The Door of Stars: MZA4 Enhancement
The Door of Stars
About
The Door of Stars was introduced in the third stage of the adventure, the Mother of Life. In it, the player characters needed to convince the mountain dwelling Otomi humans to allow them to use a fabled portal which was hidden deep in the mountains. They would need to use a certain sequence of crystals to open the gateway specifically to a realm known as Mechica, an Aztec-themed location on another world which was first introduced in the February 1983 issue of Dragon Magazine (Issue #70).
The Door of Stars is undoubtedly inspired by the Stargate franchise with a Mesoamerican theme instead of one that is Egyptian, but the idea should not conclude its use at a single adventure.
Using the Door of Stars
Mesoamerican themed gaming is an oddly rare treat. Certainly there are adventures in Dungeons and Dragons such as the classic N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God, the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan and the Isle of Dread, but there are also similarly themed games such as GURPS Aztecs, the Empire of the Petal Throne, Ixalan from Magic the Gathering, and even the aforementioned Mechica adventure. With so little to draw from, why not make use of them all? The Door of Stars could be a perfect way to allow PCs from Maztica to find their way into any of these fabulous locations for just a quick one off or even for the remainder of a campaign.
It shouldn’t be easy though, or else the Door would be used by everyone. To begin with, the Otomi would have to be dealt with either through negotiation or violence. Horrors have come through the doorway before and caused death and destruction among the Otomi people – something they certainly hope to avoid repeating. Even if this obstacle is overcome, using the Door requires a very special code that PCs should only find as the reward for the successful completion of a separate adventure.
With the proper permission and code (more on this later), the Door of Stars will open until its controls are adjusted once again.
The history of the Door of Stars begins long before humans even set foot on Maztica. It is truly one of, if not the most ancient artifact in all of Maztica. It is a product of a great sun god’s attempt to spread his worship throughout the multiverse, and it exists everywhere he is known. That deity, K’uk’ulkan created thousands of the doorways simultaneously across as many worlds, and even some not on the Prime plane.
Long before K’uk’ulkan became Kukul on Toril, he sought to connect his various aspects on disparate worlds, and thus he built the many Doorways, one per world.
Each location
would be given its own separate code known to the god and to those he thought
to share the knowledge. Thousands of
years later, the Torillian doorway has all but been forgotten and even Kukul
has disappeared from the world – yet the Door of Stars remains.
The Door of Stars is as indestructible as one might expect of any artifact created by a nigh omnipotent deity at the height of his power, as is the “control panel” that directs its functions.
The Door is a great stone circle hidden in a cavern that neither the tools of man, the power of nature, or even the hands of other deities might mar. It has survived earthquakes and archwizards all to remain inviolate after thousands of years. While the doorway may be unremarkable, it is ringed with sixteen engravings. Most are recognizable, some are not, but each glows with a faint colored light. Those who understand how the gateway functions understand that this is the specific code to open gates from other worlds to the Torillian Door of Stars.
The control panel is the key to opening doorways elsewhere. The panel stands at five feet high and contains sixteen crystals, some of which would be extraordinarily valuable if one could remove them from the location. They can be removed from the sixteen slots on the panel itself, but anyone attempting to bring them outside of a five-foot radius cannot do so, the crystals will simply be stopped by an unbreakable force.
As there are sixteen crystals, there are also sixteen slots to place the crystals in a four-by-four matrix – each of which is assigned a symbol like those which ring the Door. Mathematically there are 20,922,789,888,000 possible ways to arrange the crystals within the slots, and even if there are tens of thousands of Doors elsewhere, the chances of randomly finding one is astronomically small. A code must be discovered to open a doorway.
Below, you will find both the “code” for opening the Torillian portal and a blank form so that you can fill one out yourself. Ixalan, the Aztecs of GURPS, and even the Azcans in the Hollow World of Mystara have their own codes to their own portals. Anywhere that K’uk’ulkan might have existed or has taken interest in at some point in the past will have such a code.
Note that, opening a portal to a different world only functions if the destination portal isn't itself open.
On each door of stars there will always be the images shown on the example and blank Control Panel Settings provided below in order from left to right. The images glow on the doorway with colors that correspond to the different types of crystal. This is the specific setting for that particular location. If you want to create your own, use the sample provided below (for Toril) and create
Toril's Control Panel Sequence
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