Any ideas for a ghostmansion?

[Ravenknight]

Right.

Heres the idea. The PCs are exploring an old mansion, previously an orphanage where an evil cult used the childrens bodies to experiments involving chaositech.

Of course this means that the childrens spirits can´t find rest and are still inside the mansion. I want to get a really creepy feeling when the exploring is taking place and I´m asking You fellow EnWorlders if You have any ideas to frightning effects that the PCs can hear, see or feel..? Mind You that the childrens spirits are far to weak to be a real threat to the PCs, but they won´t know that.

 

[Drawmack]

Here's something you might find interesting, even if I did kind of lift it from a movie.

The entire place is filled with carvings of Cherub's heads. Any stone work in the place has tha faces on it. Any word work is carved with Cherub's faces. Really do it up, put them EVERYWHERE.

If the PC's are inquisitive enough they will notice oddities about the cherub's faces. maybe one is smilling while a tear rolls down it's check. Just wierd stuff like that.

At random intervals the PCs will hear childrens voices and have to roll a spot check. Eventually they should pass the spot check to realize that the mouths of the carved cherub's sync up with the voices.

The evil cult was intentionally trapping the spirits in the mansion and the carved faces are actually the physical manifestations of the trapped spirits. This way the PCs can't run roughshod through the mansion smashing stuff up or they'll hurt the kiddies. hehehehehehe

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm using the haunting presence rule from Libris Mortis and the haunting article from Dragon a year or two ago for a haunted abbey (also stemming from a very bad chaositech artifact being slipped to the abbess a long time ago). So far, creepy visions, a Murder of Crows (from Tome of Magic) and weird black ivy covering everything has everyone sufficiently creeped.

 

[Dykstrav]

The trick to get "creepy" instead of "campy" is to think subtle. What you're going for is to make the characters have to realize what they're seeing shouldn't be possible. This can be easily done without having blood running up the walls and rattling chains.

For an old orphanage, think about how the children would feel. Instead of having their ghosts congregate in some place where bad things happened to them, have them congregate in some place they were happy. That'd be creepier to me. Think about the past, how you can tell the story of the place and its people through the creey stuff.

Maybe in the dining room, where the children got to eat and chat with each other before lights out. Every night dusty bowls and spoons mysteriously appear around dinner time, lined up on the table, waiting for a portion of gruel that will never come.

People can hear children whispering in the bedrooms at night. Anyone that goes in there finds nothing and the voices stop. If they leave, the voices start again a few minutes later. The children are just acting like children, staying up past their 'bedtime.'

Have the characters spot a little girl sneaking through the orphanage at night. If she spots them, she runs away and disappears. Characters that follow her notice that her route takes her from the kitchen to a spot under a tree outside. She puts something down and goes back inside. At the base of the tree are scraps of old food long since decayed, piled on top of a small mound. If the characters dig through the soft dirt, they find a cat skeleton a few inches down. The little girl was sneaking table scraps from the kitchen at night to a stray cat that waited around outside the orphanage for her.

Little things like that make the place feel like something else "lives" there, like the characters are not alone even in an empty 10-by-10 room.

 

[Tonguez]

I like the idea of the kids being sad but friendly, most will hide but a few might actually approach the PCs.
Some might just want to be hugged - any PC that does will feel the weight of a many small cold beings cuddling into them and then black out from the con-drain (I got that idea from Enworld iirc)

others might follow the PCs around - that is until the PCs go somewhere 'bad' and the ghost start trying to block them, whispering in urgent voices 'you mustn't go there, you mustn't go there" and then a particular sound is heard approaching and the ghosts visibly flee in terror, the panic clear on ther faces.

Also I like the idea of the Mansion itself being the 'BBEG' with the orphans being trapped inside it.

 

[Solarious]

I like my version where a frankenstien-style flesh golem composed of children lies hidden somewhere, and spawns nightmare horror repesentations of their fears, terrors, hate, and imaginations. The chaositech (can anyone explain this reference to me) artifact can be the 'power source' that animates this little kid.

If you want to be twisted, tie the children directly to the pieces of their bodies used for the monster spawner. They take turns being in 'control', and one doesn't realize what all the others have done. So one moment, a little girl can be railing about all adults being evil (she had a bad experience with the pedobear), the next moment there's a nice boy who's scared of the dark (and spawns monsters related to darkness).

Alternatively, check out the 'witch' in this redention of Hansel and Gretchel. Warning, the links may be disturbing to some viewers.

