The Nemean Den
The floor slopes down into a bowl of bones — not scattered but heaped, sorted the way only an animal sorts, dry and clean and years deep. Two shapes lie asleep across the rim at your feet, and each of them has two heads.
Beyond them something enormous is lying with its back to you beside most of a boar, breathing slowly, and the tawny hide over its shoulders catches your light and does not look like hide at all. It looks like hammered metal.
DM summary. A lion that swords do not cut, asleep on a full stomach beside the rest of its dinner. Everything in this room is arranged to let the party leave without waking it.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The Wide Chambers — page 15, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Broken Galleries)
The cave chambers are the den: shade the 8-ft-deep bone bowl across the middle of the larger chamber, keep the printed wall line as the rim walk on the north side, and mark the drag-run trough through the south heap.
- Dimensions. 55 ft × 45 ft, ceiling 18 ft, the floor dishing eight feet down to the middle and back up. The party enters at the high east rim.
- Light. None. The den is dark and the lion does not need light.
bone-strewnis the whole floor: the bowl is difficult terrain and it is loud — every square of it is bone chips, and moving through it at more than half speed cannot be done quietly by anyone. - The rim walk. A ledge of intact floor two to four feet wide runs around the north side of the bowl, above the bones and clear of them. It is the quiet route and it is the reason this room is survivable.
- The boar. Most of a Calydonian boar, opened, at the lion's side. Perhaps eighty pounds of it left. It is the room's most valuable object and it is not loot — it is a bypass.
- The drag-run. A trough worn through the bone heap on the south side, three feet deep, where the lion drags its kills in. It runs from the south-west crack to the middle of the bowl, and a person can crawl it out of sight of anything standing.
- The old kill. Half buried in the heap at the north-east: a hunter's remains under a bronze-scaled cloak that is not bronze. See Loot.
- The two dogs at the den mouth. A pair of two-headed hounds lie across the east rim, four heads down, asleep in the warm draught. They are the lion's tolerated scavengers, they are bottom of the order in this room, and they will not wake for footsteps — only for the lion's roar, a fight, or a hand on the boar.
- The smell. Say it: this room smells like a kennel and a butcher's yard and nothing has been out of here in a long time.
Bypass Options
The best answer is the one the room shows you at the door: it is asleep, and there is a ledge.
- Reading it: Nature or Animal Handling DC 13 — it has eaten within the hour, it will sleep for hours more, and the boar beside it means it has no reason to hunt. A ranger, druid, or anybody who has kept large animals gets this free.
- Crossing: the rim walk, at half speed, group Stealth DC 14. Nobody needs to enter the bowl.
- One failure: an ear turns. It lifts its head, looks at nothing, and puts it down again. The party loses a round holding still and nothing else; one Dexterity (Stealth) DC 12 from the character who slipped.
- Two failures: it stands up. It is between the party and the far door, it is not yet angry, and the party has one full round to get back onto the rim and out the way they came before it decides. Take the round; do not roll initiative in round one of a lion standing up.
- Cost of the rim: single file, four rounds, and no one can carry anything bulky. If the party is hauling a body, a chest, or a barrel of anything, it goes into the bowl or it stays behind.
It is already gorged. Another eighty pounds of meat within reach of its nose makes this room a non-event.
- Doing it: move the boar, or add to it — a party's rations, a slain beast, a conjured animal, anything substantial. Animal Handling DC 12 to place food without a fuss; no check at all to simply throw rations down into the bowl from the rim.
- Success: it wakes just enough to eat, and a feeding lion is a lion facing one direction. Five rounds of complete indifference — enough for six people to walk straight across the bowl at full speed.
- The cost: state it in items. Rations gone, or the boar dragged twenty feet by two characters with Athletics DC 12 and no way to be quiet about it.
- Failure: the food lands short or wrong and it wakes properly, but hungry-curious rather than angry — it walks to the food. The party has two rounds of it looking away.
The trough through the bone heap is deep enough to hide a crawling person from anything standing in the bowl.
- Doing it: Acrobatics DC 13 to crawl 40 ft of it quietly, one character at a time, at a quarter speed. It comes out at the south-west crack, which is exit C.
