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What is the Yawning Portal?

Ultimately, of course, it is a mythical locale which lives in the imagination. So it can be whatever you want it to be.

As I’ve dived deep into its lore, however, there is a kind of gestalt vision of the Yawning Portal which has grown strong in my mind. And if you wouldn’t mind indulging me, I’d like to share it with you here as a way of drawing together everything that we’ve learned.

I’m not going to attempt a full map of the tavern, but we can use the rough sketch above to orient ourselves a bit.

FOOTPRINT: I’ve based the outlines of the sketch more-or-less on the 5^th Edition outline of the building. If you’d prefer the FR1 outline, you basically just need to shove what I’m describing as the West Wing back from the street so that it juts out the backside of the building.

• Built of stone.
• Three storeys high.
• Several chimneys.
• Slate grey roof.
• The front door is rounded. The signboard of silvery wood above the door reads, “The Yawning Potral.”

NEIGHBORHOOD: The Yawning Portal has been described as “two doors down from the Empty Keg tavern, right next to Mother Salinka’s House of Pleasure” (Ruins of Undermountain, p. 8). So Mother Salinka’s is the building directly to the east (sharing a wall with the Portal) and the Empty Keg is just beyond that on the corner.

Note: Given all the secret entrances perforating the Yawning Portal, could we imagine one from the East Wing leading into Mother Salinka’s? Yes, I think so.

Directly to the west of the Yawning Portal is the opening to the alley which lies behind it. Waterdeep has a number of these intra-block courtyard alleys (Trollskull Alley from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist is another). The one behind the Yawning Poral has never been detailed or named. Let’s call it Halaster Alley, which is sometimes known by the name Halaster’s Cove.

STABLES: The Yawning Portal’s stables are located in a separate building in Halaster’s Cove. They are likely also employed by customers of other businesses in the Cove, including Mother Salinka’s and the Empty Keg.

TAPROOM

The taproom takes up the front two-thirds of the main building, with a general look and feel according to Jason Thompson’s illustration. The front door looks across the Well of Entry to the well-worn, but polished three-sided bar at the back. Rounded balconies run along three sides of the second and third floors, with railing seating positioned to look down into the Well. On the ground floor, there are open arches leading to the East and West Wings.

• Blue tapestries hang at regular intervals around the room.
• The walls are wood-paneled.
• The floor is made from well-worn boards.
• The demon-faced fireplace stands next to the bar, facing the front door.
• The room is lit with candle wheels.
• There are tables all around the Well of Entry (including between the Well and the bar). A number of tables are built around the wooden pillars supporting the ceiling.
• A large number of curios, mostly donated by delvers returning from Undermountain, are on display throughout the taproom. (See Tales from the Yawning Portal, p. 6 for a sampling.)
• Two sets of spiral stairs, located to the east and west side of the Well, provide access to the balconies.
• Because of the design of the space, on the second and third floors there’s a narrow “hall” of sorts that extends back along the east side of the taproom. On both levels there are some fairly private tables that are not well lit and not easily seen from the rest of the taproom.

THE BAR:

• Under the bar, Durnan keeps a crossbow loaded with blunt-headed sleep arrows.
• A broadsword hangs on the wall behind the bar.
• There’s a lance-and-lion board set up for play on the bar.

THE WELL OF ENTRY: The Well is 40 feet across with a 1-foot high stone rampart. It’s 140 feet deep.

• A stone ledge juts out from the bar side of the Well, allowing access to the rope-and-harness suspended from a block-and-tackle.
• The harness is notably studded with a bronze bas relief of a skull.
• The pulley system allows Durnan to lower would-be delvers from the bar; there is also a release lever there that will rapidly drop the entire rope into the Well.
• The walls of the well are crumbly, with abundant handholds and footholds.
• The entry/exit fee to be lowered into or raised out of the Well of Entry is 1 gp.

WEST WING

The West Wing is made up entirely of guest rooms. Three floors, each with a public stair on the south end and a servant’s stair on the north end.

• Barrels filled with fireplace-heated stones are placed at the end of every floor’s central hall.
• On the third floor there’s a dining area at the far end of the hall, with a fireplace and a trestle table where the staff will serve food to those renting rooms.

EAST WING

The first floor of the East Wing has additional seating ringed by a number of private dining areas, discreetly screened with blue curtains.

