Bring It Down Behind You
The mason's confession is four tablets long and it is not about theft or murder. It is about a pillar.
I told him the west range wanted three and he gave me two, and I built it with two, and I have not slept in the eleven years since. If it ever comes down it will come down all at once and it will start in the room I am standing in.
There is a chalk cross on the pillar behind you. He made it himself, and he made it so that somebody would know.
The Way Out
The Labyrinth is not a cave. It is masonry, over a hundred years old, built fast by a man in a hurry for a king who kept changing the brief, and it has one structural sin: the west range's vault is carried on two piers where it wants three. The mason who built it wrote that down and left the tablets where they would be found.
Bring the west pier down and the range comes with it — a rolling collapse that runs outward through the maze's oldest corridors at about the speed of a hard run. Ahead of it, if the party has read the map right, is a stair to the surface.
This is the Resolution for a party that wants the Labyrinth to stop existing. It works. It is the loudest, most irreversible ending on the list, and it kills things that cannot get out.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Which pillar | R062 The Mason's Unfinished Wall is the source: the confession, the chalk cross, and a sketch. R073 The Balance Hall and R033 Trap of Tightening Walls both teach the same lesson mechanically — this maze is held up by fewer things than it looks. Investigation DC 15 in R062, or free if the party reads the tablets |
| A means | Any of: the counterweight cages of X19 dropped down the pier shaft; R077 Furnace of Falling Coals vented against the pier's base; the sluices of R024 The Split Aqueduct opened to undercut it; a cyclops from R043 or R023 persuaded to swing once; or forty minutes of honest work with a pick and Athletics DC 16 |
| A route | The collapse moves at 60 ft per round through old masonry, faster in the corridors, slower under vaulting. R037 The Cartographer's Cell and R059 The Counting Room are what make a survivable route plannable rather than a guess |
| A decision about who is down here | The chained prophet of R091. The kind shade of R076. The captives, the surveyor's crew, the naiad, whoever the party has met and left alive. Make the party say out loud what they are doing about them |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | Dust comes off the ceiling when something heavy walks two rooms away. Fine, grey, and steady, from a crack that runs the length of the vault. |
| Trace | A crack with a glass tell-tale cemented across it — an old mason's trick for watching a wall move. The glass is broken. |
| Sign | A chalk cross on a pier, redrawn many times over many years by the same hand, each time a little more emphatically. |
| Proof | Four wax tablets in a niche, in a mason's hand: I told him the west range wanted three and he gave me two. |
| Path | The mason's own sketch, with the pier marked, the range shaded, and a stair drawn in the corner with the note forty count, if you run. |
| Door | The pier itself, two feet out of plumb, groaning quietly under a hundred years of somebody else's mistake — and the stair, in sight, at the end of a straight corridor. |
Resolution Scene
Twenty minutes, and the last five of them are a chase.
Phase one — the choice (10 minutes). The party stands at the pier with the means in hand. This is the moment to make them account for it: the prophet is still chained, the kind shade is still in her alcove, the sirens are still on the shelf, and everything the party bypassed rather than killed is still alive down here. Do not lecture. Just ask who is coming with them, and let the party answer.
Anyone the party goes back for costs four rounds of the collapse budget each.
Phase two — the pull. One action, and it is worth ceremony. Describe the pier's first movement as small: a sift of dust, a sound like a door in another house.
Phase three — the run (5 minutes, in initiative). Nine rounds from the pull to the stair-head, and the collapse advances 60 ft per round from behind.
| Round | What the maze does |
|---|---|
| 1–2 | Dust and noise. A held-breath moment where nothing happens and everyone wonders if it worked |
| 3 | The first ceiling goes. Difficult terrain in the corridor behind; anything the party left back there is gone |
| 4–6 | Dexterity DC 14 each round against 2d6 bludgeoning from falling stone. One doorway drops and must be gone around, or forced at Athletics DC 14 |
| 7 | Something else is running the same corridor, in the same direction, for the same reason. It does not attack. Let the party decide whether to |
| 8–9 | The stair, and daylight coming down it, and the collapse arriving at the bottom step about a round after the last character leaves it |
The thing running beside them in round 7 is the scene's best moment. Whatever the party has been afraid of for two days, at a dead run, thirty feet away, with something much worse behind both of them.
Fallback
The collapse is faster than the party. Every Resolution has a costly way through.
- The vaulted chamber. One room in the west range is properly built — R032 Sanctum of Quiet Hours, or whatever sanctuary the party passed last. Its vault holds. Get inside, get low, and let it happen over your head. Constitution DC 13 against 3d6 and one level of exhaustion.
- Then dig. Six hours through what used to be a corridor, in the dark, on the air in one room. Group Athletics, three successes at DC 14, one check per hour. A party with a shovel, a spell, or a cyclops does it in two.
- Cost: the long rest they wanted, everything not carried, and the whole west range between them and any other exit. They come up through rubble into a Knossian hillside at dawn.
- The party still gets out. Slowly, filthily, and having survived being buried.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The mason's confession, all four tablets. An eleven-year-old signed statement that the king's architect built the west range wrong. Politically radioactive and worth a great deal to the wrong people.
- What came out with you. Anybody the party spent collapse rounds on is a reward — the prophet, the surveyor's crew, the missing girl — and they know things.
- The name of the maze's weakness, which the party can never use again because they have used it. There is only one west range.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Twelve rounds instead of nine, DCs −2, and the collapse is polite: it announces each ceiling one round before it drops |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Seven rounds, DCs +2, and two doorways drop instead of one. The thing running alongside in round 7 is hurt and hostile |
| 15 | Six rounds, DCs +3, and the collapse propagates ahead of the party as well — one round is spent running at a ceiling that is already coming down. Reward flight, teleportation, and stone-shaping outright |
- This is the loudest ending on the list and it should be allowed to be. A party who chooses to demolish the Labyrinth of Knossos has made a real decision about the world, and the correct response is to let it work and then to let the world react. Minos loses his maze, his beast, and his reputation in one afternoon.
- Never make the collapse a moral trap. Do not have the prophet's death be a surprise consequence. Put every life in the party's hands before they pull, name them out loud, and then hold them to whatever they chose.
- The nine-round table is the whole back half of the scene. Run it in initiative, keep the rounds fast, and narrate distance behind them rather than damage in front.
- Round 7 is not a fight. If the party attacks the thing running beside them, let them, and let the collapse take the round they spent. If they don't, let it reach the stair first and be gone, and never explain it.
- B12 parties ran into this maze to escape something outside. Bringing it down behind them means walking back out into whatever that was, on foot, at dawn. Ask them, at the stair-head, whether they still want to go up. Then let them.
- If the party is out of time, skip phase one, pull the pier, and run three rounds instead of nine. Ten minutes, and the stair.