Mirror of Pale Sisters
The room is small and the wall at the far end is not a wall. It is a sheet of bronze, floor to ceiling, polished to a soft brown mirror, and in it you can see yourselves standing in the doorway looking small.
You can also see her. She sits with her back to you and her face to the metal, chin on her chest, asleep, and the snakes of her hair are asleep too — all but one, which turns slowly, tasting the air, and does not wake the rest.
DM summary. A medusa elder asleep facing a mirror she cannot bear to look into awake, in a room too small to fight in. The mirror is the way past her and the only weapon that works on her, and the party can use it without ever waking her at all.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The State Rooms — page 44, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Villa)
Use the small tiled chamber at 25 × 30 ft: draw the pivot-mounted mirror wall across one long side with its crank, and mark the couch, the water bowl, and the four finished statues along the walls.
- Dimensions. 25 ft × 30 ft, ceiling 12 ft. That is the whole point: there is no room to spread out, no room for a fireball that does not catch a friend, and the far door is 30 ft from the near one with her sitting between them.
- Light. One shuttered lamp on a bracket, turned to the wall, giving dim light throughout. The mirror doubles any light brought in — a torch in this room lights it as if it were two torches, which is exactly as useful and as dangerous as it sounds.
- The mirror wall. Polished bronze, 12 ft high, 25 ft wide, mounted on a pivot frame with a counterweighted crank at floor level on the east side. It swings. Behind it is a gap of 3 ft and a crawlway.
- The sleepers' furniture. A low couch, a water bowl, a comb. She lives here. Note that out loud; it changes how a table treats the room.
- The finished ones. Four statues stand against the side walls in the poses of people who were in the middle of turning around. Three are strangers. The fourth is a Knossian soldier with a spear and a gold torc at his throat, and he is where the loot is.
- The floor. Sanded stone, swept. She sweeps it. There is nothing on this floor to trip over or knock, which removes the party's usual excuse for a noise.
Bypass Options
Thirty feet of swept floor and a woman who is not listening for you. Group Stealth DC 14. Anyone in metal armour is at disadvantage unless the party takes the extra round to pad it (rags, a cloak, no check).
- Success: the party reaches exit A. She never moves. Do not roll anything else and do not invent a complication — a clean bypass has to be allowed to be clean or the table stops trying.
- One failure: a creeper slips off the lintel and drops to the floor between the party and the far door. It hisses. It does not attack yet. One round to get out of the room or get past it.
- Two failures: she wakes, and she is between the party and one of the two doors. Roll initiative — or take the mirror option below in the same round, because it is still available and it is better.
- Cost of withdrawing instead: the party can leave the way they came at any point, freely, and she will not follow; she does not leave this room. They lose the torc and this room's clue.
The room's own weapon, and it works whether she is asleep or awake. The crank at the floor is quiet for the first quarter-turn and grinds after that: Sleight of Hand DC 15 or Thieves' Tools DC 13 to swing the mirror onto her sleeping face without waking her.
- Against a sleeping elder: she wakes at dawn, or when hungry, and the first thing she sees is herself. She meets her own gaze. Constitution save DC 16 against her own kind's petrification — on a failure she is restrained by creeping stone for 1 minute, and the party (long gone) never knows.
- Against a woken elder, mid-fight: an action to crank it, and she must succeed on a Constitution save DC 16 at the start of each of her turns while she can see the mirror or lose her action clawing the metal down. Two rounds of that is a fight the party can survive.
- Failure on the crank: the frame bangs. She wakes, angry, with the mirror half-turned — which is worse than either state, because now she can see the door.
- A hand-mirror is not this. If a player produces a polished shield or a looking glass, it works for exactly one round and then she shuts her eyes and fights by sound, which she is good at.
Whoever built the pivot frame left a gap. Behind the mirror is 3 ft of dead space and a crawlway that runs to exit C. Getting into it means moving the mirror one quarter-turn (the quiet quarter, no check) and going through sideways: Acrobatics DC 12, or DC 15 in plate or with a pack that has not been taken off.
- Success: the whole party is out of the room in three rounds without crossing her floor at all. This is the safest route and the slowest.
- Failure: someone's scabbard rings on the bronze. One sound: a creeper wakes. Resolve as one failure above.
- This is also the retreat. A party surprised mid-crossing can pile into the gap; she will not follow into a space where she cannot see, and she says so, in Greek, from the other side of the metal.
