18
The Kitchen Well
Resolution
verticalitystealth-viableathletics-gauntlet
The cistern is brim-full. The water stands a hand's breadth below the kitchen flagstones, black and still, and it smells faintly of onions because the sink beside you drains into it.
Set a candle on the kerb and look up. Four feet of dressed stone going up out of the light, wet for thirty feet and dry above. A chain hanging down the middle of it — bronze links the size of a fist, a clay bucket pinned by the ear every six feet — and at the top, small as a thumbnail, a coin of grey daylight.
The Way Out
The Palace of Knossos drinks. Eleven hundred people, kitchens, baths, a laundry, a bull-court sluiced twice a day, and all of it comes up out of the cisterns the Labyrinth was cut through. There are dozens of shafts down here. Exactly one of them has a chain in it.
Ninety feet above the kerb in R050 The Quiet Kitchen there is a scullery in the palace's west range with a windlass in it, and somebody puts their hands on that windlass at first light and hauls up eight buckets. It is not a secret and not a door — it is the water supply, and nobody in Knossos calls it an exit because nobody has ever wanted to come up it.
The first half is a climb. The second half is standing in a working palace, soaking wet, at whatever hour you arrived, with a scullion looking at you — and everyone in this building knows what comes out of that hole, and it is water.
Requirements
| Requirement | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| The right shaft | R050 The Quiet Kitchen is the one with the chain. Telling it from the others is the work: R015 Fountain of Two Mouths has both a clean mouth and a foul one and the clean one is fed from the palace draw, and R024 The Split Aqueduct has the sluice-plates that say which line goes where. Investigation DC 13 at either narrows fifty shafts to one |
| Ninety feet made survivable | Rope and hooks from R084 The Cool Cellar, which is the palace's cold store on the same water line and still has the well-tackle in it. A bar or a spear to pin the chain at the kerb. Dry hands: the flour bin in R050 is a coffin's worth of the best climbing chalk in the Aegean |
| The windlass, and its cadence | It turns at first light and not otherwise. R002 The Weeping Cistern is where you learn that — the whole vault hums for twenty minutes at dawn and stops. R024 The Split Aqueduct carries the palace's draw tally scratched beside the sluice: how many buckets, and when |
| Something to be, at the top | Folded linen and plain tunics on the attendants' shelf in R063 Bath of the Cold Spring, aprons and a stamped delivery tally in R084 The Cool Cellar, and a basket, a jar, or a load of wet washing from R050 to carry. Six armed strangers is not a costume. A servant with both hands full is invisible — and a party that arrives with nothing dry, no story, and no proof of who they are still gets through on the harder DCs below, because none of this is a lock |
Clues
| Tier | Line to deliver |
|---|---|
| Whisper | Somewhere far above you, a slow knocking — six beats, a pause, six beats — and then a great deal of water moving in a pipe. It stops. Nobody in your party did that. |
| Trace | Half a clay bucket in a corridor, thick-walled and glazed, with a bronze pin still through the ear of it and a hand's width of green slime dried along one side. |
| Sign | Scratched into the plaster beside a cistern in a careful, patient hand: eight strokes, a gap, eight strokes, over and over. A hundred and forty days of somebody counting what went up. |
| Proof | A lead pipe with a stamped collar — the double axe, and beneath it one word: SCULLERY. It leaves the cistern going up, and it is warm. |
| Path | A sluice-plate, or the kitchen's own inventory slate: third shaft feeds the west scullery. Ninety feet. Do not foul it. |
| Door | The well-head in the kitchen floor with its cover pushed aside, the chain hanging down the middle of ninety feet of dressed stone, and the coin of grey daylight at the top of it. |
Resolution Scene
Twenty minutes, and the real decision is what hour you come up. All three work.
| Hour | The climb | The palace |
|---|---|---|
| First light | The drum is turning and the chain is moving. Ride it: one Athletics DC 10 to hold on for the whole ninety feet | The scullery is full — three cooks, a lit fire, and the woman on the windlass feels your weight on the third bucket |
| Working day | The pawl is set, the chain is dead, and it is a straight climb | Corridors full of wet servants carrying things. You are one more. This is the easy palace and the hard climb |
| Dead of night | Nothing is holding the chain but you. Pin it yourself or it runs | Scullery dark and empty, the range door barred from the palace side, and one night-porter with a lamp and nothing to do |
The climb
Ninety feet, three stages of thirty, corbel ledges at 30 and 60 feet where the shaft steps in — eighteen inches wide, room to sit, and the place to belay.
- The chain. Athletics DC 13 per stage on the buckets as footholds, DC 15 on the slimed first stage. Fast, obvious, and the one that drops people. Rope changes the maths: one climber belayed from the 30-foot corbel drops every later check to DC 10 and turns a failure into a swing and a bruise.
- The wall. Four feet across is a chimney: back on one side, boots on the other, Athletics DC 15 per stage, but a failure gains no ground rather than causing a fall. Four times slower — twenty minutes and skinned shoulders.
- The pin. Stop the chain or your weight turns the drum and runs you back into the water. A bar, a spear, or a good knife through a link at the kerb: Athletics DC 12 or Thieves' Tools DC 10, holding about 400 lb — two people and their kit, not a pound more. A third on the chain makes the pawl skip: everyone rolls at disadvantage, and on any failed check the chain runs six feet and each climber makes a Dexterity save DC 12 or loses their grip.
