Unbidden Doors
The Unbidden Doors is DreamWeave's level 10-15 starter arc - a player's first brush with the drift, the fraying of the portal lattice that runs under the whole world (see The World is Woven). It stands alone and explains nothing; it foreshadows.
The story
Portals have been drifting off-target for a long time, and now the lattice has begun to do something worse: it buds new doors where it is densest - in the four great towns. In Holtburg, Shoushi, Yaraq, and Sanamar, a door has opened that nobody made. Each leads into a place that looks like somewhere in Dereth and is quietly, wrongly, not it - the same stone, the same rooms, and the wrong things living in them.
The horror is not that the doors are dangerous. It is that nobody built them. A portal is a thing a person makes. These grew.
The Driftwardens
The Pathwardens have no doctrine for this. What they can do is point you at the four ordinary tradespeople - one to a town - who were first to see their door open and have begun coordinating by courier. They call themselves the Driftwardens, a presumptuous echo of the Pathwardens, and they pay adventurers who keep the doors thinned. They pay in a shared token, the Driftwarden's Mark, spent at the Driftwarden Provisioner for the Driftwarden Set.
The four Driftwardens, one to a town, are:
- Holtburg - Edda Coleward, a candlemaker.
- Shoushi - Ando Shiraiwa, a net-mender.
- Yaraq - Nadir ibn Hakam, a water-carrier.
- Sanamar - Ottavia Renzi, a dockhand.
None of them has looked closely enough to notice the stall is better stocked than four tradespeople's savings could explain. It is quietly backed by the Meridian - but that is a thread for later.
How the arc plays
- Four towns, four doors, four distinct bosses. Each town's door opens on its own warped somewhere, with its own encounter - never a re-skin of the others.
- Repeatable every 20 hours. Each town pays one Driftwarden's Mark per run, so a player working all four earns about 4 Marks a day.
- The Driftwarden Set costs ~12 Marks in total - roughly three days of play, long enough to matter and short enough to finish inside the level band.
- Holtburg and Yaraq are boss-drop turn-ins; Shoushi and Sanamar add a kill task (the kill task pays XP, the Mark comes from the turn-in).
The four doors
Each door's boss is built around a single encounter idea, and each is given and turned in by that town's Driftwarden:
| Town | Driftwarden | Boss encounter | The idea |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holtburg | Edda Coleward | the Summoner | Never fights well - it fights late, calling waves as it is wounded. |
| Shoushi | Ando Shiraiwa | the Beast-handler | Buffs and heals its pack; there is a right kill order, and a trap for the wrong one. |
| Yaraq | Nadir ibn Hakam | the Shell | A grafted, over-plated form - until the shell dies and the real thing steps out. |
| Sanamar | Ottavia Renzi | the Drift-Twinned | The arc's thesis as a fight: the drift copies things, and this one has learned to do it on purpose. |
Town amenities
A Shard of First Light stands in each of the four towns beside the door - touch it for a free suite of buffs before you go in. The Driftwarden Provisioner keeps an identical stall in each town, spending the Marks you earn.
Rewards
- The Driftwarden's Mark currency, and the fifteen-piece Driftwarden Set it buys.
- Combat XP from the door dungeons and their kill tasks.
See also
- Driftwarden Set - Driftwarden Provisioner - Driftwarden's Mark - Shard of First Light
- The World is Woven - The Meridian - the story the arc is the ground floor of.
- Bestiary - the drift-touched creatures behind the doors.
- Quests - the per-town door quests.