So The Conquest of Chaos has been out in PDF for backers for some time now. You eagle-eyed readers may notice I didn't include any traditional secret doors. There are no secret doors on the map though there are still areas that went undiscovered and unexplored play tests. Would I be justified in called them secret areas? Well the answer is dependent on the specifics of each area, but I want to share my own definition of a secret door/area and how they should be designed with an adventure. In essence, the secret door should be treated as a puzzle.

In some games, finding a secret door can be as simple as rolling the right number on a die. Other games may expect players to describe the actions of their PCs and the GM tells them if they discovered the door based on that (or at least providing a bonus on a "find secret door" roll). And some games lay in-between, allowing for both described methods. But what is the actual purpose of including a secret door or a secret area in your dungeon? The answer to that question is at the heart of the subject.

It must be determined what is being hidden. Are we merely hiding rooms with the best treasure? Or is this where the lich’s phylactery is hidden? Or does the secret door allow access to a passage that bypasses a trap? Or is it a place where the players can discover valuable information that gives hint at the weakness of the enemy that they seek? All of these are valid and good answers to what might be on the other side of a secret door. What you are hiding informs what clues exist to lead the PCs to find that hidden are.

Sometimes it doesn't make sense to have every single one of those behind a traditional secret door. By "traditional secret door", I mean something like an illusory wall or some mechanical contraption which is only revealed/unlocked when the correct conditions are met. Hiring guards and having a complex lock is probably easier for some antagonists than employing magic. A lich's phylactery is something that makes a bit more sense being hidden behind a secret room, but sometimes these are things hidden in plain sight and guarded by a fearsome beast.

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Does the secret door reveal a path that allows PCs to avoid the dangerous trap? The creatures that regularly use the space may use a secret door to avoid traps. Goblins would create a different means of circumventing a trap than harpies would. If the area is used by slimoids then they can probably get past their trap very easily and may not even have a second path, or the second path maybe a two inch wide crack in the wall that they just squeeze through.

We also have to make our secret door function with a kind of similar game design ideology that we do with the trap. Or at least I think it's best to do so. One part should be obvious and one part should be obscured. Truthfully this is better using the landmark hidden secret paradigm, or the ICI doctrine. It's obvious that there are spikes on the ceiling. If the players ask questions or make their perception check then they can notice that the activation mechanism seems to be related to pressure plates. If they spend time and resources investigating then they discover the secret of how to bypass the trap. We're not looking for gotcha moments where the players are completely surprised. We're looking to give them an amount of information upon which they can make decisions and practice player agency.

So I'll end this by relating my favorite secret door from The Conquest of Chaos. In the level three adventure, Savage Scions of the Sea, there is a hallway which shrinks anyone who walks down it unless they perform an action prior to entering the hallway. They return to normal size when walking through the hallway to exit. This is meant to be a fun puzzle that can be solved in a variety of ways.

But if a PC simply goes far enough down the hallway they can easily find a little "mouse hole" where someone used to live. Inside, they can find some supplies but also one of the ways that they can go down the hallway without shrinking. Plus, they learn where the previous inhabitant of the mouse hole went. So it's a secret area, but it's found in a way that is fun to experiment with. It doesn't provide any treasure, but grants useful information. The info is immediately useful in that dungeon, but also provides a link to the level 4 adventure.

What's your favorite (or most hated) instance of a secret door in a great adventure?

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