Nursery of Little Drakons
The heat comes up through your boots before you see why. In the middle of the floor a slab twenty feet across glows the dull orange of a banked oven, and on it, in a heap, four young drakons lie belly-up in the warmth with their legs folded wrong, the way puppies sleep.
Something very large has been in and out of here recently. The scrape marks on the floor go from the far arch to the slab and back, over and over, and the newest of them is still warm at the edges.
DM summary. Four gorged hatchlings asleep on the hot slab, a mother out hunting on a clock, and the only comfortable ground in the room is directly under the children. The party's real enemy is the clock, and the room is won by leaving early.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The Honeycomb — page 50, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Fire Floes)
The honeycomb reads as the nursery: the central stone islands are the fractured hot slab (mark the nest scrape at its south edge), the dark flows between them are the live seam, and the outer floor is the cold ring. Wall the oval at 55 × 45 ft.
- Dimensions. 55 ft × 45 ft, ceiling 20 ft, roughly oval, with a vent shaft in the ceiling that the mother uses and nothing else can fit through.
- Light. Dim red from the slab. It reaches the walls. There is nowhere in this room that is properly dark and nowhere that is properly lit.
- The hot slab. 20 ft across, dead centre, floored with fractured basalt over a live seam. A creature that ends its turn on it takes 2d10 fire damage, half on a Constitution save DC 13. The hatchlings do not care and this is the entire reason they sleep there.
- The cold ring. The floor between the slab and the walls, 12–15 ft of it all the way round, is bare cold stone scattered with cracked shell and gnawed bone. Quiet to walk on except where the shell is: the shell drift on the north side is difficult terrain and it crunches.
- The nest scrape. A shallow bowl at the slab's south edge, lined with shed skin, containing the clutch's gizzard stones — smooth, fist-sized, and worth something to the right buyer.
- The mother's arch. The 15-ft opening in the east wall she comes and goes by. It is the widest exit and the party should be discouraged from using it in the plainest possible terms: the scrape marks all point at it.
Bypass Options
The intended path. The whelps are on the slab; the exits are not. Group Stealth DC 13, or DC 16 if the route crosses the shell drift on the north side. Anyone who thinks to go the long way round the south is taking the easier number and should be told so.
- Success: the party crosses to exit A or B in two rounds and nothing stirs.
- One failure: a whelp lifts its head, blinks, and settles. The clock does not move, but the next Stealth check in this room is at disadvantage.
- Two failures: one whelp wakes and cries. It does not attack — it is a frightened animal and it backs onto the slab — but the clock jumps two rounds and the other three are awake at the top of the next round.
- Cost of withdrawing instead: the party may withdraw to the corridor they came from at any point before the mother arrives, freely. They lose the loot and this room's clue, and they have burned however many rounds they burned.
A gorged whelp is a sleeping whelp, and a waking one can be bought. Any substantial meat — rations, a hunk of something from an earlier room, a conjured meal — thrown to the far side of the slab. Animal Handling DC 15, or DC 12 if the thrower has any ranger, herder, or kennel background and says so.
- Success: the whelps rouse just enough to squabble over it on the slab's far edge for four rounds, facing away. That is a free crossing and free access to the nest scrape.
- Failure: they wake and take an interest in whoever is holding the rest of the food. Not an attack — a mobbing, four of them nosing at packs, which makes Stealth impossible and adds one round to the clock.
- What this costs: the rations, and a real note on the sheet.
Withdrawal is a plan here, not a failure. The corridor behind the party is 6 ft wide. The mother does not fit and the whelps do not follow past the threshold; they have never been out of this room.
- When: any round before she arrives. After she arrives, the corridor is still the answer, but she is between the party and it half the time — Athletics or Acrobatics DC 15 to get past her reach, and she gets one attack on anyone who fails.
- What it costs: the room, the stones, the clue, and the time. Nothing else.
- Tell the players the corridor is too small for her. Do it while they can still use the information. An escape route nobody knows about is set dressing.
Encounter
Four sleeping hatchlings, and the thing that made them, due back.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Drakon Whelp | 1,100 |
| 1 | Coiled Drakon (arrives on the clock) | 10,000 |
The whelps alone are 4,400 base; ×2 for four bodies = 8,800 adjusted, which is a hard-leaning fight and survivable. With the mother in the room it is 14,400 base; ×2.5 for five bodies = 36,000 adjusted, against the APL 9 Deadly budget of 14,400. Two and a half times the Deadly line. There is no version of that fight where the party is fine.