• A service hallway connects the storerooms on the north end of the East Wing’s first floor to the kitchen (see below; it’s really more of a single, rambling complex of staff rooms). This hallway can also be accessed from a door in the northwest corner of the dining room (servers sometimes use this to deliver food).
• There is a secret door leading from one of the private dining areas into the back rooms.
• Another secret door leads from a storeroom into the dark end of Halaster’s Cove . Just across the alley from this door is the back door of the stables.
• The Wet Well, sometimes referred to as the Wet Way, is located in one of the East Wing’s back rooms.

Note: Exactly what connection(s) the Wet Well has to Undermountain is beyond the scope of this vision. It seems likely they also change depending on the current architectural whims of the Mad Mage. But it is generally known to offer more direct access to Skullport than the Well of Entry.

The second floor of the East Wing is a large hostel, with multiple bunkbeds and cheap cots. This area often ends up being a congregation of adventurers, swapping tales and tips while preparing for their sojourns.

• There’s a small library of books here. (With sometimes surprising titles to be found crammed amongst the common fare.)
• The room is also accoutered with medical supplies, usually overseen by a Tymoran priest who can offer healing services.

The third floor of the East Wing is newer construction and has a pair of luxurious suites, particularly well-suited for adventuring parties who have just returned with gold to spend from Undermountain.

• Both suites have secret doors leading to the third-floor balcony of the taproom.

STAFF AREAS

REAR AREA – FIRST FLOOR: Behind the taproom are several rooms.

• The kitchens, including the back door.
• Durnan’s Office, furnished with two facing couches of red velvet, a small table, and a desk.
• A private meeting room.
• Access to the Lower Depths (see below).

REAR AREA – SECOND FLOOR: Rooms for the live-in staff can be found here.

REAR AREA – THIRD FLOOR: The private quarters of Durnan and his family are located on the third floor.

LOWER DEPTHS

Wine cellars and storerooms which extend for at least three levels below the Yawning Portal. These are labyrinthine, some being of new construction and others actually being chambers that were once part of the lower levels of Halaster’s Tower.

• The lower depths are warded against teleportation and divination (most likely due to ancient protections placed here by Halaster).
• A secret tunnel from the Blackstaff’s Tower can be accessed from one of these storerooms.
• The deepest wine cellar is also Durnan’s trophy room. Some of the stone pillars here have secret vaults concealed within them, including one which holds Durnan’s old adventuring sword and a magic ring.

STAFF

The Yawning Portal has a total of fourteen staff members, including Durnan and the members of his family.

CONCLUSION

But who is Durnan? The innkeeper himself, of course, has gone through a number of iterations. I have chosen to focus primarily on the tavern itself and not dive deeply into Durnan’s evolution because NewbieDM has already done the work here.

So if you’d like to dive even deeper, check out The Many Faces of Durnan the Wanderer.

Go to Part 1

THE MAPS OF WATERDEEP

Now that we’ve walked through the textual history of the Yawning Portal, let’s take a peek at how the location has been mapped over the years.

The first official map of the Yawning Portal’s interior appears in the City System boxed set. But to fully understand these interior maps, we first need to take a look at the exterior maps of the inn, starting with the Waterdeep city map from FR1 Waterdeep and the North:

I’ve enhanced the shape of Building #4 (Yawning Portal) here to make it clear, since the only available scan was done with a potato.

The next exterior map is from the City System boxed set. The Yawning Portal is still Building #4 and it still appears in the same general location (on Rainrun Street between Cook Street and Beinimbra’s Street), but the shape of the building has changed to a simple rectangle:

The orientation of the map has also been rotated.

The next map of Waterdeep is found in TM4 City of Waterdeep Trail Map (1989), which is simply a recolored version of the FR1 map. The map in Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep, similarly, is a re-scaled version of the same map. FRE3 Waterdeep makes the map even smaller and colors the whole city gray.

In 1990, the Forgotten Realms Atlas by Karen Wynn Forstad included a new map of Waterdeep. A version of this map in red scale was also reproduced in the manual for the first Eye of the Beholder video game:

It shows a rectangular building, although given the style and scale of the map I wouldn’t read too much into that.

A new map of Waterdeep was created for 3^rd Edition’s City of Splendors sourcebook, and featured the Yawning Portal as building C48:

You may notice that the shape of the building reverted to the original FR1 map, with a few slight differences.

