The Unburied
There is a hollow in the dust of this corridor the length of a person, and nothing lying in it.
Further on there is a coin on the floor, green with age, worn thin, sitting by itself where a mouth would have been. It has been lying on clean stone for four hundred years, waiting to be paid to somebody.
And the draught, when it comes, does not smell of damp or of stone. It smells of dug earth.
The Way Out
The Labyrinth has been killing people for four centuries and it has never once buried one. The shades in it are not hostile so much as unfinished, and three of them can be finished. The rite is the oldest and least clever thing in this book: say who they were, pour water, pay the ferryman, and put them under earth. It is not a spell and there is no check that makes it work. It is carrying, digging, and saying the words out loud in a maze where saying anything out loud is how people die.
The three, as written. A DM can run all of them off this page.
| Who they were | How they died | What this one's rite needs |
|---|---|---|
| Kallias son of Damon, hoplite, third file — R013 | Sealed behind the door his file was set to hold, and died of thirst on the wrong side of it. Somebody laid his kit out for a funeral nobody came back to hold | His bones went onto the shelves and cannot be told from anybody's. You cannot gather him. Bury the kit that was laid out for him — the name is punched on the shield rim — in the spent sowing grooves ten feet away. The whole rite fits inside one room |
| Thaleia the weaver, of the tribute quarter — R054 | Went off the ninth step into the open well, going back up for her boy. She is still turning to call him | Her bones are sixty feet down in the passage the stair does not reach: a rope, an anchor, and somebody willing to go and fetch her up. She wants an answer, not a name — say Hylas back to her and say truthfully what became of him, which is what R076 is for |
| Deukalion, of the lost cohort — R022 | Sent out for water forty years ago, walked into the colonnade talking, and was still talking when it reached him | Under the sherd-drift at the west wall, and there is no earth in a colonnade. He must be carried out — four hundred pounds of dead soldier across the loudest floor in the maze — and his name has to be said aloud over him before he is lifted, which in that room is one sound token out of three |
Do all three and the dead come. Not to fight: the maze's grey population comes out of the walls and walks the party to R087 Ruin of the Old Temple, to the shrine's north wall — red stone, no handle, no hinge, no join, and not one of that room's three exits. It is the door the priests used, back when this was a temple and not a prison, and it opens because it is asked to by people who have earned the asking.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| The three dead | R013 Hoplite Ossuary, R054 Stairwell of the Nine Dead, and R022 Colonnade of Sighing Shades, as the table above. R082 Charnel of the Sated and R083 Gymnasium of Dead Champions each supply a fourth if the DM needs one |
| A name for each | The punched shield-rim and sealed tablet in the grave-goods of R013; the nine names at sitting height in R076 Alcove of the Kind Shade, and Ligeia, who remembers all nine and will simply tell you; the forty years of rolls and tallies at R096 Camp of the Lost Cohort; the punched trophies of R083. Religion DC 12 or History DC 13 confirms a name once the party has it |
| Something to pour | Clean water: R063 Bath of the Cold Spring, R089 Pool of the Sleeping Naiad, or the left-hand mouth of R015 Fountain of Two Mouths (the right one is foul and the rite will not take it). Wine from R058 does as well and the dead prefer it |
| A coin apiece | Grave-coins spat out among the bones under the drift in R082 (Investigation DC 13, ten minutes, and the Ker's leash is thirty feet); the offering bowls at the second, fourth and sixth column-pairs of R022 (Sleight of Hand DC 14 not to ring them); the quartermaster's chest at R096, whose priest will hand over three without being asked twice. No coin the party brought in is needed |
| Earth, and something to dig with | The spent sowing grooves of R013 — dead soil that will grow nothing ever again, loose, and already in a trench; the raked sand of the skamma in R083, which costs a dedication at the rack first; the red roof-fall in the collapsed void of R087. A mattock and a trenching spade are lent freely at R096 by men who will not leave their post to help; otherwise it is a shield and forty minutes |
Running one rite: four acts, no check on any of them. Dig — forty minutes with a spade in shifts, eighty with shields, Athletics DC 12, and a failed check is another twenty minutes rather than a failure. Say who they were. Pour. Put the coin in the mouth, or on the breastbone where there is no mouth left. Cover them. Religion DC 12 for the words only if nobody present would know them. The maze gets one wandering-threat roll per rite, and you should take it while somebody is knee-deep in a grave with their armour off.
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | The draught in this passage has dug earth in it. Not damp, not stone dust — turned soil, sixty feet under a hill where there is no soil. |
| Trace | A bronze coin lying alone in the middle of a swept floor, worn thin, exactly where a jaw would be. There is no jaw. |
| Sign | Three lines scratched at knee height beside a doorway, and a fourth begun and abandoned. Under them, pressed in wet chalk-dust, a spread hand — the old sign for one lies here. |
| Proof | A priest's burial roll on a plaster wall: forty names in two columns, the first struck through one by one, the second untouched. At the foot, in the same hand: the second column we could not carry out by the road. |
| Path | Cut into the underside of the old shrine's offering table, a plan of the room — four pillars, the light-well, and a straight line north out of the wall to a rectangle marked with the double axe and the word for the road of the dead. |
| Door | The shrine's north wall. Red stone, no handle, no hinge, no join you could get a knife into — and the dead standing in front of it, three deep, all of them facing the party, waiting to be asked. |
Resolution Scene
Fifteen minutes, and the decision is what you do with a door that will not stay open.
Phase one — the third grave (3 minutes). Whoever has the spade fills the last of it in. No roll. The shade watches the way people watch a grave being filled, says one true thing, and goes out like a lamp in a draught. The three sentences are in Rewards.
