PDA

View Full Version : Haunted Houses where the LOCATION is the villain, does it work for adventure RPGs?



Scalenex
2020-10-08, 09:54 PM
I really like movies and books where a cursed location is essentially the villain.

I recently rewatched The Shining and Doctor Sleep. I believe Event Horizon is criminally underappreciated.



I kind of want to use a haunted location for the basis for an RPG adventure but most haunted house stories I know involve ordinary people thrust into an evil place, not seasoned adventurers.

One thing that most haunted location stories have in common is that the people involved are slow to recognize the threat. I think most RPG players are pragmatic enough to recognize the threat quickly. They would probably either simply leave, or they would leave and then burn the haunted mansion/ghost ship/tomb to the ground.

Any tips for having a haunted location interlude story in typical D&D style adventure?

zarionofarabel
2020-10-08, 09:56 PM
It will, as long as the PCs can't leave the location. Like say if they were stuck on a space ship.

TeChameleon
2020-10-09, 03:44 AM
The biggest thing is, as always, player buy-in. If your players aren't up for a horror-flavoured game/arc, then no amount of... well, anything at all... will make it work. Assuming you have taken care of session zero, and in no particular order;

1) As noted, don't let them leave.

2) Make sure that the consequences of just burning the ****er down are even less desireable than being stuck there. Even if that's just losing out on a fat reward.

3) Allow some sort of 'safe zone', and don't let yourself be tempted to violate it for a jump scare. If you simply can't resist the urge to have something nasty happen in their safe area, save it for the climax, after which they'll be allowed to escape the evil genius loci. That being said, if they do something stupid to violate their own safe zone, all bets are off. The plot won't force its way in, but if they bring the plot with them, well, that's kind of their own fault.

4) Decide early on whether or not you want it to be possible for your evil genius loci to be decisively defeated. Is this something the PCs can fix, or is it just a case of 'survive until we can get out'.

5) Even if you don't want it to be possible for the eldritch location to be cleansed, be prepared for it to happen anyway. PCs gotta PC.

6) Anticipation and the transitive property are wonderful things. As an example, if they go in knowing that a seriously nasty fight is waiting for them... and find said fight sprayed across three walls and part of the ceiling... they're going to get a bit nervous. Especially if they can't find the cause of the spraying.

7) Especially if things go for more than one session, allow for occasional diffusion of tension. Constantly running at max creepfactor usually just results in burnout and a loss of interest and motivation. Something silly or funny happening can actually make the fear starker by simple contrast (bonus points if the funny/silly actually has something horribly tragic behind it that they don't know about until later).

8) Player paranoia is your friend; a trick I used to great effect was small, fast enemies with cover. The players were convinced that something large, nasty and invisible was in there with them. Figure out their expectations and play with them- this will work several orders of magnitude better than just describing a butcher shop exploded all over the local vicinity.

Pleh
2020-10-09, 05:42 AM
On "don't let them leave"

Alternative: give them an objective and time limit.

"Other explorers sent to location X never returned. Find out what's going on (secure location if possible), but be sure you come back before Date Y or you will be presumed MIA."

This encourages them to spend all the time available, especially if you make it clear returning early is likely to result in only a partially complete objective. Saying, "the house is haunted" will net a very small reward. Exploring enough to say, "necromancer lab broke down and there are at least Z number of threats haunting the premises" get better rewards.

Elvensilver
2020-10-11, 01:03 PM
I've once run a oneshot in a vampire-ship. A homebrew monstrosity which was an undead plant creature with sentience manned by crazed and desperate fey. After encountering a dying dryad on a dinghy, they met the ship manned by an extremely friendly nymph and smiling dryads. (the non-fey-crew was dead and drained), seriously asking for help with the broken mast, while their ship looked slimy and rotting. The boarding party was confused by the scene, and grew more confused when a twine wrapped around the paladin's foot and level-drained him, the cleric was stabbed after clearing the awning, the monk started acting strange (dominated), while the druid was permanently hindered from her nature checks by an overtly friendly nymph who couldn't decide whether to feed the party to the ship or to honestly ask for help...


