Loom-Widow's Parlor
Somebody has made a room in here. Not a lair — a room: a swept floor, a low couch, two stools set at a conversational angle, a lamp burning good oil. On the wall opposite the door hangs a tapestry eleven feet across, half finished, and it is the best thing you have seen in your life.
The loom stands beside it, and the weaver sits at the loom, and she has four more arms than she should and the patience of someone who has been waiting a while for company.
"Sit down," she says. "Somebody tell me something true."
DM summary. A half-fey weaver who charges a story for safe passage, and means it — an honest, warm, mannered negotiation with something that could kill the party and would prefer not to. The fight is the failure branch and it starts in the ceiling.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The Great Room — page 43, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The Villa)
The villa great room, walled down to 25 × 25 ft, is her parlor: couch, stools, and table sit where the carpet is. Everything above 8 ft is web — note it; don't draw it until someone looks up.
- Dimensions. 25 ft × 25 ft, ceiling 20 ft. Cramped at floor level and enormous above it — the parlor is furniture in the bottom eight feet and web in the top twelve, and the party will not notice the top twelve until they look up.
- Light. A brass lamp on a stand, good oil, warm. Bright within 20 ft, which is the whole room. She lit it for guests and will say so if asked.
- The furniture. A couch, two stools, a low table with a jug of water on it and four cups. The water is water. Nothing in this room is poisoned, charmed, or a trick, and a party that spends ten minutes checking is a party she will enjoy watching.
- The tapestry. Eleven feet of it, half done, and what it shows is this maze, from above, in a way no map could manage — not a plan, an impression: rooms as knots, corridors as slubs in the weft, and one long red thread running through the whole of it. Investigation DC 14 to realise the red thread is not decorative.
- The loom. A working upright loom, warp weighted with drilled stones. Her strands run from it to every corner of the ceiling.
- The ceiling. Twelve feet of layered web, and four Weaver Spiders in it, motionless, doing nothing at all unless she asks. Perception DC 13 to spot them, and she will not hide them from a direct question: "My daughters. They are shy."
- The rafters. Two cedar beams cross the room at 14 ft, above the furniture and below the worst of the web. They are the physical bypass.
The Toll
She wants a true story that the teller has not told before, and she wants it told properly. That is the whole price of safe passage for the whole party.
- It is not a check first. A player tells a story at the table — two minutes, their character's own, out loud. Then close it with Persuasion DC 13 or Performance DC 13, and give advantage if the story cost the teller something real: a death, a failure, a debt, somebody they left behind.
- She can tell a lie, over the loom, the way the forge-spirit can. Her Insight is better than anything the party can beat with a straight face, and she is not angry about attempts — she is disappointed, and she says so, and she asks again.
- Three things she will not accept, and she names all three up front so nobody wastes a turn: a story about spiders ("I have heard them all and none of them are flattering"), a story the party has already told her, and a story that is not the teller's own — secondhand heroics do not pay.
- What she accepts, written out, so a DM at eleven at night has options: a story about the first person the character ever failed; a story about something the character stole and still has; a story about a thing they were afraid of as a child and are still afraid of. A clever fourth answer is fine and should be rewarded — if a player offers something the table goes quiet for, that is a success, and you should not ask for the roll at all.
What safe passage buys. She names the exits, tells the party which of the three her daughters do not use, and gives them the skein (see Loot). She keeps her word exactly, and if the party comes back through this room later in the session she remembers them and charges nothing.
Two ways to lose it: touching the loom or the tapestry, and refusing to pay while also refusing to leave. She gives one warning — the lamp is turned down — and then the ceiling comes into the conversation.
Encounter
Only if the parley fails. Four spiders out of the ceiling and a weaver who re-spins the floor between them.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Weaver Spider | 700 |
| 1 | Web-Fey Spinner | 1,800 |
Base 4,600 XP; ×2 for five bodies = 9,200 adjusted, just under the APL 9 Hard budget of 9,600. What makes it worse than the number is the ceiling: five creatures that all attack from above in a room the party cannot back out of quickly.
Round 1. The lamp is turned down — that is the warning and it costs a round. If the party does not use it, the Spinner re-spins the doorway first: the way the party came in becomes 10 ft of fresh web (difficult terrain, Athletics DC 13 to pull through) before anything attacks. Then the four Weaver Spiders drop, one per corner, and restrain rather than kill.
Tactics. They aim to have the whole party restrained and nobody dead — she is not a murderer, she is a collector of stories, and a bound party can still talk. If the party is reduced to two conscious characters she stops the fight and asks again, and the price has gone up: now she wants a story from each of them. Nothing here pursues past the door; her parlor is the point.
Bypass Options
Not everyone has words, and she is a reasonable creature.
- The check: Persuasion DC 15 to substitute a keepsake — a real inventory item with a real history, handed over and explained. Coin does not work. A magic item works and is an appalling trade; she will say so and take it anyway if offered.
- Success: the same safe passage, and she weaves the object's history into the tapestry while the party watches, which takes four minutes and is the best scene in the room.
