Can someone explain the Access Cards to me?


Iron Gods


The PCs find a few colors of key cards in the first adventure, and it seems like they are meant to work for any door with a corresponding lock-type (brown card for brown locks, black cards for brown and black locks, etc), but what about later adventures in the AP? Will the Black Keys work for brown locks in other Tech Dungeons?

From the SRD:
"Access cards must be encoded to specific locks before they can function. Often, all of the doors in a complex are keyed to a unique set of cards that don't work on doors found in other complexes, much like a skeleton key might open all the doors in one castle but none in another. Coding an access card for specific locks requires a lock coder. Some access cards could be worth far more than the prices listed above if they're specifically encoded to locks that protect more valuable or significant contents."

Does that mean I need to give my PCs a Lock Coder for them to use their 5 brown access cards (and why were there 5 of them???) in other dungeons?


As I understand it (which, admittedly is not necessarily correct), the Technology Guide is written in a more general sense to be usable with any technology, while the campaign itself is more specific. One way to consider it, and the way I've been planning with my group that just started, is that the Rain of Stars was a massive, country-spanning event, but with a single source. Thus, the cards you find at the beginning should work just fine in the new places because it's all parts of Divinity that separated as it crashed. Though, in most of the new places, the locks just happen to get progressively harder, requiring higher-level cards that just happen to be found in/near the place where you need it, largely rendering the problem moot. ;)

I guess there are 5 of them at the beginning so PCs can each have one of the strange new things to play around with, since they're basically worthless anyway, being brown :P

Paizo Employee Creative Director

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One reason there's 5 is so that there's 5 chances for the PCs to find 1.

Another reason is verisimilitude; they're the most common, so having multiples lying around feels more "right."

Another reason is flavor; they're a low-cost way to slowly introduce tech and tech-related things to the campaign.

Sovereign Court

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I flavoured them as "spirit cards"; whenever you use them to try to open a door you see an image of an Androffan the card belonged to, so the primitives believe there is a spirit living in the card with the power to open doors depending on its spiritual rank.


TheKiltedStranger wrote:

Does that mean I need to give my PCs a Lock Coder for them to use their 5 brown access cards (and why were there 5 of them???) in other dungeons?

Since the Guide text for access cards is a little contradictory here ("an access card unlocks any lock of its color code or a color code of a lower rating", but "often, all of the doors in a complex are keyed to a unique set of cards that don't work on doors found in other complexes"), I ran it as the more specific case: PCs going into a different location had to use a lock coder to either recode the access cards or the door locks to match.

As Leedwashere noted, it didn't come up often when playing through the main Iron Gods quest line.


I had similar bewilderment about the doors that the access cards opened in Fires of Creation..

I think the two options--the access cards open all doors or the access cards open only doors from a similar source--are to give the GM more control.

Suppose the GM in an Iron Gods campaign wanted to add a side quest, which would involve a door that the the PCs could not open with their access cards. If verisimilitude would require low-level access in the new site, then the GM could say, "Yes, you have cards of the right color, but they are not keyed to this site. Maybe you can find new cards." Even with a ship that was part of Divinity, the GM could argue that the ship changed the keying on their doors to stop rampaging robots corrupted by Unity or mutinying crew driven mad by the Dominion of the Black.

In contrast, suppose the only reason to require an access card is to explain why prospectors have not looted the site already. Then having it open to the access cards found beneath Torch would be convenient.

Silver Crusade

I used different version of the colored cards. Some had the old picture ids per srd, some were new cards the TL had made, some were cards another faction had made. some were from other ships in the fleet. divinity was the flagship of the fleet in my world, not the only ship.

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