The Mansion Under the Ghost Lake
Halloween is a rich occasion for gaming. It is a great time to start a vaguely spooky-themed adventure, whether it is Luka Rejec’s Witchburner or Ravenloft (it “isn’t wholly without virtues” - Grognardia). You have four weekends of October left, which gives you ample opportunity to run a spooky game! In case you are running out of games with spooky vibes, this blog post will present a spooky adventure for you to flesh out and adapt at your table. This adventure draws a bit from my own history of growing up on an absolutely haunted lake. This is a blog post, not a downloadable adventure on itch-dot-io, so I am only sketching out an adventure scenario for you. Some level of assembly may be required. I’ll also be providing absolutely unnecessary commentary throughout.
This isn’t necessarily a horror adventure. I think Halloween adventures come in two varieties: (1) horror adventures that aim to evoke the same reactions in players as horror movies do in an audience and (2) spooky adventures that use horror tropes as dressing, but the tone is different. Spooky adventures don’t have to fully sap the tropes of their horror potential by, for instance, including Count Dracula bobbing for apples, but it does have a more playful tone than horror adventures. The tone I attempt to capture in a spooky adventure is that of a good adventure of Scooby-Doo (particularly, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, a seasonal favorite of mine).
Adventure Hook
Starting a spooky adventure with a trope is an effective signal to players. My favorite trope, and one that I would love to lay out in my own last will and testament, is that of learning a distant relative has died, left you a fortune, but conditioned on you spending a night in their cursed mansion. And thus begins The Mansion Under the Ghost Lake. One of the player-characters receives word that their estranged great-grand uncle has met a mysterious end (it could also be more than one player—perhaps this is how they learn that they are distantly related!). But this relative was wealthy beyond belief. As their last living heir, they have bequeathed their fortune to the player-character. Though, as the lawyer representing the estate (“Dr. Augustus Landrieu, Esquire”) informs the player-characters, a quirk of local law has it that they must occupy the relative’s mansion within one month of the departed’s demise. And there isn’t much time! Dr. Landrieu apologizes for the delay, but the relative actually passed three weeks hence. By way of apology, he offers to accompany them to the small town that houses the relative’s outrageous fortune.
The Town
Halloween adventures, both spooky and horror, seem to work best when the player-characters are out of their element, typically in a small town that is distrustful of outsiders and riddled with secrets. Just so, this adventure presumes the adventurers are fish out of water. The relative’s estate is located in a small but marginally prosperous fishing town that has grown up along a large, artificial lake created nearly fifty years ago by damming a mighty river. Other than fish, the town also produces hard liquor albeit illicitly. The local church has a powerful presence and considers drinking as cardinal of a sin as gambling or dancing. The dearly departed wasn’t disliked in the community so much as essentially unknown. A recluse in life, your great-grand uncle (twice removed) rarely left his decadent but decaying mansion. Most of the time, leaving the mansion was all but impossible. The mansion predates the small town and belongs to an altogether different town from an altogether different time. Your great-great-grand uncle built the mansion atop a high hill overlooking a quaint and sleepy village. But, due to a nearby city clamoring for a ready reservoir of water, it was decided that the village in the valley was to be the site of a new lake. The families were displaced, and the family cemeteries were disinterred to make way for the lake. A whole village lays beneath the murky depths now. The mansion does too, except during droughts. Your great-grand uncle lived his whole life in a watertight mansion beneath a ghost lake, leaving only during the rare droughts. Naturally, the townsfolk are somewhat haunted by his infrequent presence and, in their own quiet ways, happy to be rid of the gaunt, pale figure that would greet them once or twice every decade before returning to his home on the hill-turned-island.
Factions
Factions provide a deep, rich flavor for an adventure. The Mansion Under the Ghost Lake, therefore, must have factions. Some of these are primarily located in the town, others in the mansion, some in both.
The Cousins. Dr. Landrieu was late in informing the player-characters of their great-grand uncle’s demise because they were not the first relatives to whom he had to break the news. A rival group of adventurers has traveled to the mansion, and at least one of them is a distant relative (sixth cousin, thrice removed) to the player-character(s) to whom the deceased is an uncle. They were given the same information as the player-characters. I would make the cousin in this rival party a direct foil of whichever player-character is related to the deceased.
The Landlady. Madame d’Avengale is the richest woman in town and owns almost every piece of land that can be bought. Everyone in town, the church included, pays her rent, which she sets as she sees fit in her sole and capricious discretion. She has tried and true tactics for the acquisition of land: fear and deception. The Madame is an effective rumor-monger and knows how superstitious the townsfolk can be. Once she convinces people a place is haunted, its market price plunges. And when it plunges, d’Avengale swoops. She has no friends in town, except of course her cat, Caustello, and her personal attorney, none other than Dr. Augustus Landrieu, Esquire. There is a plot of land she does not yet own, but her attorney has assured her that, if the remaining heirs die in the mansion, it won’t go for very much at auction. She has given Dr. Landrieu a command: see to it that the heirs don’t last one night.