- Failure: she takes the item as a gift and does not consider the toll paid. The party is now out an heirloom and still standing in her parlor, which is exactly the right punishment for trying to buy your way out of a conversation.
- Cost: the object, permanently. She does not give things back.
Fourteen feet up, above the furniture and under the web, and her sight-lines are all along the floor.
- Getting up: Athletics DC 15 on the loom-frame's uprights or the wall brackets — and touching the loom is one of the two things that ends the parley, so it must be the brackets.
- Crossing: group Stealth DC 15 along the beams to the high vent in the south wall (exit C). The Weaver Spiders in the ceiling are dormant and will not react unless a strand is plucked.
- One failure: a strand goes. She looks up, and says — not shouting — "Who is in my roof?" This does not start the fight. It starts the parley over, from offended, which means DC 15 instead of DC 13 and no advantage available.
- Two failures: a beam creaks, a spider wakes, and the party is fighting from a 6-inch-wide cedar beam. Give them the option to drop to the couch and take the conversation instead.
- Cost of withdrawing instead: the door behind them is never blocked while the parley is live, and she does not pursue. The party may leave the way they came at any point in the conversation, and she will wish them well and mean it. Cost: the skein, the room's clue, and the tapestry, which is the best piece of intelligence in the deck.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The tapestry. Not a trap. Investigation DC 14 to see that the red thread running through the weave is a route rather than an ornament, and Investigation DC 16 or ten minutes with her permission to work out that the thread's near end is where the party is standing.
She will explain it for free if asked politely and after the toll is paid, and what she says is: she has been weaving what she can hear, and she cannot hear the exits — only the thread. This does not give the party a map and the DM should not let it become one. It tells them that the maze has a through-line and that somebody else's thread is already in it.
Exits
Room-specific: a skein of the Widow's thread. Off the loot table, and it never consumes a d100 slot. Given freely once the toll is paid, and not otherwise — it cannot be looted from her, because in her hands it is part of her.
- Fifty feet of grey silk line, thinner than a bowstring, which holds 900 lb and cuts nothing that touches it.
- Once per day, it will tie itself: speak to it and name a point within 30 ft that you can see, and one end of the skein makes itself fast there, at any angle, in any material. Undoing it is a word.
- It is fifty feet long and it will never be longer. She says this while she hands it over, and she laughs: it is not a thread you can walk a labyrinth on, and if the party is hoping for X10, they are holding a rope, not a Resolution. Ariadne's thread is Ariadne's and it is found where X10 says.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Two Weaver Spiders in the ceiling. Toll DCs −2, and she is gentler about a bad story — one retry, free |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Six Weaver Spiders, and the Spinner re-spins one 10-ft square of floor every round instead of only the doorway. Toll DCs +1 |
| 15 | Eight Weaver Spiders, two Web-Fey Spinners (a daughter grown), and the parlor's web is layered enough that the rafters are inside it — the climb bypass costs a Stealth check per beam. Toll DCs +3, and she wants a story from every character before she lets anyone through |
- Pacing. Twenty-five minutes and almost all of it talking, which makes this the room to roll after two fights. If you are behind schedule, take the story in three sentences instead of two minutes, skip the tapestry reading, and be done in eight.
- Play her warm. She is not sinister, she is not testing them, and she is not going to twist the wording of the deal. She is lonely, she is extremely good at her craft, and she wants two minutes of somebody's actual life. The threat is entirely in the ceiling and she never mentions it.
- This is the room for the quiet player. If one player has been carrying the session, let the toll be paid by somebody who has not spoken in an hour, and let her ask them the follow-up questions. She is an excellent interviewer.
- Do not require a good story. Require an honest one. A player who says "I don't know, my character isn't interesting" gets asked what their character is bad at, and the answer to that is always a story.
- If the fight starts, aim at restrained and not at dead. Five creatures whose purpose is to bind means a party that loses this fight wakes up in a parlor with a weaver who has all the time in the world and still wants a story. That is a much better outcome than a TPK and it is entirely in character.
- Table safety. Spiders and being bound and hung in a web. If arachnophobia is at the table, she can be a weaver with too many hands and no spiders at all — put the four Weaver Spiders in the ceiling as animated looms, keep every number, and the room loses nothing.
- Clue drip. Two objects: the tapestry's red thread (X10, Sign or Proof tier — somebody else's thread is already running through this maze and she has been recording it), and the good lamp oil she is burning, which is fresh and which came from somewhere with a supply of it (X05 or X03, Trace — she trades with somebody).
- Warband callback. Arachne's Weave (W12) restrain, retreat up a strand, and come back. A party who has fought them should already be looking up when they enter a room with a high ceiling. If they look up here before she speaks, tell them what is in the web and let the conversation happen with everybody informed. It is a better scene.
Creature Cards
Both belong to Arachne's Weave (W12) and recur across the deck, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The Loom-Widow is a Web-Fey Spinner with a name, a parlor, and a price; her toll, her manners, and the ceiling's patience are this room's and stay here.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Weaver Spider, Web-Fey Spinner. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.