- The cost: you are crawling through the low middle of a lion's midden with your face in it. Every character who takes this route makes a Constitution save DC 11 or is at disadvantage on their next Perception and Investigation checks — their nose is finished for the next hour — and everyone will smell of it.
- Failure: a bone-slide. The heap shifts, loudly. As "one failure" above: it lifts its head, and the crawler must hold still (Stealth DC 13) or be a shape in the bones twenty feet from a waking lion.
- Withdrawing instead: the party may withdraw to the east door at any time before it is fully roused, at the cost of a wandering-threat roll, this room's hide, and the knowledge of what was on the far side. It will not follow them out of the den; it has a boar and a full stomach and no interest in a corridor.
Encounter
One creature. Under budget on paper, and a genuine threat to a party of six.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Lion of the Nemean Den | 10,000 |
One body, so the multiplier is ×1: 10,000 adjusted, against the APL 9 Deadly budget of 14,400. The two Two-Headed Death Dogs at the den mouth are not in that number — they sleep through everything the bypasses involve. If the lion is fought, they wake at the end of round 1 and join it: add 1,400 XP, and the adjusted total becomes 22,800 for three bodies, which is well past Deadly and is the arithmetic of starting a fight in somebody else's den. It is 4,400 XP light and it is still the most dangerous room in this stretch of the deck, because of one line on its card: nonmagical slashing and piercing damage does nothing to it. A typical six-person party at APL 9 has two or three sources of damage that this thing feels. The rest of the party is carrying props.
Why it is not attacking. It has just eaten most of a boar and it is asleep on its side in the warm part of the den. Its passive Perception while gorged is 12, not 19, and it will not get up for anything it can sleep through. A gorged lion is not a merciful lion. It is a busy one.
If the party fights anyway. Say this to the table plainly, before initiative: your swords and arrows will not cut it, it is faster than you across broken ground it knows, and it will drag whoever it bites into the middle of the bowl. Round 1 it bites the nearest character, grapples them, and drags them 20 ft down into the bones away from their allies. Round 2 it does it again to somebody else. This encounter can kill three characters, and a party without magical weapons or bludgeoning damage should treat it as unwinnable. That is the honest cost of poking it. The room offers three ways not to, and one of them requires no roll at all.
Tactics. It fights in the bowl, where the footing favours it, and it will not follow the party up onto the rim walk while there is meat behind it. It targets whoever hurt it last, which means the character with the magic weapon becomes the whole fight. If it drops below half its hit points it withdraws to the drag-run and its lair-crack, dragging the boar with it — it is an animal and it does not fight to the death over territory it can leave. Let it go. A party that has driven it off has beaten this room.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
There is no mechanism in this room. The only checks are the ones in the bypasses and one more, which is worth offering the moment a player says the word hide:
Nature or History DC 14 — this is a Nemean strain, and the story about them is true: the pelt turns bronze and iron. What the story does not say, and what a successful check adds, is that the hide does nothing against a crushing weight, a falling rock, or a thrown boulder. A party that learns this has been handed the fight's only honest plan, and they will need the room's rocks — there are plenty in the bowl's rim.
Exits
Room-specific, and it is not the lion's hide.
The Peeled Hide of the Last Hunter. Under the old kill at the north-east of the heap, wrapped around a set of bones that got further into this den than the party means to: a cured square of Nemean pelt about the size of a cloak, cut and dressed years ago from some other lion, stiff as board and studded with three bronze pins. Recovering it takes ten minutes of quiet work in the bones (Investigation DC 13 to spot the shape at all, and no check to lift it).
- Worn as a cloak or lashed to an arm as a pauldron, it lets its wearer, as a reaction, reduce one hit from a nonmagical slashing or piercing weapon to zero damage.
- Doing so removes one of the three bronze pins. After the third, the hide is a rug — a magnificent, entirely mundane rug.
- It is off the loot table and consumes no d100 slot, and it is not a Resolution requirement: no way out of this maze needs a lion's pelt, and if a player hopes otherwise, let them ask an oracle.
