Death House as A Hex Feature

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Trigger Warning: Hanging, Self Mutilation; Spoilers: Game of Thrones Season One, The Haunting of Hill House

Ravenloft has a few well known dungeons but I would argue that The Death House is its most well known contribution. You can tell if a dungeon would make a great Hex Feature with the magical words of “One Shot” which is a frequent attribution to the dungeon. It makes sense as when Ravenloft hit the shelves, The Death House was released alongside as a free module. Fans of Curse of Strahd have made all sorts of versions turning The Death House into a satisfying stand alone experience. Wyatt Trull’s Curse of Strahd Companion is the most popular version, but he does so for every adventure within the Curse of Strahd campaign.

My House

The first thing I did was to figure out a history, but not necessarily something for my notes. As stated in my Page-to-Prep, it is important for you to understand the history of a location to increase its verisimilitude but that is unnecessary for your notes. The Death House is economical for a Dungeons and Dragons product, only 9 pages, which my Prep was unable to lower. With both sitting at 9 pages, I think this is why it is so highly praised.

The Death House is made with Milestone Levels in mind. That means instead of counting Experience, the players level up when they hit certain plot determinants. That doesn’t work for a West Marches game. Furthermore, it is designed for levels one through three; a ‘starter One Shot’ indeed. I run my game from levels three to ten, which means when I need to calculate Average Party Level, I do so from a range of two to thirteen. I was going to need some inspiration to make the dungeon appropriate for any level of explorers, as a jumping off point I immediately zeroed in on Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018). In it, there’s tons of ghosts hiding in the background and that’s where I decided to get gonzo with unique ghosts based on all sorts of properties: Beetlejuice (1988), Candyman (1992), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), The White Rose from Nick Cave and the Bad Seed’s Murder Ballads album, another Flanagan series The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) and multiple ghosts from The Conjuring (2013) series.

With a skeleton of an idea, it was time to add flesh.

Rise, My Creation!

As Hill House as my inspiration, I knew the plot would be the tragedy of Gothic Horror. “This all could’ve been avoided if not for a fatal flaw.” This gives good context for why the antagonists behave in the way they do but it is unseen from your players, unwritten as listed above. Some players will want to understand the mysteries of the dungeon, others are here to just chuck dice. I set a paragraph at the beginning of the Dramatis Personae as I learned from my misadventures in Grim Hollow’s The Tavern of the Lost.

I have my players roll a d12 whenever I feel like a Random Encounter Check is appropriate. On an 11 or 12, they bump into something. As stated in Bell Curves are for Cowards, I use a linear chart to determine my Random Encounters. With an equal chance of any encounter occuring, you make your game far more exciting and dynamic. The astute might notice Rakdos which is a Guild Faction from Magic: The Gathering (1993). Rakdos was brought into Dungeons and Dragons when the card game setting was made into a campaign setting with Ravnica.

I split The Drowned and the Cult of Rakdos into Easy and Medium Encounters because of how you should be building your Adventuring Day. An Adventuring Day in Dungeons and Dragons is designed for six to eight Medium Encounters before the party rests. If that does not sound like your game at all; welcome to most players experience and why people needlessly trash Challenge Ratings. I use the Gritty Rest Rules, requiring the players to be in a Safe Haven to be able to Long Rest, this means that Easy or Medium Encounters can challenge my players. I liken Dungeons and Dragons to a resource management game in a role playing trenchcoat. If you’re always at max resources, speed bumps will only be that but as the player's resources dwindle, things get more interesting. With that in mind, I tend to use Easy and Medium in dungeons, while Hard and Deadly in the ‘Overworld Zone’ of a Hexcrawl, just so my players are forced to use resources appropriate for their ability to find somewhere to Short or Long Rest.

The plethora of Ghosts; however, would be either boss monsters or pushovers. Not all of them necessarily need to be hostile, though a great many are. I didn’t adjust my range for these but had the ghosts cover a wide range of a Challenge Rating. So, depending on your player’s Average Party Level, some of these ghosts will be push overs, others will be appropriate challenges and the last batch might be too difficult, requiring quick thinking backed into a retreat. Feyrs, pronounced Fears, are a creature from the Spelljammer setting as another way to attack the players. Lastly, Innocents would be having your players get normal people that if they save, they get bonus experience and possibly a Follower or another boon at the conclusion of the session.

All Hail the New Flesh

With the plot locked and the cast set, I would need to either make or find creatures and treasure to fill The Death House’s roster. Interesting creatures and nifty treasure are two things I really look for in an excellent Hex Feature.

There’s a white harp mentioned in a room, which reminded me of the Bone White Violin from The Laundry Files (2004) series. In it, the protagonist’s wife is trained to wield a magical violin made of bone whose eldritch powers are far more than she bargained for. She has ‘This Machine Kills Demons’ as a sticker on its case, a play on a sticker Woody Guthrie put on his guitar: ‘This Machine Kills Facists’. I decided to have ‘This Machine Kills Demons’ carved into this made-of-bone Harp, with the appropriate ability to cast Bard spells by taking damage and passing a Performance Check. If a Fiend is a target of the spell, the caster has Advantage on the Check and if the spell requires a Save, the Fiend has Disadvantage on the Check.

