Menagerie of Broken Cages
Cages. Eleven of them, iron, man-height, arranged in two rows down this narrow hall with barely a shoulder's width between them — and nine of the eleven are open. Two are still shut, and one of those two has something breathing in it.
On top of the furthest cage a thing the size of a lion is lying with its tail curled over its back, and the tail ends in a fan of bronze spikes. It is eating. Down at floor level, between the rows, two shapes are pacing in slow opposite circles, keeping the cages between them, watching each other and not you.
DM summary. Three loose predators in a corridor of cages, all of which hate each other more than they want the party. The room is a lesson in not being the most interesting thing in it.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: custom map. A 60 × 25 ft aisle where eleven drawn cages ARE the room — sketch the two rows and number the cages; a page underneath adds nothing. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.
- Dimensions. 60 ft × 25 ft, ceiling 14 ft — long,
cramped, and the cages eat most of the floor. Nothing here can be fought at range from safety. - Light. Dim from a single hanging lamp at the midpoint, swinging very slightly, which throws the cage bars as moving shadows across the whole hall. It is the reason Stealth is viable at all in a lit room.
- The cages. Eleven, in two rows of five and six, 8 ft tall and 6 ft square, bolted to the floor and to each other. Nine stand open. Their tops make a continuous walkway 8 ft up, which is where the manticore is. Squeezing between the rows is a 3-ft aisle: any creature in the aisle is in reach of both rows.
- Cage 7 — occupied. Shut, chained, and there is something in it that has not been fed. It rattles when the party gets within 20 ft. See the bypasses; this is the room's loudest lever.
- Cage 11 — the keeper's cage. Shut and empty, with a bedroll, a lamp, and a bucket in it. Somebody in this menagerie locked themselves in at night, and it worked for a while.
- The feed chute. A funnel in the west wall at 6 ft with a lever beside it, chained open. It drops into a stone trough at the far end of the hall. It has not been worked in weeks and it is the single most useful object in the room.
- The floor. Straw, filth, and about an inch of things that crunch. Moving at full speed across it cannot be done quietly by anybody: all Stealth at full speed here is at disadvantage, and moving at half speed is the only quiet option.
Bypass Options
The thing in cage 7 has not eaten in a week and everything in the hall knows it. Letting it out gives all three of them something more interesting than the party.
- Doing it: the chain is old. Athletics DC 13 to break the hasp, Thieves' Tools DC 12 to pick it, or one hit from a weapon (AC 15, 10 damage) — which is loud but works. It can be done from outside the aisle, through the bars of cage 6, by a character who never enters the corridor at all.
- Success: a third hybrid comes out at a dead run. Within one round the two pacing hybrids converge on it and the manticore comes down off the cages to supervise. The party has four rounds of a three-way brawl in which nothing at all is interested in them — enough to walk the whole hall at half speed.
- What it costs, and be honest at the table: you have set an animal that has been starved in a box onto two of its own kind so that you can walk past. Some parties will not do it. That is a real decision and it belongs in this room.
- Failure (a botched pick, a missed swing): noise. The manticore looks up and the hybrids stop circling. The party gets one more attempt, and after that the standoff breaks in their direction.
The tops are a road, and the manticore is at the far end facing away from the door, eating.
- Getting up: Athletics DC 12 to climb the bars of cage 1, which is right beside the entrance and out of the aisle.
- Crossing: group Stealth DC 15 at half speed, four rounds to cross, with advantage because the swinging lamp keeps the shadows moving. The hybrids cannot climb and will not look up.
- One failure: the manticore's tail comes up — not a shot, a warning, spikes spread. Everybody stops. One Dexterity (Stealth) DC 13 to freeze convincingly; on a success it goes back to its meal and the party may continue.
- Two failures: it turns, and it is thirty feet away on the same walkway with nowhere for anybody to go. Initiative, and the party is on top of the cages in single file, which is a bad place to be but a much better one than the aisle.
- Cost: the cage tops pass directly over cage 7, and whatever is inside it will put an arm through the bars at the party's ankles. Nobody is hurt. Somebody will scream, and that costs one of the two Stealth failures.
The lever by the chute dumps a hopper of salted feed into the trough at the far end of the hall. It is the routine every animal in here was trained on.
- Doing it: the lever is seized. Athletics DC 14 to throw it, or ten minutes and Thieves' Tools DC 13 to free it quietly first.
- Success: the chute clatters, the trough fills, and all three creatures go to the trough — the manticore last, over the cage tops, because it will not queue behind hybrids. The party has three rounds with the whole hall clear behind the animals' backs, which is exactly enough to reach either exit at full speed and be gone before it matters.
- Failure: the lever throws with a bang and the hopper is empty — the feed rotted months ago. Every creature in the hall looks at the party, and the party has one round to choose between the cage-tops and the door they came in.
- Withdrawing instead: back out the way they came. Nothing follows. The cost is a wandering-threat roll, this room's loot, and this room's clue — and if the party is below half resources, withdraw is the correct call and you may say so through the keeper's journal (see Loot) rather than as the DM.
