Larder of the Drakon
The smell arrives first and it is not rot — it is butchery, cold and clean and enormous. The chamber beyond is a larder: things dragged in and stacked, some of them wrapped in salt, most of them bone. In the middle of the floor is a low hill of gold and bronze and cups and coin, four feet deep and thirty across, and lying along it with her chin on her own coils is a serpent the length of a ship.
She is asleep. You can see her breathing. Somewhere off in the dark, two sets of claws are walking a slow circle around you.
DM summary. A heist with a sleeping CR 13 on top of the prize. The hoard is this room's own loot, the mother is not going to wake unless the party makes her, and every decision in here is a trade between how much they carry out and how much noise it costs.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: The West Shore — page 57, 55 × 75 ft (one half of The White Waste)
The white waste reads as the salt larder: snow is the salt-crust and bone (drifts deepest at the walls), the frozen mere is the meltwater trough's pool. Run the room 70 × 55 ft along the page, chalk the 30-ft hoard mound, and mark the larder row along the east wall.
- Dimensions. 70 ft × 55 ft, ceiling 25 ft. Bone and salt-crust underfoot across the whole floor; the drift is deepest at the walls.
- Light. None. She does not need it. Any light source brought within 20 ft of her head is worth a mark on the Stir Track — see below — because the heat of a torch is exactly what she is built to notice.
- The hoard. A mound of coin, plate, cups, bronze fittings, and the metal parts of people, 30 ft across and 4 ft deep at the centre, with her lying along it. It is not treasure to her; it is bedding. Metal holds warmth.
- The larder proper. Along the east wall, the meat: four carcasses under salt, a stack of shields and pack-frames she could not digest, and a rack of drying things it is kinder not to itemise.
- The cold seep. Meltwater runs down the north wall into a shallow trough and away. It is painfully cold. A PC who wades, lies, or soaks in it takes 1d4 cold and counts as cold-blooded for 10 minutes — see the first bypass. This is the room's key and it is in plain sight.
- The drag-tunnel. A 15-ft mouth in the west wall, floor worn smooth and bowl-shaped. This is how she comes and goes and how the meat arrives.
- The meat-drop. A 4-ft shaft in the ceiling at the east end, 20 ft up, with a stub of chain hanging out of it. Something above used to drop food down here and stopped.
Bypass Options
Her blindsight is heat, and a creature that has taken cold damage since the end of its last turn is simply not there to it.
- The source is in the room: the seep on the north wall. 1d4 cold to soak in it, and the chill lasts 10 minutes, which is longer than any sensible robbery. Any cold spell, a frost cantrip, or a friend's ray of frost does the same job.
- Effect: a cold-blooded PC does not advance the Stir Track by moving, by carrying light, or by being close to her. They still advance it by touching the hoard, because the hoard is coin and coin makes noise.
- What it costs: the damage, the shivering, and one round each in the trough. Constitution save DC 12 on leaving it or take a level of exhaustion from the cold, which is a real price for a party already worn down.
- Failure state: a PC who lets the chill lapse mid-heist — ten minutes is not long — goes back onto the Track from that moment, and you should give them one round of warning by describing their breath stopping fogging.
This is a store-room and she keeps it the way anyone keeps a store-room.
- Doing it: drag one of the salted carcasses, or a dead serpent-hound, to the far side of the chamber. Athletics DC 14 to move two hundred pounds quietly; two PCs working together get advantage.
- Success: she rolls toward the new smell in her sleep, off the west side of the mound. This uncovers the deep hoard, clears the whole western half of the room, and removes two marks from the Stir Track because the shifting metal covers everything else.
- Failure: the carcass drops. Two marks, immediately, and one of the hounds comes to see what the party is doing with the food.
- The elegant version: a party that thinks of feeding her before they think of robbing her has understood the room, and you should say so by having her sigh, in her sleep, contentedly.
The pack has a job and no imagination.
- Doing it: throw meat, drive a carcass down the drag-tunnel, or simply let them push and then break sideways at the last moment — Acrobatics or Athletics DC 13 to slip a herding hound rather than be turned by it.
- Success: both hounds follow the meat out of the room for a full minute, which is the party's window for everything else.
- Failure: a hound cuts the line as designed and the party's retreat is behind it. Not damage — position, which in this room is worse. One mark.
- Cost of withdrawing instead: the party may leave the way they came at any point with whatever is in their hands, no check, no pursuit while she sleeps. They lose the hoard, the clue drip, and any chance of the deep pieces. Nothing else. This is the correct play for a party at low resources and you should not make them feel bad about it.
Encounter
Her, asleep, and her two dogs, awake.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coiled Drakon | 10,000 |
| 2 | Serpent-Hound | 700 |
Base 11,400 XP; ×2 for three bodies = 22,800 adjusted, against the APL 9 Deadly budget of 14,400. That is 58 per cent over, and it is 58 per cent over with the mother asleep. Read that number to your players if they start sharpening things.
Why she is not attacking. She is asleep on a warm pile of metal, gorged, in her own larder, and she has no reason in the world to be awake. Read her Will Not Leave the Clutch against the hoard: there is no clutch in this room, and the sixty-foot line she will not cross is centred on the gold. That is a gift and a trap — it means the party can outrun her, and it means she will never, ever follow them far enough to stop caring.