I am fairly certain that the next map of Waterdeep was found in the 4^th Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide. This map was never reproduced at a large scale (nor was it made for such) and is more or less useless for our purposes.

Finally we have the 5^th Edition poster map produced for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist:

You’ll notice that this map features a new outline for the Yawning Portal, although I think it can actually be interpreted in two different ways. The first is a slight variation of the City System map (with a new building directly to the east of the tavern):

And the second seems to be more of a variation on the FR1 shape:

In addition to these maps, there are two other interesting depictions of the Yawning Portal along similar lines. First, the Descent Into Undermountain computer game featured a navigational splash screen that identifies a specific building as the Yawning Portal:

Obviously Waterdeep is somewhat abstracted here (they could only model so many three-dimensional buildings), but the Yawning Portal resembles its rectangular presentation in the City System boxed set.

However, in addition to its prodigious poster maps, the City System boxed set also included a poster depicting an aerial view of Waterdeep. This poster is pretty spectacular. Although only depicting the southern end of the city due to perspective, its execution is meticulous: You can track specific streets and navigate through the city’s depiction.

And if you navigate to Soothsayer’s Way and then drop down to Rainrun Street… there’s the Yawning Portal:

I’m not certain if the artist actually knew they were depicting the Yawning Portal here. But although not strictly accurate (following the map, there should be an alley on the east side of the building), it’s (a) a 3-floor C-class building and (b) its shape is remarkably similar to that shown on the FR1 map (which is quite possibly the version the artist was working from if the City System cartography hadn’t been completed yet).

In the same vein, we can also look at Mike Schley’s map of the city used for the Lords of Waterdeep board game:

Other depictions of the Yawning Portal’s exterior are quite rare, actually. Notably Clyde Caldwell’s cover for FRE3 Waterdeep (and novelization) included the inn’s sign, the design of which was then clearly followed for an interior illustration by Ron Spencer in Expedition to Undermountain:

(Ironically, the description of the sign in Expedition to Undermountain of being “a board weathered to a silvery hue” is clearly describing the Caldwell cover, not the definitely-not-silvery wood of its own illustration.)

MAPS OF THE YAWNING PORTAL

Now we’ll turn our attention to the maps depicting the interior of the Yawning Portal. As I’d mentioned, the first such map was found in the City System boxed set:

It’s my belief that the cartographer here didn’t get a full brief. In the City System boxed set, the Yawning Portal is only described as, “Building 4, Inn.” So he drew a map that matched the dimensions of Building 4 on the city map.

One thing to note is that, up to this point, the number of floors in the Yawning Portal had not been definitively listed. The map indicates “Upper Floors” (plural), so how many floors in total? At least three. And three is, in fact, the answer listed in City of Splendors a few years later.

But there’s no staircase from the second to third floor.

For years, when looking at this map, I’d also erroneously concluded that there was, hilariously, no Well! But that’s because I was looking for the Well where I expected it to be: in the common room. But the Well actually is shown: It’s in the small room second-to-the-left at the top of the map.

You know who else missed it, though?

The cartographer for Expedition to Undermountain, which is also our next map of the Yawning Portal:

You can see that the cartographer more or less follows the same floorplan as the original map, although due to their somewhat chunky assets compromises have to be made. (For example, multiple rooms no longer have beds.) It’s possible that the reason the well disappeared from the back room is because the cartographer just didn’t have an appropriate asset to drop in.

(But given the reputation of the Yawning Portal at this point, I would love to know what decision process resulted in this map being created and published.)

In 2012, we finally get a map of the Yawning Portal which includes the titular portal. From Halls of Undermountain:

The other thing to note about this map is that the outline of the building is based on the original outline (as seen on the FR1 and later City of Splendors maps), not the rectangular outline from City System. Maps for the other floors of the building are not given, but you may notice multiple staircases up and one leading down to the “lower chambers.”

