Roost of the Ash-Winged
The passage opens into the bottom of a chimney. The shaft goes up past the reach of your light and keeps going, and its walls are furred an inch thick with soft black soot that takes the print of a hand. Iron rungs climb one face. Two ledges break the shaft partway up, and on each ledge something is folded up asleep with its wings around it like a shroud.
Then the air turns over — you feel it change direction against your face — and a slow fall of warm ash comes down out of the dark, and one of the folded things unwraps a head and looks straight down at you.
DM summary. A vertical fight in a flue, against two things that fly when the party cannot, and which pick their target by who deserves it rather than who is closest. The shaft is the enemy as much as they are; the way to win this room is to make it a climb instead of a battle.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: custom map. A 25 × 25 ft flue floor under a 90-ft shaft — the room's own text says to draw it sideways; do that. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.
- Dimensions. The floor is 25 ft × 25 ft. The shaft above it is 20 ft square and 90 ft high, narrowing to 10 ft at the top. This is a Z-axis room and you should draw it on the mat sideways.
- Light. None at the bottom. Eighty feet up, a hanging ember-basket throws a dull red glow that lights the top third and nothing else.
- The rungs. Iron staples up the north face, from floor to top, sound but slick with soot. Climbing is Athletics DC 12 per 30 ft, or no check for a climb speed. A PC who fails falls to the next ledge below or to the floor: 1d6 per 10 ft.
- The ledges. At 30 ft and 60 ft, each 4 ft deep and running two walls' length. Ash-caked, foot-printed, and littered with the small bones of birds that came down the chimney. Each holds a fury and can hold three people standing.
- The draught. The flue breathes. Every third round the draught reverses — count it out loud. On a down-draught round, the whole shaft below 30 ft fills with falling ash: each creature there makes a Constitution save DC 13 or takes 1d10 and cannot speak, sing, or hold concentration until the end of its next turn. This does not obscure anything from the furies, who have truesight, so do not let a player plan around that.
- The stoke-grate. A cold iron grate in the floor, 5 ft square, over an ash-pit six feet deep. Under a foot of cold ash in the pit: bones, buckles, and the salt-crust of somebody's ration bag.
- The side vent. A soot-choked square hole at 15 ft on the west face, 2 ft across, going somewhere. See the third bypass.
Encounter
Two lesser furies on their ledges, and neither of them is interested in the whole party.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Ash-Winged Fury | 3,900 |
Base 7,800 XP; ×1.5 for two bodies = 11,700 adjusted, against the APL 9 Hard budget of 9,600. Twenty per cent over, and the shaft makes it worse: they fly 60 ft, the party climbs 12, and half the party will spend the fight on the floor throwing things. The bypasses below are not decoration — they are how this room is supposed to go.
Round 1. The nearer fury drops to 20 ft above the floor, hangs there, and names the Adjudged — one PC, one real deed, spoken in the voice of whoever was wronged. It attacks that PC and nobody else. The second fury stays on its ledge for a full round watching the rest of the party to see who interferes.
Tactics. They are not a pair; they are two proceedings that happen to share a chimney. Each takes its own Adjudged and holds to it. Anyone who heals, shields, or bodily blocks an Adjudged becomes fair game and they will say so first. They scourge from the air, they never land while an enemy is standing, and they will not pursue a fleeing party out of the shaft — the roost is the point, and they are back on the ledges within the minute.
One warning to give out loud. A PC who goes up the rungs while a fury is loose is climbing with both hands in front of something that flies. Make that cost explicit before anyone commits: attacks against a climbing PC have advantage and a hit means a DC 13 Strength save or a fall.
Bypass Options
The fury announced a charge. Charges can be answered, and this is the fastest way out of this room by a wide margin.
- The confession: the Adjudged spends an action saying the deed plainly and naming who it was done to. No check — it either is the truth or it is not, and the fury has truesight, so lying is not a plan.
- The price: the fury takes its scourging. 4d10 lashing damage across two rounds and one level of exhaustion, and then it climbs back to its ledge and folds up. Run it as description, not initiative.
- Success: both furies settle. The party climbs, walks, or leaves as they like, and neither fury will start a second proceeding this session.
- Failure — the Adjudged refuses, or somebody attacks during the confession: the naming passes to the next-guiltiest PC and the interferer is now complicit. Full encounter, and it is worse than it was.
A poured line of salt or funeral ash is a wall to these things, and the party has been walking past salt all session.
