I put this one in a, now lost, module I wrote for AD&D 1e back in the early eighties. Beside each door in the lower section of the dungeon there was a little stud that could move in any of four directions: up, down, left, right. To open the door they just had to push the stud in the direction that corresponded to the cardinal direction of the wall. For a door in the north wall, push up; south wall, push down; east wall, push right; west wall, push left.
It took them forever--and I had been worried it was too easy.
One of my more famous (or infamous, rather) tricks to do with doors doesn't really constitute as a puzzle, per se, but a trick nonetheless.
At the end of a long and grueling dungeon- a dwarven stronghold overtaken by a cruel dragon- the party finds a gargantuan iron door, decorated with engravings depicting a great battle between a dwarven clan and a fierce wyrm. The door magically gives off an ominous presence, but is otherwise unlocked and completely normal. Throughout the dungeon, there are claw marks on the walls, charred corpses amidst smoldered armor, and the occasional loud roaring from deeper within... but no encounters with the dragon. Of course, most would assume the dragon is the 'boss' of the dungeon, and is just behind those doors. So, the heroes take a short rest, use some of their dwindling supply of healing potions, ready their strongest spells, and open the door...
...to reveal the dragon's hoard of riches, completely unguarded. No boss fight, no mimics, no traps: The treasure is just... there, and the party wastes their resources assuming the worst.
...And then, as the party is escaping the dungeon through a mineshaft under the stronghold, riches in hand... the dragon arrives, and the boss fight takes place in a cramped series of tunnels instead of the large open arena the players would likely expect.
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Former Spider Queen of the Spider Guild, and friendly neighborhood scheming creature.
"Made by spiders, for spiders, of spiders."
My pronouns are she/her.
Web Weaver of Everlasting Narrative! (title bestowed by Drummer)
For one adventure, I constructed a "dungeon" for my players, based on a re-skin of The Zebra Puzzle (sometimes known as "Einstein's Riddle"). Instead of laying out the entire puzzle at once, though, the party just found 5 enchanted stone doors, and some basic instructions. They knew that they needed to use a particular magic wand, to draw the proper magic symbol in the air, in front of the correct door, to successfully leave the dungeon. Hidden all around the dungeon among other puzzles, traps, and a handful of monsters, were the actual clues that the party needed to find the solution: the red wand opens the door to the left of the wizard's door, the jester's door leads to certain doom, the water symbol opens the door to the left of the blue wand's door, etc. I don't know if all of that is "cruel," exactly, because my players really enjoyed it, but the whole thing took 3-4 hours to solve because of all the other challenges involved.
A few other threads on various topics got me thinking about doors again so here's one for you all although it needs a session or two to impleemnt it:
Premise: An NPC requires a McGuffin from a vault. The vault is warded to prevent teleportation style interactions. The vault is guarded. The vault has only one way in/out. The NPC requires this to be a clandestine affair so the owners of the vault do not know the McGuffin has been stolen: this means no killing and nothing else to be stolen. The only clue on how to open the vault is the following: A revel held in the south will open the way. A pair of glass keys will let you see the way. Harness an ongoing storm to travel safely. Insert the index and unlock all thing.
The solution:The party are required to enter a location (be it a bank, a town, a keep etc) as quietly as possible and locate the vault and hopefully do some discreet investigations (hence it might take a session or two). The vault door is in a open area such as a large courtyard or underground cavern but infront of it is a guard tower (picture a prison guard tower or a airport control tower). The middle floor of the tower is a gaurd room, the top floor is an overseers office with panoramic windows. In this office can be found a desk which if searched finds a pair of spectacles and a length wood wrapped in iron. On a wall near a window overlooking the entrance to the vault is a lever. The windows do open so they can be used as a method of entry/exit and bothe spectacles and length of wood are magical.
Revel to the South: Pulling the lever down opens the vault door but it must be held down or the vault door automatically closes. This means a member of the party needs to stay behind to hold the lever down whilst the rest of the party enter the vault. The DM should periodically roll some dice for the guards perceptions checks against the passive stealth score of who ever stays behind but otherwise the guards do not patrol the office. Entering the vault the rest of the party descend a long corridor until they come to a dead end.
