Monte Cook's The Darkest House

[Prak]

The Nature of the House
Or, “make it up your own damned self,” apparently?

So, we’re out of character and system rules, and now we’re talking about the house itself. Fucking finally. The House will take on an outer facade that matches the cultural context of where it appears, but inside it doesn’t bother. Which… feels like something that a cheap movie would pull and try to use as a source of horror, but, if a person walks into a building that looks like an Edo-period Japanese house, and inside it looks like a turn of the century Western manor, I don’t think most people are going to find that scary. Weird maybe, but we live in a world where “Zillow Gone Wild” is a Twitter account and it posts weird fucking houses every day. That just means the people who live there don’t care about aesthetic consistency.

The House also can absorb other buildings? I’m curious to see how much, and how, this is used in the actual scenario. The Tea Room is called out as a specific location, but nothing is really said about it. And having been in the hobby as long as I have, I feel like this won’t be used to much effect. Cool ideas like this never are. But hey, maybe I’m wrong.

Next, it talks about, well, fuck, I’ll just quote it-

The Darkest House has a complicated history. Its origin might be tied to a man named Phillip Harlock. It might be tied to something far older, perhaps even something primal in the multiverse. Or it might be a combination of all such things.

...do… do game writers realize they can just write genre guides or books about ideas? That they don’t have to write settings? I ask, because if this was a book giving ideas for a haunted house adventure, or talking about it as a genre, suggestions for backstory would be fine. But if I’m buying your setting or story, I’d like to know what you say the backstory is. I can make shit up all fucking day. I’m really good at it. If I don’t like your backstory, I will change it, don’t worry. This mystery box bullshit is… Well, it’s bullshit.

But, anyway. That's kind of minor before it goes off on this thing about... how people shape their environment. No, really. "We sometimes think that when two people spend extended periods of time together, one begins to take on qualities of the other." Um. Yes. That's a recognized thing. "No, but what if one of those people wasn't a person, man, what if it was a house, man?" Yeah. People shape their living spaces. "No, but what if the house was a people, man?" Kitty Horrorshow did this better.

Oh, except that Kitty Horrorshow's Anatomy never really bothers to explain why the house is sentient and horror-y, in a rare example of The Mystery Box actually working, and here Monte's going off on some wild tangeant about "fundamental forces of the universe" that "represent particular concepts" that the House can tap into, and how that lets it be something we can hardly comprehend. And how "we just don't know the answers to all these questions" and how all we need to know is what happens inside it (fair) and that "the house hates you."

Phillip Harlock's Story
The House was owned and lived in by a (wizard/occultist, as appropriate for your setting), who grew increasingly reclusive. That is literally all this section says for certain, everything else is "well, maybe x, but no one knows, and you can't verify anything with external records."

Monte actually addresses this, in about the worst way possible, and I'm just going to show this shit in it's entirety-



I want to hunt JJ Abrahms for sport.

I mean, yes, this kind of thing has been around in RPGs longer than JJ Abrahms has been doing his mystery box thing, but...he's out there telling people that creating questions and then not answering them is good, and I seriously doubt that Monte has no exposure to that.

Next up is talking about how to get PCs into the House, and.. It’s nothing big or special. It suggests Treasure, Lore, Curiosity, and Pursuit. I don’t know that I consider this a particularly necessary section, I mean, I could come up with these easily enough, and it doesn’t talk in enough specifics to give any meat for helping you to generate an actual hook, just general goals. It does mention some super valuable diamond that is in fact in the House, and that’s kind of the thing I’d like it to do more of here, tell the GM who hasn’t necessarily read through the House scenario yet some specific things that are in the House to hang a hook on.

Something like in the next section, Stories Within the House, which talks about shit they’ll specifically find and how to tie them in, when necessary, like they’ll find The Dog, and might want to befriend it and get it out, or the NPC in the absorbed room might be a loved one they’ll want to rescue, or they’ll find “the aeolotropic structure” and want to repair it.

Or… they find The Mystic Tools, which can build a door to get them out of the House (and back in, if they wish), and “hey, maybe those tools can also build other special shit?”

Like, there’s an actual specific idea that can be fleshed out for a game. I saw that and immediately had an idea for how I can get my PCs in-- there’s an NPC they’ll encounter at the end of the first adventure, which I want to make a recurring antagonist. She’s already used demonic magic to create a rat hivemind and trick it into thinking it was a god and develop a cult of wererats around it, so it’s not a stretch that she would learn about the House, that it has these mystical tools inside it, and they can be used to build artifacts (and she’d probably be interested in the aeolotropic structure). So I can have her perform a ritual sacrifice in broad daylight to summon the House and then run in when the PCs give chase.