Bone White Harp
Legendary, Requires Attunement
A creature playing the harp takes PB Slashing damage, at a minimum. A creature can cast Bard Spells with the Spell Level being restricted by the creature’s PB. When casting a Bard Spell, the creature takes Irreducible Slashing damage equal to d6 + d6 per Spell Level and pass a DC 10 + Spell Level Performance Check. If the spell requires a Spell Attack Roll, use the Performance Check as the Spell Attack Roll. If the Bard spell targets a Fiend, the creature using the harp has Advantage to this Performance Check. If a Save is required, Fiends have Disadvantage to the Save.
The Bone White Harp cannot cast spells that heal.

If you want, make it Cursed with the restriction that it must be played at least once a day. The strings are so sharp, they cut the creature using the Bone White Harp. The rest of the treasure is stuff I found from other modules or books, so I unfortunately only have one nifty magic item. Though my personal favourite random magic item is Hit Point Press’ Peerless Etiquette Fork found in Big Bads: Creatures and Curios - while being used, you will not appear to make any social gaffes regarding cutlery. To some groups, this is a do nothing magic item, but to others it can be so hilariously useful.

Who Ya Gonna Call?

Let’s talk ghosts.

One of the more interesting parts of EN Publishing’s Level Up: Dungeon Delver’s Guide is how to make interesting traps. Set the DCs and damage, provide XP when the players are done with it. I used a bunch of these traps in this house but in the horror movie sense. A common trope is having a character in a flick is to hallucinate one act but when the camera pulls back into the real world, we see that they’ve been commandeered to perform an atrocity. An example that gives no plot details away is from Colour Out of Space (2019), where the mother is chopping vegetables and unknowing begins cutting her fingers off. With the Dungeon Delver’s Guide, I have a few ghosts who begin as these types of traps and upon conclusion, they Spawn in as something for the players to actually fight.

Yes, I decided to rip that particular scene exactly from The Haunting of Hill House (2018). I figure after the conclusion of the trap being sprung, just having her Spawn as a regular Ghost was OK. There are a few more traps that have spicier play throughs.

Another interesting piece is that I had decided to use the Candyman, who I find that his full name is Daniel Robitaille. The reason that is interesting is another Hit Point Press Big Bads release: Daniel, a flesh golem Construct gone wrong. I immediately knew what to do: a Khal Drogo. Upon Robitaille’s death, his spirit was gone and so an attempt at resurrection failed to do anything but produce a horrid flesh golem. There’s two Daniels: the angry spirit of the Candyman and the lump of flesh powered by vile arcane experiments.

Daniel the flesh golem is offered for free on the Hit Point Press website.

The last ghost I want to talk about is Phecda, who is inspired by Beetlejuice. In my research, I found that the grave that Beetlejuice shows has the name Betelgeuse which is a famous star besides inspiring the film. With that in mind, I started searching for other stars for inspiration and I started laughing when I came across Phecda. I could easily see a particular cult of Vecna mispronouncing the name. I do not have Common in my games as it is lazy, derivative and disallows interesting shenanigans; such as, a cult of Vecna mispronouncing his name during their sacrifical rites, they’ve been sending power to Phecda instead. Suddenly, this normal ghost is being empowered. When he discovered how, Phecda immediately went running to Ravenloft for its Domains of Dread in an attempt to lay low and hopefully circumvent Vecna’s wrath. With the stage set for Phecda to have power, I gave him Beetlejuice’s suite of powers; if you use him irresponsibly in your game, I hope you can do Keaton’s manic performance.

The rest of the roster of ghosts and ghostly traps I made converting The Death House into a Hex Feature can be found on my Patreon. I cannot make these available for sale as I might run afoul Copyright Infringement laws. There’s fifteen unique stat blocks across four pages for you to stock in any haunted house adventure you would like to throw at your players.

Lessons

The Death House taught me the importance of Micro-Factions. Unlike a full Faction, such as the Cult of Rakdos or Iron Kingdom’s Farrow, a Micro-Faction has a high chance of showing up in all sorts of environments because it does not have a strong identity. To insert Ghouls or Rats into a dungeon, I just need a theme that involves Undead or Disease. On the other hand, the Cult of Rakdos needs to be close to their patron’s Circus Tent. If I had made the Ghouls and Rats into a Micro-Faction by printing a page into my Random Encounter Binder, I would have easily saved myself two Pages to Prep for this dungeon but more importantly, every future dungeon.

When I created this dungeon, I was less certain of my own phrasing which is how you end up with bloated Stat Blocks. Bloated Blocks take up more space, making the adventure far longer than it needs to be.

One recommendation from the Mothership RPG is always show the Lock before the Key. I really underestimated this. I have six portraits of nobility whose fatal flaw catches up to them, making them into anguished ghosts as you do in Ravenloft. Once the party realized that the six paintings I described were enemies within the house, they got far more excited to ‘see the next one’. That also meant that there was disappointment when the Random Encounter Spawned one of the non-Noble ghosts. I am of two minds, I like the excitement but not everything needs to be foreshadowed.