A pair of glass keys: Putting on the spectacles that were in the office will reveal several hidden glyphs on the dead end. Whilst wearing the spectacles you can see a series of glyphs that spell out a phrase, assign an appropriate DC for a Intelligence check to decipher them but they spell out the pas-phrase "Open Says ME!". The way then opens up into a chamber with a large crystal in the centre. As people enter the chamber the crystal starts to glow and starts to periodically emit a blast of force energy (as per the sowrd burst cantrip but much larger in radius + the effect of a Repelling Blast Invocation).
Harness an ongoing storm: To deactivate the crystal it needs to be hit with a sustained stream of lightning. The length of wood wrapped in iron is a Wand of Witchbolt and can fullfill this requirement but someone needs to stay behind to keep the lightning going. With the crystal deactivated the rest of the party can now move on to open the final door. The door is quite ordinary looking but the key hole is circular. The key hole is quite deep
Insert the index and unlock all things: This door is unlocked by pushing your index finger into the hole where they can feel a series of buttons akin to those on a typewriter arrayed around the furthest depths of it. They need to use their index finger to push the buttons in order to unlock the door, this functions as per a normal lock picking exercise but someone is using their finger instead of lock picks. Failure on any roll results on the finger being severed! or not, it totally depends on you.
Once this final door has been opened the vault is revealed. It should be filled with gold and platinum coins, gems of various types and items both magic and mundane. Once the party have found the McGuffin they just need to retrace their steps and escape.
Ideally, the party should do some investigations and the DM can sprinkle in plenty of overhead conversations or journals hinting at the guard tower and its contents but if they come up with some ingeneous ways to get around things then roll with their ideas. The party should also, hopefully, keep in mind the McGuffin si the only things they should take and this should mean they put the spectacles and the wand back where they found them.
There should be plenty of options to flesh this out more, I rather like the thought that there is a hibernating dragon in the vault.
Party finds a dead-end corridor. They see a door with 'SECRET DOOR' written above it. The door has no handle or lock, and cannot be opened by magic or brute force
Searching the corridor around the plainly visible 'secret' door will reveal a number of actually hidden doors, all of which open onto traps of various kinds and lethality and otherwise go nowhere
The SECRET DOOR itself will only swing open when someone whispers a secret to it
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Not sure if it counts or not; but I recently ran a party through my take on Mandorcai's Mansion in Baldur's Gate and went a bit like this:
Encountered a vampire near the start who's just sat in a reading chair inside the main entrance. Clock bell rings and she vanishes, causing a door to creak open into an adjoining dining room.
In the dining room she's welcoming, offers food (brought in by unseen servants, lifting a dish reveals that player character's favourite meal). She's making no effort to hide the fact she's a vampire, even spoke about it a bit when asked (for some reason all the party wanted to know was if people's blood tasted different depending upon what their diet esd, which left me stumped as I was expecting more pressing concerns like "do you kill people"). Since the party wasn't aggressive she tells them what she can about the other inhabitants of the mansion, including "the Twins" which she knows nothing about except a warning from a previous resident (who is now missing) who said "don't let them in".
Party heads into the mansion through various hallways that loop back on themselves impossibly, and pass through different versions of the same rooms. One is an older version of the entrance hall with a painting of what might be the twins (painting is immaculate, yet the figures are indistinct). Behind the painting is a strange pattern like a tree (which I made up in the moment and had no importance whatsoever). Party agonises over what to do with the painting as they don't want to "let them in" and end up doing nothing with it.
Part way through this "maze" section they encounter a long corridor with doors lining each side, and as they work their way down inspecting them for clues to which they might go into, the doors at the far end (where they entered) start slamming open and then shut in sequence, heading in their direction, forcing them to choose quickly.
After dashing through a door they're given an opportunity to barricade it, and after a lot of banging beyond it they start to hear a knocking, repeated three times, followed by dead silence.
A while later they end up in the same corridor again, but this time there's a door half way down, and the doors on each side are bound shut by silver chains. The half way door isn't locked, but as soon as half the party are through it slams shut and locks. Picking the lock releases the physical lock but something is still holding the door shut.
Queue initiative and battle music, each half of the party is fighting one of the twins, but only one person in each group can see the twin (which is focused on them); so a 3v1 fight that would be trivial becomes extremely dangerous.
After one of the twins is defeated, the group on that side naturally wants to go help the others, but they start hearing the same knocking from before coming from the other side of the door. At this point if anyone even touches the door they have to start rolling saving throws to prevent possession by the "defeated" twin (same thing would have happened immediately if the twin had downed anyone).
