This imposing boot scraper is fashioned from black iron veined with dull silver, its three jagged teeth shaped like tiny hooked fingers. The base is a slab of dark green marble, worn smooth at the edges and engraved with thousands of hair-thin tally marks. A tarnished bronze plate rises behind the teeth, its surface blank until the scraper is used; then pale numerals crawl across it like worms beneath skin. When it removes something magical, the iron briefly glows the color associated with the effect—sickly yellow for poison, violet for curses, and cold blue for disease. It is heavy, immovable once placed, and always faintly warm to the touch.
Cleansing Iron
When a creature deliberately scrapes a boot, shoe, hoof, or other foot covering across the scraper, the scraper removes ordinary dirt, mud, blood, and similar grime. It can also remove one nonmagical substance clinging to the creature's feet, such as contact poison, sovereign glue, or caltrop residue, provided the substance could reasonably be scraped away. The scraper cannot remove an effect that requires a saving throw or an effect created by a spell of 1st level or higher.
Scrape Away the Unwanted
Once per dawn, when a creature uses the scraper, the attuned user can cause it to remove one additional effect from that creature: one curse, disease, poison, or condition causing the blinded, charmed, frightened, paralyzed, or poisoned condition. The effect must be removable by remove curse, lesser restoration, or greater restoration, as appropriate. If the effect is created by a spell or magical item, the scraper can remove it only if its spell level is 5th or lower. The scraper does not restore hit points or remove exhaustion.
A Footprint of Truth
Whenever the scraper is used, it records the creature's identity, the exact time, and the number and nature of each effect it removed. The attuned user can touch the scraper and mentally review its records, receiving a chronological summary of the last 100 uses. The records reveal whether each substance or effect was mundane, magical, poisonous, cursed, or disease-based, but do not identify its source.
The Grand Tally
The scraper maintains an indelible total of every use since its creation. The attuned user can ask it for the total number of uses, the number of creatures cleansed, or the number of curses, diseases, poisons, and conditions removed. The scraper answers by etching glowing numerals across its iron face. These totals cannot be altered by magic short of wish or divine intervention.
Counted Passage
Once per long rest, the attuned user can command the scraper to name every creature that has used it during the previous 24 hours. The scraper produces a whispered tally and briefly displays each creature's face in its bronze plate. It identifies only creatures that actually used the scraper, not creatures merely present nearby.
A Debt in the Ledger
If a creature knowingly attempts to use the scraper to remove a magical effect more powerful than it can cleanse, the scraper records the attempt and emits a sharp metallic cry. The creature must succeed on a DC 17 Charisma saving throw or be unable to willingly use the scraper again until the next dawn. The failed attempt still counts toward the Grand Tally.
Lore
The Tallying Scraper was made for the countinghouse-temple of Veyr, a deity of thresholds, debts, and exact measures. Veyrian priests believed that every impurity carried across a threshold represented a debt owed to the world. They built the scraper to collect those debts, beginning with mud and ending with curses, plagues, and the lingering stains of ancient magic. The priests claimed that the scraper never cleansed anything; it merely transferred the burden from the traveler to the ledger of fate.
History
The scraper stood for centuries at the entrance to the Hall of Seven Doors, where pilgrims, assassins, kings, and monsters were required to use it before entering. Its tally grew beyond a million uses before the hall was destroyed during the Ashen Interdict. Adventurers later found the scraper buried beneath the threshold, still counting. Since then, it has appeared at the entrances of plague hospitals, royal vaults, and one notorious thieves' guild. Several owners have attempted to erase its records; all vanished shortly afterward, while the tally continued to increase.
