Haunted House
When you’ve plundered every cavern, tomb, and abandoned mine on the map, there’s only one thing left to do. You charge your proton pack, you jump in the Mystery Machine, and you head for the nearest spoopy mansion. The idea of the haunted-house-as-dungeon is as old as the hobby, supported even in the earliest editions of the game. Shadows, wraiths, and ghosts have been kicking ass and draining levels for years, and it’s the rare gamer that’s never tried to hack through an incorporeal threat to no avail. My own love affair with haunted dungeons stems from two ideas, one system-agnostic and one specific to Pathfinder.
You see, there’s a special alchemy that happens in a GM’s head when it’s time for “the scary session.” They seem to know instinctively to invest in some candles, cue up the ghost frequency, and ready the fog machines. Here’s my own GM, for example, pulling out all the stops for a Ravenloft campaign. But even more than the special effects, horror sessions force GMs into ambiance overdrive with their descriptions. Suddenly every walk down a castle corridor is the intro to Shia LaBeouf, and that’s exactly the kind of game I love most. You get swept up in the tone and the ambiance, and for a moment you can forget the game. You can forget Dave’s mom’s basement. You’re there in dark, sword in one hand and torch in the other, and your breath begins to frost the air, and the hairs on the back of your neck are prickling… Those moments may be fleeting, but Great Gygax above do I love ’em.
At some point however, the tension inevitably breaks and the ghosty inevitably pops out of the wall. And when that happens, I don’t want just another monster fight. I want it to feel different mechanically. That’s why I love Pathfinder’s haunts. If you’re not familiar, go ahead and hit that link. They take a bit of getting used to mechanically, but the idea of turning the cleric into the thief—combining elements of traps with malevolent undead—is pure conceptual genius. This isn’t a bear trap with a few unsettling adjectives thrown in. This is an otherworldly threat, and only your learned priest’s chanting can hope to turn the tide.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever had a run-in with the spooky side of gaming? What was it like? Were there any survivors?
ARE YOU THE KIND OF DRAGON THAT HOARDS ART? Then you’ll want to check out the “Epic Hero” reward level on our Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Like the proper fire-breathing tyrant you are, you’ll get to demand a monthly offerings suited to your tastes! Submit a request, and you’ll have a personalized original art card to add to your hoard. Trust us. This is the sort of one-of-a-kind treasure suitable to a wyrm of your magnificence.
It could be of use if Mr Stabby is a good-aligned weapon.
It’s a horror session. Stranger things have probably happened…
Fighter: “Hear that Mr. Stabby? Positive energy! Quick, think happy thoughts.”
Mr. Stabby: “Blood blood blood…”
Fighter: “It’s not working. Think happier!”
Mr. Stabby: “BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD…”
Liberal use of fire can solve all problems in buildings.
GM: “The wood is old, dry as kindling, and somehow refuses to take light. Fire seems to shrivel and die in this place, as if light itself is afraid to show its face.”
Player: “You railroading son of a bitch.”
GM: “I spent five hours this week building a haunted house, and you jerks are going to investigate it.”
See, you say that but all *I* hear is “METEOR STORM! CONTINUOUS CONSECUTIVE FIREBALLS! THROW ALCHEMIST’S FIRE AT IT!”
GM: “Did I say haunted house? I meant haunted castle. Nice stone walls and whatnot.” >_>
“The warped wood shrieks and twists in the flames. As the fire grows larger, a foul smoke begins to fill the air. Roll constitution. Okay. As the fire continues to grow, you notice portions of scorched brickwork visible behind cracks in the wooden panelling…”
I’m never sure to what degree my players are joking when they say, “Can’t we just burn it down? I vote we burn it down.”
One of the best levels in the game “Thief: The Dark Project” is “Return to the Haunted Cathedral” with “The Haunted Cathedral” and “Trail of Blood” from the sequal game “Thief: The Metal Age” coming in close 2 and 3. They all have fantastic ambient music and the game itself is not focused on combat, so trying to stay hidden and alive increases the tension.