Or your PCs might be interested in Monte’s tortured occultist story, or maybe they’ll decide they want to sever the House from their world forever.

There’s also some stuff for if the PCs research the House, which… well, one is a book about Monte’s tortured occultist character, Phillip Harlock, which I might rework to fit a D&D setting better, or might discard entirely, since it feels, to me, very real worldish occult, ie, the kind of thing Call of Cthulhu investigators might find, not the thing D&D sages might have. But I could do a bit of reworking. The other is about the House itself, and if my PCs get, or take, a chance to actually research the House before running in, then this I might use. This is more… “mad study,” and feels more fitting for a D&D setting without much change (like, I’m probably going to change Harlocke’s name, and he’s mentioned in this, and it makes a reference to a specific real animal, and I’ll change that to a fitting D&D monster).

There are also rumors you can give the PCs if you give them an opportunity to investigate the House before they go in, and, again, I’m not sure I’ll use these. But, maybe my PCs will decide to be cautious about the House rather than charging right through the front door of a building that appears after a blood sacrifice.

Anyway. Next section talks about conditions within the House, and they’re pretty expected--anachronisms (obviously, in a house that can connect to any world), magic (obviously, in a haunted house), weird time (or rather, time works exactly how the GM wants)--ie, it’s a haunted house, so you can explain things within the narrative. I guess some people need or benefit from this being spelled out.

It also gives some more detail on the “you can’t reach the outside” thing- basically, any effect, technological or magical, which would connect a character to the outside world instead directly contacts the House, as do any effects like a tricorder or detect magic that would reveal the paranormal nature of the House. It gives three things these attempts could result in--deception (a cleric communing with their god gets the House pretending to be that god), mental feedback (a mid-tier mental damage attack), or possession. Other than that, the only PC ability that is outright screwed with is attempts to leave. You can still fly, walk through walls, or teleport, but these things can’t get you out of the House (though there are areas which are, we’ll say, part of the grounds, so maybe they try to teleport out, think they got out, and then find out they’re still in the House, just in the garden, or something).

There’s a lot of reiteration in this thing. It’s already said that sleeping in the house results in a mental attack, though now it gives an attack rating, and I don’t recall if it did before. But even so, things could have been organized better to reduce this repetition of shit.

The House will “heal” damage and reset changes, tho there are some entities that won’t return if the PCs manage to destroy them, and any kind of beneficial treasure or loot doesn’t reset (no gold mining the House, unless you’re ready to spend a lot of time there).

...tho I suppose you could Greyhawk the House, and grab everything that isn’t nailed down, grab all the metal fixtures, and take it all home to hoc in a big santa sack and then go back in to do it again…

Heh. So, every major section of this pdf starts with a quote, and the one for the next section is from a youtuber, Jacob Geller, whose video about Control and Anatomy, which I’m pretty sure is being quoted here (“Some houses just reject humanity”), is the thing that first told me about Anatomy, and possibly Control (can’t remember which of two videos that talk about it I saw first, Geller’s or Erik Sophie’s).

Just neat.

I'm going to call this post here and make a new one for the next section.

[Prak]

Running Games Set In The Darkest House
This section starts with a page that's basically "you've probably run adventures like this, and you've probably run games online, but if not (advice)." Nothing remarkable there.

After that, it talks about player safety and consent at the table, which, especially in a horror game, I think is a good thing to go over. And come to think of it, while I did go over it with my players for the vampire game I tried to run, I don't think I did for the 3.5 game I'm running, and I should do so (because my setting is informed by horror media).

Um, it occurs to me that "consent" is probably a misnomer for those who don't already know about this idea. It is a consent thing, but it's specifically saying to your players "hey, themes like (x, y and z) might show up in this game, are you cool with that, or should I avoid them?" One of the PDFs packaged with TDH is Consent in Gaming (also from Monte's company, free on Drive Thru RPG), and it talks about player safety, respecting players' boundaries, and includes a pretty basic content checklist you can give to your players so they can rate various stuff as "I'm cool with it," "maybe" or "absolutely not cool with this." I think I talked about this in the V5 thread, too. I don't know if I consider it necessary in a standard D&D thing, though I do think it's a good activity to go through if there's any chance of broaching potentially upsetting topics, and I think it is necessary for horror and horror-adjacent games. Because games are supposed to be fun, and accidentally triggering a player's PTSD from childhood abuse is going to ruin that fun.

TDH takes a page to talk about that and list both potentially upsetting things that overtly depicted, and a couple that are strongly suggested by not directly portrayed.

