Hive of the Bronze Bees
The far wall of this chamber is a comb. Hexagonal cells in beaten bronze, eight feet of them, floor to shoulder height and twenty feet across, and most of the cells are capped. The uncapped ones are full of something that catches your light and moves like honey and is not honey — it is gold, or something with gold in it, and it is flowing very slowly down the face of the comb into a bronze trough at the bottom.
The air above the comb glitters. Individually. Thousands of times.
Nothing has noticed you. There is a censer on a tripod by the door, three-quarters full of old grey ash, and somebody left a bundle of dry reeds beside it.
DM summary. A Daedalan hive that answers to impact and metal noise and completely ignores voices, guarding eight feet of gold-run comb. The censer by the door is the answer and it was left there by somebody who worked here. The party can have the gold if they are willing to be quiet in a very specific way.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: custom map. A 45 × 35 ft room whose one feature is a comb-covered west wall and a 2-ft catwalk — sketch it; the fight is about the wall, not the floor. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.
- Dimensions. 45 ft × 35 ft, ceiling 18 ft. The comb fills the west wall; the party enters east.
- Light. None on arrival. The comb throws back whatever light the party brings and the swarm glitters when it does — light is free here and it is also how the party sees the danger, so do not let anybody play this in the dark to be clever.
- The comb. Bronze hexagonal cells, capped and uncapped, on a frame that is bolted to the wall. Prying a capped cell open is impact noise. The gold-run in the open cells is warm, thick, and slow, and it will fill a flask in a round.
- The trough. A bronze channel along the comb's foot, half full of set gold-run, which has the consistency of hard wax and can be cut out in slabs.
- The gear-gallery. A maintenance catwalk, 2 ft wide, runs along the north wall at 11 ft, from the door to a bracket above the comb's north end. The bees do not patrol above 10 ft — the hive's whole flight pattern is the comb face and the floor in front of it, which anyone who watches for a round can see.
- The censer and reeds. On a tripod by the door: a bronze censer with old ash in it, and a bundle of dried reeds beside it, tied. This is a smoker. A stoker or a keeper left it exactly where a keeper leaves one, and it is the single most valuable object in the chamber.
- The pinion housing. At the comb's north end, where the gold-run is metered: a bronze gear train in an open housing, the same pitch and tooth-count as the pinion a certain flying machine is missing.
The Noise Ticks
The hive answers to impact and metal, not to voices. Talking is free. Shouting is free. The party can hold an entire argument in this room and nothing will move.
| What somebody does | Ticks |
|---|---|
| Talking, shouting, singing, casting with verbal components | 0 |
| Walking, running, dashing anywhere on the floor | 0 |
| Metal striking stone — a dropped weapon, a hobnail on flag, a shield set down | 1 |
| Prying a capped cell | 1 |
| Cutting gold-run out of the trough | 1 per slab |
| Any attack that strikes bronze, stone, or the comb | 2 |
| Prying the pinion out of its housing | 2 — it is loud, and it is exactly as loud as X20 says it is |
| A metal object dropped from the gallery | 3 |
The thresholds:
- At 3 ticks: the first Swarm of Bronze Bees launches and goes to the source of the last tick. Roll initiative.
- At 5 ticks: the second swarm launches.
- At 8 ticks, or on the third round of any fight: a third swarm comes out of the comb's capped cells. It is not in the budget below. It is what happens to a party who keeps hitting things.
Ticks do not decay. This is the opposite of the sound-hunting gallery elsewhere in the deck and the contrast is deliberate: here the count is a budget the party spends, not a tide they can wait out. Tell them that. Two ticks of loot is two ticks they cannot get back.
Encounter
Two swarms, and a third if the party insists.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Swarm of Bronze Bees | 2,300 |
Base 4,600 XP; ×1.5 for two bodies = 6,900 adjusted, under the APL 9 Hard budget of 9,600. It earns Hard three ways: the swarms ignore cover, they do area damage in a chamber with one narrow safe height, and the room can produce a third swarm (base 6,900, ×2, 13,800 adjusted) if the party keeps making noise. Say the third swarm exists in your own head before round one, and let the party's choices decide it.
Why they are not already attacking. Nothing here is hostile and nothing here is asleep. The hive is a machine doing a job: it meters gold-run out of the comb, and it defends the comb against impact, because impact is what a thief makes and a talker does not. Walk in, look, and walk out, and the hive will never react.
Round 1, if it starts. The launched swarm goes to the tick's source, not to the nearest character — which means the party can put a tick somewhere they are not. It arrives as a 20-ft cube of moving bronze that does not care about cover.
Tactics. The swarms hold the comb face. They will not pursue past the chamber's arches and they will not go above 10 ft, ever, even to follow. A party on the gallery is safe and can watch the swarm mill about beneath them, which is the correct and slightly undignified way to win this room.
Bypass Options
The censer, the reeds, and ten minutes of somebody's afternoon two hundred years ago.
- The check: Nature DC 13 or Survival DC 13 to make it smoulder rather than burn — damp the reeds from a waterskin, bank the ash over them, and keep it under a flame. Anybody who has kept bees, worked a forge, or smoked out a wasp nest gets advantage; a druid or a herbalist does it without a roll.
- Time: three rounds to raise the smoke, and it lasts ten minutes.
- Success: every swarm within 20 ft of the censer is suppressed — it will not launch, will not pursue, and will not defend. Carried by hand, the censer clears a 20-ft bubble around the bearer, which is enough to reach the comb, cut the trough, pry two cells, and take the pinion. Ticks still accumulate and simply do not fire while the smoke holds. When it fails, everything the party spent arrives at once, so leave before it does.