Encounter
Three loose things in a corridor, and they are already in a standoff.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bronze-Barbed Manticore | 3,900 |
| 2 | Cage-Broken Hybrid | 1,800 |
Base 7,500 XP; ×2 for three bodies = 15,000 adjusted, against the APL 9 Deadly budget of 14,400. It is 600 over on paper and worse than that in practice, because the hall is 25 ft wide with cages in it: no party formation survives here, area spells hit friends, and the manticore has the only high ground.
Why they are not attacking. They are in a standoff with each other, and it has been going for days. The manticore holds the cage-tops and the food; the two hybrids hold the floor and will not go up; each hybrid also detests the other, which is why they pace in opposite circles with iron between them. The party walking in is not a threat to any of them — it is a variable, and every one of the three is waiting to see which of its rivals reacts first.
If the party fights anyway. Say this out loud before initiative: three creatures, one corridor, and the big one is above you. Round 1 the manticore launches four tail spikes down the aisle at whoever is most armoured, from a position nothing in the party can reach without climbing. The hybrids close from both ends at once, and the party is fighting in two directions in a 3-ft aisle. This encounter can kill half the party in four rounds. It is the honest price of walking in and starting something, and this room gives three ways not to.
Tactics. Cage-Broken Hybrids attack whatever is closest, including each other and including the manticore — check that every round and let the dice make the room chaotic; that unpredictability is the warband's whole character. The manticore fights from the cage-tops, will not come down while it has spikes left, and hates the hybrids more than it hates the party: if a hybrid ever gets above floor level, the manticore attacks it by preference. Nothing here pursues beyond the hall — this is territory, and the territory ends at the doors.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
Telling the hybrids apart from the cages is worth a check: Nature DC 13 identifies them as made things rather than born ones, stitched from two animals each, and reveals the useful fact — they cannot tell friend from food either. A party that knows this plays the whole room differently and should be given the chance to learn it from the doorway.
Cage 7's occupant is identifiable at Perception DC 14 (a third hybrid, smaller, with two mismatched forelimbs). Anybody who looks knows what releasing it means. Do not spring the consequence on a table that had no way to see it.
Exits
Conditional — one roll on the loot table, and the condition is cage 11.
The keeper locked himself in at night with everything he valued: a bedroll, a lamp, a bucket, and a satchel under the bedroll. The cage is shut but not chained (Thieves' Tools DC 12, or Athletics DC 13 to force), and it is at the far west end, past everything.
In the satchel, alongside the roll: the keeper's day-book, three months of feeding times and one final entry about the bolt on cage 4. It is not treasure. Give it to the party for free and let them read the last page, which says, in a steady hand, that he intends to open all of them before he goes.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Two hybrids, no manticore. Cage 7 is empty and open, so that bypass becomes "make a noise at the far end". DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Manticore, three hybrids, and the Chimera of the Yard chained in the trough alcove — chained, and audible, and the reason the standoff exists. DCs +1 |
| 15 | As APL 12 with the chimera unchained and holding the western third of the hall. The three-way brawl bypass becomes a four-way and lasts two rounds instead of four. DCs +3 |
- Pacing: eighteen minutes bypassed, forty fought. When you are behind schedule, open with the feed lever visible and the animals hungry: describe the trough, describe the lever, and let one Athletics check clear the room in five minutes.
- Roll the hybrids' targets in the open. Their "attacks whatever is closest" trait is the room's engine, and a table that watches you roll for which of them gets hit understands within one round that this hall is a standoff and not an ambush.
- Two exits, both at the ends. This is one of the deck's deliberately two-exit rooms: the hall is a corridor and a corridor has two ends. If your party is used to picking from three doors, the pinch here is the point.
- Clue drip. Two hooks: the keeper's day-book, whose feeding times are in watches rather than hours — palace watches, kept by somebody who used to work in a palace (X08, X10) — and the bronze spike the manticore has already shed into cage 3, which is Daedalan cast-work rather than anything grown (X20, X17).
- Table safety. The hybrids are stitched, mismatched, surgical things and the cages have been lived in.
body-horrorandcaptivityare both in play; the intensity flag on the front matter names the first because it is the one you cannot avoid describing. Softer framing: they are simply strange animals, born odd, and the cages were a bad zoo rather than a workshop. The bypasses are unchanged. - Callback. The Chimeric Menagerie's (W07) signature is infighting: a party that met the chimera and the manticore in the yard has already seen that the way to survive this warband is to give it something else to fight. This room asks whether they learned it.
Creature Cards
All three belong to the Chimeric Menagerie (W07) and recur across the deck, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The tactics above are this room's and stay here. The Chimera of the Yard appears only in the APL 12 and 15 rows and is listed so a DM scaling up has the card to hand.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Bronze-Barbed Manticore, Cage-Broken Hybrid, Chimera of the Yard. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.