- A fall. The shaft delivers you to the water, which is why this shaft is the one with the chain in it. 1d6 bludgeoning per 20 feet fallen — the water halves it — plus 2d6 past the upper corbel where the stone narrows, then Constitution DC 12 or a level of exhaustion. Back to the kerb from thirty feet of cold black water is Athletics DC 12, DC 16 in heavy armour, free if somebody drops the rope.
- Wet gear. A soaked pack holds twenty pounds of water: drop it or climb at disadvantage, and heavy armour after a dunking is disadvantage until it is off. Torches, tinder, and bowstrings are done until dry; paper survives on a DC 10 in a waxed case and is pulp otherwise. The buckets go up dry — eight of them, ten pounds each — and a party that works that out has solved the problem.
The scullery, and getting out of the palace
Three beats. Not a second dungeon. Ten minutes at the table, hard stop.
- The windlass. At dawn it is Alkippe: sixty, deaf in her left ear, forty years on that crank. She does not scream — she lets go of the handle, sits down on the step, and asks whether you saw the boy who went down in the spring. Persuasion or Deception DC 13 with an apron and an errand, DC 18 dripping and armed and silent, Stealth DC 14 past her deaf side. An honest answer about the boy skips the check and buys her hands: she walks you out through the wash-house herself.
- The service passage. Stealth or Deception DC 13 to cross forty feet of corridor — but carrying something makes it no check at all, a jar, a basket, an armful of wet linen. In a palace, having both hands full is a passport.
- The north service gate. A bored spearman counting nothing. Persuasion DC 12, Deception DC 14, Stealth DC 15, one coin, or walking out at dawn in the middle of the water-carriers.
A failed beat escalates to the next one with a hue and cry behind rather than ending the scene. Three failures is the second half of the Fallback.
Fallback
Two things go wrong in this Resolution, and neither is a dead end.
- Somebody falls. They land in water, take the dice above, and go under with everything they own — and the chain runs a full turn, so sixty pounds of clay buckets come down after them: Dexterity DC 13 or another 2d6. The party fishes them out and starts again one pack poorer. The climb is still there. It is never removed.
- The palace catches them. Six wet strangers in the west scullery is not a battle, it is an embarrassment. Disarmed by eight spearmen more baffled than angry, held in a store-room four hours, looked at by a steward who does not want the paperwork, and walked out of the north gate onto the Herakleion road with their names and nothing else. Weapons, packs, and everything carried up in the buckets are confiscated — a real cost, and they are still in daylight outside Knossos.
- And if the chain will not hold at all — perished pins, a drum that runs whatever is driven through it — it is the wall alone: three Athletics DC 15 on a rope relay, forty minutes, and everyone arrives in broad daylight, the worst hour and still an exit.
Rewards
Resolution-owned, never on the loot table.
- Alkippe's word. A named servant inside the Palace of Knossos who owes the party a truth and will hide them again, once, unasked. She costs one honest sentence.
- The scullery apron and a set of palace linen, dry, plain, double axe stamped at the hem. One character passes as staff anywhere in Knossos until somebody who knows the staff looks twice. And the well works both ways — nobody in the palace believes it is a door, so the party now knows the one route into Knossos that is never watched.
- What came up in the buckets: eight of them, ten pounds each, and they arrive dry.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | The pawl is already pinned and the chain is dry to the water. One Athletics DC 10 for the whole ninety feet, all other DCs −2, and Alkippe is alone, glad of the company, and has been waiting years to tell somebody about the boy |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Half the bucket-pins have perished: three break under weight, DCs +2, and the drum is being turned by two palace guards on a punishment detail who will absolutely raise the alarm. The passage and the gate are one DC harder |
| 15 | As APL 12, and something has come up the cistern behind the party — it is in the thirty feet of water below them while they climb, and a fall is no longer merciful. The scullery holds a steward who counts the staff every morning, and the wash-house door is barred. The party can still get out; they cannot get out unnoticed |
DM Notes
- The climb is not the ending. The palace is. Eight minutes on ninety feet of bronze, twelve on three cooks and a corridor — being out of the Labyrinth and being out of Knossos are two different achievements.
- Run the palace half as a short social sequence, never as a dungeon. Three checks, two named faces, no map, no initiative, ten minutes and out. Start rolling a corridor's worth of patrols and you have appended a second adventure to a session that already had an ending in it.
- Any hour works. There is no window here, and if the players start counting hours because they think they have missed one, say plainly that the chain is there day and night and the only choice is who is standing at the top of it.
- Falling must never kill anybody. Thirty feet of water is the whole reason this shaft is the one with the chain — say so before the first climber leaves the kerb. Falls cost gear, time, and dignity, and that is enough.
- Wet is the texture, and the palace is offended rather than alarmed. They drip in the scullery, they drip in the corridor, the puddle is visible from the doorway, and nobody up here is hunting them. The cook's first line is not guards, it is get off my floor, which is why this ending lands warm instead of tense.
- If the party is out of time, the pawl is set and the chain is dry: one Athletics DC 12 for the whole climb, one Deception or Persuasion DC 13 in the scullery, and Alkippe holds the door. Eight minutes, and keep the coin of grey daylight.