The Hour the Door Opens
The chamber is thirty feet square and there is nothing in it — no bones, no lamp brackets, no marks on the walls but one: a stone bench along the south side, worn into hollows by people who sat on it a great deal.
Above the bench the ceiling opens into a bore going up and away at a slant, fourteen inches square, dressed as carefully as a well and far too narrow to be a way anywhere. Under it, flush in the floor, is a plate of black bronze the width of a shield, swept clean. Opposite, in a groove, stands a bronze leaf with no handle and no keyhole.
The Way Out
The shaft is not a shaft. It is a calendar, and the door is its hand.
Somebody raked ninety feet of bore through the rock at the angle that puts the rising sun on this floor on one morning of the year, and built a door that reads the light. Under the black plate is a sealed copper vessel of air; under that a stone jar of water and a lead pipe to a bucket on a chain. Warm the plate, the air swells, the water is driven up the pipe, the bucket outweighs the counterweight, and half a ton of bronze rises in its groove. The light goes, the air cools, and the leaf comes down.
The party never has to work any of that out. The door is not a puzzle and does not want solving — it opens itself for anyone standing in the room at the right minute of the right morning and stays open as long as the light is on the plate. Which is four minutes. Forty rounds, once a year. The whole problem is knowing when, and then being here, which means choosing to sit still in this maze while it comes looking for you.
Requirements
Knowledge, all of it, and all of it findable inside the maze.
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Which morning | R059 The Counting Room — the tally walls are not a body count, they are a calendar: bands of five, every three hundred and sixty-fifth mark cut deeper, and one of the deep ones ringed. Investigation DC 14 turns it into a date. R091 Cell of the Chained Prophet will simply tell them what day it is, without a check, and he is right |
| Which hour, and how long | R087 Ruin of the Old Temple — its own light-well was cut to catch the sun at one hour and is now plugged with maze fill. History or Religion DC 13 gives the reckoning the masons used: the second hour after sunrise, and the mason's note beside it that a light-shaft holds the sun for the length of four hundred breaths |
| Keeping the count underground | R091's drip fills its worn hollow at a rate a patient person can measure; R059's hundred-socket board and bowl of pebbles is the tally to measure it against. Either alone is a rough clock, both together a good one. A marked candle also works and is worse |
| Where the chamber is | R037 The Cartographer's Cell — Dexios's wall notes carry a bearing and a pace count to a dead-end chamber with a slanting bore he never reached and could not explain. R099 The Cartwheel Rotunda is the junction that reaches that quarter of the maze, and a lamp left in one of its outer mouths is how a party finds the same door twice |
| Leaving the machine alone | R073 The Balance Hall and R021 The Weighing Floor both teach the same lesson in a form a party remembers: a Daedalan counterweight opens for a load and closes when the load goes, and chocking one breaks it permanently. A party that has met either will not put a crowbar in this groove |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | One handspan of the corridor wall, at shoulder height, is warm. There is no fire within a mile of here and there has not been for years. |
| Trace | A stripe of bleached stone four inches wide, running down a wall and out across the floor and stopping at nothing — the colour limestone goes when the sun has had it. |
| Sign | A tally cut beside a doorway in bands of five, and every so often a mark cut twice as deep. One of the deep ones has a ring scratched round it, and there are nineteen ordinary marks after it. |
| Proof | A mason's section drawing: a chamber, a bore going up and away at a slant, the sun's line ruled straight down it, and the angle written beside it in a working hand. Underneath, in the same hand: the other one we left open. |
| Path | Six lines in a surveyor's notation — bearing, depth, pace count — and then plain Greek: the Old Door. The nineteenth morning from the ringed mark, at the second hour. Four minutes. Be early. |
| Door | The chamber itself: the worn bench, the black plate swept clean under a bore too narrow to climb, and a bronze leaf standing in a groove with nothing on it to grip. |
Resolution Scene
Twenty minutes, and the shape of it is a wait with four minutes on the end. Say the four minutes out loud when they arrive, and count the rounds aloud when they come.
Phase one — arriving early (2 minutes). Setting up is free and matters: sweep the grit off the plate, hang the drip where it can be heard, lay the pebbles out, clear the groove of rubble, block the doorway with the bench, set a watch order. Then ask each player what their character does with the hours. That is the scene.
Phase two — the vigil (four watches, roughly 2 minutes each). One character keeps the count each watch: Wisdom (Survival) or Intelligence (Investigation) DC 13 on the drip and the board. Each failure is one drift. Drift is scenery while the party stays put — the sun tells them in the end — and it only bites if they leave.
| Watch | The chamber | What arrives |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nothing but the drip and the dark | Nothing. Do not spoil this; the silence is doing work |
| 2 | The draught reverses and goes cold. Every open flame gutters out and wants relighting | Three scavengers off the live warband, hungry rather than hunting. Group Stealth DC 13 in full darkness and they go past |
| 3 | Dust sifts down the bore, and from a very long way up there is a goat bell | A patrol on a route: one Medium encounter's worth of the live warband. It will walk past a dark, silent room |
| 4 | The bore goes from black to grey | The noise clock cashes in. Whatever the party fought loudest comes back with company: one Hard encounter, in the room they need intact |
- The noise clock. Every round of combat fought in the chamber is one mark, and at three marks watch 4 arrives a watch early and one step harder. Tell them the bore carries sound, then let them choose.
