Pen of the Lowing Dark

RoomAvoidable ThreatDeadlyBull-Kin (W02)3 exits

bone-strewncrampedstealth-viablesleeping-threatcaptivity

Illustration: Room 4 — Pen of the Lowing Dark

The smell arrives first: wet straw, old blood, and an animal that has been kept too long in one place. Your light finds a floor of trampled bone — ox, mostly — and then a shape against the far wall the size of a cart, lying on its side, breathing slow.

A bronze chain runs from a ring at its throat, out across the whole width of the floor, and every foot of that chain is strung with little bronze rings that have been threaded on to it deliberately.

Between you and the far gate, there is nowhere to put your feet that is not chain or bone.

DM summary. A Minotaur Champion sleeps off a meal at the end of twenty feet of belled chain, and the chain — not the beast — is the encounter. Two drovers doze in the hay loft above. The room is a crossing, and it is a crossing the party can absolutely make without waking anything.

Terrain & Features

Battle map: The Ruined Walls — page 8, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Fallen Steading)

The steading enclosure is the stock pen: its walls are the dressed-stone-and-hurdle ring at 30 × 40 ft. Shade the floor as trampled bone (difficult terrain), draw the centre stake and chain, and sketch the hay loft along the east wall.

Dimensions. 30 ft × 40 ft, ceiling 12 ft. A stock pen, not a chamber: the walls are dressed stone to 4 ft and hurdle-and-post above that.
Light. None. Total darkness. The Champion has not needed a lamp in years and the drovers work by touch. Any light the party brings is visible from the loft.
The chain. Bronze, 20 ft of it, from a floor-stake at the room's centre to the ring at the Champion's throat. Roughly a hundred loose bronze rings are threaded along its length. It lies in a lazy S across the floor and it covers the two most natural walking lines. Weight on the chain rings it end to end; the drovers know that sound in their sleep.
The bone floor. Six inches of trampled ox bone and old straw over flagstone — difficult terrain, and noisy: moving more than half speed across it is Stealth at disadvantage.
The loft. A hay platform at 8 ft along the east wall, reached by a fixed ladder. Two Bull-Masked Cultists sleep up there in shifts. One is awake, sitting with his back to the ladder, mask off, not looking at anything.
The feed chute. A timber trough angling down from a hatch in the north wall at 9 ft. A quarter of an ox is still wedged in it, three days old, and it is the single most useful object in the room.
The stake. Iron, driven through the flagstone at the centre. The Champion can reach every point within 20 ft of it. Draw that circle on the mat. The far gate is 4 ft outside it.

Bypass Options

The intended paths through — every one has a number and a consequence

Bypass — Map the chain, then walk the slack

The chain is the floor plan. Anyone who spends an action looking rather than moving can trace where it lies: Perception DC 14 in the dark, DC 10 with light, and light costs you the drover.

Crossing: 40 ft of bone floor at half speed, group Stealth DC 15. Someone who has traced the chain rolls with advantage.
One failure: a single ring chimes. The Champion snorts, shifts, does not wake. The party has one round before the drover looks over the loft rail.
Two failures: the Champion sits up. Nobody has rolled initiative yet. Any creature still inside the 20-ft circle should leave it now, and you should tell them so.
Three failures: it is awake. Initiative.
Cost of doing it in armour: heavy armour is disadvantage on this unless it is padded out — a cloak, straw, rags round the greaves. That is five minutes and it is worth it.

Bypass — Give it the rest of the ox

The feed chute still holds a quarter carcass, and the Champion has been chained under a chute long enough to know what a chute means.

Getting it moving: Athletics DC 13 to shift the carcass from the loft end, then Animal Handling DC 15 to drop it where you want it — the far corner, outside the walking line.
Success: the Champion rolls over to the meat without ever properly waking. The chain goes slack on the near side and the whole crossing is free. No further checks.
Failure: the carcass lands on the chain. Count that as two Stealth failures immediately.
Cost: the noise of the chute itself wakes the sleeping drover, awake or not, so this bypass and the parley bypass do not combine well.

Bypass — Buy the drover

The man on watch is nineteen, he has not slept properly in a month, and he is sitting with his back to the thing he is paid to mind.

The approach: Persuasion DC 16, or DC 13 if the party opens by offering something specific and immediate — coin on the rail, a wineskin, a weapon, a promise to take him out with them. Deception DC 16 also works and he will find out later that it was a lie.
Success: he winches the feed hatch open (exit B) and holds the chain's near loop off the floor with his goad while the party crosses. He asks for nothing else and he does not come with you. He is not brave; he is tired.
Failure: he shouts. Shouting is three rings' worth of alarm and the room wakes at once.
Cost: he will be asked, later, who opened the hatch, and you may want to remember that.

Bypass — Cost of withdrawing instead

The party can withdraw the way it came at any point before initiative. The gate behind them is 10 ft from the entry and outside the circle. It costs ten minutes, this room's Resolution clue, and the conditional loot — and nothing follows them, because the thing in here cannot.

Encounter

Deadly · Bull-Kin (W02) · Budget at APL 9: 14,400 XP

Asleep, chained, and gorged — and it is still the most dangerous thing in this part of the maze.

Count	Creature	XP each
1	Minotaur Champion	7,200
2	Bull-Masked Cultist	450

Base 8,100 XP; ×2 for three bodies = 16,200 adjusted, against the APL 9 Deadly budget of 14,400. This room is 12% over the Deadly line and that is deliberate. A CR 11 charger in a 30-ft pen against an APL 9 party is not a fight the maze is offering. It is a thing the maze is asking the party to walk past.

