The Dark Room Backstory

My story begins with a dream but it ends in a nightmare. You have been warned. This story does not contain a happy ending. My name is Theo von Korrin. My father was a very wealthy and successful merchant here in Waterdeep. I was the second of four children. When my father died, he gave us all an equal share in the inheritance with the requirement that we had to spend all of the money on a business venture. If our businesses did well, we could enjoy the fruits of our success. If they did poorly, we would lose it all. My father was a firm believer in earning your own wealth. My sisters took the safe route of opening multiple stores and they have done moderately well last I heard. My elder brother invested in a shady business opportunity and hasn’t been seen in years. I suspect I will not see him again on this side of the mortal plane. And me? I put all of my money in a hotel.

The Golden Gates was an impressive structure. It took five years to build. I wanted it to be a resort for the wealthy. Five stories tall with thirty rooms all lavishly decorated. It had two ballrooms, two bath houses, a music hall, a game room, and a beautiful restaurant with an indoor veranda. I remember the opening night. It was quite a celebration. Some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in all of Waterdeep attended. Things were going so well and I had high hopes that it would continue. The next morning, however, is when things started to unravel. Two of the guests had vanished in the night. All of their belongings were still in their room but they were nowhere to be found. The City Watch was called and they searched and searched but there was no sign of the missing people. 

Over the course of the next few weeks, more guests disappeared. Just a handful at first and not every night but enough that people began to whisper and the Golden Gates developed a sinister reputation. People were avoiding my hotel and the number of bookings dropped. I hired a wizard to search for magical problems. He found nothing. I hired armed guards to walk the halls. They heard strange noises in some of the rooms but when they opened the doors there was nothing out of place. Not all of the guests vanished. A famous swordsman, whose name I will not say, was found in the morning covered in blood and completely out of his mind. He had stabbed his own eyes out. Another young lady was found hanging in her room. The door was locked from the inside and her hands were bound behind her back. The City Watch called it a suicide but we all knew it wasn’t. There were others. Some had gone insane and others died in even more gruesome ways.

I was getting desperate. It wasn’t until I hired a priestess that the source of my misfortune was finally uncovered. The priestess sensed a great evil in the hotel. She told me the problem originated from the silver door numbers attached to all of the rooms. I was, shall we say, skeptical. I’d had those specially made by dwarven craftsmen in town and I trusted them. The priestess left to investigate and came back several weeks later. She told me that had tracked down the source of the silver. Several dwarves had found a door that led nowhere deep in the Underdark. The door was made of silver so they melted it down and sold it. The craftsman I had hired did not know any of this. The priestess suspected that the original door was a gateway to another dimension and that now my hotel rooms were partially connected to it. 

By now I had no more guests and all of my servants had fled. The Golden Gates had earned a new name: “The Death Gates” and I was on the brink of financial collapse. I suggested we just remove the door numbers but the priestess told me that it was probably too late for that. She would need to close the gateway for good. I stayed with her that night. The horrors I witnessed are too terrible to even speak about. I am ashamed and afraid when I think back on it. I remember being so powerless as that brave priestess tried and failed to save my hotel. She did save my life. Her final act was to push me back into this world just as the darkness swallowed her whole. I admit it. I burned it all down. You must believe me. I did it to save this world. I didn’t know what else to do.

• Confession of Theo von Korrin for the crime of arson as recorded by Sawyer Turkle, City Watch Clerk.