It goes on to talk some suggestions about how to use TDH (one shot, recurring adventure setting, bringing it back in a later, separate campaign from when you originally used it), and then some more about how it's more about the story than the mechanics and...

Monte. Just write a fucking story game. I think Dread's mechanism is dumb, but this could just be a fucking Dread story. Or it could be a completely system agnostic setting and just say "challenges are ranked on a 1-10 system, and I leave that to you to fit into your game's difficulty."

THAT'S OBVIOUSLY WHAT WOULD MAKE YOU HAPPY TO WRITE. JUST DO THAT.

*Sigh*

It talks about challenges of running TDH, mostly amounting to players who aren't happy with things about it, and the advice is fine. Mostly. Nothing to really remark on. There are online gaming tips, which vary from general tips (be aware that people don't game online the way they do in person, take a fucking break) to techniques for running horror online (dim the lights, share information selectively, etc). The only particularly remarkable thing is the suggestion of screwing with players' mics and cameras if that's a thing whatever program you're using can do, and... I think it can work in moderation. I think it can also be abused by the wrong kind of GM. Nature of the beast, I guess. That sort of thing just exists in gaming, and social interaction. It also suggests "using the players' environments against them" (ie, making them feel uneasy by suggesting you saw something weird behind them, the player), and DMing the same thing to everyone except one player. And it occurs to me that the reason I'm a bit dubious of this sort of thing is that it edges up on gaslighting. It's not gaslighting, when done appropriately, but it's a similar idea, and that just makes me a bit uneasy.

The House Acts
FINALLY.

FINALLY THE PDF DECIDES TO TELL ME WHAT THE HELL THE HOUSE DIE DOES.

It presents an ordered list, and says to use the items in order when the House die indicates the House does a thing, ramping up from strange sounds to an item important to a character being cursed. I think it's generally a good mechanic, and finally something that is worth stealing for other games, but I'm not going to sit here and copy over the entire list. My one doubt about it is that it's an ordered list, you only really skip things if they would come up where not appropriate (ie, no House entity being present to attack a character), and if you reach the end and the PCs aren't out yet, start over, varying how things are described. And I think that could easily be a bit repetitive. Each area having it's own non-ordered list of a few things that could happen when the House acts would be better. But I don't think the list is completely bad.

Sections of the House
It restates that the house doesn't respect mundane space, so a traditional map is useless and you have a flowchart instead, which is actually another thing worth stealing from this game. I like that idea. I'm from the Dungeons and Dragons grid-based-exploration-and-combat school, so that's sort of how I naturally approach games, and even my little bit of experience with FATE (or WoD...) hasn't broken me out of that. So I'm not saying it's a new thing (because FATE Zones could easily work this same way), just that it's different from how I approach games, and I'm going to try to think more in this region flowchart mold when I'm writing adventures.
The mood of TDH breaks the House into five overall sections, each named a latin(ish?) term for a particular kind of relationship- Pater, Mater, Soror, Frater, and Amator, each representing a particular kind of love gone wrong. Each section has it's own particular mood (Pater is "cruel, domineering and distant," Mater is "cloying, smothering and emotional," etc). Each section mentions an item that's important to it, doing something specific, and an entity that haunts it and can be used when the House acts. So, Pater has the entity Father, who is ...kind of an archetypal representation of how an abused child sees their father- "impossibly tall, with a dark face and yellow eyes, and usually carries a massive leather belt as a weapon," and Mater has Mother, who looks like a big woman with a skull for a head and skeletal children clinging to her. I wouldn't say it's "Baby's first haunted house," but I also don't think it's particularly ambitious or excitingly weird theming. And I'm not slamming Monte (too much) for that. He wanted to tell a story about familial horror, and you can do good stories with that. They're just not, like, groundbreaking.

Though, glancing through the sections, I do find a place where I think an editor should have caught a self-contradiction-

There are only three ways to reach the Amator section and none of them involve finding the right door or passage. One is to use the right key on the lock in the Doorman’s head.

Um.

Monte, that's "finding the right door." I'm guessing you meant literally, but... using a particular item on a particular lock is so thematically "finding the right door" that it almost is literally finding the right door.


My focus is flagging, so I'm going to call this post here. The chapter isn't done yet, but it's a decent place to stop. When I come back, I'll be talking about the section that discusses the rooms.

[Thaluikhain]

It restates that the house doesn't respect mundane space, so a traditional map is useless and you have a flowchart instead, which is actually another thing worth stealing from this game. I like that idea. I'm from the Dungeons and Dragons grid-based-exploration-and-combat school, so that's sort of how I naturally approach games, and even my little bit of experience with FATE (or WoD...) hasn't broken me out of that. So I'm not saying it's a new thing (because FATE Zones could easily work this same way), just that it's different from how I approach games, and I'm going to try to think more in this region flowchart mold when I'm writing adventures.

