100 Open Doors: Ready-to-use Haven & Refuge locations for 5e

The THIRD book in the 100 THINGS series!

100 OPEN DOORS

Every door leads to a new opportunity, a safe place, a stranger's kindness, or a hidden adventure.

One hundred havens. Every door open. Not one of them free.

100 Open Doors is a system-neutral location supplement for any fantasy tabletop RPG. Every entry features a unique image, a read-aloud description for your players, GM-facing history and current state, and three keyed areas, all in a tight, table-ready format designed to be used, not studied.

No stat blocks. No filler. Just 100 inns, shrines, hospices, and hideaways where your party can finally stop moving, and find out what stopping costs.

The Project

100 Open Doors is a supplement containing one hundred standalone havens for use in any fantasy tabletop RPG. A haven is anywhere a traveler can stop: a roadside inn, a clifftop monastery, a healer's cottage, a tidal lighthouse, a desert oasis, a hot-spring bathhouse, a hermit's grotto, a smuggler's bolt-hole. Every one is system-neutral. No stat blocks, no DCs, no edition-specific mechanics. Just evocative, atmospheric locations you can drop into any campaign, any setting, any system.

Each entry follows a tight, consistent format:

• Original artwork — a unique image for every haven
• A title — an evocative proper name that sets the tone
• Read Aloud text — a player-facing description the GM reads at the table, loaded with sensory detail and the promise of rest
• Original Purpose — a short GM-facing note on who built the haven and why
• Current State — what it is now, who keeps it, and what it quietly costs to stay
• Three Key Areas — named spaces within or around the haven, each with a concrete, memorable detail

Every haven has a single dominant identity, a clear image or concept that makes it distinct. A doorway fire that has burned for a hundred and four years, fed after dark out of a chest of single boots and single gloves. A bathhouse feeding its own bedsteads into the tank fires to keep the water hot. An almshouse straddling a parish line, sheltering forty people one parish struck off its rolls, with the other parish's men due at first light. A shrine where the flagstones have worn into body-shaped hollows, and the building is only sixty years old. No two the same.

Every Door Has a Catch

Every door leads somewhere. Not every door leads somewhere kind.

This is not a book of safe rooms.

Every haven in this book works. The fire is lit, the broth is hot, the bed is dry, the door is unbarred. That part is real, and it has to be. The party has to want to stop here.

But a refuge with nothing happening in it isn't a location you can run. It's a description of a building. So every haven in this book has something going on when the party walks up.

Sometimes it's a price, named plainly at the door. A night's work, a message carried on, a question answered honestly. Sometimes it's the person running the place, who wants something and won't say what until you've eaten. Sometimes trouble is already on the road and the people inside know it, which turns a night's rest into a night's defense. And sometimes there's something folded underneath the welcome that nobody mentions, and every hand that tends the place first arrived here as a guest and never found a reason to leave.

Whatever it is, you can walk away from it. Take the meal, take the bed, leave in the morning. Every entry works as a plain refuge exactly when your party needs one, and every entry has a thread you can pull instead. That choice belongs to you, entry by entry, and nothing in the book takes it away from you.

The danger of a good haven is that the party wants to stay.

Five Starting Regions — Up to Eight Total

The book launches with five regions, each with its own environmental identity and atmosphere. Three more unlock through stretch goals.

• Coastal — Salt and tide wear everything down. The sea decides what stays and what goes, and it has never been in a hurry.
• Forest — The canopy closes. The trail fades. The trees were here long before anything was built, and they have been taking it back ever since.
• Plains — Open ground. Open sky. Nowhere to hide. Whatever stands out here stands alone, visible from every direction and shelter from none.
• Mountains — Thin air, sharp stone, and a long way down. Everything this high was hard to build, harder to reach, and easy to abandon.
• Swamp — Still water, soft ground, and the slow pull downward. The swamp doesn't destroy things, it just takes them in and doesn't let go.
• 🔒 Urban (Stretch Goal) — Built, rebuilt, built on top of. A city never stops layering over itself, and the oldest things are always buried deepest.
• 🔒 Underground (Stretch Goal) — No sky. No wind. No sun. Light goes only as far as you bring it, and the dark has been here longer.
• 🔒 Desert (Stretch Goal) — The sun strips everything bare and the sand covers what's left. What still shows above the dunes was not ready to disappear.

Refuge looks different in every one of them. A lighthouse keeper's spare cot has nothing in common with a monastery cut into a cliff face, or with a walled well in the middle of the sand. The region shapes what the haven is made of, what comfort it can actually offer, and what it asks in return.