I have a few quibbles, but this is a most excellent map and almost certainly the one I would choose to use when running the Yawning Portal: It’s got the Well of Entry, private meeting rooms, properly arrayed tables, etc. It even has privies! (Which I can only imagine drop waste directly down into some unlucky portion of Undermountain. Of course, there was one unfortunate incident where tentacles reached up and sucked a patron down. But only occasionally do otyughs come rambling up looking for a second helping…)

Our final official map comes from DDAL08-00 Once In Waterdeep:

Although this map seems to take some inspiration from the Halls of Undermountain map (compare the Kitchen, Meeting Room, and Lounge running down one side of the map), the overall effort is, unfortunately, quite underwhelming. It lacks quite a few key features, reverts to the rectangular outline of the building, and quite underwhelms by only offering eight guest rooms in total.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Besides the depictions of the Yawning Portal in video games (which we’ve already discussed), there have been quite a few illustrations of the interior of the Yawning Portal scattered around various D&D books (although not as many as you might think). Most are actually quite generic in character and I’m not going to attempt to catalogue them all.

There are, however, two notable exceptions, both of which come from 5^th Edition.

First, this illustration from the 5^th Edition Player’s Handbook by Scott Murphy:

Notice the devil-head fireplace in the background. As far as I can tell, this is the first time such a fireplace is described or depicted in the Yawning Portal, but it has since become iconic, appearing time and time again in illustrations of the inn.

One of the reasons for this, I believe, is because of its appearance in this image by Jason Thompson from Waterdeep: Dragon Heist:

This image is not a map, but it is incredibly detailed and has had a significant impact on the mental image most people have of the tavern.

One thing I will note here is that this image does NOT depict the Well of Entry thrusting through the front wall of the tavern. In researching this article, I became aware that this had somehow become a semi-popular interpretation of the image.

But Thompson’s art is clearly a cut-away view. You can see that the floor in front of the Well has been cut away to show the adventurers descending.

Next: The Definitive Yawning Portal

Go to Part 1

IN THE NOVELS

From 1994-2004, the Yawning Portal also appeared in a number of tie-in novels and short stories (with one additional appearance in 2009). Here’s a brief round-up of unique facts about the inn established in these novels. As stories, of course, these include a number of small descriptive details.

WATERDEEP (Troy Denning, aka Richard Awlinson, 1989)

• “Yawning Portal” not only refers to the well; it’s also a “tongue-in-cheek reference to the tendency of those who indulged in the tavern’s fare to tell tall tales.”
• Durnan’s office has a couch.

Note: This is a novelization of the events from FRE3 Waterdeep. Or vice versa, with both being released more or less simultaneously and shared passages of text.

ELFSONG (Elaine Cunningham, 1994)

• There is a secret tunnel between Blackstaff Tower and a “secret backroom” at the Yawning Portal which is hidden behind the storeroom. (It’s one of what are apparently a network of such tunnels, including another that runs to Piergeiron’s Palace. The secret room is used for meetings between certain Lords of Waterdeep (including Khelben, Laeral, Mirt, Kitten (Nymara Scheiron), and Brian the Swordmaster).
• There are live musical performances in the taproom, including by the Masked Minstrel.

REALMS OF THE UNDERDARK (“A Slow Day in Skullport,” Ed Greenwood, 1996)

• There are multiple wine cellars in the Yawning Portal, of which one is the “deepest” and home to bottles covered with “gray, furry dust.” It also contains various trophies from Durnan’s swordswinging days, including a lich’s periapt, a pair of tusks from a giant orc, and the “swords of fallen foes” (many of which gleam with enchantments). Some of the stone pillars within this cellar have secret vaults concealed within them, including Durnan’s old adventuring sword and a magic ring.
• These lower chambers (and possibly the entire inn?) are warded against teleportation (and possibly other magic).
• Belaerd, a black licorice whisky from Sheirtalar, is among the Portal’s offerings.
• Durnan is often known to sing ancient battle ballads in the taproom.
• There are enchanted, floating baskets that are used to move drinks and other supplies around the Yawning Portal.

REALMS OF THE ARCANE (“The Grotto of Dreams,” Mark Anthony, 1997)

• The taproom well is called the “Well of Entry.”

THORNHOLD (Elaine Cunningham, 1998)

• The tunnel connected to the Wet Well (which is here a hole in the floor covered by a board) leads more directly to Skullport.

Note: It’s possible that the “secret door” in Skullport (1999) was attempting to reference this passage from the 1998 novel. But the details are sufficiently different, that I don’t think so.

ELMINSTER IN HELL (Ed Greenwood, 2001)

• Durnan keeps a crossbow behind the bar.

WINDWALKER (Elaine Cunningham, 2003)

• There is a secret back door which is magically concealed using a powder gifted to Durnan by Khelben Arunsun and probably leads directly into the inn’s stables. (After closing the door, you rub the powder into the gap around the door and it vanishes.)