Again, not sure if it counts as a trick door or not, but all they had to do was not touch the door (it opened once both twins were defeated). Could have blasted it apart or hit it with axes etc. (what I refer to ever since the Shining as "here's Johnny'ing" the door). The player who almost got possessed wasn't really in any danger because they only failed one save (needed three failures for possession, or five successes to recover) and the other group dealt with their twin eventually and cast protection from evil and good to save them. But man the players did not like any of it (in a good way), exactly as I wanted for a literal house from hell. 😈
Conversely, the main entrance door was closed and locked, and I intended that the moment they tried to pick or force it it would just swing open creepily on its own, but the player who tried kicking it rolled a natural 20 with +5 Athletics, and I'd described it as looking rotten so I felt I had to just have it fly apart, then had to have work out how the non-hostile vampire would react to that.
I also had another "door puzzle" in a dungeon I ran a while back where the first chamber was circular with steps down to a circular sandy area with a stone statue at the far side it. Behind it on the wall is the exit door. Stepping foot into the circular sandy area caused a magical barrier to activate, trapping the player character who entered inside with the now animated statue who they must defeat to leave while the others scramble for a way to bring down the barrier. After the character barely survived, they go to the door and find it was never locked, all they had to do was go around.
During the same dungeon I had another circular chamber, this time full of statues. When they get close enough spirits, superimposed over the faces of the statues, demand to be entertained "or else". In the middle is a skeleton. Yet again though the exit door isn't locked, the statues are powerless to harm the players; speak with dead would have revealed that the skeleton tried to impress the statues with a back-flip and landed hard on his neck.
Basically the entire dungeon was non-stop trolling, yet my players still don't just try opening exit doors, though admittedly the Twins might have them reluctant to ever touch a door again.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
The players are trapped in the underdark and the only way out is through a mind flayer asylum. The first door is unguarded apart from one grimlock that runs away immediately. It's unlocked and untrapped, with a sign saying "not trapped" in bold lettering.
The second door is a mimic.
The third door is a heavy iron door, unopenable by the party. I've run this trick before, and it's basically a trick that the party tries and tries pushing it with all their might...
Only to find out It's also unlocked and untrapped. The puzzle is that all they need to do is tap the door lightly. I've run it four times, with different parties each time, and they all fall for it.
Fourth door is a penta-door. It has 5 sides and spins like a revolving door, with one chink that has space for one medium creature. The door spins really fast, so its a hard dexterity check to get through.
With multiple encounters with grimlocks and other maddened creatures. The occasional intellect devourer. And an underwhelming mind flayer who runs away mid way through the fight, forcing the players through a gelatinous cube behind a door he didn't go through because they didn't see him teleport.
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Hi! I'm EJO. I am a silly billy who forgets to play Genshin Impact every day and totally DOESN'T simp for at least three different ninja girls. Some other facts about me:
Milio has been ditched. Now Xerath is my friend.
My average accuracy in Marvel Rivals is about 15%.
Watertight door at the bottom of an almost empty well that drops onto a field where the contents of a Bag of Beans has been planted. The cruel part isn't so much the results of the beans as the fact that there was a magic item that was effectively destroyed by them opening the door.
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I put this one in a, now lost, module I wrote for AD&D 1e back in the early eighties. Beside each door in the lower section of the dungeon there was a little stud that could move in any of four directions: up, down, left, right. To open the door they just had to push the stud in the direction that corresponded to the cardinal direction of the wall. For a door in the north wall, push up; south wall, push down; east wall, push right; west wall, push left.
It took them forever--and I had been worried it was too easy.
One of my more famous (or infamous, rather) tricks to do with doors doesn't really constitute as a puzzle, per se, but a trick nonetheless.
At the end of a long and grueling dungeon- a dwarven stronghold overtaken by a cruel dragon- the party finds a gargantuan iron door, decorated with engravings depicting a great battle between a dwarven clan and a fierce wyrm. The door magically gives off an ominous presence, but is otherwise unlocked and completely normal. Throughout the dungeon, there are claw marks on the walls, charred corpses amidst smoldered armor, and the occasional loud roaring from deeper within... but no encounters with the dragon. Of course, most would assume the dragon is the 'boss' of the dungeon, and is just behind those doors. So, the heroes take a short rest, use some of their dwindling supply of healing potions, ready their strongest spells, and open the door...