Encounter
One elder asleep, two garden creepers in the rafters' shadow, and thirty feet of room.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Elder of the Pale Sisters | 8,400 |
| 2 | Creeper of the Petrified Garden | 700 |
Base 9,800 XP; ×2 for three bodies = 19,600 adjusted, against the APL 9 Deadly budget of 14,400. A third again over the line, in a 25×30 room where the party cannot get away from her gaze and cannot get away from each other.
Why she is not attacking. She is asleep, and she sleeps here on purpose, facing the metal. When she is awake she keeps the mirror covered; the cloth is folded on the couch. A character who thinks about that for a moment (Insight DC 12, or nothing at all if the player says it) understands that this is a woman who cannot stand the sight of her own face and sleeps in front of it anyway. Do not explain it further. Let it sit.
The creepers are draped along the lintel beam above the far door, torpid. They wake on noise, not sight, and they wake before she does — they are the room's early warning and the party's second chance.
If the party fights anyway. Say it once, plainly: this can kill the party, and that is the honest cost of poking it. Her gaze is a Constitution save every round for anyone who can see her, and this room is 25 feet wide — the only ways out of line of sight are behind a statue or behind the mirror. Averting eyes means fighting at disadvantage against a creature with a bite. If three PCs are petrified and the rest run, that is the room working as designed and the party still gets to leave; stone is not dead, and a party that comes back with a remedy has a session's worth of reason to.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The torc. The Knossian soldier's gold torc is loose on a stone throat and will come off. Sleight of Hand DC 15. On a failure the statue rocks on its base — Athletics DC 13 as a reaction to steady it, or it goes over with a crack that wakes everything in the room.
The comb, the bowl, the folded cloth. No check to see, and worth pointing at: a party that decides not to rob a woman's bedroom has made a choice, and the deck should notice when they do.
Exits
One roll on the loot table, conditional: the party takes the gold torc off the petrified soldier and leaves the room without her waking. A torc taken from a statue knocked over in a panic is still a torc; it just costs them the condition and the clean exit.
Her comb is silver and it is not loot. It is a thing you can let a player steal and then think about.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Replace the Elder with a Garden Basilisk asleep on the couch, and one creeper. The mirror trick still works and is easier: save DC 13. All DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | The Elder plus three creepers, one of them awake and threading the room on a slow patrol that crosses the party's route every third round. DCs +1, mirror save DC 17 |
| 15 | Two Elders — sisters, sleeping back to back, so the mirror can only face one at a time — and three creepers. DCs +3. Waking one wakes the other at the top of the next round |
- Pacing: fifteen minutes, and it is nearly all held breath. The room is 750 square feet and one bad roll wide. Behind schedule? Cut the creepers, keep the mirror, and run it as a single Stealth roll with the crank as the retry. Six minutes.
- Show the mirror before you show her. The read-aloud does this deliberately — the players see their own reflection first, which means the mirror is in their heads as furniture before it becomes a weapon.
- Say "she is asleep" more than once. The escapability law is only real if the party believes the sleeping is load-bearing. If they start planning a fight, have a creeper shift on the lintel and let them hear how quiet the room is.
- If someone petrifies, the party can carry a statue if four of them commit to it and drop everything else, or leave them and come back. Both are real options and you should offer them both out loud, immediately, in the same breath as the save. This is the difference between a horror beat and a dead character.
- Table safety: body horror. Petrification, and a woman who cannot look at herself. If either lands badly at your table, run her as cursed and sorrowful rather than monstrous, keep every mechanic, and let the party talk to her through the mirror if they wake her — she will listen, once, from behind her own hands.
- Clue drip. Two objects: the Knossian soldier's spear, which carries a regiment mark and a scratched line of duty-roster shorthand telling anyone who reads it that he was posted to the gate (X08), and the scrap of grey feather-down caught in the mirror's pivot frame, from something that got in here above head height (X17).
- Callback. The Gorgon Brood (W04) always gives the party a way to not look — statues for cover, a gaze with a range, a sleeping schedule. A table that has met them before should be arriving here already asking where the cover is.
Creature Cards
Both belong to the Gorgon Brood (W04) and both recur, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The Elder is this room's centrepiece, and R066 and R092 field her again when scaled up. The mirror, the crank, and the crawlway are this room's.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Elder of the Pale Sisters, Creeper of the Petrified Garden. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.