- On a failure: the reeds catch and flame instead of smouldering. That is 2 ticks and a bundle of reeds the party no longer has. There is enough reed for two attempts, total.
- Cost: three rounds, a waterskin, and a ten-minute clock the party has to work inside. Call out the minutes.
Eleven feet up, along the north wall, above a flight pattern that has never once gone higher.
- Getting up: Athletics DC 14 at the door-side bracket, or a boost with no check, or any climb speed.
- Crossing: Acrobatics DC 13 at the two-foot gap where the catwalk's plate has corroded away; a failure is not a fall — it is a hand slapping bronze, which is 1 tick, and the character catches themselves.
- What it reaches: the bracket above the comb's north end, which is directly over the pinion housing and within arm's reach of the top row of capped cells. Everything worth having in this room can be taken from the gallery, and the gallery is out of the swarms' reach even after they launch.
- The trap in it: anything dropped from up there is 3 ticks, and a character working one-handed at full stretch over a bronze housing is going to be asked to make one Sleight of Hand DC 14 not to drop the pinion. Tell them the number first.
- Cost of withdrawing instead: the east arch is behind them the whole time, the swarms do not leave the chamber, and the party may withdraw at any tick count with nothing worse than empty hands. Cost: two loot rolls, the pinion, and the room's clue.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The gold-run is not treasure in a bag; it is a substance. Working it out is the room's only puzzle and it is a short one.
| Element | Value |
|---|---|
| What it is | Bronze-gold in suspension, warm, slow, and still flowing. Investigation DC 13 or any smith: this is casting stock, and it is what the hive is for — the comb is a foundry that makes its own alloy |
| Taking it liquid | A flask a round from an open cell. 1 tick per cell pried, 0 from a cell already open |
| Taking it set | Cut slabs out of the trough. 1 tick per slab, and a slab is 8 lb |
| Ruining it | Water or cold sets it hard and grey in a round. A party who quenches the comb to be clever has destroyed the loot and made 2 ticks doing it |
Exits
Two rolls on the loot table, and the condition is simply reaching the comb and spending the time:
- First roll: the trough — two slabs of set gold-run, cut out (2 ticks) or lifted free where the channel has already cracked (0 ticks, Investigation DC 12 to spot the cracked section, which is the reward for looking before prying).
- Second roll: the capped cells, pried (1 tick each, and the party needs two). Behind the caps: finished casting stock, and in one cell out of six, something the hive was given rather than made — a ring, a stamped ingot, a bronze key-blank.
The pinion is not loot. The gear in the housing at the comb's north end is what X20's flying machine is missing, at the correct pitch, and X20 names this room as one of two places to get one. It is Resolution-owned: hand it over as the thing the Resolution needs, charge the 2 ticks, and do not spend a d100 slot on it.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | One Swarm of Bronze Bees; thresholds at 4 and 7, no third swarm. Reeds enough for three attempts. All DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Three swarms, thresholds at 2 / 4 / 6, and a Clockwork Sentinel on a fixed patrol along the comb face whose route crosses the gallery's bracket once every four rounds. DCs +1 |
| 15 | Four swarms, thresholds at 2 / 3 / 5, no censer (somebody has taken it), and the comb answers a fourth trigger: any spell cast within 20 ft of the comb face is 3 ticks, because the hive was built to guard against exactly that. DCs +3 |
- Pacing. Eighteen minutes, and most of it is planning. This is a heist room and it should be run like one: the party stands in the doorway, works out the rules, and then executes badly.
- Say the central rule immediately and clearly: talking is free. A party who thinks they are in another silence room will play this one wrong and be bored. "You can shout in here. It is metal on stone that they answer to." One sentence, up front, and the room becomes a puzzle instead of a repeat.
- Keep the tick count visible. Same trick as the deck's other counting room, opposite arithmetic: ticks do not decay, so the number on the table is a spending record and the players will start negotiating with each other about it. That negotiation is the room.
- If you are behind schedule, the censer is already smoking when the party arrives — somebody was here an hour ago and left in a hurry. Ten minutes on the clock from round one, two loot rolls, no fight, eight minutes total.
- Do not punish a party for taking the gold. Two rolls is the assigned reward and the ticks are the price. If they spend six ticks and take everything, they have earned two swarms and they should get exactly two, fought from the gallery, and win.
- Table safety. Nothing to flag; the threat is metal insects and the imagery is more uncanny than unpleasant. If anyone at the table is uneasy about insects specifically, make the swarm a cloud of bronze filings driven by the hive's bellows — same numbers, no legs.
- Clue drip. Two objects: the pinion in its housing (X20, Proof or Path tier — the bird's missing gear, and this room is one of two that carry it), and the key-blank in the sixth capped cell, which is a hollow bronze casting with no flats filed on it yet — an unfinished version of something the party may have seen in a bull's mouth (X19, Sign).
- Warband callback. Daedalan Automata (W03) always reward observation over damage, and here the observable thing is a flight pattern with a ceiling. A party who has watched a Clockwork Sentinel's patrol or counted an ox's passes should instinctively spend one round watching before they touch anything. Give that round its value out loud: "You watch for ten seconds. Nothing they do goes above the catwalk."
Creature Cards
Both belong to Daedalan Automata (W03) and both recur, so the numbers live in the bestiary — the swarm again in F15. The tick table, the thresholds, the smoke bubble, and the gallery's ceiling are this room's and stay here. The Sentinel appears only in the APL 12 row and is listed so a DM scaling up has the card to hand.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Swarm of Bronze Bees, Clockwork Sentinel. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.