By Hilander
Self Published
OSR
Levels 1-3
Sixty years ago, the young noble who built this mansion was to take a bride. Cakes were baked, a dress adorned with finest pearls, and guests and entertainers from across the countryside arrived to celebrate. Instead, they came to a funeral for the would-be bride, a funeral from which none emerged alive…
This eight page adventure uses five pages to describe about 22 rooms in a haunted mansion. It’s doing a relatively rare and focused style to achieve it’s terseness with some interesting evocative aspects. The promises of the overview are probably better than the rooms keys proper, though, even though this could be, in many ways, a textbook example of how to write a key. Or … START to write a key.
The young noble is getting married! Ought oh! The chick backs out at the last minute! He drowns her. Then, when the party guests show up, in shame, grief, and madness, pours strong poison in the marriage wine for a final toast. Oops. Just like a Samurai film, everyone dies in the end. Now the guests are all ghosts, the bride is a ghost, and he’s a ghost. And you’ve arrived at the mansion. This all comes in a relatively short little background section, a couple of paragraphs long. Nicely done, solidly terse, and relatable as human emotions. “The souls here are grieved by the betrayal of their host. None can rest until the spirit of the young noble is put to eternal rest, but they also.” This is good, you are given liberty, when playing the ghosts, to be a bit haphazard with them while giving them some focus as well. A couple of sentences and you can riff on. Likewise, there’s a coachman,
We might call this almost the platonic encounter in this adventure, an example of what all other encounters are like. Big title. Coachman. A little encounter, and a terse description. Charming, warm, friendly, helpful. And then a sentence at the end in italics which brings into context the more general description above. What’s really going on, so to speak. We can see further example of this in the main adventure site keys.
I love some of what’s going on here, even if I may be dissatisfied with the results. First off we see the rooms have a room name. Music Hall. Ballroom. You know what those rooms are, because you, gentle reader, know what the fuck a music room and ballroom look like. This orients the DM. Now, when I read the rest of the description I am reading it in the context of “Ballroom.” This will make it easier to riff on things and get the imagination going. The same general formatting is present. A short little description followed by some extra DM information in italics. The italics never goes overboard and is probably right at the edge of what I would find acceptable for highlighting before it becomes harder to read. Still, another technique would have probably been better.
That’s a pretty decent monster description in The Noble’s Soul. And it’s followed up by a decent attacks description with the Adore you and then How Could You bit. Those two lines convey an awful lot of information on how to run the encounter, which is what good writing should do.
There is a bit of a gimp present. Once you enter the house the doors and windows lock and become immune to damage. I’m not the biggest fan of that, and, it would appear to neg out the Coachman a bit, perhaps leaving him to steal horses or gak the party when they come out of the house. However, there is an out: through the use of holy water on the doors/window. Big big fan of this kind of stuff. Utility items, utility spells like Bless, these are problem solvers in the characters arsenal. Should it always work? Meh. But this is a more “neutral” way, an appeal to a game world in which gods exist and actually do small things, like Bless as a problem solver instead of just a bonus.
Approached from a First DO No harm mentality, then this adventure is hitting well. It sets up the rooms well. It has something a little interactive in most places, something to discover or something to do. It keeps the text tight. it’s written from a more neutral standpoint rather than a Screw the Party standpoint. And it hits on what makes a ghost a ghost., It’s mournful. They are not just things to stab. It allows the party to discover the history through play and perhaps resolve things.
I am not in any way mad at this thing. I’m not exactly happy with it, but I’m not annoyed and you CAN run it. I am, I think, looking for just a little more though. Most rooms are going one ‘thing’ in them. It’s just a bit TOO terse. A few more evocative words. A little dynamism to the rooms and environment. A little more creepiness to it. Certainly a DM can introduce some of that, but I’d like to see just a little more support form that from the designer. As a rather basic ghostly drop in it does fine.
This is $1 at DriveThru. The preview is long enough that you see the intro and more than a few of rooms, so a good preview as well. And it’s nice to see it listed for $1.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/541024/the-mourning-mansion?1892600