Before the game, I wrote down a couple of phrases to describe the ship, using lots of dark adjectives and then describing whatever happened in great detail. I also reflavored a lot of the vampire abilities, making the sleep spell a cloud of pollen, and the domination ability a pheromone cloud, the slam attack was nasty (but could only be used by ramming the bow into another ship or creature) and the vulnerability to sun was almost cancelled by the plant creature type and the rotting fallen foliage on deck.


It went really well, the players were quite spooked but agreed that everything made sense afterwards. There was some moral dilemma: could the ship still be healed and brought back from almost-undead? Who was responsible for the attacks? What exactly is this thing? That the players kept guessing at the nature of the attacker, and firstly suspected the denizens of it, made for a great game and an unusual mystery.

Blackhawk748
2020-10-11, 01:09 PM
Like everyone recommnds, don't let them leave. They're stuck in the Haunted Castle/Mansion/Church/Underground Parking Garage. What you need to figure out afterwards is what is doing The Thing.

Is it the entire area itself? Ala Event Horizon or Amytiville Horror?

Is there an evil shrine in the basement that is corrupting the building and it must be purged or else Bad Things Happen?

Personally, I find the second one works best for adventurers. There is a clear goal, that they need to work out themselves, they get to explore and see all the creepy stuff, and they can find a safe room or drop a consecrate somewhere and make their own.

Spore
2020-10-11, 02:20 PM
Any tips for having a haunted location interlude story in typical D&D style adventure?

Not tooting a horn for Curse of Strahd here, but it might contain what you are looking for. Its hook is Strahd, a powerful vampire and lord over his own domain luring in adventurers under the guise of a hapless burgomaster trying to fend off a vile vampire. He is basically setting himself up as the villain.

Strahd is caught in his own Demiplane of Dread, the valley of Barovia. He often claims "he is the land" while Barovia is still essentially a Transylvania inspired hellscape. Its inhabitants are 90% figments of people, mere hollowed out apparitions of real souls, 10% of creatures (aka important named NPCs) are actually souls.

You can simply assume the "Strahd is the land" is not a metaphor but to be taken literally. Introduce it at the beginning as a strong metaphor for a ruthless leader, tyrant and megalomaniac, and slowly reveal the actual Demiplane of Dread IS just the twisted mind of the villain. Don't go overboard, but you can subtly remind people Strahd has significant influence on the land (sans tactical options because he is already a 9th level wizard on top of a 5e vampire), but if he is angry, thunderclouds gather, if he is hiding somewhere, a bone chilling wind howls through the seemingly closed and heated homes, and if he is distraught, a downpour of rain starts.


haunted location interlude story

The only issue is that Curse of Strahd is a game from Level 1/3 to 10, so you should pick an important location from the book and make it the entire plane instead. Good examples are the Haunted House (1st-3rd level), Abbey of St Markovia (4-6ish), Argynvostholt (6-9) or Castle Ravenloft (level 10ish)

NigelWalmsley
2020-10-11, 02:46 PM
A haunted house is just a dungeon. Adventurers go into dungeons all the time. You don't even necessarily have to not let them leave. You can just declare that because the house is haunted, the layout moves around so leaving and coming back means starting over. Or just have it be a completely standard dungeon with the themes of "ghosts", "mystery", and "house". The tone is going to be different, but that's unavoidable because adventure RPGs are a different genre from horror movies.

Once you realize that it's just a dungeon, figuring out why the players go in is dead easy. Maybe it's like Manor Dire (https://tiraas.net/2018/10/22/bonus-48-lightning-in-a-bottle-part-1/) and if you get to the end you can unlock potent magics. Maybe the ghosts from the haunted house are spilling out to haunt the local village. Maybe it's some specific guy's house and he's paying you to make it not be haunted anymore. Maybe it's haunted because some important guy was murdered there and if you go in you can interrogate his ghost for the next McGuffin.

Phoenixguard09
2020-10-13, 12:06 AM
I feel like I may have achieved this to some small extent in the latter part of Arc 5 of Three Coins. The location of Stillhet was just as much a danger to the party and their adversaries as they were to each other.

I provided a full session of build up where the party were experiencing things upon failed Perception Checks, which led to uncertainty as to just what was happening, which then completely flipped around when the tormented spirits of the old asylum started actively pursuing them.

Kareeah_Indaga
2020-10-13, 06:12 PM
Alternative: give them an objective and time limit.

For objective: the location is sapient and insane, and the party's job is to rehabilitate it. That would necessitate sticking around and not burning it to the ground.