Why it is not attacking. It ate most of an ox two days ago and it is chained by the throat to a stake it has never managed to pull. It sleeps eleven hours out of every sixteen. It has no reason to wake and no way to reach the gate even if it does — but it can reach you, anywhere inside that 20-ft circle, in one round.

The alarm. Weight on the chain rings it. First ring: the Champion's breathing changes and the awake drover turns his head. Second: the Champion sits up, blind and listening, and the drover picks up his goad. Third: it is awake, it knows roughly where you are, and initiative is rolled.

Round 1, if it comes to that. The Champion goes for the stake first — one round of hauling, Athletics against DC 20, and it succeeds on any round it starts adjacent to a creature it has already gored. The drovers do not fight; they climb the ladder and shout for the corridor.

Tactics. It charges in straight lines and it aims for whoever is loudest. It throws people: a gored target is hurled 15 ft into the hurdle wall. It will not leave the pen while the chain holds, and if the chain breaks it will follow the party for exactly one room and then go back to the hay, because it has been trained to.

If the party fights it anyway. Say this plainly at the table, once, in your own voice: this can kill people. Sixteen thousand two hundred adjusted XP of threat in a thirty-foot room with no cover, in the dark, against a charger with a 20-ft reach circle and a toss. A well-built APL 9 party can win it and will probably bury someone. That is the honest cost of poking it, and a party that chooses it with the numbers in front of them has chosen fairly.

Exits

AObviousThe stock gate at the pen's north end, barred with a drop- plank. No check to find it. Lifting the plank quietly is Sleight of Hand DC 13; dropping it counts as one chain-ring's worth of alarm.

BConditionalThe feed hatch above the chute, 9 ft up, opened from the loft by the winch — or by the drover, if he was bought. Climbing to it without the ladder is Athletics DC 14.Rider: you leave through the larder and arrive carrying the smell of raw meat, which is a liability around anything that hunts and an advantage on any attempt to distract it.

CHiddenA hole in the west wall where something was gored through the hurdles and the repair was done badly. Investigation DC 15.Rider: you come out through a beast-made gap smelling of minotaur. For one room, any Bull-Kin that meets you hesitates — no surprise round against you, and one free round before they decide you are not herd.

Loot

Conditional — one roll on the loot table, by either of two routes, and both of them are choices rather than searches:

The drovers' chest in the loft, under the hay. Thieves' Tools DC 14, or the awake drover simply hands it over if he was bought. Getting into the loft at all means being within 10 ft of a sleeping cultist.
The neck-ring. Bronze, thick as a wrist, worth a great deal, and attached to a sleeping Minotaur Champion. Thieves' Tools DC 18 to unpin it without waking him. Failure is one chain-ring of alarm and a second attempt is allowed by anyone who still wants to be standing there. A party that kills him takes it off at leisure.

No roll if the party crosses clean and takes nothing, which is the correct play and should feel like it.

Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15

APL	Adjustment
6	Replace the Champion with a Taurine Brute (CR 5) on the same chain — still far too much for the party, still the point. One drover, asleep. All DCs −2, and the chain is bare bronze with the rings on only half its length
9	As written
12	The Champion is unchained and pacing, on a fixed circuit of the pen with a nine-round cadence; the stake is empty and the chain is a tripwire on the floor. Three drovers, one awake. DCs +1
15	Two Taurine Brutes penned alongside the Champion, all three loose, and the loft holds a Knossian drover with a horn. DCs +3. At this tier the crossing is a genuine heist and should be planned in advance, out loud, with the mat in front of them

DM Notes

Pacing: 15–20 minutes if they plan it, 4 if they run. The planning is the fun. Put the 20-ft circle on the mat and let them argue.
If you are behind schedule, the drover is already awake and already negotiating when the party arrives — he wants out and he says so in his first line. Six minutes, one Persuasion check, done.
If the party is over-resourced, do not add monsters. Take the light away instead: have the Champion roll onto the chain in its sleep so the near loop is pinned under two thousand pounds of minotaur and the only crossing left is the narrow strip along the east wall, under the loft.
Nobody has to be a hero here. If a player insists on fighting and the rest of the table plainly does not want to, stop and ask out of character. This is the room in the early deck most likely to end a character, and the whole design is an offer to walk past.
Table safety. A chained, starved, penned animal is the room's central image and it lands on captivity and on animal cruelty at the same time. The softer framing: the chain is ceremonial rather than cruel, the Champion is a guardian who chose the post, and the drovers are its attendants rather than its keepers. Nothing mechanical changes.
Clue drip. Two hooks: the neck-ring, which is Knossian palace work and carries a name that is not the minotaur's (X10, X05 — someone put this thing here and wrote it down), and the tally scratched on the loft post, four strokes a day for a very long time, which tells a party how long the maze has been staffed (X08, X14).
Callback. Bull-Kin recur across the deck. If your table meets them again they should remember two things from this room: the drovers are people, and the beasts are on a length. Both facts stay true elsewhere.

Creature Cards

Both belong to Bull-Kin (W02) and both recur, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The Champion is this room's headline, but R031, R065, and R093 field him again in their upper scaling rows. The tactics above are this room's and stay here.

Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Minotaur Champion, Bull-Masked Cultist. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.