50
The Quiet Kitchen
RoomSanctuary
workshoprest-pointresupplyquick-room
Warm. Not hot — warm, the way a room is warm four hours after somebody banked the fire. There is a hearth at the far wall with grey coals in it, a long scarred table, copper pots on hooks in size order, a water jar the height of your waist, and a stone sink with a drain that works.
On the table, in a patch of nothing in particular, a grey cat is sitting with its paws together. It looks at you for a while. Then it goes back to washing.
DM summary. A kitchen that somebody kept well and left recently, and there is nothing wrong with it. One short rest, a full resupply, a whetstone, and a cat that is only a cat.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The Back Yard — page 38, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Roadhouse)
The roadhouse's back rooms are the kitchen: use the hearth-corner room at 35 × 25 ft, keep the printed back passage as the second door, and mark the table, sink, and smoke-shelf. Wall off the yard.
- Dimensions. 35 ft × 25 ft, ceiling 12 ft, with a vaulted chimney over the hearth. Two doors at floor level, both hung and both working.
- Light. Low red from the banked coals, and there are eleven tallow candles in a jar on the shelf. The party can have as much light in here as they want, which is not true of most of this maze.
- The hearth. Coals under ash, live enough to catch in ten minutes. There is dry cedar stacked beside it and a bellows that works.
- The water jar and the sink. Clean water, fed by a lead pipe from somewhere above, and a drain that goes somewhere below. Enough to drink, fill every skin in the party, and wash — which clears any lingering rider from an earlier room that involved filth, honey, blood, or the smell of a butcher's chute.
- The table. Ten feet of scarred cedar. Under it, a shelf with a mortar, a knife roll (six knives, all sharp), and a whetstone in a wooden cradle.
- The pantry. A cool alcove off the north-west corner, hung with a door of bead-strings against flies: onions, dried figs, oil, salt fish, a wheel of hard cheese, three amphorae of oil and one of wine, and flour in a bin the size of a coffin.
- The cat. Grey, unbothered, well fed, and completely ordinary. It is not a shapechanger, a familiar, a portent, or a curse. See DM Notes, twice.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
There is no trap in this room. There is no catch in this room. This is one of the eight Sanctuary rooms and its entire function is to be true.
The only checks here are for extras:
| Check | What it gets |
|---|---|
| Perception DC 12 on the hearth wall | A loose brick, and behind it the cook's private cache: a purse and something better. This is the room's second loot roll |
| Animal Handling DC 10, or a scrap of the salt fish | The cat allows itself to be carried, and will follow the party for exactly one room. See the cat rules below |
| Investigation DC 13 on the pantry inventory slate | A running list of meals sent out, and where they were sent, kept in the same hand as the tally in R043 |
What a short rest here gives. One short rest is available, and it counts against the session's cap of two.
- A hot meal (thirty minutes, uses the pantry, needs the fire lit): every character who eats regains 1d8 + their Constitution modifier hit points on top of anything they spend Hit Dice on. Once per session.
- The whetstone (ten minutes per weapon, one weapon per character): +1 to the first attack roll and +2 damage on the first hit of the party's next combat. The bonus is spent on that hit and does not stack with itself.
- Water and wash: every container filled, and every soaked-in-filth rider from earlier rooms cleared.
- No long rest. The two long-rest rooms are elsewhere in the deck, and this kitchen is not one of them. If the party settles in to sleep, nothing happens to them — they simply do not get the benefit, and after eight hours the fire is out and the water jar is low.
The cat rules, because your players will ask:
- It has no stat block worth printing. If something attacks it, it is a cat: AC 12, 2 hit points, and it leaves.
- If fed and carried, it follows the party for one room. Once, at a moment of the DM's choosing, the cat looks hard at a door or a patch of floor about ten seconds before anything happens there — one free round of warning, and then the cat has had enough of this and goes home.
- It does not fight, guide, speak, or turn out to be anybody. Let it be a cat that survived, in a place where almost nothing does.
Exits
AObviousThe wide service door in the east wall the food went out through, propped with a wedge. No check.
BObviousThe pantry stair at the north-west, four steps up, where the deliveries came in. No check.Rider: you leave carrying food, and it shows — advantage on the first Persuasion or Animal Handling check made in the next room, because you have something everything down here wants.
CHiddenA dumbwaiter shaft beside the hearth, 2 ft square, rope intact, counterweighted well enough to take a person at a time. Investigation DC 12.Rider: the party arrives one at a time and quietly, and may take one free Perception check before anything reacts to them.
DConditionalThe cat's door: a hand-cut hole in the plaster behind the flour bin, opening into a crawl. Requires shifting the bin (Athletics DC 12, and it takes two people and makes a mess).Rider: you come out where the cat comes and goes — which is a route no built thing in this maze patrols. The next room's occupants, if any, do not get a surprise round on you.
Loot
Two rolls on the loot table.
- The first is free, and it is the pantry: oil, salt fish, figs, cheese, wine, flour, and a sack to carry it in. Roll for the odd valuable among it.
- The second is the cook's cache behind the loose hearth brick — Perception DC 12, or automatic for any party that spends ten minutes searching a room they have decided is safe.
Beyond the rolls, hand out for free and without a check: eleven candles, a tinderbox, a good knife, a full waterskin each, and three days of rations per character. A Sanctuary that makes the party pass a check for rations is not a Sanctuary. The pantry is the point.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | DCs −2, and the cache is behind an obviously loose brick. The hot meal heals 1d10 + Constitution modifier, because a level 6 party needs it more |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | DCs +1. The pantry has been raided once already — one loot roll instead of two, and the fire has been out for a day, which means twenty minutes to get it going |
| 15 | DCs +3, one loot roll, and the kitchen is in use: a pot on the coals, a knife out of the roll, and whoever is coming back will be back within the hour. Still no fight. The clock is the whole change |
DM Notes
- Pacing: fifteen to twenty-five minutes, and let it run long. This is where the table breathes, plans, argues, and says the things that make the session memorable. When you are behind schedule, give the short rest and the pantry in a single sentence, skip the cache and the inventory slate, and get out in five minutes — but do not skip the room. A party at 40% resources needs this more than it needs another fight.
- Do not put a monster in here. Ever. Not a mimic in the pots, not a doppelgänger cook, not something in the flour bin. The deck has 65 rooms with creature encounters; this is one of eight that does not, and the whole feature depends on Sanctuary rooms being trustworthy. The first time a Sanctuary betrays a party, every Sanctuary after it stops working.
- The cat is only a cat, and this is the second time this page says so because the temptation is genuinely enormous. Its one job is to be the thing the players talk about in the car afterwards.
- Substitution rule. Per the DM levers: if the party is below 40% resources and no Sanctuary has come up in five rooms, you may substitute this room for a rolled result. It is the most substitutable of the eight because it costs nothing and grants no ritual, rest-cap exception, or cure.
- Clue drip. Two hooks: the pantry inventory slate, which lists meals sent out to rooms the party has not seen and names one of them "the high room" (X17, X08) — and the second bowl by the hearth, smaller than a man's, washed and set aside, which is either the cat's or it is not (X05).
- Callback. If your table came in as tribute (B04) or as the ones sent after a missing child (B07), this room lands differently: somebody was cooking for somebody down here, and recently. Say the second bowl is clean. Do not explain it.