The Surveyor's Crew

BeginningImplies X14

map-knowledgelore-checkbone-strewn

Illustration: Beginning 11 — The Surveyor's Crew

Illustration: Threads — Thread XI — The clue

The contract is for eleven days at four drachmae a day, and the work is described as measurement. You have a chain, a plumb bob, six sticks of chalk, a wax tablet ruled in squares, and a foreman who has explained twice that the previous crew's failure to return is a scheduling matter.

At the survey station — a room they have shored with timber and lit properly, forty feet inside the entrance — the previous crew's tablet is sitting on a crate. It is filled in neatly to room fourteen. Room fifteen has been started. The line stops in the middle of a wall.

Premise. The party is hired labour on a mapping expedition, which makes them the only Beginning in the deck that walks in with a professional method. That method is X14: no artefact, no princess, no wings — they get out because they mapped their way out, and they are already carrying the tools.

Starting State

Full kit, plus the survey outfitting, which is the point of this Beginning:

A surveyor's chain — 66 ft, jointed, with brass tally-tags every ten feet.
A plumb bob and line.
Six sticks of chalk, and permission to write on anything.
A wax tablet ruled in squares, plus the previous crew's tablet, filled to room fourteen.
A shored, lit survey station forty feet inside the entrance, with a brazier, a water butt, timber, and a bell on a cord that rings at the entrance. The bell works exactly twice before the cord is cut.

Full HP and spell slots.
The crew. The party is the crew — no NPC porters to manage. The foreman stays outside; he is emphatic about this.

Opening Scene

The survey station: a 35 ft × 30 ft chamber the last crew shored with ship's timber, floored in swept dust, with three passages off it and a proper lamp on a hook. It is the safest room the party will see for hours and it should feel like it.

No creatures. This is a working scene: the party learns the survey method, reads the last crew's notes, and discovers, without anyone saying it out loud, that the last crew got fourteen rooms in and then stopped mid-sentence.

The previous crew's tablet — hand this over and let the players read it. Fourteen entries, terse, professional, deteriorating:

Entry	What it says
Rooms 1–6	Dimensions, bearings, wall thicknesses. Immaculate
Room 7	Statuary. Do not sound the walls here.
Room 9	Chain 66 ft insufficient. Room is longer on return than on entry. Re-measured. Same result.
Room 11	Marked exit with chalk. Chalk absent on return. Re-marked.
Room 12	Ph. says the marks are being cleaned. Told him to keep measuring.
Room 13	Chalk absent again. Re-marked in charcoal, which does not wash.
Room 14	Charcoal absent.
Room 15	A line, started, stopping mid-wall

What the station tells them.

Feature	Check	What it gives
The shoring	Investigation DC 12	Good work, and recent. Timber cut to fit rooms further in — they came back this way at least once
The bell cord	Perception DC 13	Frayed, not cut, forty feet along its run. It failed on its own. Or something practised
The water butt	Survival DC 11	Fresh, and refilled two days ago. Something in here has water and knows where
Four bedrolls, three packs	Investigation DC 14	Four crew went in. Three packs came back to the station and were left. Nobody unpacked them
The wall by passage two	Investigation DC 15	A chalk arrow, half-erased, pointing at a blank wall — and behind the wall, hollow

Tool Loss and Recovery

Nothing is confiscated — the party keeps everything. What this Beginning owes instead is a tool-loss rule, because the survey kit is the Resolution and it has to be possible to lose it:

The chain is bulky. Any room where the party swims, squeezes, or flees without a round to gather gear puts it at risk: DC 12 or it is left behind. It can be recovered later from the room it was dropped in, if they go back.
Chalk runs out. Six sticks, one used per room marked. When they are gone, the party marks in charcoal, blood, scratches, or nothing.
The tablets are wax. Fire, water, and being sat on all threaten them. X14's fallback is written for a party that arrives at the end with no map at all.

First Clue (Whisper tier)

X14's Whisper is on the last crew's tablet, in their handwriting: "Chalk absent on return. Re-marked."

Somebody or something in this maze cleans up navigational marks. The party will not believe it until it happens to them, which should be around room three, and the realisation that they are in a contest with the dungeon over their own notes is X14's whole spine.

Exits

AObviousPassage one, the one the last crew's bearings all start from. No check.Rider: you leave on the surveyed route — the DM tells the party one true fact about the next room before they enter it, because the tablet says so.

BObviousPassage three, unsurveyed and unlit, with the water butt's draught coming out of it. No check.

CHiddenThe hollow wall by passage two, which the last crew found and did not open. Investigation DC 15 to confirm, then Strength DC 14 or a pick to breach.Rider: you arrive through a hole you made — no door means nothing closes behind you, and the party can retreat to the station from the next room without a check.

Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15

APL	Adjustment
6	All DCs −2. Eight sticks of chalk, and the chain is DC 10 to keep hold of
9	As written
12	DCs +1. Four sticks of chalk, and the previous tablet is water-damaged past room nine
15	DCs +3, and the fourth crew member is still in here: alive, feral, and still measuring. He can be found (a Lore or Navigation room, DM's choice), he is not hostile, and what he has measured is worth more than the party's chain — if they can get a straight sentence out of him

Table-Safety Note

Low intensity: an honest job, decent pay, and a mystery about missing colleagues. The heaviest beat is the abandoned bedrolls, which is atmosphere rather than horror. Safe to run cold.

DM Notes

The best Beginning in the deck for a party that likes competence, and the only one that hands them a method instead of a mandate. Engineers, rangers, and note-taking players will love it, and the tablet prop does most of your work.
Actually make them draw the map. Not to scale, not carefully — but if a player is willing to sketch rooms and exits on a napkin, X14's ending becomes the best fifteen minutes of the session. Encourage it once, then leave it alone.
The maze cleaning their marks is the tone, and it must happen on-screen. Around room three, have a chalk arrow be gone. Not smudged. Gone. No explanation, then or later. If they set a watch on a mark, let them see nothing at all — and let the mark still be missing after.
Do not overuse the missing crew. Three encounters with their traces across nine rooms is plenty, and one of those should be a pack with a name in it.
X14 has the most demanding fallback in the deck because it depends on player effort rather than an object. Read it before you run this Beginning, so you know how generous you are prepared to be.
If you are running short, hand over the tablet, read four entries aloud, and let them pick a passage. Five minutes.