[Haunted House] Filmography

I’m going to (re)watch to following movies to inspire my design of Haunted House:

• The Haunting (1963)
• House on Haunted Hill (1959)
• The Innocents (1961)
• Legend of Hell House (1973)
• The Uninvited (1944)
• Watcher in the Woods (1981)
• The Changeling (1980)
• The Old Dark House (1932)
• The Cat and the Canary (1927)
• The Cat and the Canary (1939)
• Mansion of the Doomed (1976)
• 13 Ghosts (1960)
• The Sentinel (1977)
• Burnt Offerings (1976)
• The Woman in Black (1989)

I’m planning on taking copious notes on these movies, and perhaps even translating them into Haunted House (the rpg) terms.

I’m open to suggestions, but I’d like to keep them before 1980 (for the most part) and leave out the really obvious ones (like House, Amityville Horror, et ctera).

 

[Haunted House] Design Goals

I want Sarah to play Haunted House, so it must be competitive, and the fiction it produces must be brutal.

I want Matt to play Haunted House, so the game text must weigh in at under 20 pages. The mechanic has to be simple, but really clever.

I want to play Haunted House, so there can’t be a lot of prep work. Also, it has to successfully emulate those crappy old black and white movies that I love so dearly…without a lot of prep work.

I want people to pick up the book for the first time, read for 10 or 15 minutes, and hit the table running with dice flying.

I’m going to give the designing a break for a little while, and watch a lot of haunted house movies and read a lot of haunted house stories. As I’m watching, I’m going to take notes about how I could recreate that kind of story in the game.

 

Haunted House cover

I have more fun if I’m designing things as I go. Here’s a cover I worked on last night. I think it has the appropriate early 1960s B-movie feel.

 

How The House does things

I’ve really simplified things this week, and I’m pretty happy with the way things are working out.

The House has three skills: Harm, Scare, and Possess.

Each (game) hour, The House gets to add 1 die to one of those skills. So the first hour, you’d be rolling 1 die for Harm, and the second hour, you could either roll 2 dice for Harm or 1 for Harm and 1 for Scare or Possess.

I’m thinking that The House gets to make one attack per scene, since it’s highly abstracted and will be narrated after the roll. I’m not sure about this, and I may have to wait until playtesting to see exactly what kind of balance I need.

Let’s say that Victor has walked into the basement during the second hour. The House decides to try to Harm him by having him step on a rusty nail and puts another die into her Harm skill. The House rolls Harm vs Victor’s Observant. If Victor loses, he takes damage to his Physical Endurance equal to the margin of failure.

 

[Haunted House] Status Update

I haven’t been posting here because I’ve been working on the playtest document. I’ve changed a few of the trait names and all of the skill names to be more tasty and lighthearted, and added lots of new props, et cetera. Hopefully I’ll have something ready to give a select group of folks a pdf by the end of this weekend. If not, I’m aiming for early next week. I’ll probably be pretty quiet through the weekend since I’ll be working my ass off to get this done.

 

[Haunted House] How Intruders do things

Jenny is trying to convince Alexander to accompany her to the basement. Alexander doesn’t want to go.

Jenny rolls her Allure, which is 5 dice, versus Alexander’s Will, which is 3 dice.

Here are different ways the dice might work:

1) You actually don’t roll different dice at all, but add the number to a single d6. If Alexander gets the lower number, he does what Jenny wants and loses a point from his Psychological Endurance. If Alexander gets the higher number, he tells Jenny to shove off and gains a point to his Psychological Endurance.

2) You roll a number of d6s, but count any odd numbers as successes. The player with the highest number of successes wins. If Alexander lost he would lose as many points from his Psychological Endurance as his margin of failure, and the opposite of that if he won.

3) Sorcerer style. You roll a number of dice, and count the number of higher dice the winner has. Matches cancel each other out. Effects as in 2.

Which do you like best? Why?

 

[Haunted House] I feel a mind map coming on

I’ve had so many great suggestions for Haunted House that I’m going to have to get a big sheet of paper and Mind Map them before I lose track of them all.

For all you game designers and writers out there: if you aren’t already mind mapping in some form, you should look into it. It’s a great way to learn, generate, organize, and process information quickly.

 

[Haunted House] Player goals and win conditions

There are a couple of ways the game can go:

1) One player controls The House, and wins the game if she kills or drives insane all of the Intruders. The players win if they survive until daybreak. The problem with this is that there can be more than one winner.

2) Control of The House rotates among players. Each player defines a goal at character creation, and that goal is kneaded by the group into an acceptable win condition. The player has to not only drive his character to the win condition, but must use his character or The House to keep the other characters from getting theirs, or destroying them if they do.

 

Moral Support

I just want to take a moment to thank Matt Jackson (aka Snikle), John Lammers (aka John Lammers), and my beautiful and skilled (as artists, we consider the concept of talent insulting) wife Sarah for supporting me in all of my creative endeavors, be they game design, music, or art.

It’s a great feeling when you feel you have the respect and support of people whose hard work you respect and believe in as well.

 

[Haunted House] Make Some Characters!

I need to make sure my character creation makes sense. If I could get some folks to make some characters for me, that would be awesome! Post them as a comment.

If anything seems stupid, or you have a better idea for something, let me know.

Start here.

And then do this bit.