D&D 5E Secret Doors

[jgsugden]

If you have a story situation where it makes sense for the villain to have hidden the pivotal thing behind a secret door, nd you fear that if the PCs do not find it the game will be disrupted - consider letting them fail, and then provide an alternate route that allows the PCs to get back on track, but perhaps at a small cost. It might be a journal entry that hints at the door location if the PCs buy the book, an NPC that is willing to give up the location of the door for a price, etc... Or, it might be someone else getting behind the door and acquiring the McGuffin and the PCs needing to chase the NPC. We don't want any secret door to be an absolute game stopper, but unless there is an overwhelming time pressure involved, it is rare that you can't have an alternate path available.

On a personal basis - As a DM, I create adventures agnostic to the party. I occasionally add something as a frill that 'only the PCs could do' to make them feel special, but for the most part, the adventure doesn't worry about what they can do. Players often come up with solutions I did not imagine when faced with a problem I place before them, and there are times when they fail in their mission. All of that can be used to tell good stories. There is nothing wrong with the PCs failing sometimes - as failure is one way to keep the stakes high.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

And saying something like "You see scuff marks on the floor by the wall" is basically the same as saying "You see a secret door," so I don't think that makes the process any more engaging for the players.

It's really not. 1) I can't tell you how many times I've seen players ignore that information, while they would never ever ignore "you see a secred door"; 2) It's significantly more evocative; 3) The fun then becomes figuring out where/what exactly the secret door is (with RP, skill checks or both (best, IMO).

Of course, you'd have to use your imagination as to what kind of secret door it is, and have an idea as to how it's opened, which is information that is not often described in the adventure, unfortunately.

However, if you felt that all the secret doors were the same type (say, an actual door that has similar material to the wall attached to make it look like part of the wall, with a hidden latch), then sure, when they run into the second or third one, you can just say "there's another one of those doors here".

But I still feel that it's best to at least START with something more interesting than "You find a secret door".

 

[Quickleaf]

Right now I'm running a 5E conversion of Palace of the Silver Princess (the original orange cover version).

The eastern half of the entry level has quite a lot of secret doors, but honestly, I'm not sure why they're there. Nothing particularly important, exciting, or valuable is hidden behind them, and they don't grant shortcuts to anywhere. Some of the rooms behind them are left for the DM to fill.

These secret doors obviously aren't serving a purpose. At least not directly. These are the sorts of secret doors I'd come back to later after looking at the others and see if there's a way to present some lore or foreshadowing here. For example, what if all these secret doors are open when the PCs arrive? That hints that someone recently went through an opened them, or perhaps that they're all connected to a common mechanism elsewhere in the dungeon, wherein to open other secret doors, these ones at the eastern entry level must be shut.

EDIT: Now coming back to these doors after having read through your account of the others, I'd say foreshadowing is your best bet here. Have some crystals/prisms enchanted with continual flame behind some of these opened secret doors, so that if a player closes one and looks at it, they'll realize the light is juuust visible through the seam. You can have some broken apparatus or lingering magic energy which hints that the crystals/prisms were moved about at one time. This is establishing the pattern language for meaningful secret doors elsewhere in the dungeon.

The western half has fewer but more interesting secret doors. There are two rooms with secret doors (as well as false doors) that both lead into a third room containing nothing but a trap/red herring. There's a short hallway with secret doors on each side that constitutes a minor shortcut by joining two other hallways. And there's another room with a secret door that leads to an alternate way up to the second level. There must have been a mistake in the writing or printing, because this room has no description in the text, not even one of the blank ones that says "Add your own monsters/traps/treasure here."

There are 3 secret doors here, each doing something different:

• Trap/red herring.
• Minor shortcut.
• Level transition (2nd level).

