What’s in the Grave

How to run it

Your party is standing over an open grave and looking at you, and you have exactly two answers ready.

Bones and some coin. Or nothing.

Both of those end the scene in one sentence. Bones and coin is a vending machine with dirt on it. Nothing is worse, because nothing is the answer that teaches a table not to dig. Do that twice and your players stop opening things, and a party that stops opening things is a party you have to push through your own adventure with both hands.

That is a shame, because a grave is the best container in the game and it is not close. Nobody packs a chest. A grave gets packed, closed, carried out to a hole a sexton had already spent a morning digging, covered over, and then marked with a stone that a mason was paid to cut. Every one of those was a decision made by a person who is not here. The dead body is the least interesting object in the hole.

I have been running games for 30+ years and I got this wrong for most of them, because I kept treating a grave as a loot container with a moral hazard attached. It is not a container. It is a message somebody buried, and the party just opened it.

The three rules

1. Somebody dug this hole

Before you say a word about what is in it, roll the second table or decide it yourself. Do that before you describe anything, because who put it there is what the description is made of. If the hole is already open and you did not, roll it the moment a player asks. One of them always asks. That is the whole reason the second table exists. If you only ever use one of the three, use that one.

A grave dug by a family with a priest and a bill of costs is a different object from the same grave dug by one man alone at night, even when the contents are identical. The contents are evidence. What you actually want is the person who chose them.

2. One plain fact, then one new question

Give them the fact flat in your first sentence, with no riddle in it. The body is a child. The marker says a woman of sixty. Do not make them roll to learn what they are looking at with their own eyes.

Then stop talking. The second half of every row on this table is a decision, and the decision belongs to the party rather than to you. Answer everything and the scene is over in a minute. Hand them a fact and leave the question sitting open, and you have bought the rest of the session, sometimes the rest of the campaign.

3. Opening it costs something, and it is almost never hit points

Four rows out of the hundred carry any mechanics at all. Two of those deal 2 damage.

The cost of opening a grave is paid in four other currencies, and you should be spending one of them every single time. Time, because a grave takes real work to open and real work to close. The ground, because a hole in it stays a hole and everyone can see where. Standing, because the nearest town has an opinion about people who dig up graves and that opinion follows the party down the road. And who knows, which is the sharpest of the four: the moment anybody else finds out what the party found, the party is in a race they did not know they had entered.

The third table is that price, made concrete. Roll it when they take something out, not when they open the lid. Taking is the part that costs.

About the digging

Opening a grave is not a skill check. It is forty minutes of work in front of anybody who happens to be awake.

Use this if your table does not already have something: four boxes, ten minutes a box. One box gets the sod up and stacked. Two boxes reaches the fill line where the dirt goes soft. Three boxes is wood or stone under the spade. Four boxes and the hole is open. Two people with proper tools fill a box every ten minutes. One person with a sword and a helmet takes twenty a box and will be feeling it tomorrow.

Run a second clock alongside it for who notices, four boxes again. It fills a box every time the party is loud or careless with a light, and every time they are seen on the road in or take too long. When it fills, you have a witness standing at the wall of the yard watching them work, and how long they have been there is up to you.

Both clocks are already built into the Table Keeper, which is the browser copy of this table that rolls itself, so you do not have to draw them.

d100: What’s in the grave

Ten bands of ten. Find the band, read the row. The early bands are the burial itself and the people who made it. The later ones are what else ends up in a hole nobody expects to open, and what the party gets to walk away with. Each band names its subject rather than its verdict, so a band about who is in the hole is allowed to contain a burial that is exactly what it says it is.

Roll	The band	What it covers
1-10	Who is actually in there	Whether the body matches the plate
11-20	What they were sent down with	Grave goods, and what the goods admit
21-30	Something written	Ledgers and letters, and a page that is gone
31-40	The box and the wrappings	The box, the wrappings and the packing around them
41-50	Somebody got here first	This hole has been open before
51-60	Somebody hid this here	A grave is a safe nobody audits
61-70	Buried to keep it buried	The burial is the containment
71-80	It is not dead	Still going, or gone somewhere
81-90	No body in it	No corpse down there, and ten reasons why not
91-100	What it gives up	What they walk away with

