Sty of the Boar-Wardens

RoomGauntletMediumBeasts of the Hunt (W17)3 exits

overgrowntactical-fightterrain-exploitbeast

Illustration: Room 8 — Sty of the Boar-Wardens

The corridor opens onto a walkway that rings a sunken yard, and the yard is mud. Real mud, churned and stinking, with fig roots and pale grass coming through the walls in fistfuls where something has cracked the stone. Two boars the size of ponies are working the far corner, snouts down, armoured in bronze plates that were riveted to them a long time ago and have grown in.

At the near end, sitting upright in the filth, entirely still, is a dog with two heads. One head is watching the boars. The other one is watching you.

DM summary. A working sty, still stocked. The boars are livestock and behave like it; the death dog is the herdsman and behaves like that. The walkway lets the party look before they leap, and the hurdles let them cross without ever touching the mud.

Terrain & Features

Battle map: The Garden Court — page 42, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Small Keep)

The walled garden court is the sty: the enclosure wall is the walkway's inner edge (note the 8-ft drop to the yard). Shade the whole yard as mud, and stack the drawn hurdles against the north wall.

Dimensions. 40 ft × 40 ft yard, floor 8 ft below a 5-ft walkway that rings it on all four sides. Ceiling 20 ft over the yard, 12 ft over the walkway.
Light. Dim and green. Fungus in ropes along the ceiling gives about as much light as a full moon; the maze got damp here and something took advantage.
The mud. The whole yard floor, 18 inches deep. Difficult terrain for anything without cloven feet. A creature knocked prone in it spends 10 ft to stand and is restrained until it does. The boars move through it at full speed and know exactly where the firm ground is.
The hurdles. Eight woven-willow pen hurdles, 6 ft × 4 ft, stacked against the north wall and three more still standing as a division across the yard. A hurdle laid flat is a bridge; upright, it is half cover that a boar goes through without slowing.
The fence posts. Twelve oak posts around the pen division, sunk deep. They are the terrain trick and the fight's best joke.
The feed trough. Stone, 12 ft long, along the east wall, with a week of slops going sour in it. The dog defends the trough more seriously than it defends anything else.
The gate post. At the yard's north gate, hung with the drover's kit: a goad, a coil of rope, a leather satchel, and a bell that has been muffled with rag by someone who got tired of it.

Encounter

Medium · Beasts of the Hunt (W17) · Budget at APL 9: 6,600 XP

Two head of very dangerous livestock and the thing that keeps them.

Count	Creature	XP each
2	Calydonian Boar-Warden	1,100
1	Two-Headed Death Dog	700

Base 2,900 XP; ×2 for three bodies = 5,800 adjusted, against the APL 9 Medium budget of 6,600. It sits 800 under, and the mud makes up the difference: a party that fights this in the yard is fighting at half speed against things that are not.

Round 1. The boars do not look up. They are eating and they have been eating all day. The dog's left head has already seen you and it does not bark — it stands, walks to the gate, and puts itself between the party and the trough. Nothing has attacked yet. This is a Medium gauntlet with a whole round of grace in it, and a party that uses the round to get onto the hurdles has effectively skipped it.

Tactics.

Boars charge in straight lines and cannot turn. A boar that charges and misses keeps going until it hits something. Standing in front of an oak fence post and stepping aside is the room's intended trick: Dexterity save DC 13 to sidestep in the mud, and the boar hits the post and is stunned until the end of its next turn. A post takes two hits before it splinters.
The dog does not fight while the boars are up. It drives. Each round it uses its turn to put a boar onto a target — one head barking a boar into a charge lane, the other watching the party's flank. It only attacks once a boar is down or once someone is at the trough.
The feeding trick works. Throwing rations, a slain enemy, or the satchel from the gate post splits the dog's heads: Animal Handling DC 13, and for one round the dog is distracted, one head eating and one head arguing about it — attacks against it have advantage and it loses its drive action.
Nothing here pursues up the walkway stairs. The boars cannot climb and the dog will not leave the yard.

Bypass Options

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

Bypass — Cross on the hurdle tops

The three standing hurdles run in a line from the north gate to the south, four feet above the mud, and they will hold a person.

