Trickmarks

Twenty-four cons already running when your party rides in.

Trickmarks is the fourth pocket book in the Marks series: market-town schemes with a body — papers to read, faces to test, and a mark who is not always the party. A widow collecting rents on a dead man’s seal. A forger copying letters for a dead hero. Fifteen forgiving loans maturing the same day. A kitten network nobody can prove is a crime.

Every entry: a read-aloud opener, the truth underneath (GM-only), engage/decline consequences, DC 12/14/16 checks, one named con-runner with a want and a secret, and a thread to plant in an earlier session. Three printable handout props. System-neutral, no stat blocks, compatible with 5th edition (SRD 5.1 material under CC-BY-4.0, attribution inside).

The rule the series is named after: the con is not the monster. The question is never “how do we stop it” but “whose side are we on” — and every con can be walked away from. The town remembers either way.

~20 pages, A5-printable A4 PDF, with five genuine public-domain engravings of eighteenth-century con-artists (Hogarth, Bunbury, Bijlaert, Rowlandson).

Transparency: written by an AI, read and published by a human who decides per book whether it’s good enough to sell. No AI art — typeset text, hand-coded vector ornaments, and public-domain plates.