I use these for inspiration in some of the scarier levels I’ve exposed my players too. Gore can gross some folks out, but the right music, and an overwhelming sense of dread can just make people look at things differently. Playing on emotions…not all ghosts being evil, using children, or the sounds of distant giggles or whatnot can up the ante. I also have used the Plane of Shadow intersecting with the prime material plane as a source of tension. It’s much harder to fight when you keep popping between realities.
Also giving them something normal in the middle of desolation can make them curious, suspicious, and nervous or give them a safe place to regroup for a little bit. I used a small park in the middle of a desolated city, the central tree being inhabited by a Dryad. The party then may have something to defend and motivation to try to make things better, and it gives you something to kill off if you want to.
Here’s the music from “Trail of Blood” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr7sW6vbfM4
Really much of the “Thief: The Dark Project” “Thief: The Metal Age” or “Thief: Deadly Shadows” can be good for tension building gaming goodness.
Dude…that is some rock solid horror soundtrack. I may have to watch a play through now.
You can find the sound track for all 4 games on youtube. I haven’t quite finished the last game, and I don’t quite remember how much I liked or didn’t like the soundtrack.
Well… I’m in a Curse of Strahd game now. No idea how spooky it’ll actually get.
Sadly the GM and other players didn’t go for the twist on that I really want to try out: Child Adventurers in Ravenloft.
I recall the town my most established 3.5 character wound up owning originally was basically just a one shot horror side game run by one of the players when the GM wasn’t available. I’m fairly certain we weren’t supposed to come away with the deed to the town but it was basically a ghost town (pun intended) after we’d solved the spooky mystery and my character was a Beguiler so… yeah.
That happened and she wound up owning a town. And thus declared herself the mayor of said town. In the same kingdom another of the characters had property in (in the nobility sort of way). Even though she was a foreigner. From a different kingdom on not pleasant terms with that one.
Yeah. Basically we took spooky and wound up with politics. It all turned out ok though because…. Beguiler (and some handy connections with the rulers of said kingdom on either side and a inter-party marriage serving double duty as awesome roleplaying event and political marriage that put the rulers of both kingdoms in the same place at the same time).
A political campaign with a beguiler at the helm? That poor GM. The horror! 😛
In what way was the town originally haunted, btw?
I think there was like a ghost knight and some curse on the town that had turned everyone in animals. I barely remember the actual quest. Just the results.
The true horror was the GM making basically anything worth charming (vendors, the king, etc.) arbitrarily immune to being charmed. I had to lie and persuade almost everything instead of being able to use half my spells most of the time.
Ouch. I can understand a GM not being comfortable with a beguiler in the party. However, I think the correct response might be, “Please don’t play a beguiler,” not, “Your beguiler doesn’t work.” Sad times.
Back when I ran an Exalted campaign, our mismatched party and assorted NPCs found themselves trying to save a town from an invasion of undead. All by the numbers….until the party entered the Underworld.
In Exalted, the Underworld tends to be a reflection of Creation. The party found themselves in a town not unlike the one they had left, but warped. There was no great horrible backstory, just a collection of all the little horrors and woes that people suffer, then move on from. But the Underworld remembers, and seeing the town warped like that, with all its little cruelties and miseries on display really threw some of the players.
Then, after half the party had fled for their lives after an unwise combat encounter, some of the weaker players were trying to escape through the town’s sewers with the NPCs in tow, when they came across a Stillborn. A Stillborn is basically the monstrous ghost of a mother who died in childbirth, with a selection of horrifying attacks that decency forbids me from describing here. The encounter was set to a soundtrack of horrific moans (Lisa Trevor, from Resident Evil). It wasn’t even a powerful monster, but by the end of that encounter, one of my players was genuinely losing his composure because of those agonised moans, and we had to take a time out for him to recover. 🙂
I always wondered if anyone used that monster in a real game. Good to know!
Aww damn, I already wasted my “haunted house” story in the post where you asked about horror.
