It says Gods & Monsters, but that means it’s easily playable in OD&D, BX, AD&D, and probably any D&D descendant. Also available in print.

Gods & Monsters isn’t really designed for convention games; it’s designed for multi-adventure campaigns. Much of its rules are about facilitating long-term play among friends. However, it is my favorite fantasy game to run, so when I decided to run my first game at North Texas many years ago, it was my first choice of rules. I designed House on Crane Hill to play into its strengths as a game where weird things can happen and players are encouraged to utilize old-school resourcefulness to respond to them¹; and to minimize the game’s weaknesses when used for a one-shot game among strangers.

That’s also why I started the pregenerated characters with 500 experience points. It puts them just in range of advancing to second level during the game, if they use all or most of their mojo for archetypal rolls.

House on Crane Hill is heavily inspired by Shirley Jackson’s^• The Haunting of Hill House^• and the many movies and books inspired by it. That’s where the subtitle, “some houses are born evil” comes from, when Jackson’s anthropologist John Montague explains what he believes about what makes a house haunted.

“You will recall,” the doctor began, “the houses described in Leviticus as ‘leprous,’ tsaraas, or Homer’s phrase for the underworld: aidao domos, the house of Hades; I need not remind you, I think, that the concept of certain houses as unclean or forbidden—perhaps sacred—is as old as the mind of man. Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves and atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.

Montague then goes on to suggest that Hill House might be “disturbed, perhaps. Leprous. Sick.” That’s a pretty good description of Delarosa Manor in House on Crane Hill. The house was born disturbed.

Always steal from the best. You really do need to read Hill House to realize just how derivative I was with this adventure.

I covered some of these movies in Horror Houses back in 2010. That post was basically a summary of my research for this adventure. I’ve been fascinated by such haunted houses ever since reading Marv Wolfman’s wonderfully weird multipart Werewolf by Night story featuring a blatant borrowing^• of Hell House. All roads lead to Shirley Jackson^•: Hell House was itself a blatant ripoff of The Haunting of Hill House^•.

The adventure’s tagline, “curiosis fabricavit inferos” or “He fashioned Hell for the inquisitive” comes from St. Augustine’s confessions. It’s more a sly means of introducing a reference to Hell House than to any theology. Though, of course, the more “inquisitive” the characters are about exploring deeper into the woke levels of the House, the more trouble they’ll get into!

The actual divine power behind the House stems from the Night Priests of Hetae, Queen of Insects, of the True Family, a potential evil conspiracy in my own World of Highland.

Hetae is the hidden word, the queen of insects. She spreads infection, but not mundane infection; her infection eats time and space, her plagues are plagues of metal and gear. Hetae controls the creatures of nowhere. Her victims work tirelessly and thoughtlessly within her insect mesh. Some depictions of the insect mesh show it, like an ant farm, beneath the ground. In the books of the True Family, however, it is depicted as a different angle on reality, a place that can be entered with the right words in the right place, twisted in the secret angle.

As you might guess from the phrase “creatures of nowhere”, the True Family is heavily inspired by Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol; take or leave that as you will.

The goldwing harriers in the adventure are inspired by Morrison and of course by the silver spherical machine-creatures in Phantasm^• that, for some reason, I remember as golden.²

Because Crane Hill was written as a convention adventure, I assume that the adventure will get modified (as opposed to merely expanded or tightened) on the fly in response to things that don’t exist in campaign adventures, such as time pressure. I always ran it as a six-hour adventure, which seems to be just about right. There are a lot of ways to move things along in a haunted house in a manner that also provides clues as to how the characters can bring about a satisfactory ending.

“Satisfactory” can of course be as simple as escaping, escaping with the mcguffin, or bringing down the House, so to speak.

There are a lot of curtly-described rooms, and that’s not just because I’m lazy. It’s to provide the Guide (myself) with the opportunity to add more description appropriate to what the player characters have and haven’t done, and what they do or do not yet understand about the House.

Despite the time-sensitive nature of the House’s “woke count” this adventure is very much a situation rather than a timeline. The House is there; what it does depends on what the player characters do.

Unlike my other adventures, I designed this around printing on 8-½ by 11 sheets. I expected to make lots of changes every time I ran it, which meant reprinting it every time I ran it. Further, I expected to make those changes at the last minute, which meant no ordering from a printing service such as Lulu.com.

Now that I’m running Flashing Blades and Daredevils at North Texas, I don’t expect to use Crane Hill as a convention game again. The last time I ran it was 2019. So I thought it would be nice to put it online.

And what better time to release it than Halloween?

Besides making it available as a web site and download, I’ve also published a print version. It is exactly the same as the PDF.