• 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).

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

Start here.

And then do this bit.