No worries. I’m still properly traumatized from my first read-through. 🙁
Huh. I nearly posted this story on your ‘about horror’ comic, as I am inordinately proud of it as one of my only forays into GMing, and one that worked out surprisingly well. So I can’t quite resist now that another opportunity has come up over the course of my archive trawl. Although this is likely to be a long one…
The system was Shadowrun. If you aren’t familiar with it, my usual ‘elevator pitch’ for the system is ‘Toss LotR in a blender with Blade Runner’. Near-future Cyberpunk High Fantasy. Tremendously fun setting, even if the crunch is occasionally… iffy.
Anyways, the gig for the night was helping one of their contacts to disappear- going WAY off the radar, as said contact had- injudiciously, but understandably- pissed off one of the largest, most powerful, and homicidal megacorporations in existence. By raiding their illegal biotech lab and rescuing the collection of orphaned/kidnapped children that they were expirementing on there.
So, needing a spot to hide out that could also accomodate the kids, the contact got in touch with the PCs and asked them to locate and secure a bunker that he’d found hints about during his own shadowrunning.
In Chicago. Bug City.
See, in Shadowrun, no-one with any sense (and the majority of those who don’t have any sense) wants to go anywhere near Chicago, courtesy of the giant, extradimensional demon insects that tried to use it as the central point of their abortive world takeover bid. Things got so bad that the silent war against the Insect Spirits got very, very loud, with the authorities eventually nuking them, then deploying a genetically-engineered bioweapon, and finally walling the whole mess off and shooting anything that tried to get out.
Needless to say, my players weren’t terribly thrilled with the idea of going there, but, being the big softies that they are, accepted the job. But there was no way they were going in there unprepared; they loaded up for a serious bug hunt, including some rare, expensive, and rather potent anti-Insect-Spirit weapons.
After some misadventures, they made their way to Chicago and managed to work their way into the Chicago Containment Zone, where the Bugs are. On the way in, they’ve done some legwork and figured out that the bunker that they want was probably built off of the old Manhattan Project tunnels, so they’ve got a pretty good place to start; they parked their rig, set up camp (and camouflage and defenses), and made their way into the tunnels.
Making their way through the underground, they slowly realized that there have been skittering sounds on the edge of hearing for some time, and every once in a while, they’d catch a flicker of movement in one of the cross tunnels when they passed an intersection.
They started paying closer attention, and managed to get a good, if brief, look at the source of the noises and flashes of movement- a seven-foot-long ant, slightly transluscent, and glistening with demonic ichor. Dimly visible reflections in the darkness hinted at at least a few more behind it.
A few rounds of panic fire later, the ants have pulled back a little, and the skittering, sussurating noises have gotten louder… including from directly behind the party. At this point they realized that they’ve blundered right past an Ant Spirit Nest, and the only way left is to go forwards, which, for whatever reason, was still clear.
The party shifted into high gear, racing down the tunnels for the bunker entrance that they’d found on some of the old city blueprints, desperately hoping that it was still clear.
Rounding the final corner, the point man nearly slapped face-first into a metre-thick wall of resin. At this point, the group hesitated. The Ants are still out there, although for some reason they’re staying on the very edge of sight, occasionally flashing into view for a second as one team member or another swings their tactical lights in the right direction. The group decided that the Bugs don’t want to come too close to this area for whatever reason, and promptly set about taking advantage of this fact, laying down a string of traps in both directions from the T-intersection while one of the more mechanically-apt runners used a cutting torch to burn through the resin barrier. It’s so thick that he’s forced to cut it out in slabs, going a little deeper each time.
Meanwhile, it’s eerily quiet.
Riiiiiight up until the last bit of resin is burned through. The rustlings and scrapings started up again, building up and running together until it was a rumble that’s shook dust loose from the ceiling. The chitterings keened up into the far ultrasonic, setting everyone’s teeth on edge, as the Ant Spirits collectively went insane.
As the party hurls themselves through the still-smoking gap in the wall, the ants stampede out of both ends of the tunnel, slamming into the traps and dying in waves.
Seeing that the traps were holding them back for now, the party paused to catch their collective breath and take a look at their surroundings. It’s a… remarkably ordinary room, all things considered, that had probably even been quite nice twenty-some years ago. There were only a handful of oddities, really- it was totally devoid of furnishings, in fact there was nothing at all in it save for odd drifts of crumpled paper up against the walls. And there was a strange old discoloration, almost a chrysthanthemum pattern, spreading out from the hole in the wall they had tumbled through. Like somebody had used a giant blender with no lid laying on its side.
