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.