The Wrong Door in Misthaven
The Anchor and Fleece has two back doors. One goes to the alley where the barrels are kept and one goes to the privy, and everyone in Misthaven knows which is which, and tonight one of them is wrong.
Beyond the door is not an alley. It is a corridor of dressed limestone, mortarless, warm as a body, going gently down. Behind you the taproom is still audible — someone is losing at knucklebones, loudly — and when the last of you steps through, the door closes on a wall.
Premise. The library wink. Misthaven is the tavern the oneshot library uses as its framing table, and tonight its back door opened on Knossos. No plot, no client, no captivity: the party has full kit, whatever they were carrying at the end of the last session, and a door that is no longer there. Roll the Resolution.
Starting State
- Full kit, exactly as they were in the taproom. This is the Beginning to use for a party that has just come off another session — they keep everything, including whatever ridiculous thing they were holding. Ask each player what their character had in their hands. Take the first answer.
- What the tavern provides: one round of drinks' worth of goodwill. Each PC has one of the following, player's choice: a full waterskin, a hot pie wrapped in cloth (counts as a day's rations and one point of morale), a lamp taken off the wall, or a bar-knife nobody will miss.
- Full HP and spell slots. They were sitting down.
- No light problem, yet. They have the taproom's lamps for one hour. After that, whatever they brought.
Opening Scene
A 60 ft corridor of warm mortarless limestone, sloping down at about one foot in twelve, ending at a T-junction. The door they came through is now wall — not a disguised wall, not a secret door, just wall, and the mortarless joins run straight across where the frame was.
No creatures, no checks that matter, and no way back. This is a four-minute scene whose entire job is establishing tone: something strange and enormous has happened, and nothing is threatening them about it.
Things to find, all of them fast.
| Feature | Check | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Where the door was | Investigation DC 15 | Nothing. The wall is older than the tavern by three centuries and has never had a door in it. Whatever happened did not happen here |
| The stone | History DC 12 | Knossian palace work. A player with any Greek history knows exactly where they are and should be allowed to say the word "Labyrinth" out loud |
| The warmth | Arcana DC 14 | The stone is warm because something below is warm. This is not magic; it is a furnace, or a body, or both |
| The floor | Survival DC 11 | Dust, undisturbed, except a single set of bare footprints going down. Adult, barefoot, unhurried |
| The taproom sound | Automatic | Audible for the first minute. Then not. Do not let anyone shout back through — or rather, let them, and give them silence |
The bare footprints are the scene's hook and they are deliberately unassigned: they can belong to Ariadne (X10), to Kleio (X05), to the Kind Shade of R076, or to nothing at all. Decide when the Resolution is rolled.
First Clue (Whisper tier)
Roll the Resolution (d20) after the first room, then deliver its Whisper line dressed into this corridor. Three that fit especially well:
- The bare footprints, going down, unhurried, with a thread of red wool caught in the join of two stones where a hand steadied itself (X10, X05).
- The warmth in the stone, and the draught that comes with it — moving up, and tasting of salt (X16, X11).
- A single feather, grey and much too large, lying flat in the dust as though it had been placed (X17, X20).
Exits
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | All DCs −2. The lamps last two hours |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | DCs +1. The lamps last half an hour, because the draught is stronger than it looks |
| 15 | DCs +3, and the door does not fully close: for the first three rooms, one PC per room hears the taproom faintly, from the wrong direction, saying something they will not want repeated. It is not a threat. It is worse |
The gentlest premise in the deck. Nobody is captive, nothing is confiscated, nobody died, and the tone is wonder rather than dread. Use this Beginning for a nervous table, a new player, or a session that follows something heavy.
- This is the deck's "no premise required" opening, and it is the right one for a drop-in session, a one-shot inside a campaign, or a party who came off another adventure that same evening. It takes four minutes and asks for nothing.
- Play the wall change as mundane, not sinister. No hum, no shimmer, no ominous music. The corridor is warm and pleasant and completely indifferent, and that is much more unsettling than a slamming door.
- Let a player name the Labyrinth. Somebody at the table will know where they are from the mortarless stone and the bull motif, and giving them that moment is free.
- The library wink is a wink, not a crossover. Do not spend table time on which oneshot the party came from. One line about the taproom, one about the knucklebones, and move.
- Getting home is not the Resolution. Whatever Resolution you rolled gets them out of the maze; how they get back to Misthaven is next session's problem, and saying so cheerfully at the end is part of the charm.
- If you are running short, the footprints and the wall are enough. Three minutes.