Hello friends! I've decided to let you know I'm working on a little (well, mid-sized) haunted house adventure for Potter's Bay—the Tugh Manor seems to have a poltergeist or four. It'll hopefully be a fun adventure location for low-to-mid level characters, and will ultimately have lots of ways to embed the party in the culture and economy of Potter's Bay a little bit, if that's something you find attractive.
The manor will eventually have three entire floors, but for now I've only written the ground floor. It's a decent number of rooms already, though! I've also included the introductory material, and a little essay I wrote about haunted houses as adventure locations. Here's a sample of the first part of that essay:
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.
Haunted house adventures have been around perhaps as long as role-playing games have existed as a form—or at least as long as the inimitableTegel Manor in 1977, to which this book owes no small measure of gratitude. Nonetheless, I find that most efforts in this vein miss some crucial elements that make a place feel truly haunted. Some of this can be attributed to the expedient needs of the adventure book as a form. Much of what constitutes the mood and atmosphere of a haunting must come from the referee, inescapably. The adventure book, even with its wide array of useful tools, can only do so much in this regard before becoming bogged down in non-interactive prose and such. It is a fine line, and I’ve walked it to the best of my ability here. The rest is, as ever, up to you.
On its face, the haunted house seems in some ways inappropriate for a role-playing adventure. Much of what constitutes the core of a haunting is the suddenness and arbitrariness of happenings: floors open beneath you without warning, strangling hands reach out from paintings before you can react. It’s an effective way to kill a player character, surely, but perhaps not an ideal environment for interactiveplay. Things seem generally to happen to characters, more than because of them. Many haunted house adventure books simply ignore this problem entirely: they assemble tropes and visuals from haunted houses, but structure them as more conventional role-playing encounters. Hostile entities engage you in battle, sinister objects give subtle hints of their danger and wait for you to unthinkingly engage them. This book does these things, too.
Be sure to download the Tugh Manor document (in the downloads for Potter's Bay) to read the rest!
An anachronistic 18th-century fantasy New England fishing village.
| Status | In development |
| Category | Physical game |
| Author | Spear Witch |
| Genre | Adventure |
| Tags | Dungeons & Dragons,Fantasy,lobster,new-england,OSR,potters-bay,Tabletop,vanilla-game,village |