The Beast's Own Road
The corridor has no lamp brackets. It has never had lamp brackets. What it has is a band of polish on the left-hand wall at the height of your shoulder, waxy and dark, running on ahead of your light and out of it.
The floor is ash, packed hard by something heavy going the same way many times, and the ash is warm, and the draught coming along it is warm too, and it smells of an animal that has been out in the rain.
Nothing in this maze has been out in the rain.
The Way Out
Nobody feeds the Labyrinth's residents, and the bones piling up in R082 Charnel of the Sated arrive whole with the hide still on. Something walks out of this maze on a routine, kills, and drags the kill back in through a gate Daedalus never built. It was worn.
The road is 600 feet of unlit tunnel from the maze to a gully on the hillside, and it is not a corridor in any useful sense: it is a hole an animal keeps open by using it. The party's plan is to work out the hours it walks, wait for it to be elsewhere, and walk out along its own trod while it is gone.
Geography, because the party will ask and the timing depends on it.
- The Ramp — 180 ft. Rising, ceiling 7 ft dropping to 5, floor of packed ash over grease. Everyone stoops. Anyone in heavy armour scrapes the roof and says so.
- The Squeeze — 60 ft. 3 ft wide, 4 ft high. Pinch point one. Hands and knees, single file, packs off and pushed ahead. Nobody turns round in here wearing anything. The walls are polished smooth at four and a half feet, both sides, by the same shoulders.
- The Straight — 300 ft. 8 ft wide, 6 ft high, dead flat, bone-meal and ash underfoot. There is no cover for 300 feet in either direction. An open flame here is visible end to end, to anything at either end.
- The Sill — 60 ft. Rising to a 30-inch stone lip under a low arch. Pinch point two, and it is a one-way sill: easy to come in over, awkward to go back.
Times. Stooping and crawling as the roof demands, the road is 27 rounds — three minutes. On hands and knees throughout, 40 rounds. Dashing where the roof allows, 14 rounds, each Dash a Dexterity save DC 12 or down loudly on your face.
This works whether or not the Final Encounter's boss is dead. The road belongs to the maze, not to one animal. Kill the thing they think owns it and something else is using it by evening — the pack off the chains in R071 Kennel of the Two-Headed, or a pair of the brood out of R095 Larder of the Drakon. Same hours, smaller shoulders on the wall. Do not tell the party the road is safe now.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| The schedule | R029 The Ash Trod is the road's last leg inside the maze: Survival DC 12 or Investigation DC 13 reads the trod as walked, not swept, with prints going both ways in two ages. Cross-check it against a larder — R082 Charnel of the Sated (how cold the last kill is), R095 Larder of the Drakon (the salt-wrapped stack is dated by how far the crust has gone grey), R043 Cyclops Larder (the butcher keeps a scratched count on his block and it is honest) |
| How far into the hour you are | The freshest print at the sill. Survival DC 14 puts it to the nearest quarter-hour. On a failure by 5 or more, give them a wrong answer in a confident voice and let them act on it — this is the check the whole ending turns on |
| Light discipline, or none | The shuttered kennel-lamp by the door in R071 Kennel of the Two-Headed, or the drovers' hooded lantern in the loft of R004 Pen of the Lowing Dark. Darkvision is better. Best of all is the pegged guide-rope, which is what somebody else used |
| Your own smell, dealt with | The trod's own ash and burnt hair out of R029 (its west door already sends the party out stinking of it), the wet straw and dung of R004, blood off the hoist in R071 or the hooks in R043, or the cold salt-crust of R095. Unmasked, treat the returning resident as passive Perception 17 by scent alone, in pitch dark, on ground it knows |
| Where the road starts | Behind the 5-ft slump at the west door of R029, where the trod does not stop. The chute 8 ft up the wall of R082 is a spur of it. The herd in R057 The Split Herd will tell you for a skin of wine which of their four ways out nobody uses. Not R074 Stalls of the Bronze Herd — those bronze-lined grooves are rails, they go to a loading floor, and nothing wheeled has ever been on this road |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | A warm draught along a dark corridor, and in it a smell that is not smoke and is not damp: an animal that has been out in the rain. |
| Trace | A band of dark polish on one wall at shoulder height, waxy to the touch, with coarse hair caught in the mortar. Undisturbed dust above it and below it. One band only. |
| Sign | A rope pegged along the wall at hand height to be followed blind, and a column of hours chalked beside the pegs in a careful surveyor's hand — the last four marks scrawled. Forty feet on, the pegs are torn out and lying pointed back the way they came, and there is one sandal. |
| Proof | Green nettle and a sprig of gorse trodden into the ash, beside a drag-trail where something the size of a deer was hauled inward. Nothing green grows in here, and nothing green has ever come in through the front gate. |
| Path | R029 The Ash Trod, and the count off it: out and back twice in a day and a night, gone about an hour each time, and the trod carries on past the slump at the west door. |
| Door | A low arch, a stone sill worn into a saddle, and past it cold air that tastes of salt and wet furze, and a grey line of sky in the top of a gully. |
Resolution Scene
Fifteen minutes, run as six beats, and the decision is when to start.