Roll what is in it

Who Is Actually In There

d100	What is in it
1	The wrong age. The plate says a woman of sixty. The body is a girl of about nine, laid out carefully, in the woman's good clothes, taken in at the seams by a seamstress who did a neat and patient job of it.
2	Two sets of teeth. One skull, and behind the adult teeth is a second full adult set, coming in. Not a deformity anybody at the table has heard of. Not a mouth that has stopped working, either.
3	The hands were taken. Cut at the wrist before burial, and the cuts are clean and considered rather than angry. Everything else about this burial is respectful, right down to the flowers.
4	Face down. The box, the shroud, the goods, the rites, all correct. They just put him in the wrong way up, and a grown man is heavy, so the bearers had to work at it and then close the lid on it.
5	Too many bones for the clothes. One shroud, one set of clothing, one pair of boots, and about a body and a half of bone. Somebody wanted this to be one funeral.
6	He has not been dead long enough. The marker says forty years. This body has been in the ground about a season, and the box it is in has been in the ground for forty.
7	A face from the village. Somebody the party spoke to yesterday. A face from the tavern, or from a gate where they paid a toll. Same face, same broken nose, same grey at the temple. This burial is thirty years old and undisturbed.
8	Hair, nails, teeth and clothes. All present, all in the right arrangement, still lying in the outline of a person. Not one piece of bone anywhere in the box.
9	Bound, and it was cooperative. Good rope at the wrists and ankles, and the knots are tied on the inside, where the person being tied could reach them. Two people did this and one of them was the one in the box.
10	It is exactly who the marker says. Right age, right healed break in the right arm, right ring on the right finger, right year. In a yard full of graves this is the only honest one, and the party has no way to know that yet.

What They Were Sent Down With

d100	What is in it
11	Coin, and it is the wrong coin. Good silver, more than this family had. All of it struck a hundred miles away and all of it struck in the same year.
12	A new tool. A joiner's plane. Or a chisel, or a knife for gutting fish. Whatever this person did all day. Never used. Oiled and wrapped in cloth. A widow who could not afford it bought a working tool for a man who was never going to work again.
13	Food, still sealed. A stoppered jar with something in it that used to be a meal. Sealed properly, by somebody who expected it to be opened from the inside.
14	Paid off. A purse and a slate with a figure scratched on it, and the purse matches the figure to the copper. Whoever put them down here settled with them first.
15	A named weapon, and the name is not theirs. Cut into the blade in plain letters with no flourish on it. Ask around and one family in the district knows that name and will not enjoy hearing it.
16	A wedding ring on a cord. Around the neck rather than on the hand, which is what people do with a ring that is not theirs and cannot be given back.
17	A child's toy. The grave is a man of fifty. The toy is worn smooth, and it was old when it went in, and it went in under his hands where he could hold it.
18	Water and lamp oil for three days. Placed at the hand, not at the feet where goods go. The family was covering for a possibility they could not say out loud in front of the priest.
19	Nothing at all. Every other grave in this yard has something, right down to the poorest. This one was sent down bare, on purpose, and every person at that funeral would have seen it and said nothing.
20	A rich burial in a poor box. Plate, cloth and metal that belong three ranks above the coffin they are packed into. Either the mourners were hiding what they were burying, or they were hiding who.

Something Written

d100	What is in it
21	A name filed off. The same name removed from the plate, the box and the shroud pin. Three places, and all three done in a hurry with the wrong tool. The letters are still readable if they get a light on them at the right angle.
22	A ledger in oilcloth. Two thirds full and written in one hand throughout, and the hand gets worse toward the end. It records deliveries. Every entry carries a date, a weight and the same destination written out the same way.
23	An unopened letter. Sealed, addressed, never sent, and the person it is addressed to is alive and living less than a day's ride from this hole.
24	A list of eleven names. Nine are crossed out. The two that are not are at the bottom, which means they were added last.
25	A confession, signed and witnessed. It confesses to something small and dull. A moved boundary stone. A short measure at a market. It was worth burying anyway, and that is the interesting part.
26	The wrong date. Everything physical about this grave says one year. The plate says another, eleven years off, cut by the same hand and the same chisel as the rest of the plate, so it is not a repair and it was not a slip.
27	A map of somewhere close. Accurate for every road, ford and wall the party can check against. It marks two things that are not there and never have been.
28	A seal they have seen this week. Pressed into wax on a folded document, and the party watched that same seal go onto something else within the last few days.
29	A name scratched inside the lid. The same name, over and over, in a tight hand, until the wood gave out and the point went through. It is not the name on the plate.
30	One page torn out. A book in good order and complete except for one page. The tear is as old as the burial and the stub is still in the binding.