I see potential for a choice here: 2 doors lead to good things, but 1 door leads to a bad thing. For the choice to be meaningful (and the doors to remain "Secret Doors"), there needs to be a way to recognize/reveal all these secret doors (e.g. a light puzzle where the solution backlights all 3 of these secret doors, revealing their presence with a glowing seam), and some kind of pattern that the players can deduce which will alert them to the dangerous door (e.g. an elven vampire dungeon might use Elvish word for "sun" above the dangerous secret door). Not sure what that is yet, as I'm unfamiliar with Palace of the Silver Princess, but I'd be looking at the dungeon's overall themes and main opposition/occupants.

On the second level, the secret doors are more interesting and frustrating. There is one that one of the major NPCs will appear through, surprising the party. Said NPC might be an adversary or an ally, depending on how his first encounter with the PCs goes. There's another that completely divides the two halves of the floor--you can't go from the ballroom to the throne room without passing through a secret door! And the area where the fabled treasure resides is completely hidden behind secret doors.

Aha! Again there are 3 secret doors here, each doing something different:

• Ambush (which should also be a minor shortcut or level transition – if the players figure it out EDIT: or there should even be a way for clever players to weaponize this secret door, e.g. triggering radiant damage trap that incinerates the vampire lurking within)
• Secret Gate Door (this one is likely the most problematic as presented)
• Treasure Room

Not sure about specific layout, but as you've described, it could definitely be another choice situation: 1 door is an ambush, and 1 door is the treasure. Decide! Again, establishing a pattern language consistent with the dungeon's themes is what I'd aim for so that the players who pay attention and practice a little deduction can figure out which is which.

With the Secret Gate Door, since this leads to the Throne Room, I'm assuming it's a case of "gated" design where if you didn't find the secret door, then you didn't progress into the climax scene of the dungeon. My instinct would be to rewrite the heck out of that – make the "gate" obvious and require gathering keys or manipulating devices in the dungeon in order to open it. So not really a secret door at all. And that would inform my redesign of all the other secret doors, but that's probably changing too much for you.

Or maybe the Throne Room is an entirely optional area, in which case you just make this the 3rd choice the PCs can take.

EDIT: Having gone through everything, I wonder if your pattern language for this dungeon's secret doors could be types/qualities/colors/patterns of light?

 

[jayoungr]

It's really not.

I should clarify: for my players, it's the same thing. For another table or a random group at a con, sure, it might not be.

 

[jayoungr]

Quickleaf, thank you for your extensive suggestions! I'll definitely need to reread the adventure and see how to work on them, but I just have some quick immediate responses.

EDIT: Now coming back to these doors after having read through your account of the others, I'd say foreshadowing is your best bet here.

Sounds good, but I should mention we've already had one session in which the players covered the eastern half of the entrance level, so it's functionally too late to use them for foreshadowing in this run. I might still be able to do something with the western doors, though, since that part of the map is quite different, being largely underground.

For the choice to be meaningful (and the doors to remain "Secret Doors"), there needs to be a way to recognize/reveal all these secret doors (e.g. a light puzzle where the solution backlights all 3 of these secret doors, revealing their presence with a glowing seam),

Not sure what you mean by "a light puzzle"? Could you give me an example of one?

• Ambush (which should also be a minor shortcut or level transition – if the players figure it out EDIT: or there should even be a way for clever players to weaponize this secret door, e.g. triggering radiant damage trap that incinerates the vampire lurking within)

"Ambush" might be too strong a word for this situation. The way it's intended to work is this: the PCs enter a room that has been taken over as HQ by a shady cleric and his gang. At the time they enter, the cleric and a couple of his followers are busy in an attached adjoining room (more like a glorified walk-in closet), where they keep their treasure; the treasure room door is hidden. After the PCs have had a chance to look around the HQ, the cleric and his pals enter from the treasure room and demand to know what the PCs are doing there.

Of course, if the PCs find the door first, they could be the ones doing the surprising.

• EDIT: Having gone through everything, I wonder if your pattern language for this dungeon's secret doors could be types/qualities/colors/patterns of light?

Again, could you elaborate?

And thanks again for the detailed write-up. There's definitely a lot to consider here.

