A spiral stair climbs the inside of a round shaft, treads cantilevered out of the wall with nothing under them and nothing beside them, around an open drop. Wound about the stone newel in the middle, from the floor to as far up as you can see, is a snakeskin: shed whole, dry as paper, wide as a wagon, still holding the shape of the coil it came off.
Something small chirrs above you. Something else answers from below, and you realise that the chirring is coming from both directions at once.
DM summary. A vertical fight on a stair with no railing, against a brood that owns the middle of it. The mother is not here. The room is her skin, her children, and her dogs, and it is a hard fight only if the party insists on climbing through the middle of the nest.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: custom map. A 30-ft round shaft with a cantilevered spiral stair — chalk the circle, track height, and fight on the treads. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.
- Dimensions. A round shaft 30 ft across and 60 ft high. The stair is 5 ft wide, cantilevered, no rail, twelve treads to a quarter turn.
- Light. None. Whatever the party brought, and open flame matters here — see the bypasses and the skin.
- The drop. The open well in the middle is 20 ft across. A fall from the stair is 1d6 per 10 ft onto a stone hoist-block at the bottom. Anyone fighting on the treads should be told, once, that a shove is worth more than a sword here — and that this is true for both sides.
- The shed skin. Sixty feet of dry drakon skin wound round the newel. It burns. Fire of any kind sets the whole newel alight: 2 rounds to burn out, 2d10 fire to anything on the stair or in the well during those rounds, and afterwards the shaft is full of stinking smoke for ten minutes and the draught is dead.
- The mid-landing. At 30 ft the stair widens into a broken platform 10 ft square, floored in shell-litter, bone, and bracken. This is the nest. The whelps will not leave a 30-ft radius of it, which is one full turn of the stair above and one below.
- The hoist chain. A mason's chain hangs down the centre of the well from a beam at the top to the block at the bottom, put there by whoever built the stair and never taken away. It hangs 10 ft clear of every tread.
- The lower door. The way the party came in, and it closes. Remember that.
Encounter
Three hatchlings holding the middle of the stair and two hounds working the ends.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | Drakon Whelp | 1,100 |
| 2 | Serpent-Hound | 700 |
Base 4,700 XP; ×2 for five bodies = 9,400 adjusted, against the APL 9 Hard budget of 9,600. On flat ground this would be an easy Hard. On a five-foot stair with no rail it is the full weight of one, and the difference is entirely the drop.
Round 1. The hounds are already moving before anyone rolls — one comes down past the party on the outside of the treads, using its climb speed on the wall, and stops below them. The other holds above. That is not a pincer, it is herding: they are trying to push the party up onto the landing, where the whelps are, because that is what the pack does. The whelps do not move at all. They breathe.
Tactics. The whelps have no discipline and a short cone — they will breathe down the stairwell the moment it is available and they do not care that a hound is in the way. Let the party see that happen once; it tells them everything. The hounds never finish anyone: they knock down, then move to cut the retreat, and they will not bite a prone PC. A party that reads this correctly works out that the hounds are trying to deliver them somewhere, and that the somewhere is the only place they must not go.
What ends it. Killing the three whelps ends the room; the hounds break off within a round of the last hatchling and go looking for the mother. Nothing here follows the party out of either door.
Bypass Options
The hounds hunt on scent carried by moving air, and this shaft is a chimney.
- Doing it: shut the lower door (free, one action), snuff every open flame, and stop moving fast. The shaft's draught dies within a round.
- The cost: the party is now climbing sixty feet of unrailed stair in the dark, or by darkvision, or by one shuttered lamp at disadvantage on Perception. State that cost before they choose it.
- Success: the hounds' senses drop to 10 ft. Group Stealth DC 13 — down from DC 16 with the draught running — gets the whole party past the landing. The whelps sleep through it; they are three weeks old and they sleep like it.
- One failure: one hound finds the party by luck rather than scent. Fight two hounds on the stair without the whelps, which is a Medium encounter and a genuinely fair trade.
- Two failures: somebody's boot goes through the shell-litter. Full encounter, and the party is standing on the landing when it starts.
The hoist chain hangs ten feet clear of every tread, which is more than a hatchling's breath and more than a hound's reach.
- Getting on: step or jump from the treads to the chain, Acrobatics DC 13, then Athletics DC 14 to climb each 30 ft. A climb speed or a rigged sling removes the second check.
- What it costs: both hands. No shield, no weapon, no spellcasting with somatic components while climbing, and the party goes up one at a time because the chain is one chain.
- Success: you arrive at the beam at the top, past everything, and can drop a rope to the rest.
- Failure: a failed climb is a fall of up to 60 ft onto the hoist-block — 6d6, prone, at the bottom of the well with a hound on the stair above you looking down. This bypass is the fastest and the most expensive and you should say both parts.
- Withdrawing instead: the lower door is ten feet from the party's start and nothing here pursues past it. Cost is the clue drip, the loot, and the climb — which means whatever is at the top of this stair stays unvisited.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The skin. Nature or Investigation DC 13: one animal shed this, it did so within the year, and it was thirty feet longer then than the stair is now. That is the single most useful sentence a party can be handed in this room, and handing it out early is a kindness. Arcana DC 15 adds that the skin is dry enough to take a spark from a struck flint, which the party may treat as a weapon or a warning.
The shell-litter on the landing: Investigation DC 12 counts seven shells and three living hatchlings. Four went somewhere.
Exits
One roll on the loot table. The nest litter is what is left of the people the hounds herded up here before the party arrived: buckles, a purse, a good knife, a sealed case.
- After the fight: no check. Rake the bracken.
- Without the fight: Sleight of Hand or Investigation DC 15 from the tread below the landing, reaching over — one attempt, and a failure wakes the whelps.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Two whelps and one hound; the chain is rigged with a sling seat already. All DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Four whelps and three hounds, and one hound starts on the chain, which takes that bypass off the table until it is dealt with. DCs +1 |
| 15 | Four whelps, three hounds, and the mother comes home: a Coiled Drakon enters at the top of the shaft at the end of round 3. This is a fight the party is meant to lose and flee down; make the lower door's distance clear before you ring that bell. DCs +3 |
- Pacing. Twelve to eighteen minutes fighting, six sneaking. Behind schedule: put the whelps asleep and the hounds elsewhere, and run this as one Stealth check and one good description of the skin. Three minutes, and it still does its job, which is to make the party afraid of what shed that.
- Run the stair as a map, not a corridor. Draw the spiral, number the quarter-turns, and put minis on treads. Half the tactical interest here is that nobody can flank and everybody can fall.
- The skin is a loaded gun and the players will find it. Let them fire it. Two rounds of fire in a chimney with a party on the stair is a spectacular, survivable disaster, and it is the memory this room is for. Just be sure you said "dry as paper" out loud first.
- Clue drip. Two objects here take a clue well: the sealed case in the nest litter, a surveyor's case with a plumb bob and a wet chalk line still in it, which suits X14 (A Thread of Your Own Making); and the hoist chain and beam, someone's engineering left in a stairwell nobody uses, which suits X20 (The Bronze Bird) or X19 (The Bull-Gate Mechanism).
- Table safety. Nothing beyond ordinary heights. If anybody at the table is bad with falling, say up front that this stair does not crumble — the drop is a choice, not a trap.
- Warband callback. Drakon Nest rooms are always about a circle somebody will not leave, and about a mother who is somewhere else for now. A party that has met the nest before will spend this room looking up, which is correct.
Creature Cards
Both belong to Drakon Nest (W08) and recur 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: Drakon Whelp, Serpent-Hound. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.