Phase two — they come (4 minutes). Every shade the party has walked past comes out of the stone: the nine on the stair, the procession from the colonnade, the man with his lamp. Do not roll initiative and do not let a player do it either. Nothing touches anybody. They fill the corridor and walk, the party walks in the middle of them, and everything between here and the shrine stands aside — including what they fought earlier.
Phase three — the asking (3 minutes). At the north wall the dead stop and turn round, and nothing happens, because the door is not a mechanism. One character puts a hand on the stone and says the three names and what was done for each of them, out loud, in the first person. There is no check and there must not be one; ask the player to actually say it at the table. Then the wall moves — a whole course of red stone swinging inward on a pivot nobody cut, onto a level dry stair of older stone going up.
Phase four — the clock (5 minutes). The door stands open for ten minutes, plus one more minute each time any character says one of the three names aloud. Tell the players the clock exists. Then give them the three things worth arguing about:
- The dead do not come through. They cannot. They came as far as they can come and they stand in the doorway seeing the party off, and one of them will say so if asked.
- Anyone still alive down here is reachable, and there is time to go back. Roughly one room's worth. This is the real decision and it should cost minutes off the clock in front of the players, counted out loud.
- The door can be wedged. A spear, a shield rim, a mattock haft: Investigation DC 14 to see how it takes one. Wedged, it never closes again and the Labyrinth of Knossos has an open door on a hillside for the rest of the campaign. Let them decide, and write it down.
- If the maze interrupts — at APL 12 and up it should — the dead are in the doorway and they are not moving. Narrate what arrives; do not run it.
Fallback
Two rites of three, or a name said wrong, or a shade struck instead of buried.
- A wrong name is not fatal. The shade goes quiet, turns away, and will not look at anybody; come back with the right one and it costs twenty minutes and a wandering-threat roll. A knowing lie is different — the dead do not punish it, they decline.
- With only two paid, the door still moves — a hand's width at a time, only while somebody at the wall keeps saying the names, and it stops at eighteen inches.
- The cost: everyone goes through prone, one character per round, packs pushed ahead of them — Athletics DC 13, a failure is a stuck round and 1d6 bludgeoning as the slab settles, and the last one through takes 2d6. Every pack that will not fit stays in the maze; take the bulky items off the sheets in front of the players.
- The party still gets out. All of them. On the hillside, in the tombs, in daylight, carrying their weapons and a debt to somebody they did not finish — a hook for later, not a penalty for tonight.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The coin you did not spend. One grave-coin, kept back. While it is carried, anything that was once a person and is not one now hesitates for one round before it acts against the bearer — once per creature, and never for anybody who strikes first.
- Three names, written down. Families in Knossos and Amnisos never got these bodies, and a party who can name three of them is owed hospitality in three houses for life.
- What each one said before it went. Kallias: "Tell them the door held." Thaleia: "Did he get up the stair?" — and the honest answer is yes, he sat on a bench two corridors away and went on, and Ligeia watched him do it. Deukalion says nothing at all. He salutes, badly, and that is the one the table will remember.
- The priests' road. A slab of red stone in a hillside cemetery above Knossos, which opens from the outside for anyone who says the three names. Decide before next session whether your campaign wants a back door into the Labyrinth, because it has one.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Two rites, not three, and the colonnade one is not on the list — Kallias and Thaleia are both diggable in the rooms they died in. All DCs −2, digging takes ten minutes, and the door's clock is twenty |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Four rites, and the maze interrupts each one at the halfway mark: roll a wandering threat over an open grave, with the digger prone in it. DCs +2, digging takes forty minutes, and the clock is eight |
| 15 | As APL 12, and something is feeding on the unburied and objects to the work — the fourth body has to be taken off whatever is eating it in R082, without a fight, before it can be covered. DCs +3, the clock is five minutes, and a wedge is the only way anybody goes back for anybody |
- This is the gentlest ending in the deck. Play it completely straight. No twist, no shade that turns, no price hidden in the fourth act, no lesson about trusting the dead. The party does an honest, tiring, unglamorous kindness and it works exactly as promised. A DM who puts a sting in this one has broken the only ending in twenty that rewards decency, and the table will feel it for the rest of the campaign.
- Charge them the labour and make them describe it. Forty minutes a grave, in the dark, in shifts. Ask who is digging and who is holding the light. The whole Resolution is the difference between we bury him and forty minutes off the session clock, and only one of those earns the door.
- Make the players say the words, not you. When a name goes into the air, ask the player to say it out loud at the real table, and let three seconds go by afterwards.
- The colonnade rite is the hard one and it is meant to be. The name has to be said aloud, and aloud is one sound token in a room with a blind wraith in it. The answers are all there: a globe of silence, a bowl thrown down-draught, or carrying Deukalion out to earth, which is the intended play and four hundred pounds of work.
- Nothing here is a fight. If a player attacks one of the three, it is not there any more and that rite is closed for the night; the other two still work and the fallback still opens the door. Do not roll initiative in this Resolution for any reason.
- This is not a bargain and it is not a guide. Nobody trades the party anything and nobody walks them out. The price is work and respect, never an object, and the dead are dead — if your table starts negotiating, the shades do not understand the question.
- If the party is out of time, they have already done one rite by accident somewhere tonight; say so, hand them Kallias's grave-goods and the spent grooves in the same room, run one dig and one name, and go straight to the asking. Eight minutes, and keep phase two — the walk out through the maze with the dead is what this ending is built for.