Secret Room - The Contractor (RPG All)

This week's post is loosely based on the recent case of Timothy and Tracy Ferriter, who allegedly had a secure room built to 'house' their adoptive son.

A contractor tipped the police to the existence of the room. He'd been asked to build a small, lockable room in the Ferriters' garage, 8 by 8 ft, with no way to open the only access door from the inside. It had electricity, a window air conditioning unit and a camera in the ceiling, and the Ferriters insisted it be built within two days. The whole thing felt off, so as soon as the contractor finished the job he told the cops, who discovered that the Ferriters were using it to keep their son in secure lockdown when he wasn't at school. 

The case is ongoing.

Secret or secure rooms are fairly common in fiction. There was a time when you couldn't write a cozy cottage murder mystery set in England without at least one 'priest's hole,' and the trope is very common in cobwebbed ghost stories too.

Harvington Hall

Secret rooms turn up now and again in pulp crime novels, particularly those that have some connection with Prohibition, when there were very good reasons for hiding the booze store, or making sure that your tunnel to the outside world wasn't easily spotted by curious onlookers. Some, like the cellar of the 21 Club in New York, still exist.

PIX11 News

The principle is sound enough. You need somewhere secure, concealed and relatively easy to access. To do this, you take a portion of the existing structure and wall it off from the rest of the unit. You want to make sure that the space isn't so large that it's easy to spot by cursory inspection, but it can't be so small as to be useless. The priest's holes were built to accommodate one person, perhaps two, and then only for a few hours. The 21 Club's cellar wasn't meant to be secure housing for anyone; it just had to be big enough to store a restaurant's worth of booze, and convenient enough that the waiters didn't have to schlep all over the block to get another bottle. 

However this example introduces a new element - the contractor. Someone has to build that room, after all, and construction is a fairly specialist job. Particularly if you want that secret room to have electricity, or plumbing, and especially if you want it to be undetectable. The man who built the 21 Club's cellar was an expert in his field, and he had to be. The whole point was to make an actual brick wall, with all the weight that implies, slide shut noiselessly, with minimal effort, and without leaving any tell-tale scuff marks. This is not a simple feat of engineering. This wants effort, and skill.

You know who else has a particular set of skills? Player characters.

Let's talk gamification, and for once in a way let's talk Fantasy. I'm not going to specify setting, except to say that it could as easily be Ravenloft as Swords of the Serpentine.

Command Performance

The group is hired by a suitably mysterious client, who calls themself Lord Bardwell, owner of Bardwell Hall. Lord Bardwell wants the adventurers to build a secret room at the Hall, to these specifications:

• It must be south-facing.
• It must have a window or some kind of view port that allows Lord Bardwell to see a particular constellation, at certain months of the year.
• It must be undetectable by ordinary means.
• The people currently living at the Hall - Lord Bardwell's family and servants - can't know the room is being built.

That last part's the kicker. The group might have all manner of architectural or magical talents that will help them build that room. How can they do it without being spotted by the people living there?

Complicating factors:

1. 'Lord Bardwell' isn't really Lord Bardwell at all. Their actual employer, who prefers to remain incognito and is working through magical disguises or some kind of third party, is the second eldest child of the current Lord Bardwell, the scholarly one who has esoteric and peculiar tastes. Hence the need to look at a particular constellation. Best not to ask what their obsession is really all about. Or why they need to be so secretive.
2. There are several possible locations for the south-facing room, but the best one is in the old Tower, sometimes called the Green Tower after the green cupola at its top. It's one of the oldest sections of the Hall, and houses a forgotten cellar as well as a seldom-used guest bedroom. The reason why few people go there is because it's supposed to be haunted ...
3. Lord Bardwell - the real one - spends most of his time in his bedroom, as he's a complete invalid. An ever-changing procession of doctors and other parasites visit every month, each with their own cure. This means new faces come and go regularly, which can be a blessing or a curse depending on how clever, and how much of an interfering busybody, the latest batch of doctors are. To get access to the Hall the player characters can disguise themselves as quacks - probably not much of a stretch for them.
4. Lord Bardwell's spouse, the beautiful (and licentious) Baroness, spends most of her time in sunnier climes, working her way through the servants and hotel staff. However, Lord Bardwell unexpectedly cuts her off at the wallet, forcing her sudden return to Bardwell Hall complete with a menagerie of card sharps, eccentric swordsmen and other lackies who are hoping for a sniff of the Bardwell loot.   

That's it for this week. Enjoy!