The Box And The Wrappings

d100	What is in it
31	The box was built for somebody else. A foot too long, wrong at the shoulders, and the fittings do not match the joinery. The joiner used what was standing in the workshop that night.
32	Banded and nailed from the outside. Iron straps, and the nails go in from the outside in a pattern rather than where a joiner would put them. Nothing about this box was meant to open easily.
33	Not a box at all. A door, hinges still on it, laid over the body and weighted at the corners with field stone. Somewhere near here is a doorway with nothing in it.
34	Quicklime. A foot of it over the body, which is what you do when you are frightened of a sickness. Nobody in the district remembers a sickness that year. Anyone who digs into it barehanded takes 2 acid damage and finds out why gloves exist.
35	Salt in the wrappings. Packed thick, all the way round, and salt costs more here than the coffin did. Somebody spent real money on this and it was not on the funeral.
36	Two hundred stitches. The shroud is sewn shut with ten times the thread it needs, in tight even work. The thread is fishing line. Whoever did it was not in a hurry and was not going to leave a gap.
37	The lid is on backwards. It fits either way, so nobody would notice unless they were already looking. Once they see it, they will want to know what the right way round would have put where.
38	Charcoal all round. A hand's depth of it packed against every face of the box. It keeps the wet out, which nobody here would bother doing, and it keeps a smell in, which is plainly the point.
39	The fill dirt is not from here. Different colour, with a kind of stone in it that is not from this county, and no local roots. A carter brought soil a long way to fill one hole in a yard that is full of perfectly good soil.
40	A stone on the chest. The size of a man's chest and about that heavy, set down square rather than dropped in. This is a local practice, and the party can go and ask whose it is.

Somebody Got Here First

d100	What is in it
41	Opened once, closed again. Two sets of nail holes. The second is slightly off the first, and it is a different nail.
42	A tool left in the hole. A spade head with no handle, at the bottom, rusted flat against the clay it has been lying in. Somebody left in a hurry and did not come back for it.
43	Backfilled fast. Half the fill is topsoil that should be at the top, the marker went back in crooked, and it has stood crooked for years in a yard where everything else is straight.
44	One thing was taken. The body is undisturbed except for one hand, which has been moved and put back wrong, and one finger, which is bare and carries a mark where something sat for a long time.
45	One thing was left. Wedged in at the foot of the box, in a style nobody was making when this person died. Everything else down here has gone the colour of the wet wood around it. This has not.
46	The spoil is still lying there. A grassed-over mound beside the grave that never went back in, and it is about a third of a grave's worth of dirt. Somebody took something out of here and never replaced the volume.
47	Small boot prints. Pressed into the clay at the bottom of the grave and preserved there. They belong to a child, or to a very small adult. Either way they are on top of the burial rather than under it.
48	It was opened from the side. A tunnel comes in at the head end from about twenty feet away. It is big enough for one person on their belly, and it was backfilled loosely and is settling.
49	Fed, and recently. Food in the fill about six inches down, in layers going back years. The top layer is not old.
50	Dug and reburied many times. The dirt is soft to arm's depth and has no structure left in it at all. This hole has been open more often than it has been shut.

Somebody Hid This Here

d100	What is in it
51	A strongbox under the body. Locked, and the lock is decades newer than the burial. Whoever put it there did it without disturbing the corpse, which is careful work.
52	Twelve of the same weapon. Wrapped and greased and laid the length of the box under the body. Not a collection. An issue.
53	A second body under the floor of the box. Thrown in rather than laid down, with no shroud on it and nothing sent with it. The one on top got a funeral. The one underneath got a lid.
54	The parish silver. Church plate wrapped in sacking, and every piece of it is there. The parish has been telling everyone for years that it was taken in a raid, and there was a raid, which is what made it work.
55	A whole life, in papers. Deeds, a birth record, a seal, letters, all belonging to one person, and none of it belonging to the corpse. Within twenty miles a living person is answering to that name and holds the rest of the documents.
56	A working life's savings. A jar with about nine years of a labourer's wages in it, and it is still accumulating: the top layer of coin is this year's.
57	A sealed cask. Buried alongside the body and still watertight, and it is heavier than one man can lift. It is not wine and the party will smell that before they see it.
58	A key sewn into the lining. Iron and plain, and made by a smith who was good at it. It opens a door in the largest building within a day's walk, and nobody living knows which one.
59	The evidence. A bundle of clothing that did not belong to the corpse, stiff and dark, wrapped tight and pushed down at the foot of the box where a spade would not find it by accident.
60	There is a room. A flat stone at the bottom of the grave lifts. Under it is a space with a lamp, a blanket, a jug, and room for exactly one person to lie down.