Almost against their will, they took a closer look at the discoloration.
It was the shredded remnant of Bug Spirits.
At this point, they were about ready to take their chances with the swarm of Ant Spirits outside, but a quick glance through the hole at the seething, keening masses of demonic chitin outside was enough to convince them otherwise. The Ants were climbing over mounds of their own dead in their urgency to reach the hole.
So, very, very carefully, they moved out into the corridors. The hallways are dark, empty, and the air was musty and stale, like an old tomb. The only sound is the rustling of the runners wading through the ever-present mounds and drifts of paper, which seems to be all that’s left here aside from the dust. In a few rooms, they find bits of evidence- old wall plaques, fragments of desks, the occasional threadbare stuffed toy- that show that this bunker was at one time used as a hidden school for the magically gifted children of an elite quasi-secret society, the Illuminates of the New Dawn.
Careful searching had also found a simple map of the school, and the group hesitantly made their way towards the most central point, the assembly hall.
As they moved towards the assembly hall, they could have sworn that they heard echoes. Or maybe there was just something else down there with them, rustling through the paper drifts. The hint of a distant, childish giggle was written off as nerves, the imagination playing tricks. And so they slipped through the gloom as bravely as they could muster, trying not to think of the sea of demonic ants struggling desperately to get at them, nor the invisible monster that they were growing ever more certain shared the darkness with them.
They reached the double doors of the assembly hall, swung them open, and stopped dead.
Aside from one rather large, glaring detail, the room was basically what you’d expect from a twenty-years-neglected elementary-school assembly hall in a school posh enough to actually have an assembly hall instead of just using the gym- rows of small chairs, scattered backpacks, schoolbooks, and toys, a thick layer of dust on most everything, a huge, bloody ritual circle heaped with the decayed little corpses of what must have been the entire student body, more than a hundred all told, and the flensed adult corpse of the one who had presumably cast the ritual, sprayed out from the ‘head’ of the circle.
It took a while before they were even willing to go into the room.
Eventually, though, they mustered up their courage and headed in, not really finding much at that point. Steering well clear of the circle, they moved back out to the double doors at the entrance and hesitated there for a moment.
At that point, something that no-one spotted slammed into the largest runner present (the Orc Medico), knocking him to the ground and tearing a strip off the backplate of his armour. It didn’t do any damage- all it really did was ruin the finish, basically- but the group was pretty seriously unnerved all the same.
They didn’t get much of a chance to contemplate this, though- they’d left a drone sensor at their entrance hole to warn them when the bugs were getting close, and they were.
Taking up firing positions by the door, the team crouched tensely, waiting for the Warrior Ant Spirits to breach the last line of traps. With a final, halfhearted rattle and hiss, the last trap was swarmed under, and the Ants charged the hole in the resin wall, spraying acid as they… blurred and faded into shadows.
They were spraying resin, not acid. The hole was sealed off hole completely, and the wall reinforced until it was double its previous thickness. This did not reassure my players.
Now doubly convinced that there was some form of invisible monstrosity with them in the dark, they contemplated burning the place and running for it, until I gently pointed out that perhaps the survivors of Chicago wouldn’t particularly appreciate strangers exploding from underground on a torrent of flame and enraged Bug Spirits, even assuming that they managed to get out of the bunker before being turned into charcoal briquettes themselves.
Their courage thus fortified, they headed back to search the rest of the complex. Their second clue came in the form of a janitor’s closet- looking in from the doorway, all looked normal. If you walked in and turned around, everything you could see while pressed up against the back wall was scrawled, over and over, in ink and cleaning fluids and blood and claw marks and feces, with the words “Don’t Blink.”
Finding nothing more of note past this point was somehow not comforting.
Eventually, with other options petering out, and the distant rustlings and gigglings intensifying, the party headed back to the assembly hall. There, the sharp-eyed archery sniper spotted a shred of kevlar the same colour as the medico’s torn armour… sticking out of one of the drifts of paper. Cautiously brushing the papers aside with an arrow, the sniper found a dusty patch of faded pink fur.
