9
The Delivery
Resolution
stealth-viabletimerparley-viable
The cellar smells of tallow, brine, and the sour end of last year's wine. Forty empty jars stand along the wall in ranks, mouths up, each one tall enough to hide a person who does not mind their knees.
Above and outside a chain is running, and it keeps running. The cold air coming down the chute with it smells of a wet street before dawn: dung, straw, rain. A man comes in with a lamp and a wax tablet, and starts counting jars.
The Way Out
Nothing grows down here. Every lamp burns oil pressed in a grove somebody owns, every candle was rendered from a beast that ate grass, and the firewood beside the refectory hearth came off a hillside with trees on it. The maze is victualled, by a palace, and a palace keeps accounts — so it is victualled on a round.
- What comes down. Lamp oil and tallow, grain, salt fish, charcoal, cut olive-wood, and wine in the great two-handled jars. Every ninth day the run doubles and twelve head of cattle come down on the hoof behind it.
- How often, and when. A run every third day, arriving in the receiving cellar an hour before dawn, in the dark, by lamp. It has not been missed in living memory: the thing at the bottom of this maze eats in all weathers.
- How long the floor is busy. Forty minutes to unload and tally, twenty to load the empties and lash them. The first empty truck goes up at first light and the last is through the top gate inside the hour.
- How far up. Nine minutes on the chain — a hundred feet of bronze chute, then four hundred of rail at one in six, to a receiving yard behind the cattle market with the sky on it.
- How many drovers. Seven. Four carters with goads, a tallyman with a wax diptych, and two chute-men on the windlass.
Nobody in this ending is helping you. They are not guards, not initiates, not anybody's agents; they are men on a wage at four in the morning who want their breakfast, and they will not hide the party or lie for it. They will, however, fail to look — and a party that can hold still, smell right, and let a bored man count jars a foot from its face is in daylight before he finishes his tally.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| The round | R014 The Drowned Ledger is a receiving clerk's office: among the forty-one surviving wax tablets are victualling entries — jars down, jars up, by day and hour — and the round has not changed in a century. R059 The Counting Room has the living version: the surveyor's tally-board carries an outer column, advancing by threes, with carts written at its head. Investigation DC 14, or free to anyone who reads either document aloud |
| Something to ride inside or under | R084 The Cool Cellar — eleven sunken pithoi, one cracked and empty, and the ranks of returns beside them. R090 The Vintner's Trap — the stacked amphorae on the walkway, empty, shipping marks still on their shoulders. R058 Cellar of the Wine-Dark Vat — sixty-one casks, five courses, and most of them going back up |
| Smelling and looking like freight | R019 The Tallow Refectory — tallow, sacking, cold mutton fat, and a stack of firewood that came down this same way. R090 or R058 do it faster and worse: must to the elbow, or wine to the knee. Ten minutes and no check, and it is the requirement parties skip and then regret |
| The route to the cellar | The victualling corridors are threaded for the drovers, and the guide-line is thicker, waxed, and rubbed shiny at hand height on both sides. R026 Court of the Thread-Wardens teaches the knots; anyone who read the splices there recognises the line anywhere, no roll. Otherwise Survival DC 13 to follow ruts, dung, and spilled grain uphill |
| Being there on the morning | R093 The Bronze Cattle Chute is the way up, and the drovers' route-board hangs by its windlass: a scratched plank listing the day's runs in order. Perception DC 12 to read it, and it names the hour. The chute is a goods road that happens to be swept by a mechanical herd; the herd runs to clear the rail, not to kill anyone |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | A stack of split olive-wood beside a hearth, seasoned and axe-cut, in a place where nothing has grown for a thousand years. |
| Trace | Two grooves worn a hand deep into the flagstones, four feet apart, running away into the dark — and a dry cake of ox dung lying between them. |
| Sign | A chalk mark on the shoulder of a cask, in a clerk's hand: a house sign, a quantity, and a date. Somebody consigned this. Somebody expected it back. |
| Proof | A tally-board with a column nobody reads, ticking up by threes, and one word written at the head of it: carts. A man underground with no sun kept his calendar by the deliveries. |
| Path | The drovers' route-board by the windlass. The day's runs in order, an hour against each, and the last line: empties up, first light. |
| Door | Nine empty jars roped onto a truck in a cold cellar, a chain running above them, and grey light four hundred feet up the incline. |
Resolution Scene
Twenty minutes, and the decision is whether you go up as cargo or as labour.
The arithmetic. The tallyman knows six of the seven faces. Two extra pairs of hands on a busy morning is ordinary. Six is a problem. So the party splits, and the split is theirs: some carry, the rest ride.
- As labour. Apron, goad, and the end of a jar. Deception or Performance DC 13 on first contact, then no further check while they keep working — advantage if they smell right, disadvantage in armour, automatic failure for anyone carrying a shield. A suspicious drover raises no alarm; he asks who hired you, and a wineskin settles it. He would sell you for a copper if anyone thought to ask him later. He is not a friend.
