The Book of Doors

Wondrous item (artifact), unique, does not leave its pedestal

"You don't open the Book. You ask it, nicely, and then you wait while it thinks about whether it likes your face." — A Rift-Sniffer pup, explaining the job to a visitor

The Book of Doors rests on a stone pedestal at the centre of Quillnib's Handle. It is taller than three goblins stacked on each other's shoulders, bound in a hide nobody has managed to identify, and it breathes. Slowly. You can see the cover rise and settle if you watch long enough.

Every page is a door. Turn to the right leaf, lay a palm flat on the ink, and you step through into the place the page describes: a market stall, a stairwell, a bedroom three hundred feet up the side of a tower. The Handle has no street plan. The Book is the street plan.

Temperament

The Book is not a tool, and the goblins of the Handle stopped pretending otherwise a long time ago.

• It has moods. On bad days pages stick together, and the Book opens only to the districts it finds restful. Rift-Sniffers call these closed days and nobody gets to work on time.
• It holds grudges. People who have been rude to it find their pages turn slowly, sometimes over the course of an hour. One merchant who spat on the pedestal has waited eleven years for the page to his shop to finish turning.
• It is fond of the old. Elderly goblins say the Book turns faster for them. Rift-Sniffers say that's because old goblins are polite.
• It reads back. Anyone who lays a hand on a page feels, briefly, that they are the one being read.

Pages

The Book has never been counted, because the count changes. New pages grow in when the city builds something new; they arrive blank, and the ink fills in over a few weeks as the place becomes real. Pages for demolished places don't disappear. They fade to a pale grey and lead somewhere that used to be there.

Every goblin born in the Handle is registered to a page, and carries its number as part of their name. A goblin whose page is lost or faded is called pageless, and pageless goblins find doors in the city are slower to open for them.

The oldest twenty-three leaves, the First Pages, were in the Book when it was found and hold the oldest parts of the city. Three of them are missing entirely. The stubs are still visible in the spine, cut clean. Nobody living remembers what was on them.

Using the Book

Only Rift-Sniffers may turn pages. This became law after the Night of Wrong Pages, and the pedestal has been guarded ever since.

For a visitor with a Rift-Sniffer's help, a trip through the Book takes one action and costs whatever the Sniffer charges. Anyone foolish enough to try it alone makes a DC 18 Intelligence (Arcana) check:

Pages written or repaired in Blackweight are much more reliable. They also cannot be changed afterwards.