Set the clock before they step on. Take the freshness read privately and note a number of beats: eight if they read the tracks well, four if they failed by 5 or more, and never tell them which they got. The road is six beats long. Complications cost one beat each. It comes back at the top of the beat after your number runs out.
| Beat | The road | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Ramp, stooping, grease underfoot | Heavy armour: Stealth DC 13 or one beat |
| 2 | The Squeeze, packs off and pushed | Anyone above Medium size: Athletics DC 14 or one beat, and the pack stays |
| 3 | The Straight, first half, no cover | Nothing, unless a light shows |
| 4 | The Straight, second half. The guide-rope's pegs end here | One beat if they stop for the sandal, and they will |
| 5 | The Sill approach, the dung heap, the smell at its worst | Constitution save DC 11 or the retching gives them away |
| 6 | Over the sill and out | Athletics DC 10, no consequence for failure except noise |
The real decision is at the mouth, before beat 1. Going now means walking on a number they half-trust. Waiting for the next departure means six hours in the dark beside its front door — a short rest they will not enjoy, and a real chance something else finds them first. Put both on the table plainly. Do not let a player who says "we wait" discover that waiting was secretly wrong: it costs an encounter roll, no more.
Light. An open flame on the Straight is seen end to end, no check. A shuttered lamp cracked to a slit is Stealth DC 15 to work while moving. No light at all is half speed and no Perception beyond arm's reach: double the Straight's beats, often correct.
Fallback
They are on the road when it comes back. This is the fallback, and it is where most tables will end up. Nobody dies here by default and nobody goes back the way they came.
- The warning. One beat before it arrives: the draught reverses, and the wall-polish is suddenly wet. Give them that, always, and give them the beat to use it.
- Go flat. At the Squeeze, and only there, the wall is worn out into a hollow one body deep. Lightless and masked: Stealth DC 15, advantage if they dealt with their smell, disadvantage if they did not. It passes within a foot of their faces. A failure is not a fight — it is being stepped on. 3d6 bludgeoning, knocked prone, and it does not stop, because a thing that lives here is used to bones in its road.
- Or go past it. The Straight is eight feet wide and so is it. Athletics or Acrobatics DC 15 to slip by along the wall; failure is 4d6 bludgeoning and shoved 20 ft back down the road, retryable next round. Two rounds of this is enough. It is not hunting them — it is going home with a carcass in its teeth and it wants the corridor.
- Then out. Once it has passed, the gate is behind it and the road is empty all the way to the sill. Everybody still moving walks out. Anybody down gets dragged out by the ankles. This always resolves.
- The price. A pack each left in the ash, one item of the DM's choosing gone for good, a level of exhaustion apiece, and the road is now known to have been used. Nobody comes back this way quietly, and the next party who tries finds the gully watched.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The hours, written down. A knotted cord or the surveyor's chalk column, marked with when it walks. There is no map of this gate anywhere in Knossos: every faction that wants quietly into the Labyrinth will pay stupidly for it, and every faction that wants it sealed will pay more.
- The sheddings at the sill. A plate of horn the size of a buckler, worn off against the same stone over years of the same shoulder. Proof of the beast that is not a head on a spear, and nobody had to kill anything to hold it.
- The surveyor's chalk and the sandal. A name is cut into the chalk-stub's ferrule. Somebody's household is still waiting, and now the party knows what to tell them.
- What came in and did not go out. Off the drag-trail: a hunting spear with a farm's mark burned in the shaft, a shield with the boss stove flat.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | The guide-rope is intact end to end, so no Perception penalty for going lightless. All DCs −2, the road runs eight beats' grace on any read, and if it does come back it is a single hound on the Straight, not the resident |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | The Squeeze has partly fallen in: 40 ft of belly-crawl, packs left behind for good, and the hollow is gone, so a caught party has only the fight-past option. DCs +2, and the beat count drops by one |
| 15 | As APL 12, and the road is shared. Two departures overlap: something goes out while the party is walking in the other direction, on the Straight, before the resident ever gets home. Run that meeting first and the return afterwards |
- The road is a clock, not a puzzle. They can always walk it; what they cannot do is know how long they have. Keep the count on a slip of paper, mark beats out loud as they burn, and never announce the number you set. The ending is the sound of you making a mark.
- Run the dark in three parts, and never call for a flat Stealth check on the Straight. Each beat: one thing heard ahead, one thing heard behind, one thing a hand finds on the wall — dripping, their own breath coming back too fast off a narrowing, hair in the mortar, something warm and soft in the ash. Then ask if anybody wants light. The temptation to strike a spark is the scene. Checks belong at the pinch points only, where a body can actually be seen.
- Nothing wheeled has ever been on this road. If a player starts talking about carts, deliveries, or supply, that is a different way out entirely — send them to the bronze grooves in R074 and let this one stay what it is: a hole worn by feet.
- You need neither a dead boss nor a live one. Decide before the session which resident is walking tonight and stick to it. If the finale went the party's way, the shoulders on the wall are smaller and hungrier and the hours are unchanged.
- Somebody got here first and it went badly. The pegs torn out and pointing back, the one sandal, four scrawled marks at the end of a careful column. Do not explain it and do not let anybody find a body. The chalk is the horror: neat for two days, then not.
- Table safety. Crawling in pitch dark in a space too small to turn round in is the most reliably distressing thing in this deck. If it is on the veil list, run the Squeeze as a stooped walk of the same length and change nothing else; the timing is the point.
- If the party is out of time, skip the freshness read and the six beats. Give them the trod, the polish on the wall, one sentence of geography, and one roll: group Stealth DC 13 against a road they have twenty rounds to clear. Success is the gully and the rain; failure is the fallback in full, in five minutes. Keep the draught reversing, and keep the sandal.