The two hounds are awake and they are not the threat. They herd. They will not bite a prone creature and they do not finish anyone; they cut off the route back and push. What they are pushing the party toward is the middle of the room, because that is where the pack's mother is, and they genuinely do not understand why anyone would object.
If the party fights anyway. A CR 13 with constrict, swallow, a 60-ft poison cone, and three legendary actions, in a room with no cover, against a level 9 party, is a party wipe more often than not. Say it plainly before initiative. The two mercies are real and both are printed on her card: she is Slow to Wake — one round of disadvantage, no breath, no legendary actions, which is exactly one round in which a party that runs has run — and she is vulnerable to cold below half her hit points, which is the only version of this fight that ends well.
Withdrawal. The drag-tunnel and the entrance are both open the entire time. A party that wakes her and leaves the way they came, immediately, gets out; she stops at sixty feet from the hoard and screams, and that scream is the last thing they hear from this room. Cost: whatever they were still holding when they dropped it, and every mark on the Stir Track stays marked if they ever come back.
Traps / Puzzles / Checks
The Stir Track — four boxes. Draw them where the players can see them.
Mark a box when any of these happens:
| Trigger | Marks |
|---|---|
| A PC spends an action taking from the skirt of the hoard | 1 |
| A PC spends an action digging into the middle of the hoard | 2 |
| A PC works under her forelimb or under a coil | 3 |
| Anyone moves more than half speed within 30 ft of her, or speaks above a whisper | 1 |
| Any light or heat source comes within 20 ft of her head | 1 |
| Metal armour worn by anyone standing on the hoard, per round | 1 |
| Feeding the larder successfully | −2 |
Sleight of Hand DC 15 on any looting action avoids that action's marks entirely. Roll it in the open. Cold-blooded PCs are exempt from the movement, light, and proximity rows, but never from the looting rows.
At the fourth mark she wakes, with Slow to Wake in force. Announce it exactly like this: "Her breathing changes. You have this round."
Reading the hoard. Investigation DC 13: nothing in this pile is younger than a year, which means she has not eaten anybody recently, which means she is not gorged, which means she will be hungry when she wakes. History DC 15 on the coin: three centuries of Knossian mint, and the newest issue is from a reign nobody at the table has heard of.
Exits
Room-specific: the hoard, and nothing here consumes a d100 slot. What the party gets depends entirely on how deep they were willing to dig.
- The skirt — one action, 1 mark. About 120 drachmae in mixed coin per action, plus one small worked thing: a chased cup, a pair of gold earrings, a bronze mirror with somebody's initial on the back.
- The middle — one action, 2 marks. The Serpent's Weeping Cup. A shallow bowl of overlapping drakon scale, cool to the touch. Fill it with any liquid and leave it a minute and every poison, venom, and disease in that liquid is destroyed. Three uses, after which the scales dull and it is a nice bowl.
- Under her forelimb — one action, 3 marks, and it is exactly as stupid as it sounds. A shed tooth, thirteen inches, curved, still sharp: worth about 400 drachmae to an armourer and usable as an improvised weapon at 1d8 piercing, which snaps on a natural 1. Under it, pinned flat, is somebody's whole pack — dry, intact, 60 ft of good rope, a lamp, a tinderbox, and a sealed letter that nobody living has read.
Nothing any Resolution requires is in this pile. No seal, no writ, no wax or feathers, no spool, no chalk and chain, no gate-key. If your session's Resolution needs an object, it is where that Resolution says it is and not under a sleeping drakon — a hoard that hands out the win condition turns the deck's best avoidable room into a mandatory one, and this room is worth more than that.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | No hounds, and she is genuinely gorged — the Track is six boxes. Cold seep damage 1d4, DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Three hounds, and two Drakon Whelps sleeping in the bone drift by the east wall who wake at the third mark, one round before their mother. DCs +1 |
| 15 | The Track is three boxes, the seep has frozen solid (chip it out: an action and a DC 17 Strength check), and she is not gorged — she wakes hungry, with no Slow to Wake round. DCs +3 |
- Pacing. Fifteen to twenty-five minutes and it is the best twenty-five minutes in this batch. Behind schedule: hand them the skirt of the hoard for two marks total, skip the deep tiers, and get them out in six. Do not cut the Track itself; the Track is the room.
- Draw the four boxes on paper in the middle of the table and mark them with a pen the players can see. Nothing else in this deck generates the same silence.
- Let them argue. The whole design is a group decision about greed made under a visible clock, and the correct DM behaviour is to say very little and mark boxes.
- When she wakes, mean it. The one round of Slow to Wake is real and generous and the party will remember using it far more fondly than they would remember a fight. If they spend that round attacking instead of running, they have made a decision and you should honour it all the way to the death saves.
- Clue drip. Two objects here take a clue well: the sealed letter in the pinned pack, unread, which will carry any Resolution's clue at any tier and is the most flexible clue hook in this batch; and the bronze mirror from the skirt, polished and unscratched, which suits X17 (The Wings of Icarus) if you want a feather caught in its case, or the Gorgon-facing Resolutions if you prefer.
- Table safety. A larder of human remains, described as meat. Keep it clinical rather than lurid, and offer the softer framing: the carcasses are cattle and goats, the pack-frames are the only human note, and the room still works exactly as well.
- Warband callback. Drakon Nest is always a circle something will not leave. Here the circle is the gold, and the party can see it, and every step they take toward the middle is a step they chose.
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: Coiled Drakon, Serpent-Hound. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.