Getting up: step off the walkway, no check. Acrobatics DC 13 per hurdle-span to cross — three spans in all — or DC 10 for anyone who has a hand on a spear used as a balance pole.
Success: the party crosses the yard without entering the mud. The boars cannot reach a target four feet up and will not try twice. The dog watches them the whole way and does nothing, because nobody has gone near the trough.
One failure: you go into the mud, prone and restrained until you spend 10 ft standing. The nearest boar charges you next round. The rest of the party is still up on the hurdles and this is very much survivable — but somebody now has to decide whether to come down.
Two failures: the hurdle line goes over. Everyone on it lands in the mud and the fight is on, in the worst possible posture.
Cost of doing it in heavy armour: disadvantage, unless someone else takes the pack and the shield across first, which costs one extra crossing.

Bypass — Withdrawing instead

The walkway rings the yard. A party that decides not to go down can simply walk around to the far stair and out, no check, no cost except the loot and the clue. This is a Medium room that a careful party never fights, and that is allowed.

Exits

AObviousThe walkway's far stair and the arch beyond it, reachable without ever entering the yard. No check.

BConditionalThe yard's north stock gate, which is barred from the yard side and needs someone down in the mud to lift it.Rider: you leave through the working end of a livestock pen and you are filthy to the thigh. Disadvantage on Stealth for one room against anything with a nose, advantage on any attempt to convince a beast you belong here.

CHiddenA root-cracked gap in the yard's west wall where the fig has broken the stone, screened by hanging growth. Investigation DC 13 from the walkway, automatic from inside the yard.Rider: you squeeze out through living roots and arrive with green on you — for one room, you have advantage on Stealth anywhere there is vegetation, and you smell like the outside, which is a thing some prisoners in this maze will notice.

Loot

One roll on the loot table — the drover's satchel on the gate post.

After the fight: no check. Take it off the post.
Before the fight: Sleight of Hand DC 12 from the walkway with a hook or a spear, while the boars root and the dog watches you do it. It will let you. It is watching the trough.

The hurdles are not loot and they are worth more than the roll. Eight woven willow panels, each about 25 lb, each buoyant, all of them lashable. If your Resolution is X16 or X11, this is where the party's raft comes from, and a party that thinks to take two hurdles with them out of a pig pen has earned every bit of the escape they build with them.

Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15

APL	Adjustment
6	One boar and the dog. The mud is ankle-deep rather than knee-deep — difficult terrain, no restraint. DCs −2
9	As written
12	Three boars, two death dogs, and the trough has been freshly filled, which means the drover is nearby and the animals are keyed up. DCs +1, and a boar that hits a post is not stunned — the posts are rotten at this tier and go over
15	Four boars, two death dogs, and one of the boars is old, scarred, and clever: it does not charge, it waits by the hurdle line and takes anyone who falls. DCs +3. Give the old boar 50% more HP and a reaction that shoves a creature within 10 ft prone into the mud

DM Notes

Pacing: 12–15 minutes if fought, 4 if crossed. Both outcomes are correct. Do not steer.
If you are behind schedule, the boars are penned behind the standing hurdles when the party arrives and the dog is asleep on the trough. One Acrobatics check and a held breath. Three minutes.
If the party is fresh and wants a fight, this is a good one to give them: it is Medium, the terrain is funny, and nothing here is tragic. Let a boar brain itself on a fence post and let the table laugh.
The dog is the room's brain and it should read as such. It never barks until the last round it is alive. Two heads means two things being watched at once, and you should narrate both every round: "the left head is on the fat one with the shield. The right head has not stopped looking at you."
Table safety. The boars have bronze plate riveted into grown-over flesh. That is body-horror adjacent; if it will not land well, the plates are a harness and a caparison rather than surgery, and nothing changes.
Clue drip. Two hooks: the muffled bell on the gate post, wrapped in rag by someone who works down here and wanted quiet (X10, X08 — this maze has staff, and staff have routines), and the fig root through the wall, which came from somewhere with soil and sun and is a Whisper-tier pointer for X17 or X16. If your Resolution is X11 or X16, put the raft idea in a player's head here by having a hurdle float in a puddle.
Callback. Beasts of the Hunt are animals, not soldiers. Food works on them, fear works on them, and none of them will chase you further than their territory. That should be true every time your table meets them.

Creature Cards

Both belong to Beasts of the Hunt (W17) and recur across the deck, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The tactics above are this room's and stay here.

Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Calydonian Boar-Warden, Two-Headed Death Dog. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.