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View Full Version : DM Help Chronicles of Darkness/CTL Haunted House ideas.



Bennosuke
2016-03-27, 11:38 AM
Hey all,

I need some help fleshing out a minor story arc to a game I am running.

So I am running a Chronicles of Darkness (New WoD 2nd Edition) game IRL and I would like to have the players explore something like a haunted house (actually, it was something they expressed interest in doing during one of our sessions).

The characters have good motivation to explore the house. Specifically, it leads to another dimension (weird yes, but that fits the over arching story... stay with me here). So I had the idea that maybe this "door", actually leads to a Hallow from CtL. I know CtL is only nWOD 1st edition, but I wouldn't expect the rules to be too much of an issue. So the nugget off of which I am building this haunted house is that it belonged to a fae who killed him/herself rather than be dragged back through the hedge by his former master, right at the moment of re-capture. Exploring the house will lead to discovering signs of a struggle, evidence that something more than human once lived there, that the house is now haunted by this Changeling, and eventually to the doorway of the hallow.

While I have played a CtL game before, I'm not as familiar with the lore as maybe VtR or even VtM, and this is where I could use some help. I am looking for advice both for building the concept idea, and possible for small hooks/scenes that can take place within the house.

Thank you in advance, both for getting through this post and for any advice/ideas you may have.

-Benno

Bennosuke
2016-03-30, 08:33 PM
One pathetic bump?

JohanOfKitten
2016-03-31, 10:38 AM
I've played CtL only for one session, so I'm not an expert at all, but I could give you some advices or leads to follow for some scenes:

About CtL / WoD 2nd :
- If I remind correctly, winter court interact a lot with fear, sadness, creepyness. You should look for this court to build the ghost.
- You should dig a bit how exactly is the Hallow, to fit it to why the PCs want to go there (or think that it's what they're looking for) and to the personality of the fae. It could help to build the story.
- Some vampiric powers of the new VtR can be inspirefull (like the Maze power of the Stryges (p211 :smallbiggrin: )

About Haunted houses :
- Think about the atmosphere. The PCs need to be scared, to be surprised, to experiment the terrible feeling that there's something they absolutly must not do.
>> Dim the lights if it's appropriate, make the ghost slam a door at another storey, add chill wind coming through the chimney etc... It's sometimes nice to be the little voice in the head of one of them, like "With the shadows overwhelming you, you feel like a presence is touching you. Maybe, just maybe, you should have stay with the others..." or "You all heard a terrible scream in the kitchen, like someone having his skin rip slowly. Andrea, you couldn't help yourself but remind of Tom. As the scream goes, you remember his last moment."

- 1 ghost 1 place ? It's nice to have a powerfull and charismatic entity haunting the place, but it could be short. They interact with it, the action end (they fleed to another room, the ghost goes elsewhere...), they do a brief rest or move to the next place, they interact once again with it, ...
>> Add more to the place. Maybe the fae was a psychopath who kill little boys/ burn the head of ginger actresses / like to castrate rich businessman as revenge. Maybe some grunge kids squat the place and were murdered by the ghost. Maybe a witch try to use the place to canalize power energy but only free dark spirits. Maybe some cultists thinks that the myth around the haunted house was link to satanism or some demon dude (and they could try to open the dimensional door thinking it will free the demon from hell). it will add a lot to the adventure if the players has to deal with different things and have to put things together to understand the lot.

- be iconic with the house : If you had just : "So you arrive in front of the said house. it's an old two stories house, with a small garden behind and a porch at the entrance." Well, with this, we can expect to see a kitchen, a living room, a dinning room, stairs leading to 2 bedrooms and a bathroom. Maybe a cellar as an extra. It won't leave the players a mark.
>> First, locate the place. In San Franscisco, you can have the famous victorian houses, very visual. In Louisiana, you may find big colonial house, with some flavor with slavery for story arcs you may want to add. etc... You can inspire yourself with famous haunted house (You should search a bit about the winchester mystery house, drawn by the winchester widow herself who was starting to be nuts, and which made no sense for a lot of places in the house (stairs leading to nowhere, horizontal window in the floor, the omnipresence of the 13 number, doors leading to the void). The place can had an interesting surrounding. The chalet in the mountain is difficult to access and may have a generator out of the building, in a small cabin.
>> Build the house and fill it with rooms. It could be a mansion, an hotel, a place, just a big house of rich guy. It could have been a place to cure mental illness in the 19th century, an old library, a colony center, a dressmaker shop with his home nearby, some covent in the past, the elder house of the city, where the mayor lived when it was still the independance war... The house had the usuals rooms, but you can had multiple cellars, a small crypt in the garden, the inevitable attic, maybe a greenhouse, a garage for which you need to go outside (in the dark) if you want to visit it, a closet that hides a secret bedroom, some secret crazy corridors that can be used to spy on the other rooms, or even stables !
>> Fill the rooms with memorable settings : the stairs in the hallway must be a bit special. It's probably the first thing of the inside they will see, they will pass near them or use them several times and it's a good place for a lot of events (steps creaking, falling chandelier, fall from the second story, etc...). If there is a chimney, make it spectacular. Put knives or a cleaver proeminently hung on the wall of the kitchen, add a ladder to the bookcases, to see if a player would dare to go up and take the book they're looking for, put a four-poster bed in the "master bedroom" and play with the curtains, the wind and shadows...


- Possession is fun ! On a NPC if possible, but it's not forbidden to play with a PC body. To give messages, warning, threats, or to attack, to scare them or try to burn the house... Full of possibility, a lot of fun during the game. When a ghost possess your friend, you don't know if you should shoot him straight, try to knock him out, whisper prayers or just flee. :smallamused:



For example of a memorable Haunted House in a game I played :
The group was late to take the boat that lead to a christmas party on an island on a lake, in New-Hampshire. On another island on the lake, there was an hotel (in an Hampton style) that close in the 60' after a fire, and abandonned since then. It was haunted by a whole family linked to the fire. With the anniversary date, funny things happens and our samll boat was driven to the island (the gps gave the wrong directions, the night was falling and a tempest started). So we arrived on this island, frozen by the winter tempest, lost, with our phones that can't work.We hide in the ruined building, searching for shelter. I don't remember everything cause it's been two years since we played this, but I know that we spend a lot of time in a salon with a bar, making a fire in a chimney and searching booz in the bar (what ? we were highschool teenagers for most of us in this game), that we errand a bit to find a phone or things to deal with the cold for the night, that corridors where sometimes bleeding messages. Someone searched in a room in ruin due to the burning and fall trough the ground on several stories, end up in the cellar, but we couldn't go find her directly, so we had to run through a lot of rooms and deal with haunted events without thinking twice, while she wakes up in the boiler room, with a ghost of a kid trying to tell her something, a boiler that start to heat up and looks like it's gonna explode and another ghost coming from a corridor, but more dangerous that the kid. Long story short, we had to deal with a terrible psychopath father ghost who killed his family, but discover that the mother went crazy, killed her children, her husband, then killed herself by burning the place. With guilt and broken mind, her ghost transform the father in the monster she wanted him to be to put the responsability on him. Sorting out the complete story was the first step to survive the night. At a moment, we had someone in the group possessed, a vampire NPC who started to try to kill a PC immediatly. I had to stick a stake in his back to stop him, avoiding the heart to avoid killing him.
That was a freaking haunted house.




My advices are very vague, but I hope one or two things might help you to design your haunted house