Hmmm...do the players know that in advance, or are they going to start making maps and start saying you've made a mistake somewhere before they find out?

[Prak]

Nothing says to tell the players in advance, and I've never played with mappers, but given that it's a haunted house adventure, I would hope the players realize quickly that it's diagetic.

[Prak]

Ok, so, just finished the GM's Guide, which took less time than I expected it to. The remainder talks about how the rooms are presented in the program itself, entrances into the House and where characters wind up (front door leads to living room, back door to foyer, "Over The Wall," of the house appears in a context where houses have walled or fenced off yards, leads to the garden, and the party might just be in a room that the House decides to eat), ways to get out of the House, and ends with a quote from Kitty Horrorshow's Anatomy, which is again cool. I'm not super interested in Haunting of Hill House, but my kind of story, so it's nice to see Monte had *some* exposure to less traditional, more unique takes on the haunted house archetype.

After that is media recommendations (which *does* point people to both Jacob Geller's video and the actual video games it talks about, which is a nice consideration, especially given that Kitty Horrorshow is a sole independent game maker, not a studio, and she makes very offbeat games that need more people looking at them), and finally the Remnants, which are just player handouts.

I'm away from my PC, looking at the pdf on my phone, so I'm not sure what I'm going to look at next. Possibly the House program itself.

[Prak]

The remaining links on the index page of the program are to the house diagram, a reference sheet for the GM, a Key Guide (ie, a guide to the keys pcs will find in the House, the journal of Phillip Harlock, a system reference for the players, the Consent in Gaming pdf, and four character sheets (all the same, save for which of the four chapter quotes appears on them).

So I'm going to move to going through the rooms themselves, and rather than strictly going over every single one, I'll just talk about anything that pops out to me.

The Rooms
The rooms are listed alphabetically, but because I'm reading through before I run this, I'm going to go through them as a player, or my recurring antagonist NPC, would experience them, starting in the living room.

This is what the room pages look like-


You get a map that can be used in game, an image that I think is usually going to be a "this is what you see" but on this sample is just a splash page for TDH, an overview, collapsible sections for each major part of the room, and any quick notes the GM may need to keep in mind.

Living Room
Ok, didn't take long for me to find something I want to talk about, but also this isn't really about the living room itself, just gets mentioned there.

Windows on the outside of the house allow people to look in and see what should be on the other side of them, but if you're in the House, they always look out onto a dark night. That's fine.

What I don't like is that they are flat-out indestructible.

There's no reason for this. The House is obviously it's own metaphysical realm. Breaking a window should just mean you're out in the yard of the House, not actually escaping it, so there's really no reason to flat out say "the PCs cannot break the windows."

I really don't like arbitrary restrictions like that.

The Library

Rather than the somewhat pleasant smell of old books, this room has an odor of stifling loneliness.

What the fuck does "stifling loneliness" smell like? IPA?

There are some cool items here that I might steal for future games I run- one appears to be a philosophical text about joy and despair, and if left on a table or shelf while one sleeps, when they wake up, it will be open to a passage on either topic and have a new book sitting next to, beneficial if the passage is about joy and depressing, disheartening or the like if despair. Another is just a sapient book that speaks through rearranging text on its pages, that is willing to work with and spy for the PCs if they treat it well by talking to it and writing poetry in it.

The Gallery
There's a pretty cool thing that involves a few rooms, but happens in the Gallery, so I'm going to talk about it here, but I'm also going to spoiler it, just so people who might play this can avoid the spoiler (or know that they're spoiling themselves by reading it)-

Ok, so there's a pair of items that can be found in the rooms before the library (assuming that people go through the Front Door), referred to as The Eyes of the Child. They are painted green eyes, about life size, that were torn from a canvas, one is found in the living room, and the other in the library. If someone has them when they walk into the Gallery, The Curator appears and will discuss the paintings in the room if asked about them, including one of a child, with the eyes torn out of the painting. The Curator won't directly ask for the eyes, but if someone has them, they will make pointed comments about how nice it would be if the child had their eyes back. The person carrying the eyes of the child can offer them, and The Curator will ask them "would you like to see with the eyes of a child?" and if asked to elaborate, will only explain "wouldn't you like to see more than anyone else?" If the PC takes them up on the offer, they have to give The Curator something in addition to returning the eyes, just something of any kind of value, and the more attractive the item is to The Curator, the better. If they do so, The Curator will hold the painted eyes up to those of the PC making the deal, and transform their eyes to look like those of the painting, after which point that person can see, and even interact with, things that are otherwise invisible or even non-existent in the House, such as a gargoyle in the library that can point the most direct path to things and places in the House, or an elevator door in the area that leads to the Gallery.