Why they are not attacking. The whelps ate perhaps an hour ago — you can see the shape of it in them — and young drakons sleep off a meal in heat like stones in a fire. They are not guarding anything. They are children who have overeaten. The mother is not here because she is out getting the next one.
The return clock. She comes back at the end of round 6, counted from the moment the party crosses the threshold. Count it down out loud from round 3. The clock accelerates:
| Trigger | Effect on the clock |
|---|---|
| A whelp wakes and cries | She arrives two rounds sooner |
| Any loud noise — a shout, a shattered pot, a spell with a bang | One round sooner |
| The party takes the gizzard stones | No effect. She does not count them |
| The party kills a whelp | She arrives at the end of the next round, whatever the count says, and she knows |
If the party fights anyway. Say it plainly: this can kill the party, and that is the honest cost of poking it. Four whelps in the open is a real fight that will run five or six rounds — and six rounds is the clock. The party will still be standing in a burnt oval with their resources spent when a CR 13 constrictor comes down the east arch and blocks it. She constricts, swallows, and does not stop for the wounded. She will not leave the room while a whelp is alive, which is the only thing that gives a fleeing party a chance.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The vent shaft in the ceiling is 25 ft up and 4 ft across, and it is how she comes in when she is not using the arch — roll a d6 when the clock runs out: on a 1–2 she comes down the shaft instead, landing in the middle of the room. Tell the party the shaft exists (Perception DC 12) so that "she came in behind us" is a thing they were warned about.
Reading the room: Nature DC 13 or Survival DC 12 tells a character three true things — the whelps are gorged and will sleep for hours, the scrape marks are hours old at most, and whatever made them is very much bigger than these.
Exits
One roll on the loot table, conditional: the party must take the gizzard stones from the nest scrape — Sleight of Hand DC 14 reaching past the slab's edge, with the heat effect applying to whoever does it — and be out of the room before the mother returns. Stones taken and then dropped in a panic do not count.
The whelps themselves are not loot and an egg is not loot. If a player wants to carry one out, that is a campaign, not a d100 roll, and it is between you and them.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Three whelps. The mother returns at the end of round 8, and she is heard coming a full round before she is seen. DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Five whelps and two Serpent-Hounds awake and pacing the cold ring, which turns the Stealth crossing into a timing problem. Clock: end of round 5. DCs +1 |
| 15 | Six whelps, two Serpent-Hounds, and the mother returns at the end of round 4 — the room becomes a two-round smash-and-run for the stones and everybody knows it. DCs +3, slab damage 4d10 |
- Pacing: twelve minutes, and it must not sprawl. The clock does that work if you say the number out loud every round. Behind schedule? Set the clock at four rounds, skip the feeding bypass, and let the room be one tense Stealth roll and an exit. Six minutes.
- The whole room is one question: do we get greedy? The crossing is easy. The stones are not. Do not editorialise; just keep counting.
- If the party is winning the whelp fight comfortably, she is early. That is not a punishment, it is the clock behaving as written, and you told them.
- If the party is nearly dead when the mother arrives, she goes to the whelps first — every time, without fail. That is one free round and it is the room being fair, not you being soft.
- Table safety. These are babies, and the room is built so that killing them is the loud, stupid, expensive option rather than the moral one. Some tables will find the nursery framing uncomfortable in the other direction; if yours does, make the whelps adolescent rather than newly hatched and change nothing else.
- Clue drip. Two objects: the half-digested bronze in the nest scrape — buckles, a greave, a surveyor's chain link that did not belong to a shepherd (X14), and the shed skin, which is translucent and, held up to the slab glow, shows the shape of the vent shaft above like a map of where she goes (X12, if the party is looking for a way to bring the ceiling down).
- Callback. The Drakon Nest (W08) always gives the party the choice before it gives them the fight — asleep, absent, or coiled somewhere they can see from a distance. If your table has met W08 before and they still poke it, the deck has done its job and they have made their bed.
Creature Cards
Both belong to the Drakon Nest (W08) and recur across the deck, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The clock, the slab, and the cold ring are this room's. The Serpent-Hounds in the APL 12 and 15 columns have their card in the bestiary too; pull it if you scale up.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Drakon Whelp, Coiled Drakon. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.