 

[Quickleaf]

@jayoungr You bet! So here's an example of a light & mirror puzzle, though it need not be so crafty and elaborate: Penny Arcade - News - Light and Mirror puzzle in D&D

Another version, easier for online play, might be levers on either side of a gate/door which move two braziers behind the gate. Light the braziers, move them to the right position, and a map becomes backlit in the ironwrought gate. That sort of thing.

So a "pattern language" is probably unnecessarily architectural jargon from Christopher Alexander, who was describing patterns of human use of space (e.g. many cultures like having a sitting nook by a window because it's just comfortable and pleasant place to look out, read, play music, etc).

I've adapted that term to apply it to dungeon traps in the past – basically that you as DM/writer settle on a small palette of traps (1-3) and settle on a consistent logic and way to communicate the potential threat to the players. And then you start making creative twists to that pattern. For instance, say I have a flame mage dungeon where the traps are attached to braziers, bronze torch sconces, and that sort of thing. The first time, yeah a fire bolt leaping from a brazier and striking a PC is enough to establish this pattern. The players learn to cast detect magic and avoid/counter the next hallway of braziers. But deeper into the dungeon I want to evolve that and present twists – e.g. two braziers which DON'T detect as magic, and a locked metal door at the end of the hall. What does this mean? Are they traps? Are they levers? What the players don't yet realize – but they could if they cast detect evil and good or a ranger used Primeval Awareness – is that there's a special fire elemental with False Appearance hiding within the brazier's flame.

That's trap talk.

But this same sort of thinking can be applied to secret doors.

Following with the "light" theme – which I have no idea if that fits Palace of the Silver Princess, I just made it up – let's go with patterns of light. Shifting light behind the thin seam is "safe secret door", while consistent unchanging light emanating through the thin seam is "dangerous secret door." How can I telegraph that to my players? Vampire dungeon, they have a big brass statue that shows three lamenting vampires dissolving as they look up at something (i.e. the sun). Shifting light is associated with clouds or shadows obscuring the light source, while consistent light is associated with sunlight. Something like that.

Say there's a central magic prism at each dungeon level. Activate it and light streams through the seams in the secret doors, revealing them. Some have consistent light behind them, but others have shifting/wavering light. Now the players are at the choice phase where they need to apply what they've learned about the dungeon & its inhabitants to make that mental connection that establishes their first pattern: Consistent light secret doors = bad.

And once you have that, THEN you get to start evolving the idea and presenting twists, just like I did with that trapped brazier example.

 

[77IM]

Right now I'm running a 5E conversion of Palace of the Silver Princess (the original orange cover version).
...
I expect you'll tell me this is bad design, and I don't disagree, but I'm committed to presenting this bit of D&D history in all its historic weirdness. I just want the experience to be fun too, as far as that's in my power.

Does the adventure say anything about wandering monsters? Many classic adventures had very harsh rules where you had to roll for random encounters every 10 minutes or every hour or something, and those encounters weren't necessarily balanced. So if you are going for that "old-school feel," that's the approach I would take. Those gygaxian dungeon crawls were a careful balancing act between poking every square with a 10-foot pole and staying one step ahead of the dungeon inhabitants.

 

[jayoungr]

Does the adventure say anything about wandering monsters? Many classic adventures had very harsh rules where you had to roll for random encounters every 10 minutes or every hour or something, and those encounters weren't necessarily balanced. So if you are going for that "old-school feel," that's the approach I would take.

Yes, it does, and I have been rolling for them. But the dice didn't come up right for any wandering monsters in the first session--go figure!

 

[iserith]

Yes, it does, and I have been rolling for them. But the dice didn't come up right for any wandering monsters in the first session--go figure!

Yeah so if that's already built into the adventure, I suggest doing option 2 that I suggested upthread. Drops in easily and it works.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I should clarify: for my players, it's the same thing. For another table or a random group at a con, sure, it might not be.

I should clarify too: I meant that it doesn't have to be.

Either way, Quickleaf got into more of the kind of thing that I meant to convey than I did. Good stuff there.