...to reveal the dragon's hoard of riches, completely unguarded. No boss fight, no mimics, no traps: The treasure is just... there, and the party wastes their resources assuming the worst.
...And then, as the party is escaping the dungeon through a mineshaft under the stronghold, riches in hand... the dragon arrives, and the boss fight takes place in a cramped series of tunnels instead of the large open arena the players would likely expect.
Former Spider Queen of the Spider Guild, and friendly neighborhood scheming creature.
"Made by spiders, for spiders, of spiders."
My pronouns are she/her.
Web Weaver of Everlasting Narrative! (title bestowed by Drummer)
For one adventure, I constructed a "dungeon" for my players, based on a re-skin of The Zebra Puzzle (sometimes known as "Einstein's Riddle"). Instead of laying out the entire puzzle at once, though, the party just found 5 enchanted stone doors, and some basic instructions. They knew that they needed to use a particular magic wand, to draw the proper magic symbol in the air, in front of the correct door, to successfully leave the dungeon. Hidden all around the dungeon among other puzzles, traps, and a handful of monsters, were the actual clues that the party needed to find the solution: the red wand opens the door to the left of the wizard's door, the jester's door leads to certain doom, the water symbol opens the door to the left of the blue wand's door, etc. I don't know if all of that is "cruel," exactly, because my players really enjoyed it, but the whole thing took 3-4 hours to solve because of all the other challenges involved.
A few other threads on various topics got me thinking about doors again so here's one for you all although it needs a session or two to impleemnt it:
Premise: An NPC requires a McGuffin from a vault. The vault is warded to prevent teleportation style interactions. The vault is guarded. The vault has only one way in/out. The NPC requires this to be a clandestine affair so the owners of the vault do not know the McGuffin has been stolen: this means no killing and nothing else to be stolen. The only clue on how to open the vault is the following: A revel held in the south will open the way. A pair of glass keys will let you see the way. Harness an ongoing storm to travel safely. Insert the index and unlock all thing.
The solution:The party are required to enter a location (be it a bank, a town, a keep etc) as quietly as possible and locate the vault and hopefully do some discreet investigations (hence it might take a session or two). The vault door is in a open area such as a large courtyard or underground cavern but infront of it is a guard tower (picture a prison guard tower or a airport control tower). The middle floor of the tower is a gaurd room, the top floor is an overseers office with panoramic windows. In this office can be found a desk which if searched finds a pair of spectacles and a length wood wrapped in iron. On a wall near a window overlooking the entrance to the vault is a lever. The windows do open so they can be used as a method of entry/exit and bothe spectacles and length of wood are magical.
Revel to the South: Pulling the lever down opens the vault door but it must be held down or the vault door automatically closes. This means a member of the party needs to stay behind to hold the lever down whilst the rest of the party enter the vault. The DM should periodically roll some dice for the guards perceptions checks against the passive stealth score of who ever stays behind but otherwise the guards do not patrol the office. Entering the vault the rest of the party descend a long corridor until they come to a dead end.
A pair of glass keys: Putting on the spectacles that were in the office will reveal several hidden glyphs on the dead end. Whilst wearing the spectacles you can see a series of glyphs that spell out a phrase, assign an appropriate DC for a Intelligence check to decipher them but they spell out the pas-phrase "Open Says ME!". The way then opens up into a chamber with a large crystal in the centre. As people enter the chamber the crystal starts to glow and starts to periodically emit a blast of force energy (as per the sowrd burst cantrip but much larger in radius + the effect of a Repelling Blast Invocation).
Harness an ongoing storm: To deactivate the crystal it needs to be hit with a sustained stream of lightning. The length of wood wrapped in iron is a Wand of Witchbolt and can fullfill this requirement but someone needs to stay behind to keep the lightning going. With the crystal deactivated the rest of the party can now move on to open the final door. The door is quite ordinary looking but the key hole is circular. The key hole is quite deep
Insert the index and unlock all things: This door is unlocked by pushing your index finger into the hole where they can feel a series of buttons akin to those on a typewriter arrayed around the furthest depths of it. They need to use their index finger to push the buttons in order to unlock the door, this functions as per a normal lock picking exercise but someone is using their finger instead of lock picks. Failure on any roll results on the finger being severed! or not, it totally depends on you.