REALMS OF THE DRAGONS (“The Keeper of Secrets,” Ed Greenwood, 2004)

• The Yawning Portal has a well-oiled back door which “swings wildly” in Mirt’s wake and leads into the kitchen.
• There’s a trapdoor in the taproom with a spell on it that only lets Durnan open it. The chute inside leads down into “unseen depths” and Durnan dumps corpses down it. “Something that slobbered” waits their arrival.
• Orders are not “bawled.” (You get one warning and then you get ejected.)
• The taproom is lit by candle wheels hung overhead.
• You might see a lance-and-lion game board set up on the smooth-polished bar. (Mirt often plays with Durnan.)
• Black Sail is an ale on tap.
• Durnan keeps a “baldric heavy with warblades” on a peg on the wall behind the bar.

DOWNSHADOW (Erik Scott Deble, 2009)

This novel takes place in 1479 DR.

• The climb from the bottom to the top of the well is described as “a bow shot—a long hard climb.”
• There’s a harness at the end of the rope in the well.

ENDLESS QUEST: TO CATCH A THIEF (Matt Forbeck, 2018)

The Yawning Portal briefly appears in this choose-your-own-adventure book, but contains no detailed description of the tavern. (Although the character is told that there’s a secret route to Skullport there.)

LATER EXPEDITIONS TO UNDERMOUNTAIN

The Yawning Portal next appears in the 3^rd Edition City of Splendors (2004), still listed as building C48 (inn, Class C, 3 floors). The entry describing the inn is quite brief, but does state:

Yawning Portal: Built atop the ruins of Halaster’s Hold, the Yawning portal inn (C48) contains the primary entrance to Undermountain, a large well that drops down into Undermountain’s first dungeon level (UM L1). Secondary entrances are found in the inn as well, including a link to the inn’s less well known “wet” well and a passage leading out of the Yawning Portal’s cellars.

There is also an NPC named Adama Miiralin, who’s a regular at the Yawning Portal. I am not attempting a survey of all the various patrons of the Portal over the years, but Adama is notable because he keeps a record of everyone entering Undermountain.

Expedition to Undermountain (2007) includes additional details on the Yawning Portal, including what I believe is the first reference to the city “exiling the worst of its criminals to the depths of Undermountain” through the Well of Entry.

• The Yawning Portal is “built of stone, with a slate roof and an upper floor of guest rooms.” The inn seems to have lost a floor in this description, but later adds one instead by saying “there are three floors of guest rooms.”
• The tavern’s sign reads “The Yawning Portal,” with the words deeply carved into a silvery piece of weathered wood suspended from two short loops of black chain suspended from a black-painted iron pole above the front door.

The front door leads directly into the common room where:

• The floor is “well worn boards.”
• Word paneling adorns the walls, with an elbow rail and rich blue tapestries hung at intervals.
• The furniture is made from heavy, stout wood.
• Some of the tables have been built around the wooden pillars that hold up the ceiling and can’t be moved.
• The Well of Entry is now referred to as the “Entry Well.”
• Those who would journey into Undermountain are referred to as “The Called” and there are often hopefuls looking to join or form adventuring groups in the Yawning Portal.
• The crossbow below the bar is now a double crossbow, loaded with sleep arrows, and has been joined by a rod of flame extinguishing and a +2 seeking and returning handaxe (although Durnan often just “hurls a metal tankard when most brawls break out”).
• Durnan will dose drinks with sleeping powder to take care of rowdy drunks.

The Entry Well:

• “[T]apers as it descends, from 40 feet across at the top to 30 feet across at the bottom.”
• 200 feet deep. (Although this is possibly only the length of the rope, in which case its depth does not appear to be given. In any case, the depth returns to 140 feet in all future references.)
• The rope has a bucket attached to the end of it.
• A pulley system allows Durnan to raise or lower the bucket; there’s also a release lever that will drop the rope to the bottom of the well.

The upper floors are reached by “steep wooden stairs opening off the common room.” In winter, these rooms are heated by barrels filled with fireplace-heated stones that are placed at the end of every floor’s central hall.

Expedition to Undermountain also includes a good deal of detailed information about particular patrons and the fourteen live-in staff members. Some of these staff members sleep in the stables, while others take unoccupied guest rooms on the third floor (or relocate to cots in the cellar if the inn is full). Durnan’s family also live in rooms on the top floor.

