies of Locke L'Amora (the wizards group there) for general creepiness and sort of puppetmaster-type power.

[Anonymouswizard]

Biological samples, taken before the money is handed over. They can be used to track the person no matter what shapechanging magics or abilities are being used. In a world where there are Changelings, I'd be shocked if this wasn't already standard practice.

Yeah, likely the moneylender will employ low level magic or a minor magic item to check identities. As another specific example, some churches will run moneylending services, assuming Clerics are relatively common (as compared to unempowered Priests) then a wand of Zone of Truth will give them a decent reason to believe this person is who they say they are (I could build a full routine here that involves Detect Magic and a few other spells, but it depends on how common abjuration magic is).

If all else fails, a few days of delay to deal with paperwork and verify that yes, the lands/items do belong to you makes such a scheme harder to pull off. Not much harder than it is otherwise, but a simple check in with the person at their home address before handing over the money will work wonders.

[Contrast]

I'm assuming changelings are a known part of the setting and as such the people involved would reasonable quickly realise whats going on. If not they'd probably assume Disguise Self was at work.

The simple solution is they only deal with people they know who can prove they are who they say they are. Detect Thoughts is only a 2nd level spell which according to spellcasting services should be somewhere in the 10-50g range so values substantially above that should be relatively easy to work around.

Another point - if these are local low level loansharks then there's a good chance they'll just at the house of whoever you were pretending to be and insist they owe them the money regardless of their prostation of innocence. I'm not sure how that really seems to meet their goal of bleeding them dry. If they're masquerading as someone the loan sharks can't be sure will stay around and be trackable to put pressure on to repay the loan then they probably weren't going to lend you money in the first place.

The other issue is - there's a reason changelings tend to hide themselves and keep a low profile. People already don't trust them and now you've made an enemy of some very unpleasant people. The gangs offers a bounty on changelings. Innocent changelings start getting lynched in the streets as the gang starts increasing other criminal activity to make up for their losses and changelings get the blame.

Depending how knowledgeable people are about changelings in your setting you could throw in some wrong things as well - there's a rumour that changelings will revert if cut with a silver knife or can't stand images of the moon or etc etc.

[Yora]

A high profile criminal changeling could inspire other changelings to try take him out of the picture. Those could be particularly dangerous as they know his tricks and would be able to spot and track him better.

[Corran]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l39Cvj8iUZg
Make Keyzer Soze a changeling as well, in the extremely unlikely scenario the players get to find out.
Obviously change things here and there. For example, stealing from the loan sharks was only one of the transgressions against Mr Soze. Mix in things that the party has done so far (previous quests, even pull in stuff from other characters' backgrounds if you can). The quest offered could just be whatever you were planning for the party going forward. This whole thing needs to be done carefully though if you dont want it to backfire. Players dont tend to react well to when feeling cornered, and making them feel cornered wont be easy in the first place either.

[HappyDaze]

I'm assuming changelings are a known part of the setting and as such the people involved would reasonable quickly realise whats going on.
In Eberron, where the changeling race is based, this is the case. They have a variety of fantasy measures to verify identity and prevent identity theft. That's not to say a skilled changeling can't get away with things, but if they push too far or against some of the big players, there are elements in the world that can shut them down hard.

[Evaar]

Depends on the setting. In Eberron, as noted above, there will be countermeasures in place because Changelings aren't unheard of. Moneylenders are probably pretty paranoid about Changelings in Eberron.

In Forgotten Realms, I don't know that anyone really expects to encounter a Changeling ever. But it's not uncommon for low level magic users to know magic like Disguise Self and the like. So you might have moneylenders using anti-illusion tools, which wouldn't actually affect the Changeling. Given what the character's doing, they might assume their tools aren't working and step up to the next logical step - as suggested above, biological samples like hair or blood. Maybe certain moneylenders have access to Zone of Truth. Maybe an especially high level, dangerous moneylender is a 15th level Warlock with the Witch Sight invocation, and he comes to investigate what's tripping up all his underlings in this area.

[Nifft]

FR has Doppelgangers and at one point in history Candlekeep was overrun by the darn things, so it's pretty reasonable that they'd also have some kind of shape-independent tracking & identification.

=== ===== ===

In this PC's favor, though, having the stolen signet ring was probably more than enough to justify theft of funds. Being able to change face would help avoid capture later, but honestly the most critical aspect was just having the signet ring. Plenty of mundane rogues would be able to pull off such a stunt with one of those and a disguise kit.

Regarding the money-lenders, it might be difficult to put them out of business.

Even the most unscrupulous ones might have a large number of legitimate loans -- and might have innocent people who depend on them as investors. Robbing an evil middle-man might harm ordinary good people.


Anyway, in Eberron an easy answer might be more communication, perhaps intermediated by a local House Sivis rep: "Hello Sivis Dullmuck, this is Sivis Thistlerill, we just want to confirm that Baron Dullmuck did wish to mortgage three properties in Thistlerill."

