NOB DOORS
NOB DOORS
Below are just a few examples of Nob doors. Many others can still be discovered and mapped by adventurous explorers.
A Nob door is a supernatural phenomenon that intrigues scholars of the mystical arts. At first glance, they appear to be solid doors, made of common material. However, they do not interact with any matter around them, behaving like “ghosts” in practical terms. They do not reflect ambient light, as if they had their own degree of illumination. This causes strange optical effects, with some of them fully illuminated in the pitch black of a moonless night, or others completely immersed in shadow under the midday sun. The rain passes through them as if they weren’t there. It is impossible to touch them, even using magic.
They are not spectral or ethereal objects and even incorporeal or ethereal beings cannot interact with these doors. The only known way to interact with these strange manifestations is by inserting the correct key into their lock. The reason why the key to a Nob door is always tangible and the door itself is always intangible is unknown.
When you insert the correct key into its lock, the door opens – this time revealing passage to some unknown location. Most of them stay open for 33 seconds and close again on their own, however there are reports of doors with erratic opening times. Many Nob doors teleport whoever passes through them instantly to another distant location on the material plane, but some lead to unknown extradimensional spaces. The arrival point has a second version of the same door, with some exceptions. After being used as a passage, the same door only activates again after 3 weeks.
Trying to use the correct key in the lock after Nob’s door has already been passed through has no effect. The key turns in the lock, but the door will not open. When trying to use an incorrect key, the key goes through the door like all ordinary matter.
The location of the keys to these extraordinary portals is a kept secret. Normally, anyone who has one of these keys and knows its function keeps the fact in absolute secrecy, fearing that it could be taken by force by artifact thieves. There are keys that were lost during clashes over their possession and others whose whereabouts have not yet been located.
Speculations
Numerous theses have already been raised about what the doors of Nob actually are and what the origins are. One of them is that such doors are remnant objects. Another hypothesis is that they were magical connection portals between distant points in the universe that existed before the regenesis of Glitch Mundi and remained in the current universe as fragments of erratic dimensional magic, with their key binding enchantments still active, but with anomalous functioning.
Name origin
Nob was an adventurous explorer who came across one of these strange doors and dedicated her life to studying them. Legend has it that she managed to gather a considerable number of keys, in addition to mapping the entry and exit points of each of the doors to which she had access. The current whereabouts of the map and her keychain are unknown.
Examples of Nob Doors
Door 77:
A bizarre contraption with 77 identical locks distributed in a misaligned manner across the entire surface of the door. Only one of them is correct and activates the passage to your destination. The remaining locks will activate a security countermeasure and make the door disappear and reappear within a 7 km radius of its current position. The correct lock changes with each use of door 77. To identify the correct lock, the door displays an enigma on a metal disc in its center, which changes according to the correct lock change. Legend has it that there is a mathematical calculation capable of determining the current correct lock, as well as the next ones. Its entry point is at the volcanic mines in Teahon and its exit point is underwater, near the beaches of Centra. Opening the door in the volcanic mines does not make the sea of Centra leak there, however a living being that arrives at the exit point must hold its breath and use the necessary means to swim and reach the surface to avoid drowning.
Rat Route:
This door is 5 cm deep inside a rat hole, so it´s not immediately visible to a standing person. When using its respective key, the door expands to the size of a compatible door for medium or large creatures to pass through (with some difficulty). When it closes, it returns to its tiny size. It´s located behind the counter of the Naked King’s tavern in Centra. And takes the traveler to the Drowned man rock near Dolkadan.
Shadow Step:
This door is permanently immersed in total darkness and like all Nob doors, it does not react to natural or magical light. Its entry point is deep in a cave on the continent of Dolkan. Its exit point is near the ruins hot spring in Teahon.
Glass adit:
This door is completely invisible to the naked eye, but can be seen through the glass lens on its key. No spell or effect of 8th level or lower can make the glass door visible. Its entry point is located in an air pocket in an underwater cave on a sandbar on the continent of Honuan and its exit point is in the sand whirlpool on the beaches of the continent of Morgen.