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DontEatRawHagis
2013-11-18, 10:31 PM
Setup:
Village is ravage by creatures of shadow at night. Light protects them only temporarily, eventually the creatures do break through.

A mansion in the center of the village is the epicenter of the invasion. Combination of Necromancers and Mages have summoned these beings... probably.

Need Ideas:
What do you put in a mansion to make it feel less like another dungeon and more like Spook Central?

Think of different rooms of the mansion and what beings might take roost. I'm trying to make it so the players do not know what they are going up against.

Benthesquid
2013-11-18, 10:38 PM
Generally, if I think of a Haunted House, I think in terms of there having been something awful that happened there in the past. All of the spooky features of the haunted house should build towards the revelation.

So first ask yourself, why is the house haunted? Did a man go crazy and kill his wife and children? Was it the site of a dark rite that bound an evil spirit within the house? Was a deformed child hidden away in a locked garret until he or she went mad and swore vengeance from beyond the grave?

Don't have it be a bunch of unrelated 'spooky' things. Have everything hint, vaguely at first, but with ever increasing solidity, at the awful history of the house, then tear away the veil, and make your players believe that what was done there was so bad that the house is beyond redemption.

Ravens_cry
2013-11-18, 10:47 PM
Well, this is something my DM did. He wrote up a bunch of manifestations of the ghosts on separate pieces of paper and folded them. If you went into certain areas, you'd get this feeling, and you could either attempt a will save to try and ward it off OR you could read the note in secret, and do whatever the note said. If you failed the will save, you had to do it anyway, but if you made it, you couldn't read the note. Some were mostly harmless, merely a passing vision of something suitably ghoulish, while others were more dangerous, like claw your face until you bled scratched up your face, or even deadly like one that made your character jump out a wind ow over a cliff, impaling yourself on the weather vane, or slit their own throat or stab yourself in the gut.
The important part is, you didn't know until you look or failed trying to resist, but since you decided to look, it felt fair somehow.