Segev
2020-10-13, 07:40 PM
I've said it before when the topic came up, but I think the key to a proper horror atmosphere is a sense of betrayal. Not just "Among Us" style "don't know who the traitor is," or "the traitor has betrayed us," but rather, betrayal of expectations. Not subversion: betrayal.

Deadly Premonition is a Twin Peaks-inspired game with segments of Silent Hill-like "otherworld" combat/survival where you're surrounded by "shadows" that are basically zombie-ghosts. They mutter creepy things, moan, and want to kill you by flailing at you. But! They can't see you unless you are breathing. There's a mechanic for holding your breath that involves only being able to do so for so long.

This is a very good setup for the kind of betrayal I'm talking about: your senses are telling you that the monsters are RIGHT THERE and that there's no way they can't see/smell/hear you. But as long as you hold your breath, you're invisible to them. But you can only hold your breath so long. And holding your breath doesn't make you FEEL safe, and even makes it harder to run away. So the way to make yourself safe feels dangerous, and thus, you feel horror.

The Quiet Place is a relatively recent horror movie wherein the monsters are blind, but hear so very well that everyday activities of non-animals draws them from miles around. People live in isolation and in as utter quiet as they can manage to avoid drawing their attention. Every loud noise is a jump scare due to the extreme quiet of their lives AND due to the fact that it can draw the monsters. The tension here is brought about by the need for constant attention to detail to avoid making any noise. The betrayal is brought about by the fact that constant quiet is creepy to a human mind. Hearing is our second-best sense, and having to use it to ensure it's not detecting anything, having to cut ourselves off from any communication that isn't line-of-sight, is unsettling. And everything CAN betray you. You could step on a twig, or trip and fall, or even sneeze. Anything and everything is a source of sound you might accidentally generate and bring THEM upon you.

The tension you build is a sense of how nothing you see can be trusted to be safe. It's almost a relief to see dangerous things, because dangerous things are things you can tell how they're going to threaten you.

PCs don't spook easily. Adventurers don't spook easily. The former are controlled by otherworldly horrors who are safely immune to the bad things happening to the PCs they control, while the latter are experienced and jaded and have seen and survived a lot. PC adventurers are very hard to creep out, unless the DM is an excellent campfire ghost story teller.

But it can be done.

First, your horror location that is its own monster needs rules. They can be fairy tale rules, or quirky rules, or dark and depressing rules, but they need to be there. The rules should be stacked against the party, but they should be exploitable to an extent. These rules need to involve behaviors that do not feel safe, but which actually are the key to staying safe. It really helps if the rules are easy to break on accident, too.

"Blindfold yourselves," "hold your breath," "don't make a sound," "walk backwards using a mirror to see the monsters," "don't enter brightly lit areas," or other such ritualistic behaviors all defy normal human methods of mastering their environment, and if they are what is needed to keep the Bad Things from having an unsurmountable advantage, it will naturally build tension.

On presentation: be sure to emphasize the difficulties imposed by the rules, as the PCs follow them. Mention periodically things that make following the rules harder, especially when the PCs are doing a good job following them.

Give them a chance to recover from a slipup on the rules, too. Immediately, they should feel like they screwed up, but make small slips have only a small chance of drawing attention (eventually, it'll happen if they keep slipping up, no mater how small the chance). When they draw attention, make them unsure if they really have, or if the attention they drew is going to slip by and ignore them. Give them chances to try to resume the "safety behavior," but make it harder because of the desperation of it. And use the closing in of the threat as the timer. When they succeed at resuming the behavior, don't let off with the danger immediately; it should linger, looking for the rule-breakers or leaving a lingering threat around that, if triggered again, can respond much faster. Maybe even make them have to fight something because of it, and bring up the question of whether they can fight without further breaking the rules. Make it a puzzle for them.


A key to "don't let them just leave" might be to make it a fairly normal dungeon-crawl...to a point. And then the horror starts, and it becomes a quest to GET OUT. The normal monster fights and traps suddenly are gone, or replaced, or are revealed to be OtheR Than tHEy SeEmed. It should be just before the place closes itself up around them, shutting off the "safe path" back out, that they learn the rules to stay safe. Or maybe even they can pick up on hints to them leading in, but they look like some sort of key for a final puzzle, and it's only when they get to the point where they learn the final bit and find out that Everything Changed into a horror setting that they get the hints put together into The Rules.