Once this final door has been opened the vault is revealed. It should be filled with gold and platinum coins, gems of various types and items both magic and mundane. Once the party have found the McGuffin they just need to retrace their steps and escape.
Ideally, the party should do some investigations and the DM can sprinkle in plenty of overhead conversations or journals hinting at the guard tower and its contents but if they come up with some ingeneous ways to get around things then roll with their ideas. The party should also, hopefully, keep in mind the McGuffin si the only things they should take and this should mean they put the spectacles and the wand back where they found them.
There should be plenty of options to flesh this out more, I rather like the thought that there is a hibernating dragon in the vault.
Party finds a dead-end corridor. They see a door with 'SECRET DOOR' written above it. The door has no handle or lock, and cannot be opened by magic or brute force
Searching the corridor around the plainly visible 'secret' door will reveal a number of actually hidden doors, all of which open onto traps of various kinds and lethality and otherwise go nowhere
The SECRET DOOR itself will only swing open when someone whispers a secret to it
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Not sure if it counts or not; but I recently ran a party through my take on Mandorcai's Mansion in Baldur's Gate and went a bit like this:
Again, not sure if it counts as a trick door or not, but all they had to do was not touch the door (it opened once both twins were defeated). Could have blasted it apart or hit it with axes etc. (what I refer to ever since the Shining as "here's Johnny'ing" the door). The player who almost got possessed wasn't really in any danger because they only failed one save (needed three failures for possession, or five successes to recover) and the other group dealt with their twin eventually and cast protection from evil and good to save them. But man the players did not like any of it (in a good way), exactly as I wanted for a literal house from hell. 😈
Conversely, the main entrance door was closed and locked, and I intended that the moment they tried to pick or force it it would just swing open creepily on its own, but the player who tried kicking it rolled a natural 20 with +5 Athletics, and I'd described it as looking rotten so I felt I had to just have it fly apart, then had to have work out how the non-hostile vampire would react to that.
I also had another "door puzzle" in a dungeon I ran a while back where the first chamber was circular with steps down to a circular sandy area with a stone statue at the far side it. Behind it on the wall is the exit door. Stepping foot into the circular sandy area caused a magical barrier to activate, trapping the player character who entered inside with the now animated statue who they must defeat to leave while the others scramble for a way to bring down the barrier. After the character barely survived, they go to the door and find it was never locked, all they had to do was go around.
During the same dungeon I had another circular chamber, this time full of statues. When they get close enough spirits, superimposed over the faces of the statues, demand to be entertained "or else". In the middle is a skeleton. Yet again though the exit door isn't locked, the statues are powerless to harm the players; speak with dead would have revealed that the skeleton tried to impress the statues with a back-flip and landed hard on his neck.
Basically the entire dungeon was non-stop trolling, yet my players still don't just try opening exit doors, though admittedly the Twins might have them reluctant to ever touch a door again.
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
So, I haven't done it yet, but here's my idea:
The players are trapped in the underdark and the only way out is through a mind flayer asylum. The first door is unguarded apart from one grimlock that runs away immediately. It's unlocked and untrapped, with a sign saying "not trapped" in bold lettering.
The second door is a mimic.
The third door is a heavy iron door, unopenable by the party. I've run this trick before, and it's basically a trick that the party tries and tries pushing it with all their might...
Only to find out It's also unlocked and untrapped. The puzzle is that all they need to do is tap the door lightly. I've run it four times, with different parties each time, and they all fall for it.
Fourth door is a penta-door. It has 5 sides and spins like a revolving door, with one chink that has space for one medium creature. The door spins really fast, so its a hard dexterity check to get through.
With multiple encounters with grimlocks and other maddened creatures. The occasional intellect devourer. And an underwhelming mind flayer who runs away mid way through the fight, forcing the players through a gelatinous cube behind a door he didn't go through because they didn't see him teleport.
Hi! I'm EJO. I am a silly billy who forgets to play Genshin Impact every day and totally DOESN'T simp for at least three different ninja girls. Some other facts about me:
Milio has been ditched. Now Xerath is my friend.
My average accuracy in Marvel Rivals is about 15%.
I like cheese.
Watertight door at the bottom of an almost empty well that drops onto a field where the contents of a Bag of Beans has been planted. The cruel part isn't so much the results of the beans as the fact that there was a magic item that was effectively destroyed by them opening the door.