The Chandler's Rest
A niche off the corridor, barely a room: eight feet of headroom, a plank door hanging open on good iron hinges, and inside, warmth. A stool. A shelf of clay lamps stacked mouth to tail like sleeping birds. A barrel with a tap. The air smells of olive oil and hot wick and, faintly, of a person.
Someone kept the lamps of this maze filled, and they kept their kit here, and they were tidy about it.
DM summary. The maze's supply cupboard, still stocked, still safe. Oil, bandages, a bar for the door, and one short rest — and a tally-board that tells a party where the lamps of the Labyrinth are and in what order they were lit.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: custom map. A 20 × 15 ft lamp-closet off the corridor — quicker to sketch freehand than to lay a page for. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.
- Dimensions. 20 ft × 15 ft, ceiling 8 ft. Cut into the corridor wall, not built. Two people can work in here and a sixth person is standing in the doorway.
- Light. One lamp burning in a wall bracket when the party arrives, which should worry them and should not. It has a four-day reservoir; the chandler filled it and did not come back.
- The door. Planks and iron, with a drop-bar and two iron brackets on the inside. Barred, it holds against anything short of a Taurine Brute. State the effect plainly: while the bar is down, the wandering-threat roll is not made in this room, and anything that comes will have to knock.
- The oil barrel. Roughly six gallons of good olive oil on a stand with a brass tap. Enough to fill fourteen lamps or twelve flasks, and it burns the way lamp oil burns, which is to say slowly and usefully rather than spectacularly.
- The shelf. Twenty-two clay lamps, eleven of them sound. A coil of new wick. A striker. A jar of honey and a roll of clean linen — a healer's kit with seven uses left, and it is not a magic item, it is just a tidy person's supplies.
- The tally-board. Whitewashed wood, hung by the stool, ruled into a grid. Every lamp bracket on the chandler's round, in the order they were filled, with a chalk stroke per day. The strokes stop abruptly nineteen columns in.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
There is no trap. There is one thing worth reading and one thing worth opening.
| Element | Value |
|---|---|
| Reading the tally-board | Investigation DC 12, or free for anyone who says they look at it properly. The board is a route: forty-one lamp brackets in walking order, which means forty-one rooms that connect, which is the closest thing to a map anyone has found |
| What the board gives | Once per session the party may declare they are following the chandler's round. On their next d100 roll they roll twice and take either result. Then the round runs out — the board stops where the strokes stop |
| The strongbox | Under the stool, iron-strapped oak, locked. Thieves' Tools DC 13, or Athletics DC 15 to break it, which is loud enough that the DM makes one wandering-threat check for the corridor outside |
| Refilling | No check. Six gallons is six gallons; the tap works |
Exits
One roll on the loot table — the chandler's strongbox under the stool, opened by Thieves' Tools DC 13 or broken at the cost of the noise.
The oil, lamps, wick, and healer's kit are not the roll. They are simply here, they are free, and a party that leaves without topping up its light has made a mistake that the Labyrinth will collect on later.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | The chandler's kit is fuller: ten gallons, sixteen sound lamps, nine healer's-kit uses. DCs −2, and the tally-board reads free |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Three gallons, six sound lamps, four healer's-kit uses. DCs +1, and the strongbox has a needle in the lock — Perception DC 15 to spot, 2d10 poison and poisoned for an hour if missed |
| 15 | As APL 12, and the niche has been found before you: the bar is snapped, the barrel is a third full, and there is a body under the shelf that has been there four days. Nothing is here now. DCs +3 |
- Pacing: 6–8 minutes, and it is a breather. The party has been holding its breath somewhere; this is where they exhale, count arrows, and argue about whether to take the barrel with them. Let them have the argument. It is characterisation and it costs you ninety seconds.
- If you are behind schedule, hand them the oil and the short rest in three sentences and put the tally-board in the read-aloud so they can't miss it. Three minutes.
- If the party is at low resources and it is early, this is the room to give the second short rest at. Say yes.
- Do not haunt it. The temptation is to make the missing chandler a ghost, a trap, or a twist. He is none of those. He is a man who did a job for nineteen years and then one day did not come back, and the room is better for leaving that alone.
- Clue drip. Two objects: the tally-board, which is navigational knowledge and the natural home of a Sign-tier clue for X14 or X19, and the name scratched into the underside of the stool with a date — a man's name, a woman's name under it, and a third that has been rubbed at (X10, X05). If your Resolution is X17, the last column of the board is headed with a word the chandler used for the shafts that draw air, and it is not the word for a corridor.
- The ninth lamp. Somewhere on the board, in a different hand, one bracket has been crossed out and annotated: do not fill. Do not explain it. If the party asks, they get the crossing-out and the handwriting and nothing else.