On atmosphere: it is normal for players at a table to joke around and keep things light-hearted, in my experience. I have seen people gripe that this ruins efforts at horror games. One way to enforce a bit of atmosphere is to have some element of The Rules be something that the PLAYERS can (and must) RP to manage their danger level. Try not to be TOO "gotcha" about it unless your players are into the kind of party games that make them have to do silly things on triggers that are increasingly hard to remember, but use it to enforce a certain amount of sobriety. The increase to the players' RL cognitive load might be minor, but coupled with the rule potentially being one that also cuts down on joking OOC chatter, it will put them in the PCs' minds a bit more and add to the tension.

A really simple example is the notion of "stay quiet." If voices or noise draws the monsters or brings the curse or whatever, enforce that on the players. If they speak out loud, their characters are treated as having done so, too. Make them point, pantomime, etc. Either play it up yourself, too, or at least keep your voice low and quiet, providing the tone you want things to have.

A mean trick might be for the horror place to have a "jocular" theme. One easy to snicker and laugh about. Encourage this, to a degree, and then twist it "evil clown" style, and still have the humor show up...but have laughter draw the curse/monster/whatever. And have things trying to make the players laugh. Their own fight to keep the levity down will naturally build the horror, and you can still use humor to release, especially when Bad Stuff is already happening and thus there's no risk of it Getting Worse just then.

Lord Torath
2020-10-14, 08:44 AM
PCs don't spook easily. Adventurers don't spook easily. The former are controlled by otherworldly horrors who are safely immune to the bad things happening to the PCs they control, while the latter are experienced and jaded and have seen and survived a lot. PC adventurers are very hard to creep out, unless the DM is an excellent campfire ghost story teller.Oh, this is good! I don't think I've ever heard players described quite this way. Well done!

The rest of the post is good, too, but I had to comment on players being other-worldly horrors.

Lvl 2 Expert
2020-10-14, 08:52 AM
Not tooting a horn for Curse of Strahd here, but...

I'm currently in Curse of Strahd, and the unspoilered bit of this post feels like quite a spoiler to me. At least with how our game has been going, this bit of info wasn't known to me several months into the campaign. Maybe spoiler that part too for any future visitors please? Thanks!

Segev
2020-10-14, 10:55 AM
Oh, this is good! I don't think I've ever heard players described quite this way. Well done!

The rest of the post is good, too, but I had to comment on players being other-worldly horrors.
Thanks! I can’t take full credit for it; in the Heroes of Horror book, one of the insanities a character can get is that his whole life is controlled by entities from beyond who manipulate all for their amusement. It stuck with me as cute fourth-wall breaking.

The distance from what your character experiences does lend a sort of inhuman resilience to how most players treat them. It’s hard to really dig in when you’re safe and warm and enjoying pizza to your character’s cold, wet slog through a fetid swamp in the dark with phantom touches and mysterious sounds everywhere.

Scalenex
2020-10-25, 10:46 PM
Thank you for the great replies everyone.


The biggest thing is, as always, player buy-in. If your players aren't up for a horror-flavoured game/arc, then no amount of... well, anything at all... will make it work.

True.



Assuming you have taken care of session zero, and in no particular order;

1) As noted, don't let them leave.

2) Make sure that the consequences of just burning the ****er down are even less desireable than being stuck there. Even if that's just losing out on a fat reward.

3) Allow some sort of 'safe zone', and don't let yourself be tempted to violate it for a jump scare. If you simply can't resist the urge to have something nasty happen in their safe area, save it for the climax, after which they'll be allowed to escape the evil genius loci. That being said, if they do something stupid to violate their own safe zone, all bets are off. The plot won't force its way in, but if they bring the plot with them, well, that's kind of their own fault.

4) Decide early on whether or not you want it to be possible for your evil genius loci to be decisively defeated. Is this something the PCs can fix, or is it just a case of 'survive until we can get out'.

5) Even if you don't want it to be possible for the eldritch location to be cleansed, be prepared for it to happen anyway. PCs gotta PC.

6) Anticipation and the transitive property are wonderful things. As an example, if they go in knowing that a seriously nasty fight is waiting for them... and find said fight sprayed across three walls and part of the ceiling... they're going to get a bit nervous. Especially if they can't find the cause of the spraying.

