Lamia's Perfumery
A shopfront, in a labyrinth. A bead curtain, a swept step, and a smell coming off it that stops you in the corridor: rose, and hot resin, and under that something like a room you slept in as a child.
Inside it is nine feet to the ceiling and every inch of wall is shelved with alabaster jars. A woman is decanting at a low table, pouring a thread of something amber from one vessel to another without spilling a drop, and she does not look up until she is finished.
"Two hundred and eleven," she says, "and none of them yours. Come in, or don't — but do stop breathing my doorway."
DM summary. A lamia who sells memories and buys them. She will trade safe passage for one, at a price a player has to name out loud. Hospitality binds her while it lasts, and the fight only happens if the party breaks it.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The State Rooms — page 44, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Villa)
Wall off the small red-tiled chamber at 25 × 20 ft and line three walls with drawn shelf-ranks of jars. Mark the decanting table and brazier by the inner door.
- Dimensions. 25 ft × 20 ft, ceiling 9 ft. Two people can pass each other in here and six people cannot fight in it. This is the room's most important fact and it cuts both ways.
- Light. Four hanging lamps with coloured glass and a brazier of coals under the decanting table. Warm, close, and about as far from a dungeon as this maze gets.
- The shelves. Floor to ceiling on three walls, alabaster jars in ranks, each stoppered with wax and labelled in a small hand. Two hundred and eleven of them. The top shelf holds nine that are not labelled.
- The air. Thick with resin smoke. Anyone who stays more than five minutes makes a Constitution save DC 12; on a failure they have disadvantage on saving throws against her effects until they get an hour of clean air. Tell them the air is heavy before you roll anything.
- The decanting table. Low, brass-topped, with a spirit lamp, a coil of copper tube, and about forty drachmae of equipment. She works at it for a full minute every ten and she does not look up while she does.
- The delivery slot. Behind the north shelf-rank, a hatch a person can fit through on their side, where the empty jars go out and the alabaster comes in.
- The attendant. An Empusa Attendant stands in the corner by the curtain with a tray. She has stood there for some hours and she will stand there for some more.
Encounter
Only if hospitality breaks. She will tell the party exactly what breaks it.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Myrrha of the Nine Jars | 3,900 |
| 1 | Empusa Attendant | 1,800 |
Base 5,700 XP; ×1.5 for two bodies = 8,550 adjusted, against the APL 9 Hard budget of 9,600. It sits under budget on paper and plays harder than that: a nine-foot ceiling, twenty-five feet of floor, and two hundred jars of weaponised memory mean no area spell is safe and no formation survives round one.
What breaks hospitality, in her own words, said once, unprompted, before any business is discussed:
- Striking her, or her attendant.
- Taking a jar that has not been paid for.
- Breaking a jar, on purpose or otherwise.
- Lying about a memory after she has accepted it.
Round 1, if it comes to that. She does not open with claws. She breaks a jar at her own feet — Draught of Yesterday, the whole shop's worth of somebody else's childhood at once — and the attendant closes the bead curtain, which is the only wide exit. Everything after that is happening in a cupboard.
Tactics. She fights along the shelves, never in the open floor, moving 20 ft a round on the walls. She goes for whoever is holding a jar. She does not pursue past the curtain and she does not kill a fleeing guest — she takes their name instead, and if your campaign runs long, she will use it. At half hit points she stops and offers the original deal again, at double the price, and she means it both times.
Bypass Options
The trade she actually wants — a memory, and what it costs — is under Traps / Puzzles / Checks below. These are the three ways past her that are not that.
She is a collector and she is bored of the same three vintages.
- The approach: Persuasion DC 16 cold, or DC 13 if the party offers something specific and strange that she cannot have made herself — a stoppered flask of sea air from a crack in the rock, a bone from an ossuary that has been sorted by somebody obsessive, honey from a bronze hive, the smell of a fire that burned something famous.
- Success: she takes it, gives passage, and is genuinely delighted, which is unsettling.
