Reflections on The Door

Origins

The Door, from Adventure: The Door in Reality was initially included in The Overgrown Wilds as a way to foreshadow The Lost Swords Gamechanger from Apocalypse World: Burned Over. Below is an excerpt from Apocalypse World: Burned Over, describing the Lost Swords:

The Lost Swords are a powerful weapon, an army of war machines, that someone — who? — left for the people in this time, in this place, to discover. Each Lost Sword is sealed in a capsule, like a giant coffin of opaque, impregnable black glass. They’re awaiting release: the correct handprint, the correct keycode, the correct psychic password? Who knows what will eventually open them up.

When I was establishing the basic details of the setting for the Overgrown Wilds, before we started play, I saw a chance to organically include the monolith-like capsule for the Lost Sword in The Skyway. The flavour text for this location stated that there was a "cult of humanity's rebirth" there, so I figured that they might worship a black monolith while misunderstanding its purpose. Thus, the idea of The Door was born. Its name was initially intended to be a red herring or general hook to attract interest.

Early Developments

As we played the game, some running themes of fractured realities and multiverses started to surface. Matthew Lutey's nature was a key part of this, but also having STYG-0 in the setting (when we had decided that it wasn't necessarily the same reality as 40k) played into this idea. Outside of this game, I had also started to come up with the early concepts for Campaign: Convergence, which fuelled this thinking about The Door as some kind of mysterious portal. It seemed like it would be a good lead-in to a crossover campaign, if the players were interested. I started to float the idea and the group seemed up for it, so I started to treat The Door as an unresolved mystery, whose form would be decided later. During The Door in Reality, Session 3, Matthew confronted The Door in-game with a very good roll, leading to some adlibbing about its nature and relating it to Matthew's character and interests. This led to some reveals about its unresolved form and its potential, which I think paved the way for the direction of the rest of the campaign.

Towards the Endgame

After more information / mystery about The Door was spread as a result of Matthew's interaction with it, other players started taking interest in its potential. Ultimately, most of the party wanted to at least see it, if not use it for something, which resulted in much of the game focusing on The Door towards the finale. It was the ultimate destination of the game, really, and its nature (with some negotiation and adlibbing) allowed characters with wildly different motivations (as is often the case with Apocalypse World) to focus on one goal and each get some kind of resolution or ending.