Dwarven Door

Dwarven doors are fabled pieces of engineering, they are said to be very hard to spot and near impossible to be opened by force or trickery.

Guarding secret passages to their kingdoms, tomb entrances, safes and vaults, as well as secret dwellings; these doors are built to last through the ages and to be only found and opened by the ones that have the right to, and them only.

This type of door is made from a single slab of stone and carved to blend seamlessly with the natural shapes of the rock around it; its locking mechanism and hinges are cast from bronze or brass to prevent rust and decay, and will be perfectly operational even after centuries left untouched.

The door sits on recesses on the entrance tunnel’s mouth, in such a way it is braced against solid rock. It is of a small size even for a dwarf, in order to have a good thickness versus surface area ratio to prevent it from being broken or cracked easily. It opens to the outside, given that pulling is less efficient than pushing or ramming for that matter.

It opens from the outside through a single key hole that is covered by a lid to keep it free from debris and the action of weather. The key that opens it is a very complicated and sophisticated design and the lock it fits is basically impossible to pick. Once the key is inserted and turned, it unlocks a mechanism that holds the master lever retracted into a recess in the door, and it then shoots out powered by leaf springs inside of the mechanism.This lever controls the four locking bars inside of the door and also doubles as a pulling handle for the heavy stone block.

The whole mechanism is very light to operate and to open thanks to incredibly exact fit and construction and is reliable beyond reason. Such is the skill and cunning of the dwarves that the common folk tend to refer to this type of technology simply as “dwarven magic”.

Most of those secret places count on other lines of defence apart from the “magical” doors, including traps, false entrances and decoy treasures, and many times the things meant to be protected inside will actually be securely hidden in a secret chamber even more difficult to spot and open.