North Texas RPG Con Event: House on Crane Hill
Welcome to Delarosa Manor. Some houses were born evil…
If you can make it to the North Texas RPG Convention on Saturday, June 3, I’ll be running a game of Gods & Monsters. The event is “House on Crane Hill”. As I write this, there are three earlybird tickets available, and there will be four free tickets available on April 15 at midnight.
Assuming you have an account on the NTRPGC sign-up site and are logged in, here’s the event page.
The adventure will use pre-gens at first level. Bring dice, pencils, and your Barrett’s Electromagnetic Field Generator.
Crane House is an idea I’ve been working on for quite a while now. Tell me if you’ve heard this story: a hand-selected research group is chosen to spend a week investigating an abandoned house known for its supernatural activities. But this is no ordinary haunting.
No living organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
Thus Shirley Jackson• began The Haunting of Hill House•. Many movies and books about malleable haunted houses and malleable realities have inspired this adventure. The first such story I read was in issues 34 to 37 of Werewolf by Night in Marcosa House (available in Essential Werewolf by Night, volume 2•). Doug Moench’s Marcosa House was heavily influenced by Richard Matheson’s• Hell House• (and the movie, The Legend of Hell House•). Matheson, along with half the works listed here, was inspired by The Haunting of Hill House• (which became the 1963 Robert Wise film, The Haunting•).
Later, in college, I saw Phantasm•, which was very influential on movies of this type. Stephen King has written several evil buildings, including The Shining• (Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation• is also inspirational), the short story 1408• (made into a great movie with John Cusack), and the Rose Red• TV movie. There’s also A Nightmare on Elm Street•. While it isn’t set in an evil building, Elm Street captures the fluid reality inside these evil houses.
Several years ago I toured the Winchester house in California, an odd bit of architecture which to some degree inspired Rose Red•. There have been attempts at other-worldly houses in adventure gaming, including the sample adventure in Ron Edwards’s Sorcerer, the Judges Guild adventure Tegel Manor, and the D&D adventure Palace of the Silver Princess. But I think this will be a unique and very old-school take on the genre.
So if you’re looking for a haunted house adventure this June, sign up now!
North Texas RPG Con
- House on Crane Hill NTRPGC Event at North Texas RPG Con
- “Some Houses are Born Evil. Delarosa Manor is one. A mashup of Hill House, Phantasm, and more.”
- North Texas RPG Con
- “The NTRPG Con focuses on old-school Dungeons & Dragons gaming (OD&D, 1E, 2E, or Basic/Expert) as well as any pre-1999 type of RPG produced by the classic gaming companies of the 70s and 80s (TSR, Chaosium, FGU, FASA, GDW, etc). We also support retro-clone or simulacrum type gaming that copies the old style of RPGs (Swords & Wizardry, Castles & Crusades, and others).”
books
- Essential Werewolf by Night, Vol. 2• (comic book)
- Collecting Werewolf by Night #21-43 and a few others, this contains the Belaric Marcosa storyline from issues 34-37.
- The Haunting of Hill House•: Shirley Jackson (paperback)
- Hill House has become the prototypical haunted house, and yet the original is still the most beautiful.
- Hell House•: Richard Matheson (paperback)
- The original novel, Hell House, is better as both a haunted house story and a psychological horror story than the movie was; the bland science of the movie, while it doesn’t make much more sense, is less bland and plays a bigger part in the book.
- Horror Houses
- What to do when your house hates you? These movies will help you relate.
- The Shining•: Stephen King (paperback)
- One of Stephen King’s more famous haunted house stories, a very creepy descent into madness.
movies
- 1408• (DVD)
- John Cusack did a great job holding this one-room script together; note that there’s a two-disc version of this movie with a director’s cut, but the theatrical version was so well cut that I can’t imagine an extended version doing anything but lessening the movie.
- The Haunting• (DVD)
- The movie plays up Eleanor Vance’s mother’s death, and plays down her etherealness, but this is a great translation of an untranslatable book to movie.
- The Legend of Hell House• (DVD)
- A weird sci-fi-horror, fun, but not up to the quality of its ancestor.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street•
- One of the best horror movies of my generation, up there with “Halloween” in influence, if not in execution, and seemingly heavily influenced by it.
- Phantasm• (DVD)
- Anchor Bay does a decent enough job pulling together a few extras, such as interviews with the Tall Man and Jody, a nice commentary track, and footage from a convention panel.
- Rose Red• (DVD)
- This high-powered take on The Haunting of Hill House was a lot of fun to watch, and sported a surprisingly good cast.
- The Shining• (DVD)
- Back in the old days few people could do a Stephen King novel justice—including Stephen King. Stanley Kubrick did a great job with The Shining, and Jack Nicholson provided some iconic scenes (as did Danny Lloyd).
More North Texas RPG Con
- Kolchak’s Cold January at North Texas 2024
- I’ll be running another Kolchak: The Night Stalker game at North Texas in 2024, again using the Daredevils rules from Fantasy Games Unlimited. We finally move into 1977 for the great Chicago freeze!
- Flashing Blades at NTRPGC 2024
- I’ll be running a game of Flashing Blades on Wednesday at North Texas 2024.
- A Kolchak Christmas at North Texas 2023
- I’ll be running another Kolchak: The Night Stalker game at North Texas in 2023, again using the Daredevils rules from Fantasy Games Unlimited.
- Kolchak is back, baby! At North Texas 2022
- I’ll be running another Kolchak: The Night Stalker game at North Texas in 2022, again using the Daredevils rules from Fantasy Games Unlimited.
- Daredevils Detailed Action Time and Action Options Cube
- The Fantasy Games Unlimited game Daredevils, from 1982, has a very interesting combat turn system. Plus, an Action-Option cube you can assemble yourself!
- Four more pages with the topic North Texas RPG Con, and other related pages
“He fashioned Hell for the inquisitive.”