- Stray blows. The jar, the pipe and the bucket chain are all against the south wall. Any burst that catches it cracks the jar; patch it with wax, pitch or tallow at DC 14, and unpatched the leaf rises three feet instead of six and holds two minutes.
- The real decision, in watch 4: hold the chamber and fight carefully in a room where the walls are the way out, or give ground into the maze and come back at a run. A party that leaves returns (5 − drift) minutes before the light, minimum zero — at drift 5 the door is already up and half the window gone. Never a shut one.
Phase three — the four minutes. A bar of gold appears high on the north wall and walks down it. It touches the plate; count thirty seconds; something under the floor knocks twice, and the leaf goes up in its groove with a hiss of water. Beyond it, seventy feet of raking stair, gorse roots through the joints, and morning.
- Forty rounds. Six people walking out with their packs on is about eight of them — a generous window for a party that is ready, and none at all for one arguing about rope.
- One errand is possible and no more. Fifteen rounds out and fifteen back at a dash is roughly 300 feet of maze: the last room, not the one before it. Dragging a body or an unconscious character halves it.
- The leaf falls when the light leaves, over two rounds. Anything in the groove takes 4d10 bludgeoning and is pinned; Strength DC 16 to hold it, Dexterity DC 15 to clear. Offer it as a tactic first — a pursuing warband can be walked into it.
- Arriving in the last minute is survivable: jam the groove with a spear, a crowbar or a chain, Athletics DC 15 — sixty more seconds, and 2d6 off the jammer.
Fallback
Wrong day, wrong hour, or an hour too late. They do not wait a year.
- Light a fire on the black plate. Twenty minutes fed hard: three pints of oil or its equivalent in torches, spear hafts, packs and the bench, which means the party's light for the rest of the session goes into it.
- The chamber has no draught with the leaf down. At the end of every 5 minutes of burning, each character makes a Constitution save DC 12 or takes a level of exhaustion — four saves in all.
- The vessel splits with a bang like a dropped anvil. Half the counterweight is gone, the leaf heaves up eighteen inches and jams, and it will never move again.
- Everyone goes out flat — packs pushed ahead, plate armour off and fed under separately, one at a time, in the smoke. Anything Large takes another road.
- What it costs: the fuel, the exhaustion, and the machine — no annual door, no way back in, and the next people to sit on that bench sit there for nothing.
- The party still gets out. Always. Say so.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The angle. The mason's section drawing: a working sun-shaft calculation that fixes where the maze sits under the sky, and worth an unreasonable amount to anybody who means to come back.
- The date. They know to the morning when that door opens again — a way into the Labyrinth of Knossos, once a year, for four minutes, that no gate guard controls.
- The black plate, but only out of the wreck of the fallback: a hand's width of bronze so dark it looks like a hole, warm to the touch at noon, indoors, in winter.
- The bench. Everybody who ever waited here cut a name into the underside of it, and there is room for six more. Adding theirs in the last hour is what it is for.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Three watches, one arrival, and the drip clock is already rigged by whoever sat here last. All DCs −2, the window is six minutes, and the leaf stays up until somebody steps clear of the plate |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Grit sifts down the bore all night: the plate must be swept in every watch (Perception DC 14 to notice it is dirty) or the door lifts three feet. Arrivals in watches 2, 3 and 4, DCs +2, window three minutes |
| 15 | As APL 12, and the groove is fouled with rubble somebody packed in on purpose — Athletics DC 17 during the light or the leaf stops at four feet. Watch 4 is the live warband in force, the window is two and a half minutes, and whatever survives follows the party up the stair into the daylight |
- Deciding what day it is takes one sentence and no calendar. The moment the party earns the Path clue, say out loud: the door opens on the morning after you have entered three more chambers. Pick a number that leaves three to five rooms and hold to it. The session's room count is the only clock this game has, and a good one.
- The wait is the scene, not the filler. Two arrivals across four watches is the ceiling; a third turns a vigil into a wave defence and loses the one thing that makes this ending unlike the other nineteen. The material is the watch order, the drip, and what six people say to each other in the dark with four hours to fill.
- Do not let anybody solve the door. If a player starts prising, the first check tells them plainly that this is a counterweight and levering it breaks it — and if they break it anyway, that is the Fallback and it works.
- Being early is free and being late is expensive. Say it in those words: it is the whole strategy here, and a party that hears it plans around a clock, not a corridor.
- The shoulder mornings. Missing by a day either side, the light still reaches the plate weakly: the leaf lifts a foot and holds ninety seconds. Two or three people prone, no packs, no armour, and somebody left to try the fallback. Offer that rather than the year, and make them choose who.
- If the party is out of time, hand them the Path clue in the corridor outside, open on watch 4 with the fight already joined, and run the four minutes. Eight minutes at the table, and keep the bar of gold walking down the wall.
- Table safety. Waiting in the dark, and a squeeze under half a ton of bronze in the Fallback. If either sits badly, run the vigil with the lamps lit and stand the jammed leaf at three feet. Nothing else changes.