It's not ground breaking, I don't think, but I like it.

The Gatekeeper
One of the first exits the PCs can find (again, assuming they enter through the Front Door), here they find a figure that's kind of out of one of Guillermo Del Toro's more metaphysical movies, The Gatekeeper, as well as The Doorman (who can also be found in The Cellar, by someone who has The Eyes of a Child)-

The Gatekeeper

The Doorman

The Gatekeeper will ask the PCs a series of questions, but say nothing else, other than to get out if they answer no lie to them. If they have the appropriate key, they can insert it into the Doorman's chest and open a door to escape the House.

There's a catch, however, in that the Gatekeeper demands a toll.

The toll is, perhaps unsurprisingly to the genre savvy, what or who one loves most. Only one PC has to pay this price for the whole group to escape, but someone has to. If they tell the Gatekeeper a true answer, then the object of their love appears, and is destroyed by the Gatekeeper. A person or animal is killed, an object or class of object (such as "gold"), even one in the answerer's possession, in which case it appears in the Gatekeeper's hands, is destroyed, and if the answerer says they love an abstract concept, then an symbol of that concept appears and is destroyed.

The kind of cool thing is in the case of less definite answers. A PC who loves a class of object, say "gold," more than anything else can never again possess that thing, feeling burning pain if they try to do so. If they love an abstract concept more than anything, then that concept can never again enter their life. A person who treasures justice more than anything else is doomed to a life of injustice and oppression, one who treasures fame will forever be overlooked, or, perhaps at "best," infamous.

If the answerer lies to The Gatekeeper, then they're told to get out, and the Gatekeeper will never allow them to pass again (though they could, hypothetically, slay The Gatekeeper)

The Studio
I suppose the big thing with this room is that it gives the PCs another potential exit, but there's an entity here and a couple of sort of magical items that are kind of cool-

On the exit- If a painting is made on one of the blank canvasses here depicting one or more of the PCs, and then hung in the Gallery, then whoever is depicted can use that painting as an entrance to and exit from the House.

There are a couple of spooky paintings here that if taken to the right area of the House, grant special bonuses. One depicts a beheaded priest, fountaining blood, overseeing some religious ritual for skeletons.

If taken to the right place, all PCs present fully heal, and get a Boon (ie, Advantage) on actions until they next sleep.

The other painting shows a twisted bare tree emerging from the back of a wolf in a graveyard, with a stained glass triptych behind it, and if taken to the right place earns the PCs the ability to call on this wolf once to immediately slay any corporeal target of Rating 9 or less, giving them a sort of freebie.

But what's really cool here, other than the paintings just being cool paintings, is The Duplicate. A formless, invisible force of creative energy that wants to create itself--by copying one of the PCs. It can copy appearance, mundane equipment, and voice, but to copy memories and personality and such, it must be given them or steal them from the PC in question. And if it gets those things, the original PC is reduced to a catatonic state, and the Duplicate steps out of a canvas.

...and then the Player just plays the Duplicate. Because the Duplicate is their PC for all intents and purposes, save that it is aware that it is a duplicate. If the Duplicate is slain--either in the House or outside it--it is reduced to a smear of paint and the original PC regains their memories et al.

Which could be an issue if the party has since left the House.

To make matters worse, however, if the duplicated character was previously possessed by an entity called The Lurker, the Lurker does not go with their memories. It stays in the original body, and can then control it, meaning that, potentially, the party sees one of their number collapse as another them emerges from a painting, then the original rises and insists they're the real one--and they're not. And if the Lurkered-Original is slain, then the Duplicate dies later, then that character is just gone. Oh, but the Lurker doesn't die with the host body, and now it's just roaming around the House, not visible.

If the Lurker is in the House, having been let in in the Foyer, but not able to possess the person who did so, then it will happily possess the catatonic original after the party leaves the Studio.

The Studio is cool. I might steal it whole cloth for other games I run.

I think I've read through roughly a third of the 72 rooms, so. I'll be back with a new post later.

[Prak]

I'm back to reading through rooms, and have gone through another six rooms at this point, with... very little worth commenting on.

I've read through something like 30 rooms total, out of 72, and I've found things worth commenting on here in five of them.

I'm not saying that's a complete condemnation of the module design, or that the module will be a complete snooze that no one should bother with. Because I'm genuinely only talking about things that I find really interesting, or am just so against that I want to point out they are present.

But. It's not great. Out of the not-quite-half that I've read, a sixth of those rooms are worth commenting on. So, if that ratio holds, there will be about 12-15 rooms with something particularly noteworthy in them.