Our next major expedition to Undermountain is Halls of Undermountain (2012), a 4^th Edition adventure which takes place in 1479 DR. The new or altered details for the Yawning Portal here are:

• “[T]hree upper floors of guest rooms…” (This is almost certainly just a slip-up, but it’s been a hundred years so you could certainly imagine that at some point Durnan added an extra floor.)
• The inn is now run by Durnan the Sixth, descendant of the original Durnan.
• The entrance/exit cost for the Entry Well is now 10 gp. (Inflation will kill you. Literally.)
• No healing or help is provided to returning adventurers, but Durnan will send a runner to fetch a cleric for no extra charge.
• The Wet Well is now referred to as the Wet Way. It’s located in the cellar instead of a backroom, where a curtained archway hides the well. The well descends uninterrupted to a cistern, but a separate passage leads up from the cistern into Undermountain. (Durnan VI has no idea the Wet Way connects to Undermountain.)
• At least some of the Yawning Portal’s rooms are suites.

There is another goodly selection of Yawning Portal regulars detailed here.

Also in the 4^th Edition era, the 2010 D&D Encounters organized play adventure Halaster’s Lost Apprentice also took the players to the Yawning Portal:

• The taproom has glass windows.
• The backdoor is (a) visible from the taproom and (b) leads into the alley behind the Yawning Portal.
• This alley, inexplicably, has a canal running down the middle of it. (Waterdeep doesn’t have canals. Although maybe it does now: The 4^th Edition-era map of Waterdeep infamously forgot to turn on some layers before exporting, resulting in all the streets and Castle Waterdeep disappearing.)

5TH EDITION ERA

The Yawning Portal does not appear in the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, making its debut in 5^th Edition as the framing device in Tales from the Yawning Portal (2017).

• It turns out the original Durnan went into Undermountain in the late 14^th century. When he returned a hundred years later, he paid off Durnan VI (and apparently kicked him and his family out of the inn).
• There are balconies on the second and third floors of the tavern that overlook the Entry Well.
• The entrance/exit fee has been reduced back to 1 gp.
• There is a sizable list of curios displayed in the taproom (p. 6), which I won’t reproduce here.

The inn next shows up in the opening scene of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (2018):

• “The place is a stone building with a slate roof and several chimneys.”
• “Most of the ground floor is taken up by the tavern’s common room.” (This doesn’t explicitly eliminate the numerous backrooms, private rooms, secret rooms, and guest rooms that have previously been found on the first floor, but it seems to have had that effect on subsequent depictions of the Yawning Portal.)
• The candle wheels have been replaced with iron lanterns hanging from the ceiling and candles on the tables.
• There’s an incredibly cool fireplace next to the bar which looks like the ceiling-high head of a demon with flames burning in its mouth.

Dungeon of the Mad Mage (2018) expands on this description, with a particular focus on the entrance to Undermountain itself:

• It takes 10 rounds to descend the Well if you’re being winched down.
• The walls of the Well are “crumbly, but have abundant handholds and footholds.”

The other entrances to Undermountain from the Yawning Portal are conspicuously absent, particularly given that this book is the first to ostensibly present the dungeon in its entirety (albeit at a fraction of its former size).

Our very last stop here is DDAL08-00 Once In Waterdeep, a D&D Adventurers League adventure from 2018. It notably includes a map of the inn (more on that below), but also:

• Asserts that the Well is not the foundation of Halaster’s old tower, but rather “the tip of a sunken stone tower.”
• A stage has been constructed by a travelling theater company at one end of the common room, draped with curtains. (This is presumably temporary, but might be something that happens on a not infrequent basis.)
• Durnan has a Welcomer’s Brew that gives 5 temporary hit points.
• One of Waterdeep’s “signature double-decker dray carriages” smashes through the front wall.

Next: The Maps

The Yawning Portal seems utterly synonymous with the Forgotten Realms today, but it actually didn’t appear in the original Forgotten Realm Campaign Setting boxed set, published in July 1987.

The wait was not particularly long, however. By the end of the year, driven in part by the prodigious amount of Realmslore Ed Greenwood had created for his setting, TSR had released nearly a dozen Forgotten Realms books, including FR1 Waterdeep and the North and the first details of Durnan’s tavern.