- As cargo. A pithos is 4 ft tall with a 16-inch mouth: one person, knees to chin, armour off and packed separately, Acrobatics DC 10 to get in. The sack-load of green hides takes two lying flat and stinks appallingly, which is the point. The underframe takes one lashed above the rail slot — free with a harness, Athletics DC 13 for the nine-minute haul without one.
The six beats. In order, each on a different ability, about a minute apiece.
| Beat | The check | On a failure |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Getting aboard | Stealth DC 12 while the drovers are at the far end | A jar rocks. +1 Notice |
| 2 · The floor tally | Constitution DC 10 — dust, tallow, cold, do not cough | +1 Notice, and he pauses beside that jar |
| 3 · The lashing | Dexterity save DC 12 as the rope comes over the load | The rope pins a shoulder; hold or yelp. +1 Notice |
| 4 · The haul | Nine minutes of banging trucks. No check — this is the beat where the drovers talk about the maze over your head | — |
| 5 · The gate tally | A second man, a second list, daylight. Deception DC 13 or Sleight of Hand DC 13 | +1 Notice, and he calls the tallyman over |
| 6 · The yard | Fifty people, and getting off a cart is the loudest thing you do all morning | +1 Notice |
Notice is a track of three. At one, a drover looks twice. At two, the train halts while somebody walks the row with a lamp — one round to fix it with a bribe, a thrown voice, or somebody stepping out as hired labour and taking the attention. At three they are found and the Fallback runs. No single failure ends this ending, and the tension is entirely in the number, so say it aloud.
Fallback
Costly, twice over, and the party is outside at the end of both.
- They missed the day. Never make them wait three days in a maze that is hunting them — walk the haulage instead. Five hundred feet of greased incline: three Athletics DC 14 climbs, with the bronze herd running the rail to clear it every quarter hour — Dexterity save DC 15 for 4d10 bludgeoning, or press into a wall refuge. The top gate is chained: Athletics DC 17, ten minutes, loud, in daylight. Six armed strangers climbing out of the ground in front of the cattle market is a thing Knossos talks about for a year.
- They were found on the cart. The drovers will not fight adventurers for a wage; they cut the lashings and let the load run back down the incline, and the party has one round. Riding it down means starting again with the whole chute awake. Cutting their own truck free of the string keeps them on the chain: Dexterity save DC 13 or 3d6 bludgeoning as the load goes past, then the last two hundred feet with the gate coming down on its chain — Athletics DC 15 to get under it, or 2d6 and out anyway, scraped raw.
Either way they are on the surface within the hour: the fallback never costs the escape, only the anonymity that was the prize.
Rewards
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The tallyman's diptych, lifted off the cart or copied out in the cellar: a full year of the round, every delivery by day, by hour, by gate. Anybody who wants into that maze again — or out of it — has just been handed a door.
- A drover's apron and goad. Sacking gone stiff with tallow. In the receiving yard nobody looks at the wearer twice, and it will do that once more somewhere else before somebody asks a question it cannot answer.
- The maze does not know it lost you. No alarm, no forced gate, nothing killed. This is the only ending in the deck whose account of the night is nothing happened, and to a party intending to come back that is worth more than the wine.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | The round is every second day, so nobody has to wait. Five drovers, no second tally at the top gate, and Notice is a track of four. All DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Nine drovers, and the tallyman counts the empties by weight on a beam scale at the gate — a loaded jar is caught with no check unless the party has balanced the load. Notice is a track of two. DCs +1 |
| 15 | As APL 12, and it is the ninth day: cattle on the hoof in the chute, the bronze herd running behind them to keep them moving, and a priest of the Cult riding the last truck with a written manifest, checking seals. DCs +3, and the yard above is full because it is market morning |
DM Notes
- This ending is logistics, and logistics is a genre. Nobody grants permission, nobody takes pity, nothing is fought over: the party reads a timetable, finds a container, smells like cargo, and holds still. The pleasure of it is competence, not luck.
- Run the hold-still scene as six small beats, never as one Stealth roll. Aboard, the floor tally, the lashing, the haul, the gate tally, the yard — each on a different ability: Stealth, Constitution not to cough, a Dexterity save under the rope, nothing at all while the drovers gossip over their heads, Deception in daylight, a crowded yard. No failure ends the scene; it moves the Notice track, which is what the players sweat, so say the number aloud.
- The drovers must stay strangers. Give them names, breakfast, a grudge about the ox — and never let one decide to help. The moment a carter becomes an ally this turns into somebody else's ending, and it stops being frightening, because the party stops being freight.
- Spend a sentence on the smell. Blood, ash, and hot metal on six people is what gets them caught; tallow and lees is what fixes it.
- The tally is a person, not a DC. A cold man with a tablet who has counted forty jars three hundred times, who counts aloud, loses his place, and starts again. Put his lamp against the jar somebody is inside. That beat is the whole Resolution and it costs you nothing but nerve.
- If the party is out of time, cut straight to the load: they have the day, the jars are roped, and the scene is beat 2 and beat 5 only — floor tally, gate tally, two checks, eight minutes. Keep the chain running overhead.
- Table safety. Confinement: an adult folded into a jar, in the dark, being counted. Softer framing is the underframe or the hide-load — open air all the way up, same beats, same track.