I just read in the downloaded rulebook that, "Monsters may freely move through normal doors, and they may ignore Lock cards". This seems a fairly bizarre rule, assuming I understand it correctly. If a door is locked then surely a monster should be unable to move through it, or it should be smashed to pieces from that point on?

The monsters are extra squishy and/or extra-dimensional so they just squeeze through the keyhole or phase through the door...

Yea, I was wondering how that works as well. For some of the locks, it involves a magic pass phrase, so you could assume the monster or creature knows it/magically can pass.

VTSvsAlucard said:

Thematically you can also assume that a humanoid monster has a key to their own locks and so can open a door and lock it back behind them... and then somehow destroy the key before an investigator kills them.

Gameplay wise I think it is so that you do not have to reveal any cards in a room when a monster goes through to find out if it is locked.

Xiayose said:

But the Keeper will have placed all the Lock cards himself, would he not? In theory, the Keeper should be able to use his knowledge of the cards to voluntarily refrain from moving monsters through locked doors if it wasn't logical for them to do so. For instance, maybe you could allow "sentient" humanoids such as witches to pass through locked doors using their own key, but things like zombies, beasts and Mythos creatures would have to find an alternative root, or at the Keeper's discretion, destroy the door to move through it. The Keeper could make some secret notes for himself of which rooms are impassable to which monsters. For a little extra work it might be worth it for internal consistency and it might even add to the suspense for the players as they ponder why a monster didn't take the most direct route during its move.

Xiayose said:

Actually I've just looked over the rules again and it appears that Lock cards are always the top card of a stack in a room, and have a large padlock symbol on the top. Consequently, all locked rooms are known to the Keeper and the Players at the start of every scenario. It would therefore be straight forward to rule that only certain monsters can move into or out of locked rooms, using their own key in the case of some humanoids, or magical means for some beasts and eldrich creatures. The Keeper would have to make sure it didn't break the scenario though, such as making a timed event impossible to execute or something.

I think the rule is there to keep situations from occurring where the players don't want to unlock a door for fear of a monster coming through that door/room. It also would beg the question of whether the monsters could unlock rooms, doing the player's work for them.

Ultimately, the house is there to challenge the players, not the keeper. Yes, there is a slight thematic disconnect, but since this is a board game and not an RPG then its not a big deal.