The Salt Door
The corridor changes underfoot before it changes to look at. Grit, then wet grit, then a floor that is more barnacle than stone.
Then the sound. Not dripping — dripping you have had for two days. This is a slow enormous breath somewhere ahead, in and out, in and out, with about nine seconds between, and it smells like the outside of the world.
The Way Out
At the bottom of the seaward halls the Labyrinth simply stops being a building and becomes a cave, and that cave opens on the water at the foot of the Knossian cliff. A boat could come in at low tide. Nobody has, in years, because of what moved in.
The Salt Door is open for about twelve minutes at slack low water, twice a day. Outside that window it is thirty feet of flooded rock, and the party swims it on a held breath or not at all. The tide is not a punishment. It is the clock the whole scene hangs on, and the party can know it in advance.
The complication: the door is warm and safe and full of fish, which is why the Deep Water Kin (W14) keep a watch on it. Not a warband's worth — a watch. Two sirens on the rock shelf and something bigger asleep in the deep channel.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Reaching the seaward halls | Downhill and toward the sound of water. R010 Vault of the Salt Wind confirms the direction, R069 The Drowned Procession and R048 Chapel of the Iron Wave are on the way, and any water in the maze runs there eventually |
| The tide | R048 floods on a five-round cycle and the tide-marks on its wall are a table — Investigation DC 13 reads the last nine days off them. R010's gull bones and salt crust give Survival DC 14. Without either, the party arrives at a random point in the cycle: roll d12 for minutes until the next slack |
| Something that floats | A door, a table, the wine-vat lid from R058 Cellar of the Wine-Dark Vat, an inflated skin, or an actual raft from R008's pen hurdles. Athletics DC 12 to swim it unassisted; DC 16 in armour |
| Passage past the watch | Stealth on the shelf (Group DC 14, and the sirens are listening not looking), a parley — sirens negotiate and they want news and names — or a fight. R089 Pool of the Sleeping Naiad can buy the party a word of introduction that skips the fight entirely |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | The draft in this corridor tastes of salt, and there is grit on your teeth that was not there an hour ago. |
| Trace | Barnacles. Live ones, closed, forty feet below the last place water should reach — which means water reaches here, regularly, and recently. |
| Sign | A tide-mark on the wall in nine rings of green weed, and beside them a sailor's tally scratched with a nail: two strokes a day, and one long one every seventh. |
| Proof | A gull. Dead, old, whole, its wings folded — it flew in from somewhere and it did not come down a shaft. |
| Path | A wet rope handline, bolted to the wall at chest height, running away downhill into the dark. Somebody rigged this for a walk they intended to take at speed. |
| Door | The cave mouth at the end of the shelf. Grey daylight on moving water, twelve minutes of it, and the sea breathing in and out through the gap. |
Resolution Scene
Fifteen to twenty minutes, and the decision is now, badly or later, ready.
The party arrives at the shelf — a 60 ft ledge above a deep green channel, the cave mouth at the far end. Tell the players exactly how many minutes of slack water are left. This scene does not work as a surprise; it works as a countdown they can see.
The fork.
- Go now. The window is short — say four to six minutes when they arrive — and crossing the shelf fast means crossing it loud. The sirens wake. One round of pursuit per minute spent on the shelf, and the party leaves gear behind.
- Wait for the next slack. Six hours. In a maze. That is a long rest they badly want and a long rest the Labyrinth will interrupt: two wandering encounters, or one and the finale arriving early. Legitimate, and the party arrives at the door rested and unhurried.
- Swim it flooded. Thirty feet of submerged rock at any point in the cycle. Athletics DC 15, one round of held breath, and the thing in the deep channel gets one grapple attempt at whoever swims last. This is the option a party with a water-breathing effect makes trivial, and they should be allowed to.
The sirens. Two of them, and they are the best argument in this Resolution for talking. They have been listening to the maze for years and they will trade what they know — including where the finale sleeps — for news of the surface, a name, or a song. They do not want to eat the party. They want to be told things.
Fallback
The party misses the slack, cannot swim it, and cannot wait. The door breathes both ways.
- Ride the surge. On the incoming wave the cave floods hard and fast and the water has to go somewhere; there is a blowhole thirty feet up the cliff face that it goes out of. Go in on purpose, hold onto the handline until the pull reverses, and be fired out of a hole in a cliff.
- Cost: 4d6 bludgeoning, one level of exhaustion, and every unsecured item is gone. Ask each player what they clipped on and what they were merely holding.
- The party still gets out. Wet, battered, and short a pack, on rocks below Knossos in daylight.
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- The tide-reckoner. A drilled limpet shell on a cord, the sailor's tally-keeper. Whoever holds it always knows the state of the tide, anywhere, without a check. It is very small and it is worth a ship's captain's respect.
- What the sirens told you, if the party talked: one honest answer about the Labyrinth, including the finale's nature or the location of one other Resolution.
- The wreck-line. The shelf's back edge is a century of things the sea pushed in. One salvaged item of the DM's choice, waterlogged, plus somebody's name-ring.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Twelve full minutes of slack on arrival, all DCs −2, one siren instead of two, and nothing in the deep channel |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Four minutes of slack, DCs +2, and the thing in the channel is awake and hunting — it gets one attack per round against anyone in the water |
| 15 | As APL 12, and the sirens are a full watch of four with a scyllan horror in the channel. The window is three minutes. Run the shelf crossing in initiative |
- Show the clock, always. A tide the players can see coming produces frantic brilliant play; a tide that arrives unannounced produces a TPK and an argument. Announce the minutes out loud, every round, in a flat voice.
- The smell of the outside is the best moment this Resolution has. Salt, weed, rot, open air. Spend a full sentence on it before anybody rolls anything — after two days of wet limestone it will land harder than any door.
- Let the sirens be interesting. They are the maze's most reachable inhabitants and they have nothing to do but listen. Give them one piece of true, useful, strangely-phrased information and one thing they get wrong.
- B08 parties have already been in the water once, and this is their Resolution. Lean on the callback: the same storm, the same cliff, the hull they lost. They are not escaping to safety, they are escaping back to the wreck.
- If the party is out of time, skip the fork. Put them on the shelf at slack low water with the sirens asleep and let them walk out into daylight. Six minutes, and the smell of the sea does all the work.