And, like, "not worth commenting on" includes a Japanese shoin, with an old radio in it, that a child speaks to you through to offer some advice, and you get attacked by a murder woman, and a subterranean chapel to an unnamed god. Like. There are some rooms here that it's kind of interesting for them to exist in the House, but the way they're used is just... not super interesting. There are events that will engage the players. But only in the way that you are engaged by some one driving like an idiot on the freeway in front of you. They'll catch your attention, make you act in response to them, but it's not like you're going to tell all your friends about the guy in the unremarkable car who's in such a hurry that they're swerving around people already going the speed limit plus five. So, sure, my bar is sort of high? But not that high.

Oh wait, there's a room called The Ravendream a big lounge that looks like it's from a business, not a house (intentionally so), where you'll meet a guy who is made of ravens, and wants to take a dream from you. And if you don't, he'll attack you, and if you do, he'll take it and in return you can just drive away the Brother entity when he appears. Like, that's actually sort of cool. Just not enough that I felt it was worth bringing up.

The Greenhouse
Figures I'd find something worth commenting on two rooms after I said all that.

Ok, so in the Greenhouse, the party finds a skeleton overgrown with plants, and it's bones look wrong. Like ribs bending the wrong way, a hole in the skull that doesn't seem to be the result of trauma, hand bones emerging from the sternum wrong. And basically if they don't leave immediately, instead sticking around to search more, they get attacked by the vine that caused that wrongness.

The vine attacks by surprise, and turns its victim's body to a gelatin-like softness for just long enough for it to plunge inside. No, literally, just that long. So the victim might fuck themselves up by moving in reaction, not realizing their body is basically gelatin, and wind up with their arm stuck in their torso, or their weapon stuck in their hand when their flesh quickly returns to normal. Or two victims might get stuck together, their limbs fused inside each other. There's multiple automatic wound attacks in this area, you *can* make a roll to avoid sticking your hand through your torso, but overall, if the party's average rating is too low, somebody's gonna die or wind up super fucked up here.

And that's really what I'm remarking on here. There's quite a few things in this module that can just fuck you up or flat out kill you with little to no warning if you're not a high enough rating. And sure, there's that little guide about how Rating 1-2s should run from pretty much any threat, 3-6s will be challenged, and above that, you can go toe to toe with threats here.

But would we accept that from any other module? Would we accept a module that doesn't have a "this was written for a party of n level" and instead says "n level characters should flee from literally any threat here, x level characters are going to have a rough time, and y level characters can probably stand and fight?"

Not really. Not unless it was super up front, and even then, it's basically saying "don't run this for n level characters."

I've been thinking as I go through this about whether I want to use the House system to run it (two of my players have said they'd be cool with that), convert the threats to d20 (there are actually a lot fewer "creatures" in the House than I expected, and more things that are effectively traps, so this is actually reasonably doable), or use it as a jumping off point to write my own thing. And I'm just reminded of when I looked at the original Tomb of Horrors in a desire to run a classic deathtrap dungeon, and the constant "the rules can fuck off" nature of the things that make that actually hard just completely turned me off to the point that I said fuck it and wrote my own dungeon. This isn't as bad, because there is an explicit system, albeit a very light one, but there are still quite a few places where the module just says "fuck your puny mundane human, you gonna die, son!"

And... I could convert this into d20, and do a bit of mathing to figure out what a Rating 8 threat should be for my party to be legitimately challenged but still have some chance of overcoming it, or whatever, but... I'm honestly not sure I think it's worth it.

The Back Rooms
Monte has an homage to the creepypasta The Back Rooms in the House. It's unmapped, because it's basically unmappable, as it's an endless* stretch of repeating beige-carpeted, yellow-wallpapered rooms. And I remark on this because... It seems like a bad idea in a tabletop RPG (or virtual tabletop RPG as the case may be). In a video game, you'll see stuff like this and it's basically "if you do the right sequence of rooms, you get out," or "if you have the right magic item, you can actually get through this maze." In a story, it's not really important that one can't get out of the endless maze, because you're reading the story of how a person trapped within reacts. But the way it's handled here is "you can wander, track time rather than locations. If you want to get out, you have to make very hard checks to get on the right track once a day, and continue doing so for as many days as you've previously spent there." There's a couple of journal pages that can be found, and you might get to "the ocean" where the rooms turn into more caverns, before they find an actual ocean. They might run into an entity called The Smiling Man, who is basically nightmare Ben Shapiro (ok, I just wanted to take a stab at Shapiro. The Smiling Man is short, smiles with a fanged toothy grin, and if you encounter him in another room he traps one PC in an exitless room for unknowable time, whispering unsavory things to them, before returning them to the very instant they were taken. And given who I am, I would be very tempted to play that up as "malevolent Ben Shapiro captures you"). He's a Rating 9 entity, meaning that he very well could kill one or more PCs here. Though I should say that a lot of Entities in the House do not pursue if you flee. Some do.