- Failure: she is not insulted, she is disappointed, which is worse. The price for a memory doubles — two memories, or one and a favour — and the attendant moves to stand between the party and the curtain.
- Cost: whatever the party handed over is gone, and if it was a Resolution requirement you should say so before they hand it over. Never let a player trade away their way out by accident.
She works at the table for a full minute every ten, and she does not look up.
- The window: one minute. Ten rounds, which is plenty and does not feel like it.
- The check: Stealth DC 15 per character to reach and go through the delivery slot. The attendant is watching the curtain, not the shelves.
- One failure: a jar rocks on its shelf. She catches it without looking and says, without turning round, "Those are not for sale." No hostility. The window closes and the party is back to negotiating, from a worse position.
- Two failures: a jar goes. Hospitality is broken by rule three, and the contents are somebody's last hour, and everyone in the room lives it. Initiative, in a cupboard.
- Cost: the delivery slot is a shoulders-and-hips squeeze. Anyone in heavy armour must shed it (two rounds) or fail automatically.
Free, and she means it to be.
- What it costs: the party leaves by the corridor they came in on, or simply walks past the shop and never goes in. She does not stop anyone who has not taken anything.
- What it really costs: the jar, the clue, her honest answer, and the fact that she now knows six faces. She is not a monster who forgets. If your table runs long, she should turn up again with one of their names already in a jar.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The trade. She wants a memory. Not a fact, not a secret — a memory, with a smell in it.
How to run it. Ask the player to describe the memory in two or three sentences, out loud, in character. That description is the transaction; do not roll for it. Then charge them one of these, and let them pick:
| The price | The mechanical cost |
|---|---|
| A memory of learning something | Lose proficiency in one skill or tool of the player's choosing until the character has a long rest outside the Labyrinth |
| A memory of a person | Permanent disadvantage on Insight checks concerning one named individual, and the character no longer recognises their face |
| A memory of a place or a language | Lose one language, or one prepared spell slot's worth of preparation — a spell the character can no longer bring to mind until they next prepare outside the maze |
She pays fairly. One memory buys safe passage for the whole party, her private stair (exit B), and one honest answer to one question about the maze.
Other checks in the room.
| Element | Value |
|---|---|
| Reading the labels | Investigation DC 13 and any relevant language: they are names, dates, and one-word descriptions. Amyntas, the harbour, year of the fire. Nobody in this shop consented in a way you would want to defend |
| Spotting the unlabelled nine | Perception DC 12 — they are the only jars with dust on them |
| Knowing what she is | Arcana or Religion DC 14: lamia, Lamia Court, bound by the guest-rules she is invoking and not by anything else. The hospitality is real and it is a contract, not a trick |
| Palming a jar | Sleight of Hand DC 18 against her passive Perception of 16, and she is counting. This is the single worst idea available and the DC reflects it |
Exits
Room-specific: A Jar of the Ninth Shelf. One of the nine unlabelled alabaster jars. She will sell exactly one, for the second memory, or hand one over as the honest answer to a party she has taken a liking to. Stolen ones work identically and cost the room its peace.
- Action to unstopper and breathe. For 10 minutes you carry the working memory of Sarpedon, a Knossian mason who cut stone for this maze for eleven years: advantage on Investigation and History checks concerning the Labyrinth's construction, and one automatic success at locating a bricked passage, a false wall, or a load-bearing course.
- Single use. Then the jar is empty and the character is briefly, genuinely sad about a man they never met.
- It cannot name a way out. Sarpedon cut stone; he was never told what he was building, and he says so. The jar is a tool for reading walls, not for finishing a Resolution.