Every entry is built around one of four gameplay modes, leaning that direction but also leaving room for the GM to pivot where needed:

• Combat — something wants the haven and the people inside intend to keep it, like the gatehouse where a nineteen-year-old keeps a line of burning tallow across the threshold, and the pack outside has stopped rushing it and started waiting for it to burn down
• Exploration — the haven itself is the interesting content, what's hidden, what's broken, what tells a story, like the lodging house rebuilt upward four times as the water rose, with three drowned floors underneath the one you're sleeping on and a twelve-foot pole leaning beside the hatch
• Social — a specific NPC anchors the haven and interaction drives the scene, like the four sisters who give the beds away for nothing and let nobody leave in the morning until every guest has answered the same three questions about the coast road they came in on
• Mystery — a phenomenon defines the haven and the players investigate something that has gone wrong, like the cliff cell offered to one guest a night, where whoever takes it sleeps a week's worth in a single night and nobody else on the crag sleeps at all until their turn comes

Each entry is compact. Short enough to scan in sixty seconds, detailed enough to anchor an entire session, and paired with a unique image that sets the scene before you read a word.

Why Havens?

Every road runs long. Eventually the party is hurt, hunted, soaked, or out of daylight, and what they need isn't another fight. It's a roof. A fire. A bed. Someone who knows how to set a bone.

The haven is where the journey pauses and the party is at its most willing to trust. Armor comes off. Watches go unset. Somebody talks too much. That makes it one of the best scenes in the game and one of the most under-served in published material, where shelter is usually a line of bookkeeping and a fade to morning.

100 Open Doors sits in that gap. These are refuges that genuinely work, each with one thread you can pull. An inn isn't just an inn. It's a negotiation, a trap, a sanctuary, a debt, or a story, and now you have a hundred of them.

Who Is This For?

• GMs who improvise. Your party is beat up and looking for somewhere to stop tonight. You need something now. Flip to any page.
• GMs who prep. Seed your hexmap, mark the safe houses along a trade route, or build a session around a single haven and what it charges.
• Worldbuilders. Strip the names, keep the concepts. Reskin them for your setting.
• Any system. 5e, OSE, Daggerheart, Cairn, Shadowdark, Knave, MÖRK BORG, Pathfinder, or your homebrew. If your travelers get tired, this works.

Reward Tiers

Discounted Early Bird Reward tiers available for the first 48 hours

• $15 — PDF — 100 Open Doors PDF
• $20 — PDF & POD — 100 Open Doors PDF + Print-On-Demand Code (Print & shipping paid directly to DTRPG at redemption.)
• $45 — 100 Things Digital Collection — 100 Open Doors PDF + 150 Ruined Towers PDF + 130 Ways Across PDF. Three supplements, one pledge.
• $60 — 100 Things Complete Collection — All three PDFs + Print-On-Demand codes for all three. The full digital and print library. (Print & shipping paid directly to DTRPG at redemption.)

Stretch Goals

100 Open Doors launches with 100 entries across five regions. Every stretch goal expands the book, either by unlocking a brand-new region or adding entries to regions already in the collection.

• $1,000 — Unlock one new region (10 entries) 
• $2,000 — Unlock one new region (10 entries) 
• $3,000 — Unlock one new region (10 entries) 
• $4,000 — +10 entries 
• $5,000 — +10 entries 

Every entry that unlocks is complete and ready to use. If there's a kind of refuge you'd love to see make it in, drop it in the comments. We can't use every idea, but we love hearing them.

Add-Ons

If you would like to check out more of our work, you can grab previous projects as add-ons. Click the link to see the full project page with more details.

$5 — Bonus Support Add-On — Your name in the credits section.
$15 PDF or $20 PDF + POD — Previous '100 Things' books

• 150 Ruined Towers - Expanded beyond the original 100 through backer-funded stretch goals. System-neutral, table-ready, each entry with original artwork, read-aloud text, and keyed areas. Works with 5e, Daggerheart, and other TTRPGs.
• 130 Ways Across - One hundred and thirty bridges, fords, ferries, and crossings your party has to get across, or wish they hadn't. Also expanded past its original 100 by backer stretch goals. Same format, same system-neutral design.

Fulfillment

All rewards are fulfilled digitally through DriveThruRPG.

• PDF: You will receive a code to download your PDF directly from DTRPG.
• Print-On-Demand (POD): Tiers that include a physical copy will receive a POD code to order a printed copy directly from DTRPG. Print and shipping costs are paid to DTRPG at the time of order.

You can check current costs before you pledge using the links below: 
Print Cost Calculator | Estimated Shipping