There's a lot of talk in the GM's Guide about how Harlock came down here, to the Ocean, and set off across it to find the Original House, but there's nothing here for if the PCs decide they want to venture out over the Ocean. I think the Original House is found another way.

The Master Bedroom
This room is in the Amator section of the House, the section linked to an entity that represents jealous possessive romantic relationships. It's where you start to really learn more about Philip Harlock. In this room, if the House acts and the Lover entity shows up, one of the characters is essentially cursed with autofailure. The Lover is invisible and immaterial, and in this room it will pick a character and follow them, causing them to fail every roll they make (no save against this, it just happens), and after a few failures, The Lover will whisper to them, entreating them to stay with the entity in the House forever. If they refuse to promise that, they get to resist a mental attack, with failure indicating that they do not throw off this autofailure effect, and if they succeed, they do. If they don't throw off the effect, then the Lover will whisper to them again later, to the same effect. If the character does promise to never leave, the autofailure curse ends, and nothing else happens, until they try to leave the House, at which point they have to roll to resist a mental attack.

Remember that thing with the unbreakable windows? And how I don't like arbitrary restrictions? I hate arbitrary curses that say you fail every roll no matter what even more. The fact that you can end this effect by rolling to resist (and that roll will not autofail) or making a promise you can later break does redeem this to some extent for me, but I still don't like it.

The Psychomanteum
Wow, that's two rooms in a row with something I want to talk about. Damn.

Here the PCs meet a ghost, who isn't connected to the House in any way, just a ghostly dude who found an open door in reality and has been chilling here waiting for people to come by. At which point he will try to possess one of them.

So... there's this dude. There's the Lurker, found in the Foyer, and there's a haunted dress in the Sewing Room. That is three different entities that will try to possess PCs, and I swear I'm forgetting something. And that's not counting The Duplicate, who... is technically doing something *like* possession, but if it succeeds, the player just takes the role of the Duplicate and their PC is now identical to before, save for knowing they're a copy. But then there are also two(?) effects which can reduce a character to absolute meaninglessness, erasing everything remarkable about them, and essentially killing them off without literally killing them, just erasing them as a person and leaving a living body with no will to do anything. Oh, and in the courtyard, you might just get grabbed by a giant dark hand and yeeted out of the House, to be discovered unconscious later, if your buddies make it out.

So, it's entirely possible for a small party to all get possessed. A standard four or five person party could have two characters reduced to meaninglessness, and the rest possessed. Plus there are some threats that have a good chance of just flat killing a PC.

The Darkest House is incredibly fucking deadly, and your PC might not even die, they might just be rendered unplayable. And, like... Ok. It's not as bad as Tomb of Horrors with it's "fuck the rules" mentality of creating difficulty (altho TDH also has places where you have to do something you could easily never think to do in order to advance, a fact which is only saved by the fact that it is not a linear adventure), because it *does* (broadly) play by it's system. But... iunno. The fact that your entire party could wind up possessed by different entities, or some people trapped, while others die, and others get possessed, and maybe someone got yeeted out, and doesn't know that their friends are now all dead, possessed or trapped? just... Fuck sake, Monte.

Which, now that I've read through all the rooms, is actually a pretty fitting start of concluding this review. The House is fucking deadly, unless you're bringing in a character that its system deems a Rating, like, 7 or more. Keep in mind that you automatically fail any task with a rating six or more points above your rating for that thing, so if you're bringing in low-level adventurers or inexperienced investigators or whatever, you completely fail to attack or defend against the deadliest entities and effects in the House, while they probably auto succeed on hitting and damaging you. You can't sleep in the House without suffering mental assault, save for a couple of safe rooms, and while there are potions and such that will recover wounds, and the very last room I read has an entity that you can barter with who will, in effect, reduce a wound's rating if you ask for healing, and a room before that has a fountain which will heal one wound for each PC, you're definitely playing Sisyphus here.

What do I think of it overall? Well, I think I will probably run it as its own thing on occasion. If my usual group can get together online sometime soon, I'll run two of my closest friends through, and I could definitely see doing it as a Halloween game, either standalone or as a diversion one shot from your usual game (could be interesting to have the PCs from your usual game stuck in the House in their dreams, when they sleep, then the goal isn't so much getting out of the House, but getting free of the nightmares).