Buried To Keep It Buried

d100	What is in it
61	Nailed through. Iron through both wrists and both ankles into the wood, driven after death by somebody who was not angry about it. This is a procedure and it was done carefully.
62	The head is at the feet. Separated, placed at the foot of the box, with a flat stone set between it and the body. Somebody knew a rule and followed it exactly.
63	A ring of iron stakes. Driven point down all round the box at arm's length and evenly spaced, the whole way round. One of them is bent outward.
64	It is not a body. Something wrapped in seven layers of cloth and bound with cord, roughly the size of a torso. The binding is the only part of this burial anybody spent money on.
65	Consecrated twice. Two sets of rites cut into the box, in different hands and years apart. The second set is smaller and far more careful than the first.
66	The marker is a warning. The party read it as a name because it is where a name goes. It is not a name. The oldest woman in the parish can tell them what it is, if she is willing to admit she can read it.
67	An instruction inside the lid. Addressed to whoever opens this, in plain language, giving them one specific thing to do and no reason at all why. It takes about a minute to do.
68	Nothing roots here. For a hundred feet around, in a yard that is otherwise thick with grass, the ground is bare. It is not salted. The grass has been trying for years.
69	Fresh mortar, every year. Fresh mortar on the slab, a different hand each time, layer on layer, going back further than anybody in the parish has been alive.
70	Buried on a boundary. Deliberately astride the line between two parishes, so that neither one of them is responsible for it and both of them have known that for a long time.

It Is Not Dead

d100	What is in it
71	It is warm. Not alive. Nothing is moving and nothing is breathing. It is simply the temperature of a person who has been sitting by a fire, and the ground around it is cold.
72	Something moved when the light hit it. It happened once and it was fast. Everybody saw it. Nobody agrees on which part moved.
73	The nails are pushed out. All of them from the inside, a quarter inch each and even all round. Nothing did that in one push. The wood around every head is crushed rather than split, which is what happens when a thing leans on it a little at a time.
74	It is breathing on a long clock. The chest moves about once every four minutes. Anybody who sits and watches for ten minutes will confirm it, and will then have to decide what to do about a thing that takes three hundred and sixty breaths in a day where they take twenty thousand.
75	In flower. The body is full of a plant nobody grows here, and it has come into flower down there in the dark with no light at all. The blooms are open.
76	There is a nest in the box. Not the occupant. A well established one, generations deep, and the animals in it are not afraid of the light. The first person to reach in takes 2 piercing damage.
77	It sits up, and then it waits. It does not attack and it makes no sound. It does nothing at all until one of them speaks to it. The first person who does makes a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or answers its questions honestly for the next minute.
78	Awake, and tired of it. The occupant cannot die, is entirely lucid, and has been down here long enough to have stopped being frightened. They want out, and they will be honest about what that costs, and it is not nothing.
79	Something got out. The box is whole from the outside and empty apart from a hole in the bottom board, and the board is splintered downward and outward.
80	A tally, and it is current. Marks in groups of five, cut with something soft into the side board at the head end. Do the arithmetic and the count is correct to within about a week of today's date.

No Body In It

d100	What is in it
81	Never used. Cut, lined, marked, paid for, and nothing has ever been in it. The plate carries a name and two dates and the ground underneath has never been broken.
82	Emptied from below. A shaft comes up through the floor of the grave and goes back down out of the light. Anyone standing on that floor when they find out makes a DC 10 Dexterity saving throw or drops ten feet with the fill and ends up prone in the dark, unhurt, with the rest of the party looking down at them.
83	It is a decoy. The real burial is eight feet to the left with no marker on it at all. The party would never have found it if this one had not been so obviously and so expensively wrong.
84	He is not dead. The funeral happened, the village grieved, the stone was cut, and the man walked out of the district under a different name. At least one person in that village arranged it and is still here.
85	Moved, and there is paperwork. The body was relocated years ago and the church has the record of it. The answer is dull. The reason written on the form is not.
86	Full of clean water. A grave-shaped cistern of sweet cold water, and the village has been drawing from it. There is a worn place on the lip and a rope mark cut into the stone.
87	Weighted instead of filled. Sandbags, or stone, or a wrapped log, made up to about the weight of a person by whoever knew the box would be carried by pallbearers who would notice.
88	Somebody is living in it. Bedding, a candle stub burned down this week, a bowl, and a very small stack of personal things kept tidy in the corner.
89	Everything a person owned, packed. Everything a person owned, put in the way you pack when you are leaving somewhere, arranged around an empty space in the middle about the size of a body.
90	Nothing, and it never was anything. The marker stands on undisturbed earth. It has always stood on undisturbed earth. Somebody paid a mason and picked a plot and buried an idea.