Cheapest option might be the "message station", which is priced by the page, so maybe it wouldn't be sent immediately (only after the page fills up?) -- even if it were delayed, putting an extra day or two between the notification and the payout wouldn't harm legitimate business overmuch, and it would protect against a lone impersonator.

More sophisticated scams would involve impersonating someone known to work for the Baron, and personally known by the Baron's local Sivis House rep, so you could "confirm" the request at the right time. But that's a lot riskier, especially if the original is still walking around while you're dressed up as an impersonation.

[firelistener]

It's historically been common practice to put waiting periods on asset liquidation. This isn't to prevent fraud so much as it keeps the the bank or loan office from needing to scramble to get enough liquidity to hand over to the person trying to withdraw cash. Banks don't just sit on cash, but rather they spend it on investments. So if Mr. Bigbucks comes by and says he wants to mortgage a very profitable piece of land, they obviously want it. However, they probably have most of their cash already spen on raw commodities to trade, real estate, and loans to other businesses. If everyone can just walk in and take out huge loans without pause, the bank or loan office can go bankrupt. This is precisely what happens in a "run" on a bank.

So your guilds would, realistically speaking, not just agree to the same tactic the changling is using. It could work with small amounts really well, or maybe one time for very rich individual, but the same moneylender would refuse to conduct this kind of business and grow extremely nervous about the future if more than one high profile businessman was liquidating assets. That kind of thing reeks of imminent war or economic downturn, since these politicians would probably only sell off profitable investments if they intended to flee the region or needed to suddenly pay a lot of people cash (like an army of soldiers).

[KorvinStarmast]

The other issue is - there's a reason changelings tend to hide themselves and keep a low profile. People already don't trust them and now you've made an enemy of some very unpleasant people. The gangs offers a bounty on changelings. Innocent changelings start getting lynched in the streets as the gang starts increasing other criminal activity to make up for their losses and changelings get the blame. There are a lot of good ideas in this thread, but I really like this one for moving the story forward.
A high profile criminal changeling could inspire other changelings to try take him out of the picture. Those could be particularly dangerous as they know his tricks and would be able to spot and track him better. They don't want her ruining it for the rest of them. Nice call.

{snip}That kind of thing reeks of imminent war or economic downturn, since these politicians would probably only sell off profitable investments if they intended to flee the region or needed to suddenly pay a lot of people cash (like an army of soldiers). Great post. Nice tips on world building there. :smallcool:

[Segev]

It's also important to consider what the moneylenders know and don't know. Have any of them talked to each other, yet, or is it all isolated?

Moreover, have they figured out they've been swindled, rather than that the slimy Duke is trying to renege on his loan? The moneylender, after all, has all the paperwork, including the Duke's own signet-ring seal on it. Does he realize there was an impersonation, or does he think the Duke is trying to cheat him by feigning outrage at the claims on his property? What CAN the moneylender do against a Duke, anyway?

The same question applies to each of the moneylenders she's hitting this way: which of them, if any, have figured out it's identity theft rather than simply rich people trying to cheat them by stealing the loan money? And for those who've figured it out, how did they do it?

Now, the biggest hint would be when it happens repeatedly. One is...well, it's a hazard of doing business. How frequently does it happen, and how to they normally deal with it? If she's hitting the same moneylender a second time, how close in time to the last hit is it, and how does that compare with the normal rate of it happening?

It would be enough of them in quick succession that they start to notice a pattern in how this particular scam goes that might tip them off to it being not their supposed clients trying to cheat them, but a case of identity theft (though they wouldn't use that phrase) to scam them out of the money without the "client" even knowing they'd supposedly "borrowed" it.

[ecarden]

A lot of this is going to depend on setting, but generally a money lender (on any scale) isn't going to want to do business with people they don't know, or who isn't being vouched for by someone they know. They want to make sure they can put their hands on someone and squeeze until the money comes out (or, in nastier settings, sell them to make back at least part of it).

Moreover, for serious scale stuff, there's going to be a real shift from 'here have a big bag of gold,' to 'what do you want it for? You want to build a new mill. Certainly, I'm happy to cosign the contract and pay for that, with your lands as collateral and at X% interest.'

The other thing to remember is that, depending on your society and structure, the bank may, or may not, be loaning out its own money. If it's not, then some very rich people are going to be very pissed and out looking for their lost gold (or the mercenaries they hire are).

For the larger loans, zone of truth before the loan can be taken out.

For the smaller loans, you're obviously in a high wealth society if loan sharks targeting the poor are a serious issue, but I still assume these are (to a major enterprise, or an adventurer) small amounts. The most likely reaction is to either lean on the other customers (if they're illegal loans) or to simply decide doing these small loans isn't worth it (if they're a legal enterprise) and withdraw entirely.

Gee, it's a shame that Timmy died because you couldn't come up with the cash to pay the priests for healing, but at least you got the loan sharks out of the community, right?

Alternatively, there's always the 'turn this to my advantage.' Clearly since good ol' Dave doesn't remember taking out the loan he must have been controlled by magic. It was probably those dirty elves/tieflings/wizards/sorcerers, we should get together a nice mob and go kill them all. Well, you should, while I loot their houses.