But I don't think I'm going to use it in the game I'm currently running. I think it's interesting overall, but that using it with D&D characters just creates more issues to address than I'm willing to deal with at the moment. Also... the theme of the House, relationships gone twisted and wrong, is just... not something I want to address in the way it does in my D&D game. So, to that end, I think it will be more inspiration than something I plug in directly.

There are some things worth taking away. I particularly like the Studio and the Gallery, and maybe that's just because I'm an art nerd. But the story overall doesn't much resonate with me, and I think I'd rather do my own haunted house, influenced by this style of haunted house, than to directly use it.

I do need to correct something- I backed the kickstarter for a more reasonable $45, not $80. I don't regret backing it (especially for $45), though I do kinda wish that I had backed for $85, since that includes more material that will be exclusive to backers of that level. ...but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to find that material through certain nautical means of a dubious nature when it's actually done (to be released later this summer, ostensibly). Also there's the question of whether I will even consider that material worth an extra $40 when it comes out. Which is not certain in the slightest.

Fulfilment was done through Monte's website's store, but it seems that it isn't publicly available at the moment (it doesn't show up in a search). Fulfilment used a coupon code that added the product to the cart and applied a discount, so it looks like it will retail for $45, but that might change when it's publicly available. I would expect it to not retail for more than $55 at the most, and I think that's a stretch. If you want to check it out for yourself, well, it's about the price of a date at the movies (with snacks), so it might be worth a look if you have the disposable income. It does work for PC and Mac, dunno about other OSes. Also, I would not be surprised if it shows up for those dubious nautical means within a month or so.
Edit: The Darkest House is now up for sale on Monte's site and Drive thru, for $45.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

Thanks for the review Prak.

Despite being deeply skeptical of anything that that calls itself system agnostic or otherwise brags it can be run in multiple systems... I have to admit I'm disappointed. A haunted house is such a great concept, but the execution is just... Well... Monte Cook.

Which is a shame, because The Darkest House has some neat ideas. The arbitrary railroading is probably the worst part, but I don't know how you could run an adventure that claims to supports both Call of Cthulhu and D&D characters. And after reading this review, I see that answer is... You really can't.

[Sir Neil]

If the answerer lies to The Gatekeeper, then they're told to get out, and the Gatekeeper will never allow them to pass....

I couldn't parse this bit. They try to leave, but if they lie about payment they're told to get out. Does he warp them out for lying, is this an error loop, or something else?

[Prak]

If the answerer lies to The Gatekeeper, then they're told to get out, and the Gatekeeper will never allow them to pass....

I couldn't parse this bit. They try to leave, but if they lie about payment they're told to get out. Does he warp them out for lying, is this an error loop, or something else?

The Gatekeeper is in a specific room, when characters enter, they demand a toll, asking one character to say what they love most. If the character lies, the Gatekeeper refuses to let them use the Doorman to leave and tells them to get out (of the room).

The Doorman can also be found in the cellar, with no Gatekeeper demanding a toll, you just need the right key and the thought "I wonder if this key I found does something of I stick it in the lock on this dude's head..."

Note- there's like ten different keys in TDH

[Sir Neil]

Okay, got it now.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Is there any clear advantage to having this thing's micro-system be level based? I can't imagine you're going to run a campaign in one haunted house that's long enough to level up more than maybe once. The conversion would be way the hell easier and less likely to create unexpectedly underpowered characters if all you had to do was write down your character's two biggest strengths and one biggest weakness or something.

[Prak]

I mean... That's sort of how it works anyway? The idea is that you have a single overall rating, which is added to most rolls, and then you maybe have a few things that your are particularly good or bad at. I suppose it could also have been set up such that instead of giving people an overall rating, the default difficulty is modified, but that's needlessly complicated when you could just say "turn the characters' level into a rating from 1 to 10."

Like, lets say you have a tenth level D&D rogue. That just converts over to a Rating 5 character that has a +6 to stealth rolls and advantage on damage when they're attacking stealthily." There's genuinely very little to making or converting a character. Like, even if the party has a wizard, a rogue, a ranger and a fighter, and you might think the fighter is underpowered because of their lack of special things to translate, then you can just say "ok, Fightar Man gets a boost on all attack and defense rolls" while everyone else has their own more specialized specific ratings.

[WalkTheDin0saur]

Yeah I figured it was something like that. What I'm saying is why not have every PC be a Rating 5 TDH character regardless of what level they were in D&D or how many points they had in GURPS Cybermesopotamia or wtfever. Just bring everyone in at whatever rating the module is balanced around.

[Prak]

Because Monte has never had an idea that he stopped to examine before committing it to paper and selling it.