The Bellows Gallery
Four great bellows stand along the wall of this gallery like sleeping animals, each one taller than a man, each with a bronze handle worn bright by use. Their hoses run up into the ceiling and away. The far wall is shut by a bronze iris — four overlapping petals, closed to a seam, warm to the hand.
A ribbon is tied to the centre of the iris. It is lifting and falling in a draft you can feel on the back of your neck. Something in this building is still breathing, and it is doing it somewhere else.
DM summary. A pressure lock with four inputs and one right order, and the order is written on the room three separate ways. No creature here will do anything; the only thing you can lose is time, skin, and quiet.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The Processional — page 26, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Temple Approach)
The processional is the bellows gallery: its inlaid floor band is the compass rose, ready-made. Draw the four bellows along the south wall with their wind-glyphs and the 8-ft iris at the west end.
- Dimensions. 50 ft × 25 ft, ceiling 18 ft — a long gallery, not a chamber. The party enters at the east end, where the draft comes from.
- Light. Dim and steady from three sealed glass lamps in the ceiling that have been burning on gas for longer than anyone can account for. There is no darkness problem here and no light to take with you.
- The four bellows. Set along the south wall, each cast with the glyph of a wind: Euros (east), Notos (south), Zephyros (west), Boreas (north), in that order along the wall from the door. Each takes one character a full round to pump, or two characters half a round.
- The iris. In the west wall, 8 ft across, four petals, no keyhole, no hinge, no crack to lever. Warm. When it opens it opens fast and stays open.
- The compass rose. Cut into the floor at the gallery's centre, eight points, with the sun's daily course scored across it as a shallow arc — east, south, west — and the arc is deeper where the mason went over it twice.
- The seized Sentinel. A bronze guard stands frozen mid-stride between the second and third bellows, one hand still resting on a handle, its head turned to the next machine along. It has been there long enough to grow a skin of verdigris. It is not going to move. It is a maintenance record with legs.
- The relief valve. A brass mushroom head above the iris, with a stain of soot under it in the shape of a cone. Somebody has already got this wrong.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The lock. The iris opens when the four bellows are pumped in the correct order, one after another, with no more than six seconds between them. Any wrong order resets it.
The correct order is Euros, Notos, Zephyros, Boreas — start with the wind you can feel, then follow the sun. The room says so three times:
| Clue | How they get it |
|---|---|
| The ribbon | It flutters from the east: the draft in this gallery comes in at the door. Perception DC 10, or free if anyone mentions the ribbon. This gives them the starting bellows |
| The compass rose | The sun's arc scored east → south → west across the floor. Investigation DC 12 to read it as an instruction rather than decoration. This gives them the direction of travel |
| The Sentinel | Its hand is on Euros and its face is turned to Notos: it froze one step into the sequence. Investigation DC 13, and this clue alone is enough for a player who thinks about what the posture means |
Any one of the three plus a guess gets there. Two of the three make it certain. A party that pumps the four in the order they are mounted along the wall gets it right by accident — let them, and let them never know how lucky they were.
Getting it wrong. The pipes shriek — a rising note that carries a long way through this part of the maze — and the handles lock for one minute.
- First wrong order: noise only. Roll d6; on a 1 the DM owes the party a wandering-threat encounter within the next two rooms.
- Second wrong order: noise, and the relief valve spits. A 15-ft cone of scalding air from above the iris: Dexterity save DC 14, 2d10 fire on a failure, half on a success. It is telegraphed by a two-second whistle, so anyone who has already seen it go off can step out of the cone with a reaction.
- Third and later: as the second, and the party should be told plainly that this is now costing them more than the fallback would.
The fallback (every puzzle has one):
- Force the petals. Two characters on a pry bar, spear shaft, or the Sentinel's own arm: Athletics DC 17, ten minutes, and success wedges the iris open to a 3-ft gap that cannot be closed again. Anything following the party comes through it too.
- Trip the governor. Thieves' Tools DC 16 on the housing beside the iris. Fifteen minutes and one level of exhaustion for the character doing it, from holding a spring-loaded plate open with a bare hand. On a success the iris opens fully and normally.
- Earth or metal magic — shape stone, heat metal, knock, or anything a player argues convincingly — bypasses the lock outright. This room is not precious about it. Let the spell work and move on.
Solved state. The iris opens with a sound like a held breath released, and the gallery's draft reverses: warm air now comes out of the iris and past the party toward the door. It stays open. Exit B is available to everyone, including anything that comes in behind them.
Exits
None. This is a machine room, not a store room. The lamps are sealed, the bellows are bolted, and the Sentinel is worth a fortune and weighs eleven hundred pounds.
A player who spends ten minutes and a Investigation DC 14 stripping the Sentinel's verdigris finds a maker's stamp and a serial number. That is not loot. It is better, and see the clue drip.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | All DCs −2. The ribbon clue is given free on entry, and the relief valve does 2d10 but only on the third wrong order |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | DCs +1. Five bellows and five petals, and the fifth wind — Kaikias, north-east — goes between Boreas and Euros, which a player has to work out from the rose's eight points. Relief valve 4d10 |
| 15 | DCs +3, five bellows, and the sequence must be completed in four consecutive rounds or it resets — which turns the puzzle into a positioning problem, because nobody can be at two bellows at once. Relief valve 4d10 and the cone covers 20 ft |
- Pacing: twelve minutes, and it is the whole room. When you are behind schedule, give the ribbon and the rose for free on entry — "the draft comes in from behind you, and there is a sun cut across the floor" — and let the first correct guess open the iris. Five minutes.
- Never let this room become a stuck room. It has an Obvious exit and two fallbacks. If your table has been at the bellows for fifteen minutes, have the Sentinel's arm creak and settle another inch toward Notos. That is a free clue delivered as atmosphere and nobody will feel handed it.
- The Sentinel must not move. The temptation to animate it is enormous and it would ruin the room, which is the deck's clearest example of theme without threat: a party that has fought the automata elsewhere will spend three minutes refusing to walk past this thing, and that anxiety is the entire cost of admission. Let them work out on their own that it is dead. Then let it stay dead.
- Clue drip. Two hooks: the Sentinel's maker's stamp, which carries a serial number, a workshop mark, and a year (X20, X17) — and the wall behind the Boreas bellows, where a maintenance hand has chalked a list of shafts and which of them draw at which hour (X17, X14).
- Callback. Daedalan Automata (W03) are always a pattern before they are a threat. A party that has watched a Bronze Ox run its rails or timed a Sentinel's patrol should arrive here already looking for the sequence, and the room rewards exactly that instinct.
Creature Cards
The Sentinel in the corner is inert scenery and its numbers are only here in case your table insists on testing that. It belongs to Daedalan Automata (W03) and recurs across the deck, so the card lives in the bestiary.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Clockwork Sentinel. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.