7) Especially if things go for more than one session, allow for occasional diffusion of tension. Constantly running at max creepfactor usually just results in burnout and a loss of interest and motivation. Something silly or funny happening can actually make the fear starker by simple contrast (bonus points if the funny/silly actually has something horribly tragic behind it that they don't know about until later).

8) Player paranoia is your friend; a trick I used to great effect was small, fast enemies with cover. The players were convinced that something large, nasty and invisible was in there with them. Figure out their expectations and play with them- this will work several orders of magnitude better than just describing a butcher shop exploded all over the local vicinity.

Your post is a proverbial gold mine.



I've once run a oneshot in a vampire-ship. A homebrew monstrosity which was an undead plant creature with sentience manned by crazed and desperate fey....

That sounds awesome.


A haunted house is just a dungeon. Adventurers go into dungeons all the time.

Good point, I guess a haunted location is a dungeon with a little less pulp action a little more horror



You don't even necessarily have to not let them leave. You can just declare that because the house is haunted, the layout moves around so leaving and coming back means starting over. Or just have it be a completely standard dungeon with the themes of "ghosts", "mystery", and "house". The tone is going to be different, but that's unavoidable because adventure RPGs are a different genre from horror movies.

Once you realize that it's just a dungeon, figuring out why the players go in is dead easy. Maybe it's like Manor Dire (https://tiraas.net/2018/10/22/bonus-48-lightning-in-a-bottle-part-1/) and if you get to the end you can unlock potent magics. Maybe the ghosts from the haunted house are spilling out to haunt the local village. Maybe it's some specific guy's house and he's paying you to make it not be haunted anymore. Maybe it's haunted because some important guy was murdered there and if you go in you can interrogate his ghost for the next McGuffin.

All good points


For objective: the location is sapient and insane, and the party's job is to rehabilitate it. That would necessitate sticking around and not burning it to the ground.

That would be difficult to set up but the payoff would probably be worth it.



I've said it before when the topic came up, but I think the key to a proper horror atmosphere is a sense of betrayal. Not just "Among Us" style "don't know who the traitor is," or "the traitor has betrayed us," but rather, betrayal of expectations. Not subversion: betrayal.

Deadly Premonition is a Twin Peaks-inspired game with segments of Silent Hill-like "otherworld" combat/survival where you're surrounded by "shadows" that are basically zombie-ghosts. They mutter creepy things, moan, and want to kill you by flailing at you. But! They can't see you unless you are breathing. There's a mechanic for holding your breath that involves only being able to do so for so long.

This is a very good setup for the kind of betrayal I'm talking about: your senses are telling you that the monsters are RIGHT THERE and that there's no way they can't see/smell/hear you. But as long as you hold your breath, you're invisible to them. But you can only hold your breath so long. And holding your breath doesn't make you FEEL safe, and even makes it harder to run away. So the way to make yourself safe feels dangerous, and thus, you feel horror.

The Quiet Place is a relatively recent horror movie wherein the monsters are blind, but hear so very well that everyday activities of non-animals draws them from miles around. People live in isolation and in as utter quiet as they can manage to avoid drawing their attention. Every loud noise is a jump scare due to the extreme quiet of their lives AND due to the fact that it can draw the monsters. The tension here is brought about by the need for constant attention to detail to avoid making any noise. The betrayal is brought about by the fact that constant quiet is creepy to a human mind. Hearing is our second-best sense, and having to use it to ensure it's not detecting anything, having to cut ourselves off from any communication that isn't line-of-sight, is unsettling. And everything CAN betray you. You could step on a twig, or trip and fall, or even sneeze. Anything and everything is a source of sound you might accidentally generate and bring THEM upon you.

The tension you build is a sense of how nothing you see can be trusted to be safe. It's almost a relief to see dangerous things, because dangerous things are things you can tell how they're going to threaten you.

PCs don't spook easily. Adventurers don't spook easily. The former are controlled by otherworldly horrors who are safely immune to the bad things happening to the PCs they control, while the latter are experienced and jaded and have seen and survived a lot. PC adventurers are very hard to creep out, unless the DM is an excellent campfire ghost story teller.

But it can be done.

