The Way You Came
You know this floor. There are grooves cut in it, running the length of the hall in parallel lines, and you know what grows in them.
Forty feet ahead is the threshold and the bronze gate beyond it, and between you and both of those there are eleven people with spears who have been told that nothing comes out of this maze. They are not monsters. They have a brazier going and somebody has been eating olives.
They have heard you. They are standing up. One of them says, quite clearly, "That's not the priest."
The Way Out
The simplest ending on the list: turn around and go back.
The entrance hall is where the party came in — R001 Threshold of Bronze Teeth for most, the arena ramp for a B03 party, the sinkhole or the sea cave for others. Nothing about it has changed. It is not hidden, it is not lost, and it is not far.
It is held. Somewhere in the last several hours the Cult of the Thread (W18) worked out that there are living people in the maze who are not supposed to be, and they have done the sensible thing: put eleven wardens and two officers on the threshold and barred the gate from outside.
This is the Resolution where the party fights their way out of a building. It is the most straightforward and the most violent, and it is the only one where the last scene of the session is a straight tactical problem with people on the other side of it.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Knowing the way back | Any of: the thread (X10), a map (X14), a guide (X05), or simple memory — a party who came in through R001 can retrace three or four rooms without a check. R037 The Cartographer's Cell shortcuts it entirely |
| A plan for the threshold | Eleven wardens and two officers in a 60 × 40 hall with a brazier, a barricade of pen hurdles, and the tooth-grooves in the floor. R026 Court of the Thread-Wardens and R031 The Braying Arena both teach how the Cult fights; R013 Hoplite Ossuary teaches what the grooves do |
| The gate | Barred from the outside. Either the wardens open it — because they are told to, tricked into it, or routed through it — or the party works the counterweights from the gatehouse, which is X19's machine and can be borrowed wholesale |
| Willingness | Whatever walks up out of the Labyrinth of Knossos in daylight becomes a story on Crete the same afternoon. Some parties want that. B03 parties, who were put in an arena for somebody's entertainment, want it very much |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | Woodsmoke. Faint, and in a maze that has no fires in it, coming from the direction you came from. |
| Trace | Fresh cordage. Somebody has spliced new rope into an old fixture within the last few hours, and they did it neatly and in a hurry. |
| Sign | A hurdle barricade across a corridor two rooms in from the entrance, built to be defended from the outward side. Somebody is keeping things in, not out. |
| Proof | Voices. Bored, unhurried, entirely human, discussing a rota — who has the middle watch, and whether the priest is coming down tonight. |
| Path | The entrance hall from the inside, seen from a doorway: the brazier, the barricade, eleven spears, two officers, and the bronze gate shut behind all of it. |
| Door | The gate open — however you managed it — and the ramp beyond, and daylight on limestone, and Knossos going about its business at the top of the slope. |
Resolution Scene
Twenty minutes, and the decision is which of the three doors out of this fight you take.
The threshold. 60 × 40 ft, the bronze gate on the short wall, the party's doorway opposite. Tooth-grooves in the floor running lengthwise. A hurdle barricade at the midline, a brazier, and a stack of the Cult's supplies. Eleven wardens (W18) at the barricade and two officers behind it — one who gives orders and one who has the gate key on a cord.
Three ways through, and they are all real.
- Fight it. A Hard encounter at APL 9 and no more than that: eleven wardens is a great many bodies and not much threat, and the officers are the fight. Three tactical facts the party can use, all of them learned earlier in the maze:
- The grooves. Anything sown in them sprouts. The Cult knows this and stands clear of them; a party who kicks a broken tooth into a groove gets a skeleton fighting on the wardens' side of the barricade, and the line breaks.
- The brazier. Kick it into the hurdles and the barricade is on fire in two rounds. So is the party's air.
- The gate key is on a cord around one officer's neck, which makes this a fight with a target rather than a fight with eleven people.
- Bluff it. The wardens are waiting for a priest. They said so out loud. A party with Cult robes from R026, a bone needle from X10, or the sheer nerve to walk out of a labyrinth complaining about the standard of the rota can talk the gate open at Deception DC 16 — with advantage for every piece of Cult knowledge they picked up along the way. A party who bluffs this should not then be ambushed. Let it work.
- Work the gate yourself. The gatehouse is off the threshold hall and its counterweight machine is X19's. Get three people in there for ninety seconds while the rest hold the door, and the gate comes up with the wardens on the wrong side of it. This is the best version of the scene and it needs a party who splits up under pressure.
The clock. The gate takes ninety seconds to open by any method and the officers can send for more. Six rounds, and on round 6 a second watch of six arrives from the gatehouse stair. That is the pressure; it is not a wipe, and it is not endless.
The wardens are people. Bored, olive-eating, on a rota, doing what a priest told them. A party who routs them will have them run, not fight to the last, and a party who kills eleven of them has done something the campaign should remember.
Fallback
The party cannot take the threshold — too hurt, too few, out of everything.
- The tribute hatch. In the ceiling of R001, or the first room in from whichever entrance the party used, there is a hatch the Cult lowers food through. It opens once a day, a little before dawn, for about four minutes, and it is nine inches wider than a person.
- Cost: the wait. However many hours until dawn, hidden in the room with the tooth-grooves, with the Cult's own supply party arriving at the other end of it. No long rest — the party spends the night in the one place that is guaranteed to be visited. Stealth DC 15 as a group when the hatch opens, and a scramble.
- They come out in the dark, in the Cult's own supply yard, past a mule and a sleeping boy, and they are outside before anybody knows it.
- The party still gets out. Quietly, at dawn, having beaten the threshold by refusing to fight it. This fallback is arguably a better ending than the fight; do not apologise for it.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The gate key on its cord — a bronze tally, not a key, cut to a warden's rota. It gets its bearer past any Cult of the Thread checkpoint once, and the Cult keeps checkpoints all over Knossos.
- The threshold, held open behind you. Whatever the party did to that gate, it is now a door that Minos's maze does not control, and the party is the reason. Somebody will come asking.
- The Cult's supplies: rope, oil, bread, olives, water, and a rota with names on it. The rota is the useful part.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Six wardens and one officer, no second watch, and the barricade is half-built. Deception DC 13 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Sixteen wardens, three officers, and a bull-brute (W02) chained by the gate as a deterrent. The second watch arrives on round 4 and again on round 8. Deception DC 18 |
| 15 | As APL 12, and the High Warden himself is on the threshold — use the F16 boss statistics as a mid-fight arrival on round 5. The gate is chained as well as barred |
- This is the Resolution for a party that has decided to be the monster that comes out of the maze, and the tone should honour that. They have been prey for four hours. Now eleven people with spears are watching a doorway and something is in it.
- Keep the wardens human. The olives, the rota, the man who says "That's not the priest." A threshold fight against faceless cultists is forgettable; a threshold fight against bored men on the middle watch is the ending of a session people quote.
- All three approaches must be genuinely available, and the bluff must be allowed to simply work. The single worst outcome here is a party who talks their way to the gate and is then ambushed for it, which teaches the table that the social path is a trap.
- The tooth-grooves are the callback. If the party opened this session in R001 watching hoplites sprout out of the floor, letting them weaponise the same grooves against the people guarding the door is the best structural joke the Labyrinth has. Reward anyone who thinks of it enormously.
- Six rounds, one reinforcement wave. Do not let this become an endless-spawn fight. The clock exists to make the party commit, not to grind them down.
- B03 parties were thrown into an arena for an audience. Let the audience be at the threshold. Let one of the wardens be somebody who was cheering.
- If the party is out of time, put six wardens on the barricade, let one good idea open the gate, and go to daylight. Eight minutes.