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.

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 bosses

Each door's boss is built around a single encounter idea:

Town	Boss encounter	The idea
Holtburg	the Summoner	Never fights well - it fights late, calling waves as it is wounded.
Shoushi	the Beast-handler	Buffs and heals its pack; there is a right kill order, and a trap for the wrong one.
Yaraq	the Shell	A grafted, over-plated form - until the shell dies and the real thing steps out.
Sanamar	the Drift-Twinned	The arc's thesis as a fight: the drift copies things, and this one has learned to do it on purpose.

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
• 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.