(The “and the North” portion of the title was actually something of a misnomer. According to Shannon Appelcline, Greenwood had warned TSR that his Waterdeep lore alone was enough to fill a book. And that was more than true: Almost all of the material about the rest of the North got knocked out of FR1 and later handed over to Jennell Jaquays for FR5 The Savage Frontier. It’s unclear why they didn’t just drop “and the North” from the title. Perhaps they felt locked in by the title they had solicited? But I digress.)

THE EARLY DAYS

In FR1 Waterdeep and the North, the Yawning Portal appears as Building #4:

4. The Yawning Portal (inn) – See Durnan, p. 17

Thus, most of the original information about the Yawning Portal is actually contained in the NPC write-up of its proprietor, and these are fairly barebones: It contains a “well-like shaft leading down into Undermountain, the subterranean ways under Mount Waterdeep.”

The Yawning Portal’s next appearance is in the City System (1988), a boxed set filled to the brim with twelve huge poster maps, ten of which joined together to form an insanely huge map of the city. The City System was designed to be used in conjunction with FR1 Waterdeep and the North: FR1 described the city. The boxed set only included the huge maps and a small pamphlet with useful tools (like random Street Scenes and indices).

(This confused the heck out of me as a kid, who bought City System but never saw a copy of FR1 at the local game store.)

In the City System, therefore, the Yawning Portal remains Building #4, but no additional text description is provided. The boxed set does include the first official map of the interior of the inn, but we’ll come back to this later.

The Yawning Portal’s next appearance was in the adventure module FRE3 Waterdeep (1989), also by Ed Greenwood. The PCs are taken to the Yawning Portal by Elminster and Khelben Arunsun the Blackstaff. The adventure tells DMs that they can use the map from the City System boxed set, but also includes a much more detailed description of the Portal’s interior:

• It’s a “large, rambling building.”
• A signboard above the “round door” reads “The Yawning Portal,” and “on the door itself, someone has chalked ‘Come Ye Inn.’” (sic)
• It is dimly lit.
• There’s at least one private side room.
• A 14-year-old girl works as a server.

Most notably, FRE3 adds a second well to the Yawning Portal:

Durnan leads the party to the back of the inn. (…) The innkeeper lifts a huge bar from the door with one hand, as though it weighs nothing, and leans it against the wall. Then he opens the door and leads you into a dark room. The torch’s flickering light shows a covered wall and a table. On the table lie coils of rope, a tinder box, and a half dozen unlit torches…

“I haven’t been down this back way in some time,” he says. “We usually go down the dry one; it keeps the water cleaner.”

At some distance down the well, there’s a side tunnel that leads into a cavernous region of Undermountain which includes the Pool of Loss.

(The reason for this addition is fairly obvious: The adventure wants to send the PCs to Undermountain, but doesn’t have the space or page count to do that. So Durnan has a short cut that takes the PCs more or less directly to where they need to go.)

Despite only being an adventure module, FRE3 Waterdeep was frequently cited in TSR products as the authoritative source for the Yawning Portal. This notably includes the Ruins of Undermountain boxed set (1991), which rather hilariously notes:

More about Durnan and the inn can be found in the sourcebook FR1/Waterdeep And The North, the City System boxed set, and the module FRE3/Waterdeep. Details of the inn itself have been omitted from these pages to allow DMs free rein in customizing this rambling, shady place.

“We’ve detailed this location in THREE different books, but we haven’t included those details here so that you can have ‘free rein’ in customizing it.” Yeah. Sure. Whatever you say, TSR.

(Ruins of Undermountain II actually doubles down on the absurdity here, similarly demurring to describe the inn, but this time asserting that “the Yawning Portal is detailed in the original Ruins of Undermountain boxed set,” where, of course, readers will instead find the boxed set declaring that it definitely does no such thing.)