What It Gives Up

d100	What is in it
91	Exactly what they came for. Undamaged and on the first spade, with no catch attached to it at all. Hand it over and let them have the moment. A table that has been paying for graves all campaign needs the ledger to run their way once.
92	The answer to an old question. One plain object that settles something the party asked you about three sessions ago and have not mentioned since. Do not announce it. Describe the object plainly and let whoever remembers be the one who says it out loud.
93	A name they can use. Cut deep and still legible. Say it out loud in the nearest town and a face changes, and the party will find out today whether that is good or bad.
94	Money, plainly. Enough to matter for a few weeks and not enough to end anything. Nobody is coming for it and it is not cursed.
95	Their work. The tools of whatever the dead person was good at, and one finished piece that is genuinely fine. Somebody was excellent at something and this is the only proof left.
96	A place to come back to. Cut into the bank behind the yard, and this grave is what points at it: the marker faces the door instead of facing east like every other stone here. It is dry and sound, and big enough for the whole party to sleep out of the weather. It is on a road they will travel again. Mark it on their map yourself.
97	Somebody is grateful. A person has been waiting years for this grave to be opened. They arrive within the hour, unarmed and thanking them. They brought food.
98	It closes as they work. The sides come in slowly and steadily. Nobody is hurt and there is no roll. Anything not lifted out in the next few minutes stays down there permanently, so they have to choose fast, out loud, in front of each other.
99	It is a gift, on purpose. Somebody buried something valuable here for whoever came after, and left a note saying exactly that in plain words. It is not a trick and there is no second half.
100	Bones and dirt. A person, decently buried, long finished, with nothing left to say about anything. Run it straight the first time it comes up: it is the row that proves the rest of this table was never automatic. Fill it in, say a word over it, and walk away.

d20: Who put it there

Roll this before you describe the hole. If you did not, roll it the moment a player asks, which will not take long. Most of the twenty reframe what is already in the hole without changing a single object in it.

Where the two tables argue, the d100 wins.

• The d100 already named the hand that did the work. Rows like the wrong age, the face-down burial, the filed-off name and most of the box rows say outright that a person chose this. Row 16 says nobody did it and row 9 says the dead arranged it themselves, so roll again on either. Those two are answers to a hole nobody has explained yet, not corrections to one that is already explained.
• There is no body in it, rows 81 to 90. The second table still answers, but the question changes: it is who paid the mason, picked the plot and stood at the graveside, rather than who put a body in the ground. A grave with nobody in it was still staged, and the stager is the whole point of the band.
• There is nothing to take. On rows 81, 90 and 100 the third table never fires, because the third table is the price of taking something out and nothing came out. That is not a gap. That is the row doing its job.