- What it costs: one ration's worth of salt per ledge. There is a salt-crust bag in the ash-pit — Investigation DC 13 to find, enough for one line.
- Laying it: a PC on a ledge spends an action pouring. No check. The fury cannot cross the line and will not try.
- Success: the shaft above a salted ledge is denied to that fury. Salt both and the climb is unopposed above 60 ft; salt one and the party has a rest stop they cannot be followed onto.
- Failure state: a line scuffed by a boot, a fall, or a down-draught round is broken and stops working. Anyone fighting on a salted ledge will break it within two rounds, so this is a bypass for a party that climbs and does not swing.
The 2-ft hole at 15 ft is the flue's old bypass duct and it comes out above the upper ledge.
- Getting in: Athletics DC 14 to climb across from the rungs, or a boost from below.
- The crawl: 40 ft of unbreathable soot. Three rounds holding your breath, and Athletics DC 13 at the elbow where it narrows to 18 inches. Packs, shields, and anything on the back stay behind — a PC goes through with what they can push ahead of them.
- Success: you come out on the shaft's upper lip, past both roosts, and can drop a rope for the rest.
- Failure at the elbow: stuck for one round, out of air, then 1 level of exhaustion and a 1d10 hit from the soot going in; a second failure means backing out entirely, which costs the same again.
- Cost of withdrawing instead: the party can leave by the way they came at any point and nothing follows them out of the shaft. They lose this room's clue drip and the climb, which is the only route to exit B.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The ember-basket at 80 ft is an iron cage on a chain, still hot, hung where the flue narrows. Perception DC 13 from the floor to see the chain runs down the south wall to a cleat at head height.
- Releasing it (no check, one action at the cleat) drops the basket down the shaft. Everything in the shaft below it makes a Dexterity save DC 15 or takes 4d10 fire, furies included — they are resistant, and they will absolutely remember who pulled the cleat.
- The solved state: the basket lands in the ash-pit, sets a slow smoulder, and the shaft becomes an up-draught permanently. No more down-draught rounds; the climb is clean; the room fills with smoke at head height on the floor instead.
Exits
None. Everything that has ever been brought into this room has been burnt, and what is in the ash-pit is buckles and salt. The salt is worth having and it is not a loot roll; hand it over.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | One fury, on the lower ledge. The draught reverses every fourth round. All DCs −2, and the salt bag is in plain sight |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Three furies — the third comes down the shaft from above on round 2, which means the ceiling is not safe either. DCs +1, ash damage 2d10 |
| 15 | Three furies and an Erinys of the Vigil roosting at the top, who does not join the fight but does declare a charge against whoever pulls the cleat, and will be waiting at the lip. DCs +3, ash damage 2d10, draught reverses every other round |
- Pacing. Fifteen to twenty minutes as a fight, five as a confession. Behind schedule: open with one fury already awake and hanging at 20 ft with the charge on its lips, and let the party's answer end the room in three exchanges.
- Count the draught out loud. "Two." "Three — the air turns over." A stated cadence is worth more to the table than any amount of description, and it makes the down-draught round feel like the room breathing rather than a DM's whim.
- Naming the Adjudged is the whole room and it needs care. Ask each player, once, early in the campaign or before this room, for one thing their character did that they would not want said out loud. Use that. If a player has nothing and does not want to invent one, the fury names the party's worst act in this maze, which after several rooms is never a difficult list to write.
- If a player is dominating, hand them the confession. It is the best scene in the room and it is one character talking while everyone watches.
- Clue drip. Two objects here take a clue well: the ember-basket's chain, a hundred feet of good iron links that somebody hauled down here, which suits X14 (A Thread of Your Own Making); and the birds' bones on the ledges, gulls among them, which suits X16 (The Salt Door) — sea birds get in somewhere, and the top of this shaft smells of it.
- Table safety. Falling, bad air, and a scourging. The confession beat asks a player to name something shameful in character; offer them the out before you ask, and accept "she has never told anyone and she is not telling you either" as a valid answer that costs the exhaustion instead.
- Warband callback. Erinyes & Ash never pick the nearest target and never chase the wrong one. A party that has met them before should already be arguing, before initiative, about who is going to have to answer for what.
Creature Cards
Both roosts are the same creature, which belongs to Erinyes & Ash (W19) and recurs across the deck, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The tactics above are this room's and stay here.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Ash-Winged Fury. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.