At this point, she NOPE’d backwards and shot the pile.
Everyone just stopped and stared as the arrow sank into the pile, slowed to a stop, and then tipped onto the floor, as if it had hit something that was soft and yielding, but not penetrable.
Wavering between fear and irritation, the sniper stomped up and swatted the paper aside, revealing what looked to be a perfectly ordinary pink teddy bear.
Cue animalistic berserk terror as the sniper shifted back into her natural eagle form and laid into the thing with her claws (the sniper was an Eagle Shifter, which in Shadowrun meant that she was a magically-endowed bird that had achieved sentience and the ability to assume human… or elven, in this case… form, but was still fundamentally a bird).
Thankfully, as an eagle, she had some specialized weapons- modified shock gloves worn on her feet/claws. And the elemental damage worked to bypass the teddy’s immunity to normal weapons.
Somewhat less thankfully, when its vessel was destroyed, the Blood Spirit that had been animating the teddy came shrieking out, a stream of sticky red liquid bubbling impossibly upwards to form a vaguely humanoid shape. Sadly for the Blood Spirit, all this really accomplished was to put its ‘face’ in easy eagle-claw range, and it was summarily dispatched long before the red film over the sniper’s vision cleared enough for her to even realize the thing was there.
As the eagle-sniper continued to spray what little was left of the Blood Spirit all over a fairly significant area, the rest of the group paused and took stock of the situation. Given how blood magic worked, and the toy, it was almost certain that the ritual murder of the children had been used to power these toys as defensive mini-golems.
A long pause ensued as the sniper wound down and shifted back to her elven form, panting, while the rest of the party gloomily observed just how many kids there had been, and how many toys there were in the assembly hall alone.
The rest of the session was a tense bug hunt, but it was more ‘thriller’ than ‘horror’, so I won’t bother with a lot of details. But my players were actually unnerved enough by the whole mess that they wouldn’t stop making perception checks, even after they had found everything. After the third or fourth check found nothing (because there was nothing left!), I finally gave up and let them ‘find’ a final evil toy in the ductwork on the next check.
So that’s the story of how I managed to traumatize my players with a small pink teddy bear. The part I’m most proud of that’s not in the (incredibly long >.0) story above is the fact that this entire thing took place in the real-world summertime, so both sessions happened in full daylight, in quite a nice room with big windows, comfortable chairs, and a generally welcoming atmosphere (for the curious, the session break happened… completely unintentionally on my part… right after the medico was knocked down by one of the super-speeding demon dolls. Not a bad cliffhanger at all!).
Great use of the ants.
“If those monsters are sacred of whatever’s living in here, what the hell chance do we have?”
Rock solid tension building right there.
Thanks!
*heh* It’s really just the horror equivalent of ‘there’s always a bigger fish’, and it’s something I’m a bit prone to using- have to e careful with it because it can come off as cheap and/or lazy uncomfortably easily.
That being said, I couldn’t quite resist it in this case, since the Insect Spirits get some serious buildup in the source material- you know things are bad when ‘nuke Chicago’ is a better option than… well, basically anything that involves not nuking the second-largest city in the US.
And if you’re wondering why toys?
Well, ever notice that Raggedy Anne/Woody and crew from Toy Story share a very significant trait with the Weeping Angels?
Naw man. There is PLENTY horror potential in Toy Story. For me though, the horror is mostly on the toys’ side of things. Two words man: dog toys.
Our group of players has had a few nasty encounters with enchanted houses across several games; now our standard Plan B when we see one of them involves buying some flour and use it to create a thermobaric explosion.
Sure you can burn down the haunted house, but is that really defeating it? It’ll still be sitting there, a smug ruin full of missed opportunities and undiscovered treasures.
If they want to burn the building down, ensire that they do it from the inside at the very ground floor. The building collapse in all dorection around them as it burns. If they try to burn from the outside, always have the building topple in the direction with most party members. If they try to do it at a distance, the building is unburnable.
An important reminder to not haunt any single-story structures.