The Wax Cellar
Cool air, and a smell like a temple on a feast day: beeswax, cedar, and dust. Barrels line both walls of this low cellar, lidded and sealed, and stacked between them are shallow crates of feathers — grey, white, brown — sorted by size and packed in straw like eggs.
At the far end is a workbench. Clamped in the bench, half finished, is a wing.
DM summary. Somebody's supply cellar, inventoried in a neat hand by a person who fully intended to come back for it. Nothing in here will hurt the party; the room's job is to hand them the strongest X17 clue in the deck and, if they read carefully, a piece of navigation.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: custom map. A 40 × 20 ft store room of barrels and crates — sketch the shelving; the inventory matters more than the floor. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.
- Dimensions. 40 ft × 20 ft, ceiling 9 ft. A store room, not a hall. The party enters down four steps at the east end.
- Light. None burning, but two lamps sit filled and trimmed on a shelf by the door, and a tinderbox beside them. Somebody kept this room ready.
- Eleven barrels. Beeswax, pressed in rounds and sealed with cloth and pitch. Each barrel is 90 lb and no party is carrying one out. A cook pot's worth can be cut and carried by anybody who thinks to bring a container.
- Nine crates of feathers. Sorted by length, longest at the bottom, and every crate is labelled in the same hand: primary, secondary, fill.
- The bench. Ash-wood, bolted to the floor, with a bronze-wire wing-frame clamped in it. One wing is skinned in feathers and wax. The other is bare frame. A wooden comb, a pot of size, and a knife are laid out beside it in the order you would use them.
- The inventory wall. Whitewashed plaster, floor to ceiling, covered in a running account in charcoal: what came in, what went out, what it went to.
- The cold. This cellar is ten degrees colder than the corridor outside it, because there is a draught coming down through the ceiling vent at the west end. A candle held up shows the flame leaning.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
There are no traps in this room. Say so to yourself before you run it, because the temptation to put one here is strong and the deck needs rooms that are exactly what they appear to be.
Reading the inventory wall is a ladder, and every rung is worth having:
| Check | What they get |
|---|---|
| Looking at all (no check) | It is an accounts wall. Somebody was running a workshop down here and keeping books |
| Investigation DC 11 | Wax and feathers, in and out, against dates. The outgoings all go to one place, named only as the high room |
| Investigation DC 14 or History DC 13 | A column of shaft measurements in cubits, three of them circled, with a note on which draws hardest and at what hour. This is the navigational advantage — see below |
| Investigation DC 16 | Under the last entry, in a different and much worse hand: "he will not wait for the wax to cure. I have told him." |
The wing on the bench requires no check at all. Anybody who looks at it knows what it is for. This is X17's Proof-tier clue and it is the most literal object in the deck: the route out of the Labyrinth, clamped in a vice, half built.
The navigational advantage. A party that reads the shaft column can plan. Once per session, after this room, they may reroll one d100 room result — they know enough about how this quarter of the maze is plumbed to double back and pick a different way. Note it on the DM's scratch list; it is theirs to spend when they like.
Exits
None, and this is deliberate rather than stingy.
The wax and the feathers are Resolution property. They are X17's requirement, not a d100 roll, and per the loot rules a Resolution's requirements are never on the table and never granted as treasure. If X17 is the live Resolution, this room is where the party gets its materials and X17 governs what they can carry and what it costs. If X17 is not live, the barrels are ninety pounds each and the feathers are worth nothing at all, and a player who insists on hauling wax should be allowed to, and should feel the weight.
The two filled lamps and the tinderbox by the door are yours to give away free. A party that leaves this room without taking them has made a mistake nobody should have to check for.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | All DCs −2, and the shaft column is circled clearly enough that Investigation DC 11 gets it. Nothing else changes; a lore room does not get harder because the party is stronger |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | DCs +1. Two of the eleven barrels have been opened and re-sealed by somebody else, recently, and there are wax shavings on the floor that are still soft |
| 15 | DCs +3, and the last line on the wall has been scratched out and written over in a third hand. Whatever is using this cellar now still is. Give the party a reason to hurry and no monster to fight |
- Pacing: ten minutes, and it is all reading. When you are behind schedule, hand them the wing on the bench and the shaft column for free, skip the wall ladder, and get them out in four minutes. The wing is non-negotiable; it is the clue the whole X17 route hangs on.
- Put the wing in a player's hands. Describe it as an object with a weight and a smell, not as a plot token: bronze wire, ash, three thousand feathers, and one wing not finished. If your table does not have a plan when they walk in here, they will have one when they leave.
- Do not put a monster in this room. It is one of ten Lore rooms and one of the few places in the maze a party can stand still and think. The
map-knowledgereroll is worth more to a session's pacing than any fight you could stage here. - Clue drip. Two hooks, and you should use both: the half-skinned wing on the bench, which is X17's Proof tier verbatim, and the inventory wall's outgoing column — everything in this cellar went up, to a room the ledger will not name (X17, X20). If your live Resolution is neither, the wall's last legible entry is a delivery of forty lamps to a bronze gate, which serves X08 and X19 just as well.
- Callback. This is the second half of a conversation with R006 Gallery of Unfinished Wings, and the two rooms are deliberately not adjacent — there is no map, so the connection is made in the players' heads when they recognise the same handwriting. If they have seen R006, tell them the hand is the same. That recognition is the reward.