Roll who dug it

d20	Who dug this hole
1	Family, properly. A priest, a paid box, a bill of costs that still exists in a parish ledger the party can go and read.
2	Family, and in a hurry about it. They told the parish it happened on a different day, which is a lie anybody can catch by asking two people the same question.
3	One person, alone. It took them most of a night and the hole says so: narrow at the foot and ragged at the corners, with the sod put back badly on top.
4	The parish, at parish expense. For somebody nobody claimed. There is a line item and a date and no name.
5	The people who killed them. Buried carefully and correctly, with the right rites said over them. That care is the confession.
6	Soldiers on the march. Done properly and fast by people doing the job the way they would want it done for them next week. There is a unit mark on the marker if anybody knows to look.
7	A man who was paid to do it. Who did the minimum, used a cheaper box than the one that was paid for, and kept the difference.
8	A guild. Their own rite, their own mark on the lid, their own rule about who is allowed to come. That rule is still in force.
9	The person in the grave. Everything but the last spadeful, arranged in advance, paid in advance, and left with written instructions for the one part they could not do themselves.
10	A stranger whose land it was. They did not know the dead at all. There was a body on their ground and it needed doing, so they did it.
11	Two parties, years apart. One buried them. A second party came back years later and did the whole job again properly. The second burial is the careful one.
12	A physician, quietly. They were told not to and they were told why, and they did it anyway. They wrote nothing down about it, which for that person is out of character.
13	A creditor. Who buried the debt with the debtor: the written note is in the box, so that the obligation would be settled and would stay settled.
14	The neighbours, together. In one afternoon, and there is a record somewhere of who brought the boards, who brought the rope and who brought the food.
15	A child. Everything about the work is small, slow and careful. Somebody who was not strong enough for it did it anyway, and did it well.
16	Nobody. The ground took them and the shape is a coincidence. This is true, it is provable, and the party will not believe it for a second.
17	A stranger passing through. Who left more than they had to out of their own pack, and did not leave a name.
18	Somebody following written instructions. To the letter, including the parts that make no sense to anybody, including them.
19	The most respected person in the nearest town. They did it personally with their own hands and have never once mentioned it.
20	Somebody who wanted it found. Every part of this is a fraction too shallow, a fraction too obvious, and the marker stands a foot taller than the ones on either side of it. This grave was dug to be dug up.

d20: What the grave wants in exchange

Roll when they take something out. Not when the lid comes off. Taking is the part that costs.

Most of these are the grave itself. Some are only the world reacting to people who were seen digging, and a couple are nothing at all. Narrate what happens and let the table argue about which kind it was.

Roll the price

d20	The price of taking something out
1	The hole stays open. Nothing they put back in stays put. Three days of the fill working its way out overnight, and then it settles and behaves.
2	A name, said out loud. Whoever lifted the first spadeful is going to hear their own name spoken somewhere behind them, once, before the week is out, with nobody there.
3	Somebody has to be told. None of them will get any peace about this until one living person has been told who was in that hole. It does not have to be a useful person.
4	The weather turns, and they get the blame. For a week. The blame is the actual problem, not the weather, and it will be waiting for them at the next village along.
5	Something of equal weight goes back in. Nothing enforces this. No rule, no roll, no consequence you can name. Your table will feel it anyway and will start arguing about it inside two minutes.
6	The dogs will not come near. Every dog in the district, and specifically toward whoever carried the lid. Dogs are how a small place decides who to trust.
7	A debt transfers. Whatever the dead owed, an heir now expects the party to make it good, and they have a document, and the document is real.
8	Put the ground back exactly. Any of that dirt carried off the site starts turning up in their packs, their boots and their bedrolls until every handful is back where it came from.
9	One night's sleep, each. The whole party takes a level of exhaustion at dawn. One long rest clears it. It is a bill, not a curse.
10	The marker is wrong and it wants that fixed. The name is not the name. Something down there minds, and it will go on minding until the right one is cut.
11	There was a witness. A neighbour watched the entire dig from the treeline. They did not come forward and they will not come forward yet, and they know exactly what the party took.
12	It will not stay put down. Whoever lifted the first object out of the box cannot set it down for longer than an hour without picking it up again, and they will not notice they are doing it.
13	It wants to be moved. It does not want repairing and it does not want putting back. It wants to be somewhere else, and the party will work out where before they work out why.
14	One of them dreams the burial. From inside the box, accurately, including four or five details nobody in the party saw or could have seen. They wake up knowing the date.
15	Nothing. It is a hole in the ground. It was always a hole in the ground. The party has been extremely superstitious about a hole in the ground for two hours and they will not thank you for saying so.
16	The parish knows by morning. Not because anybody told them. Their standing in the whole district drops and it is a real problem the next time they need a door opened.
17	It wants the rest of itself. There is more of this body somewhere else, in another hole, in another county, and it is not going to be quiet until the pieces are in one place.
18	A trade, offered plainly. As they refill the hole, something surfaces in the dirt that is worth more than what they took. Taking it accepts terms that nobody has stated out loud.
19	Come back. Not now. In a season, on a day they will simply know when it arrives, and they will know it in the morning like a name they forgot.
20	It wants the one who put them there. That is the whole request. It is specific, it is patient, it is not in a hurry, and it is not asking the party to do a single thing they were not already going to do.

DM cheat sheet

Auto-built from every data-dc, data-hp, stat block, preset clock and pre-loaded combatant in this file. Prints on its own sheet.