The living lion's hide is not on offer. If the party kills it and skins it, that is between them and the four hours it takes, and the result is a trophy worth a fortune in Knossos and nothing at all down here.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | The lion is CR 9 rather than 13 (−25% hit points, no Drag) and it is not immune, only resistant, to nonmagical slashing and piercing. DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | The lion gains +25% hit points and one legendary action — Pounce, moving up to 30 ft and making one claw attack. The two death dogs at the mouth wake on the first failed Stealth check rather than sleeping through it. DCs +1 |
| 15 | As APL 12 with +50% hit points, a second phase at half health (it stops fighting to kill and starts fighting to keep, dragging bodies to the drag-run and returning), and a lair action on initiative count 20: the bone heap shifts and every creature in the bowl makes an Athletics DC 15 check or is knocked prone. DCs +3 |
- Pacing: twelve minutes bypassed, forty fought, and the forty is a mistake. When you are behind schedule, give the Nature read for free at the door — "it has eaten, and there is a ledge" — and resolve the room in one group Stealth check. Six minutes.
- Show the immunity before it matters. The read-aloud says the hide looks like hammered metal. If a player still opens with a longsword, let the first hit land and describe the blade skidding off, then give them the round to reconsider. Do not spring the immunity as a gotcha in round three.
- The way to beat it is weight, not edges. Rocks on the bowl rim, a shoved column, a collapsed heap, a fall. If your table gets creative about crushing this thing, say yes to all of it — that is the intended shape of the fight if the fight happens.
- Let it leave. The lion withdrawing at half health is written into its tactics because a party that drives off a Nemean lion has a better story than a party that butchered one, and because the persistence rule wants this maze to still have its animals in it next session.
- Clue drip. Two hooks: the old kill's kit — a hunter's satchel with a rolled chart in it, half eaten, showing tunnels rather than rooms (X14, X12) — and the boar itself, which is wearing a bronze ear-tag with a Knossian mark, because somebody in this maze is farming these animals (X08, X06).
- Table safety. A den floored in bones with a half-eaten kill in it is the intensity here, and it is
bone-strewnrather than gore. If your table wants it lighter, the bones are old and dry and the boar is the only fresh thing in the room. Nothing changes mechanically. - Callback. Beasts of the Hunt (W17) are animals and answer to animal logic: food, scent, territory, and a full stomach. A party that split a death-dog's attention with a thrown haunch elsewhere in the deck already knows what to do here, and this room is the graduation exam for that idea.
Creature Cards
The death dogs belong to Beasts of the Hunt (W17) and recur across the deck, so their numbers live in the bestiary. The lion lives in this den and nowhere else, so it is printed here.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Two-Headed Death Dog. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.
The Lion of the Nemean Den
Huge beast, unaligned · CR 13 (10,000 XP)
AC 17 (bronze-turning hide) | HP 187 (15d12 + 90) | Speed 50 ft., climb 30 ft.
Saves Str +11, Con +10 · Skills Perception +6, Stealth +6 · Keen smell · Darkvision 60 ft.
Hide That Turns Bronze. Immune to slashing and piercing damage from nonmagical weapons. Bludgeoning damage, magical damage, falling rock, and crushing weight all affect it normally, and it knows this.
Gorged. While it has eaten within the hour its passive Perception is 12 instead of 19, its speed is 30 ft, and it will not rise from a resting position except to feed or to defend itself.
Sure-Footed in the Bones. The bone bowl is not difficult terrain for it, and it makes no noise crossing it.
Multiattack. One bite and two claw attacks.
Bite. Melee weapon attack, +11 to hit, reach 10 ft, one target: 2d10 + 7 piercing damage. If the target is Large or smaller it is grappled, escape DC 17, and while grappled it is restrained.
Claw. Melee weapon attack, +11 to hit, reach 5 ft, one target: 2d8 + 7 slashing damage.
Drag to the Middle. It moves up to 20 ft, dragging one creature it has grappled with it, without provoking opportunity attacks.
Turn the Blade. When a creature hits it with a melee attack using a nonmagical weapon, that creature makes a Strength save DC 17 or the weapon is wrenched from its grip and lands 10 ft away in the bones.