The Tallow Refectory
A long table for forty, scrubbed pale, with benches down both sides and tallow candles burning in a line all the way to the far end. There are bowls set out. There is bread under a cloth, and the cloth is warm. There is a pot of barley and mutton on a trivet over coals that somebody banked within the hour.
Nobody is here. Nobody has been here for a while, by the dust on the benches at the far end — but the near end is clean, and the food is hot, and there are exactly enough bowls for your party.
DM summary. Food, warmth, a door that bars from the inside, and a long rest. There is no catch. There is not going to be a catch. The room's only real difficulty is convincing six paranoid adventurers of that.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The Taproom — page 37, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Roadhouse)
The taproom is the refectory: push the printed tables into one 40-ft spine down the middle, keep the counter as the sideboard, and mark the hearth at the kegs' corner. Wall the room to 60 × 20 ft.
- Dimensions. 60 ft × 20 ft, ceiling 14 ft. A monastery refectory in everything but name, built into the maze by people who ate here in numbers.
- Light. Nineteen tallow candles down the table's spine, burning steadily, with a box of spares in the sideboard. Warm yellow light, end to end. It is the best-lit room the party has been in since the surface.
- The table. Oak, forty feet, scarred with four hundred years of knife-marks and one very good carving of a boat.
- The food. Barley and mutton in the pot, enough for twelve. Bread, olives, salt fish, a jar of honey, and watered wine in a stone flagon. Six days of rations for six people can be carried out of here, in the sideboard's baskets, and the party should be told the number.
- The hearth. Coals banked under the trivet, and a stack of split wood beside it that has been stacked by somebody who stacks wood well.
- The door. At the east end, oak with a drop-bar and iron brackets. It bars from the inside. It is not a mechanism, a trick, or a trap; it is a door with a bar on it, and it works.
- The serving hatch. West wall, waist-high, with a scrubbed sill and a kitchen behind it.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
There is nothing to disarm. There are two things worth doing and one thing worth knowing.
| Element | Value |
|---|---|
| Long rest | Available here. One per session, per the attrition model. Bar the door and take it. No roll, no interruption, no wandering-threat check |
| Barring the door | No check. Two people, one bar, ten seconds |
| The kitchen behind the hatch | Investigation DC 10 to bother climbing through, which is to say: free to anyone curious. Cold store, a bread oven with embers, a hot brick, and nobody |
| Searching for the catch | Investigation DC 20, and it fails. Let them roll it. Let the roll come up 22. Tell them there is nothing. This is the room |
| Who cooks | Unanswerable. See DM Notes |
Exits
None, and that is not the same as nothing. There is no roll on the d100 table in this room because everything here is food, fuel, and light, and those are worth more than a roll at hour four of a session.
What the party can walk out with, for free, without a check: six days of rations for six, a full wineskin each, nineteen candles, a hot brick, a jar of honey, and a long rest.
If your Resolution is X05 and the party is carrying somebody out of this maze with two levels of exhaustion on them, this room is the answer to that problem and you should let it be, generously.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | As written. Sanctuaries do not scale up to punish low-level parties |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | As written. If you are tempted to add something here, add another candle |
| 15 | Still no catch. Resist the urge. The only concession to a high-tier table is that the food is cold — somebody banked the coals four hours ago rather than one, and whoever it was has stopped keeping to the hour |
- Pacing: 10–15 minutes, of which the first eight are the party refusing to eat. Budget for that. It is funny, it is characterful, and it is the whole scene.
- Let them search. Every player will check the food, the pot, the bread, the candles, and under the table. Answer each one honestly and immediately: it is barley and mutton, it is fine, it is good, actually. Do not roll dice for them. Do not use ominous phrasing. Do not do the pause.
- Then do this, once, at about the ten-minute mark: a candle in the middle of the table gutters and goes out, and while nobody is looking directly at it, it is lit again. Say nothing else about it. That single beat is the entire supernatural budget of this room and it works far better than a monster.
- If you are behind schedule, skip the searching: "the food's fine, the door bars, you can take a long rest here." Four minutes. This room's value is mechanical and it survives being run fast.
- One of two long-rest rooms in a hundred. The other is R084 The Cool Cellar. Per the attrition model, a party gets one long rest per session at most, and spending it here — early, warm, on a full stomach — is a legitimately different session shape from spending it late and desperate. Let them choose and do not editorialise.
- Who cooks. Three answers, all of them good, none of them canon: the Cult of the Thread feeds its lost cohort here and keeps the pot on; the maze does it, the way the maze does the lamps and the sweeping on the memorial stair; or there is a kitchen slave who has been down here nineteen years, who hides when he hears people, and who will not come out for anyone. Pick one privately. Never confirm it. If the party sets a watch on the hatch, they see nothing, and the pot is fuller in the morning.
- Table safety. None required, and that is deliberate — this room is where the deck puts its hand down and says the maze is not relentless. If your table has had a rough two hours, this is the room to slow the tempo on.
- Clue drip. Two hooks: the boat carved into the tabletop, done carefully by someone with a long time and a homesick streak, which is a Whisper- or Trace-tier pointer for X16 and X11; and the stacked firewood, because wood does not grow underground and somebody carried it in from somewhere with trees (X17, X12). If your Resolution is X10, one of the bowls at the far end of the table is smaller than the others and has been set aside, clean, at a place nobody uses.