Off-table. It consumes no d100 slot.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Myrrha alone, no attendant, and she asks for a memory of something small — the price is flavour rather than a proficiency. All DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Two Empusa Attendants; the second was out on an errand and comes back through the curtain at the end of round 1. Myrrha gains 30 more hit points and her Draught recharges on 4–6. DCs +1 |
| 15 | An Empusa Bath-Mistress is taking tea at the back of the shop and the perfumery is her supplier. She does not fight unless Myrrha falls, and then she is very much the encounter. DCs +3, and hospitality now binds the party as well: a guest who breaks it takes 3d10 psychic the first time they do, whether or not anyone saw |
- Pacing: 15–20 minutes, and it is a scene, not an encounter. Give her a voice and keep it dry. She is a shopkeeper first and a monster fourth.
- If you are behind schedule, she has already named her price when the party walks in and there is no browsing. One memory, one description, one stair. Six minutes.
- The memory is the room. Do not let a player buy passage with "uh, I remember my mum". Ask a follow-up: what did it smell of? Who else was there? Two questions is all it takes and the answer will be the best thing that happens at the table that hour. Then take it away from them.
- If a player wants to buy their memory back later, yes. Her price is another memory and she will not do the same trade twice.
- Do not let this become a fight through DM impatience. Every path out of this room except one is peaceful. If the table stalls, have her put the price on the table and start the minute of decanting — a visible window makes people act.
- Table safety. Consent, memory, and having something taken out of your head are the room's whole texture, and charm effects sit badly with some players. Flag
charm-fearup front. The softer framing: she trades in stories rather than memories — the character forgets the telling, not the living — and every mechanical cost stands. - Clue drip. Two hooks: the labels on the two hundred and eleven jars, which are a register of everyone who has come through this part of the maze in living memory, including some names a party may be looking for (X05, X10), and her honest answer, which is the natural place for a Proof- or Path-tier clue delivered in her voice rather than the DM's (X06 especially — she knows exactly which power in this maze bargains and what it charges).
- Callback. Lamia Court runs on hospitality contracts. If your table meets them again — the bathhouse, the marriage feast — the rule they learned here should hold: behave like a guest and nothing touches you, and the moment you stop, everything does.
Creature Cards
The attendant belongs to Lamia Court (W10) and recurs across the deck, so her numbers live in the bestiary. Myrrha is this room's and nowhere else's.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Empusa Attendant. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.
Myrrha of the Nine Jars
Medium fiend (lamia), neutral evil · CR 8 (3,900 XP)
AC 15 (natural armor) | HP 142 (19d8 + 57) | Speed 30 ft., climb 20 ft.
Saves Wis +6, Cha +8 · Skills Deception +8, Insight +6, Perception +6 · Darkvision 120 ft. · Passive Perception 16
Hospitality Bound. While a guest has not struck her, taken a jar unpaid, broken a jar, or lied about a memory she has accepted, she cannot attack that guest and does not permit her attendants to. She states all four conditions aloud before any business.
The Nine Jars. Nine unlabelled jars sit on the top shelf. If she is reduced to 0 hit points, all nine break at once: every creature in the room makes a DC 16 Wisdom save or is stunned for 1 minute, reliving somebody else's life, repeating a save at the end of each of its turns.
Cloying Air. A creature that ends its turn within 10 ft of her makes a DC 16 Constitution save or has disadvantage on saving throws against her effects until the end of its next turn.
Multiattack. She makes one Bite attack and two Nail attacks.
Bite. Melee weapon attack, +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 17 (3d8 + 4) piercing damage plus 7 (2d6) psychic damage.
Nail. Melee weapon attack, +7 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d8 + 4) slashing damage.
Draught of Yesterday (Recharge 5–6). She breaks a jar into a 30-ft cone. Each creature there makes a DC 16 Wisdom save, taking 27 (6d8) psychic damage and being incapacitated until the end of its next turn on a failure, or half as much damage and no condition on a success.
Slip the Shelves. She moves up to 20 ft along a wall or shelving without provoking opportunity attacks.
Name the Offence. When a creature she can see breaks hospitality, she says what they did, aloud. Each creature within 20 ft makes a DC 16 Wisdom save or is frightened of her until the end of its next turn.