The Bootleggers. The moonshiners of the town have been harassed by law enforcement and devout members of the church at every turn. But their trade sure is profitable. They distill enough moonshine to keep the entire region in a happy stupor. And their financial success has allowed their members to fend off Madame d’Avengale’s efforts to buy their land. As such, they are the only townsfolk not paying her rent. But the bootleggers have fallen on hard times after the arrest of their leader and the destruction of their base of operations. In search of a new locale far from authorities, they found the old mansion had resurfaced on account of this year’s drought. A few good ole moonshiners have made their way via rowboat to scout the place.
The Widow. Your great-grand uncle was no bachelor, but neither was he happily married. He referred to his wife only as “the bride” and she hardly referred to him at all. They were not close, except in their proximity in the mansion and by blood relation (they were second cousins, once removed). When it came time to draft a last will and testament, she was purposely omitted. She and your great-grand uncle shared the mansion but drew a line down the center. He resided in the eastern half and she in the west. Compared to his wife, your great-grand uncle was practically a social butterfly. No one outside the mansion itself knows of her existence, much less of their estrangement. The widow herself does not even know she is newly widowed—she hasn’t ventured to that side of the mansion in several decades. Her primary companions are the mansion’s staff; chief among them is the groundskeeper, a gloomy figure with a hunched back that spends most his time digging shallow graves in the backyard. He calls it “gardening.”
The Lake
The lake is a great and ominous danger surrounding the mansion. The locals tell tales of catfish bigger than you or me, that are known to gobble up live chickens like they were appetizers for a yet-unserved main course. But the fish aren’t the only danger in the lake. The lake is well and truly haunted. Spirits from the family graves that make up the lakebed remain restless. Some townsfolk report being pulled under by unseen hands. Others report a woman in a flowing gown that walks atop the water on dark, misty mornings, calling out a siren’s song. Still others swap tales of the “fishboy” that lives out the woods near the shore and whose head is that of a catfish and body is that of a man. All are, of course, entirely true. And verifiable. The player-characters must cross the lake to get to the mansion’s island, so perhaps they’ll learn for themselves. “Perhaps y’all should wait till the fog clears up?” a local may suggest, but Dr. Landrieu, tapping at his time piece, reminds the player-characters not to dilly-dally. As they cross the fog-blanketed lake, tolling church bells seem to ring from beneath the water. Poking their heads into the water to try to see what lies below isn’t advisable. The water is pitch black this time of year anyway.
The Mansion
I like for time to matter just as much as space in a site-based adventure, such as a dungeon crawl. This can of course be managed via tracking turns and adding risk such as with an overloaded encounter die, but I like for the referee to have some countdowns in mind as well. In this adventure, there is one countdown that is automatic and another that is triggered. The first is how long until the mansion is underwater again. As soon as the player-characters set foot on the island, it begins to rain, the first rainfall all year according to the locals. And it won’t stop until the mansion is underwater. If the player-characters aren’t out of the mansion by the stroke of midnight in three days’ time, they’ll be trapped in it, deep underwater, just like their great-grand uncle was all those years. Each day has a different level of flooding. The first day, rain can be heard pounding the roof and seen from outside the windows. On the second day, the windows on the first floor show that the first floor is submerged. On the third day, the water seems to rise inch by inch every few minutes until, by midnight, all three stories of the mansion are underwater.
The second countdown is triggered by player action. One of the rooms is a sitting room with walls adorned with idyllic scenes of a peaceful village in the valley. Other than a few canapé sofas, the only major piece of decor in the room is a grandfather clock, covered in a thick layer of dust. The clock isn’t ticking and, upon inspection, it seems the pendulum is stuck by a spider’s web. Clearing the web causes the pendulum to move again, but as the clock’s hands begin moving backwards. Suddenly, it stops raining outside (though rain can still be heard in the attic), and, looking out the windows reveals that there is no longer a lake. Instead, the mansion is on a hill, surrounded by a quaint village. The world seems brighter outside, although with a faint sepia tone. If the player-characters leave the mansion while the grandfather clock is ticking, they can go into the village and interact with the locals. The referee should keep strict track of time during such excursions into the village, because it is an illusion. The player-characters have walked into the lake. After enough time has passed, tell them that they begin to feel their lungs fill with water and give them a chance to break out of the illusion and swim to the surface.
Other than that, the mansion should be a standard, three-story dungeon crawl, with vaguely spooky trappings, like zombie butlers or man-eating houseplants à la Little Shop of Horrors. This blogpost is designed more to spur ideas than to provide a fully functional mansion crawl. I recommend stealing some ideas from The Waking of Willowby Hall for a good mansion crawl, though of course making it spooky. The classic module Castle Amber also has some spooky ideas worth stealing. If you would like to really amp up the Halloweenness of this adventure, you could also add in some classic Halloween monsters. Perhaps Madame d’Avengale is a vampire, and Dr. Augustus Landrieu, Esquire is her thrall. Some of the Bootleggers might be werewolves (or werecatfish). Maybe the widow is making a new husband out of the best corpse parts she can scrounge up from the bodies that go missing on the lake and has a laboratory rivaling that of Frankenstein on her side of the mansion. All of these elements are seasoning to give the adventure a proper spooky taste, and I don’t think it is possible to over-season a Halloween adventure with spooky or even macabre elements. This is the season of spice, in fact. Happy pumpkin spice season to all who celebrate.