But because the Portal actually hasn’t been particularly detailed previously, Ruins of Undermountain does add several new details:

• “The Portal is a rambling, dingy, blue-tapestried building of smoothly carved pillars and paneling.”
• It is located “squarely on the site of the long-vanished tower and fortified warehouses of the archmage Halaster Blackcloak.”
• It is the “the only known entrance” to Undermountain accessible to the general public.
• The first well is 40’ in diameter and located in the main taproom. It’s “situated between the bar and most of the dining tables” and surrounded by a “waist-high, foot-thick stone ring/rampart.” Lit torches are placed around the circumference of the well and there’s a massive block-and-tackle “hanging from a stone lintel above the well, hiding among the roof beams.” The well is 140 feet deep, dark below 50 feet, and there are noisemakers at the bottom (used to signal the taproom for the rope to be lowered).
• You pay Durnan 1 gold piece per head to be lowered into Undermountain.
• The “wet well,” which is used only for washing water, is lesser-known and hidden in a backroom. It leads to a section of the dungeon not detailed in the boxed set, but which connects “with the city sewers in many places” and the plane of Hades (via the Pool of Loss). It’s possible that there are actually multiple passages intersecting the wet well, but the phrasing here is ambiguous.

Now, you might expect to find some reference to the Yawning Portal in Volo’s Guide to Waterdeep (1992), but not really. It has a city map which my copy lacks, but which I believe is essentially identical to the one from FR1 Waterdeep and the North and on which the Portal remains Building #4. And it has a footnote telling you to go check out FRE3 Waterdeep.

So our next stop is actually the City of Splendors boxed set (1994), which is very much designed to replace both FR1 Waterdeep and the North and the City System boxed set (although it lacks the latter’s prodigious map). The numbered key for Waterdeep is overhauled with ward-based numbering, and the Yawning Portal is now C48 (C for the Castle Ward).

City of Splendors mostly compiles the known information about the Yawning Portal from all of our previous sources, but there are a few notable new details:

• Durnan established the Yawning Portal in 1306 DR.
• The Yawning Portal is a 3-story Class C building. (Class C buildings are generally the “tall row houses that line the streets” with shops on the ground floor and offices or apartments above that, but the “better-kept” inns and taverns are also grouped in here.)
• It now also costs 1 gold piece to get pulled OUT of Undermountain. (Make sure to budget accordingly.) I believe this is also the first reference to patrons wagering on would-be adventurers.

There is actually now a long break in the Yawning Portal being described in RPG supplements, with one interesting sidenote in Skullport (1999), which claims in two different places (p. 9 and 64) that there is a secret door in the Yawning Portal’s wine cellar which leads, along a side passage, to the Bonewatch Pass, a tunnel which runs all the way to Skullport.

THE VIDEO GAME ERA

During this gap in RPG books from 1994-2004, the Yawning Portal actually makes two notable appearances in video games: Descent to Undermountain in 1994 and Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark in 2003.

These are particularly notable because, as far as I can tell, they’re the first visual depictions of the tavern.

Note: Some online sources claim that the Yawning Portal also appeared in the Eye of the Beholder games, but although there is an unnamed tavern that briefly appears in the later games of that trilogy, there’s nothing to suggest that it’s the Yawning Portal.

The depiction of the tavern in Descent to Undermountain is rather severely limited by the FPS technology of time, with everything rendered in Doom-style blocks.

• The common room is depicted as a big square room, with a big square well.
• Rather than a rope dangling over the well, there’s a wooden platform with a skull-embossed cage that’s lowered into Undermountain.
• The common room is surrounded by a hallway studded with guest rooms. (The guests are delightfully eclectic, including a mind flayer, a drow, and the Open Lord’s son.)

Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark has a very different design for the inn. The game starts on the second floor, which features:

• An armory in the back corner of the inn, stocked with adventuring gear.
• A large common room, which is sort of a hostel with multiple bunkbeds and a small library of books.

A stair leads down to the first floor where there’s:

• Another common room, this one with cheap cots for sleeping but also accoutered with medical supplies for treating those injured escaping from Undermountain
• The taproom which… uh… lacks any taps? (The games’ presentation is a little ramshackle here.)

Notably the taproom also lacks a well. The well is instead located in the basement, and is less of a well and more of a “gaping chasm.” A “well” is located on a rocky spur jutting out over the chasm, and is protected by a clockwork brass dome that irises up and down.

(The pointlessness of this defensive device is established a moment later when a beholder floats up out of the chasm and near-murders Durnan.)

More recently, in the new Neverwinter game (2019), the Yawning Portal is depicted once more:

This presentation is heavily influenced by the Portal’s presentation in Waterdeep: Dragon Heist (as we’ll see below).

• The taproom is shown to have a vaulted ceiling all the way to the third floor, with balconies featuring additional seating lining three sides of the room (and skylights!).
• The three-sided bar juts out into the room.

Next: Novels & Later Expeditions