 

[William Ronald]

I like the idea of the kids being sad but friendly, most will hide but a few might actually approach the PCs.
Some might just want to be hugged - any PC that does will feel the weight of a many small cold beings cuddling into them and then black out from the con-drain (I got that idea from Enworld iirc)

others might follow the PCs around - that is until the PCs go somewhere 'bad' and the ghost start trying to block them, whispering in urgent voices 'you mustn't go there, you mustn't go there" and then a particular sound is heard approaching and the ghosts visibly flee in terror, the panic clear on ther faces.

Also I like the idea of the Mansion itself being the 'BBEG' with the orphans being trapped inside it.

Perhaps the mansion itself is an entity from another plane, waiting for the requisite number of victims to return from its place or origin. Possibly the walls and doors of the masion could change appearance rapidly, unnerving the players. Perhaps the mansion could taunt the players with images, or manifest part of itself as a creature coming out of the walls, the floor or ceiling.

 

[Joël of the FoS]

Something here from an lost netbook (Haunted Sites). I've always wanted to use it. The description and atmospheric is quite cool and eerie:

Joël

---

CHILDREN IN
THE ATTIC
by Margaret L. Carter
Annapolis, Maryland

This location occupies a phantom space attached to a hundred-year-old house. This two-story structure is in good repair and appears to be an ordinary, comfortable home for anyone who decides to buy or rent it. In a small upstairs bedroom, however, a massive, heavy chest blocks a long-disused door. Upon moving the chest, anyone who investigates finds that the door is warped but not impossible to open. Opening the door reveals a walk-in closet empty of all but dust and cobwebs.
Anyone who steps inside the closet sees the back wall dissolve into mist, then change into another door, secured by a wooden bar. Yet this room lies against an outside wall; there is nowhere for the door to lead.
If this portal is unbarred and opened, the musty smell of the closet changes to the fumes of smoke. Before the investigator’s eyes, a steep, narrow stairway leads up. The house, however, has no floor above this one.
The stairs bend around a corner, continue upward, and finally end at a narrow door, small enough to force a tall person to stoop to enter.
Beyond this door, the odor of smoke becomes dense and unmistakable. The intruder hears the cries of babies and the screams of children.
Eighty years ago, the attic of the house was occupied by a young woman who practiced “baby farming,” providing shelter and food for orphaned and abandoned children under the slipshod oversight of the local town council. She accepted more children than she could adequately care for, greedy for the stipend paid by the council. She pocketed most of the money allotted for the feeding of the orphans, nourishing the infants on watered milk and the older children on cheap, meager fare. In the overcrowded, poorly supervised attic nursery, one of the toddlers stumbled into the open hearth. The fire quickly spread from his clothes to the rest of the room, blocking the exit. The “nurse” and all her charges burned to death in the destruction of the attic.
Anyone who enters the ghostly re-creation of the attic finds that the main room features a large fireplace, from which flames and smoke billow out. The rest of the attic is divided by flimsy wooden walls into several cramped rooms. The only furnishings consist of an overstuffed chair beside the hearth and straw-filled mattresses covering the floors from wall to wall. Smoke and the stench of burning flesh, hair, and cloth fill the air.
Upon stepping over the threshold, the intruder instantly becomes disoriented. He or she stumbles through the tiny rooms, with their low, slanted ceilings, unable to find the way out.
Dozens of screaming children crawl on the floor or roll on their pallets, vainly struggling to escape the flames that engulf them. All the children capable of crawling cluster around the intruder, clutching at arms, legs, and clothes. Upon being rebuffed, they clamp their teeth onto any exposed flesh they can reach. They force the intruder to drag them along in his or her escape attempt.
No attempt at extinguishing the flames has any effect. If a visitor attacks the babies, one blow from a weapon causes the infant to fall “dead” and change into a heap of bones. Within minutes, however, it reconstitutes its lifelike form and clutches onto the visitor again.
A wailing woman, with her hair and gown aflame, rushes out of the thickest cloud of smoke with an infant in her arms. She tries to give the baby to any living person she can reach. If the intruder accepts the baby, the other children stop mobbing him. He then finds himself in front of the open door to the attic stairs. As long as he carries the baby, he can successfully descend the stairs and exit through the door into the closet.
As soon as the phantom door is barred, it vanishes. The baby transforms into a charred skeleton wrapped in the disintegrating ash of swaddling rags.
If an intruder refuses to let the woman give him or her an infant to “save,” the visitor will never find the way out. The children’s clawing and biting become more painful, as if they are growing more solid. Eventually they rip the intruder to shreds. His or her mutilated body will be found in the closet, should anyone else open it in the future.
A successful exorcism by a powerful priest will reduce the woman and children to calcined bones and make the flames vanish. To make the entire haunted attic (with the stairs) disappear completely, however, a more elaborate ceremony performed by several holy persons together is required.