Signed key

A long secret code that proves someone is who they say they are, the way a house key proves you live there: the strongest thing a door can check.

Doors check in grades, and this is the top of the ladder. Below it, an account someone had to make and can be traced to. Below that, a display name anyone can type. At the bottom, a link anyone can pass to anyone, which checks nothing at all.

It is load-bearing because everything a room's writing is worth rests on what its door checked. Where the door checks a signed key, a line on the page can be relied on as coming from the person it names. Where it checks nothing, a name on a page proves nothing, and a claim that someone already agreed to something is treated as information and brought to that person directly.

A Player+ asks what the door checks before the room and writes the answer on the first line of the venue card. They do not read "private" as "checked": privacy limits how far words travel and does not prove who anyone is. A warm room with an open door is still an open door.

Keys of this kind are also a reminder that trust and identity are different things. A door can establish who someone is; it cannot establish whether they keep their word. That is grown the slow way, through commitments made and kept, and it is what widens a card.

Also called: — Stands on: The door · Room · Key Opens onto: Venue card · The open web · Sign · Trust · Widen In play: door Sources: Player+ Modules, Before Your First Room, Venue Cards · The DNA of Heaven, Part X (what the door checks). Open: none found.