First, your horror location that is its own monster needs rules. They can be fairy tale rules, or quirky rules, or dark and depressing rules, but they need to be there. The rules should be stacked against the party, but they should be exploitable to an extent. These rules need to involve behaviors that do not feel safe, but which actually are the key to staying safe. It really helps if the rules are easy to break on accident, too.

"Blindfold yourselves," "hold your breath," "don't make a sound," "walk backwards using a mirror to see the monsters," "don't enter brightly lit areas," or other such ritualistic behaviors all defy normal human methods of mastering their environment, and if they are what is needed to keep the Bad Things from having an unsurmountable advantage, it will naturally build tension.

On presentation: be sure to emphasize the difficulties imposed by the rules, as the PCs follow them. Mention periodically things that make following the rules harder, especially when the PCs are doing a good job following them.

Give them a chance to recover from a slipup on the rules, too. Immediately, they should feel like they screwed up, but make small slips have only a small chance of drawing attention (eventually, it'll happen if they keep slipping up, no mater how small the chance). When they draw attention, make them unsure if they really have, or if the attention they drew is going to slip by and ignore them. Give them chances to try to resume the "safety behavior," but make it harder because of the desperation of it. And use the closing in of the threat as the timer. When they succeed at resuming the behavior, don't let off with the danger immediately; it should linger, looking for the rule-breakers or leaving a lingering threat around that, if triggered again, can respond much faster. Maybe even make them have to fight something because of it, and bring up the question of whether they can fight without further breaking the rules. Make it a puzzle for them.


A key to "don't let them just leave" might be to make it a fairly normal dungeon-crawl...to a point. And then the horror starts, and it becomes a quest to GET OUT. The normal monster fights and traps suddenly are gone, or replaced, or are revealed to be OtheR Than tHEy SeEmed. It should be just before the place closes itself up around them, shutting off the "safe path" back out, that they learn the rules to stay safe. Or maybe even they can pick up on hints to them leading in, but they look like some sort of key for a final puzzle, and it's only when they get to the point where they learn the final bit and find out that Everything Changed into a horror setting that they get the hints put together into The Rules.


On atmosphere: it is normal for players at a table to joke around and keep things light-hearted, in my experience. I have seen people gripe that this ruins efforts at horror games. One way to enforce a bit of atmosphere is to have some element of The Rules be something that the PLAYERS can (and must) RP to manage their danger level. Try not to be TOO "gotcha" about it unless your players are into the kind of party games that make them have to do silly things on triggers that are increasingly hard to remember, but use it to enforce a certain amount of sobriety. The increase to the players' RL cognitive load might be minor, but coupled with the rule potentially being one that also cuts down on joking OOC chatter, it will put them in the PCs' minds a bit more and add to the tension.

A really simple example is the notion of "stay quiet." If voices or noise draws the monsters or brings the curse or whatever, enforce that on the players. If they speak out loud, their characters are treated as having done so, too. Make them point, pantomime, etc. Either play it up yourself, too, or at least keep your voice low and quiet, providing the tone you want things to have.

A mean trick might be for the horror place to have a "jocular" theme. One easy to snicker and laugh about. Encourage this, to a degree, and then twist it "evil clown" style, and still have the humor show up...but have laughter draw the curse/monster/whatever. And have things trying to make the players laugh. Their own fight to keep the levity down will naturally build the horror, and you can still use humor to release, especially when Bad Stuff is already happening and thus there's no risk of it Getting Worse just then.

Again, difficult to pull off but probably worth it.




I tend to favor hard magic systems in my home brew world but I think haunted locations might best work with a soft magic system.

My basic idea is that emotional events creates a psychic impression on the area which will eventually fade away.

My world has two major cataclysms killed 95% of the population and hit the reset button on civilization. The last one involved Lovecraft inspired eldritch horrors that seek to eat souls. I call them Void Demons because they are spawned from the Void and I like literal names.

I figure places where lots of Void Demons died or places where they set up sem-permanent bases would bear a psychic taint for centuries to follow. These areas would have a higher than usual rate of murders, suicides and other crimes and tragedies and no one is sure why. This could create a "hungry" haunted location like the hotel in The Shining. If it was underground it could be a classic dungeon.

TeChameleon
2020-10-26, 09:05 PM
Good luck! Glad my post was helpful.

Here's to hoping you can scare the snot out of your players :smallamused: