The Ones Sent After
The locket is enamel over gold and it opens stiffly, because it is new. Inside, painted small and badly, is a girl of about fourteen with her mother's chin and somebody's stubbornness: Kleio, of a house whose name is on three ships in the harbour, missing nine days.
The mouth of the passage is a service entrance behind a laundry, and there is a palace guard leaning against it who has been paid to look elsewhere for exactly as long as it takes you to walk past him. He does not wish you luck. He says, "Nine days," as though correcting a figure you had wrong.
Premise. A professional retrieval. The party has been hired to go in and bring a living person out, which is the cleanest possible mandate and the one that makes every room's "do we have time for this?" question bite. Nine days is a long time. Everyone at the table knows what nine days usually means.
Starting State
- Full kit, plus a retrieval outfitting paid for by a wealthy house: 100 ft of rope, six torches, a lantern with four hours of oil, chalk, ten days' rations, two healer's kits, and one Draught of Epidaurus per PC. Yes, that is generous. It is the loudest way to tell the players that the client is rich and frightened.
- The locket. A portrait of Kleio and a lock of her hair — which matters for any divination the party can manage, and you should let it work.
- The brief. Alive if possible. Her body if not. Proof either way. The party was told the third clause and it is going to sit badly with somebody at the table, which is correct.
- Full HP and spell slots.
Opening Scene
A 50 ft × 20 ft service corridor of unfinished limestone, three doors on the left that all open on laundry stores, and at the far end a widening where the corridor stops being palace and starts being maze — the join is visible, dressed stone giving way to the older mortarless work.
No creatures, and the scene is an investigation. Everything here is evidence that somebody came this way nine days ago, and the party's first job is learning to read it. That is exactly the skill X05 will demand of them.
The trail, in the order it should be found.
| Evidence | Check | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Bootprints | Survival DC 12 | Two sets in, one set out. The one going out is heavier — carrying something, or someone |
| A torn hem | Investigation DC 13 | Good linen, dyed with murex. Her family's colour. It is snagged waist-high on the join, which means she went in walking, not dragged |
| Chalk marks | Investigation DC 14 | Someone marked the wall here with a numbered arrow, professional and confident: 1 →. Not her hand |
| A cold campfire | Survival DC 14 | Two nights old at most. Whoever made it stayed close to the entrance and did not go deep |
| The guard | Persuasion DC 12 | She went in alone, on purpose, past him, and paid him more than the party's client did |
That last one is the scene's turn. Kleio was not taken. She walked in, having bribed her way past, and she was not the first: the guard has been paid four times this season. The party's mandate quietly changes from rescue to retrieval of a person who may not want to come, and X05 is built for that.
The chalk marks are not hers. They belong to the Surveyor's Crew (see B11), who are somewhere in here doing a job, and the party can follow their numbering for as long as it lasts. It lasts four rooms and then the numbers stop mid-sequence.
First Clue (Whisper tier)
X05's Whisper, and the guard hands it over for a copper: "She went in on her own. Nobody made her."
Deliver it as gossip rather than revelation, and do not let anyone confirm it yet. The idea that the girl they were sent to save is down there by choice should sit unresolved for four or five rooms; X05's Trace and Sign tiers pay it off.
Exits
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | All DCs −2. The guard talks for free |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | DCs +1. Drop one healer's kit and the draughts from the outfitting |
| 15 | DCs +3. The guard is dead in the third laundry store, two days old, and somebody wanted the party's questions unanswered — which means someone knows they are coming |
A missing young woman, a nine-day silence, and a client who has already asked for a body. That is a heavier frame than it looks. Say the third clause of the brief out loud at the start and check the table is comfortable with it, and be clear that Kleio is alive — she is, in every version of X05 — so nobody plays five hours braced for a corpse.
- This is the deck's best "we have a job and a deadline" Beginning, and it makes the session clock a story element rather than a DM convenience. Every time the party lingers, you get to say "nine days" again.
- Kleio is alive and she is not helpless. X05 requires her to be able to walk a route only she can walk. She has been in here nine days because she found something worth staying for, and the party's job at the end is persuasion as much as escort.
- The guard is worth playing well. Bored, venal, entirely honest once paid, and the last person to see her. He is the whole exposition budget of this scene.
- The Crew's chalk numbering is a gift you can withdraw. Four rooms of "the numbers say the exit is that way" and then nothing, right when the party has learned to rely on it, is a very good beat.
- If you are running short, keep the locket, the bootprints, and the guard's one line. Six minutes.