D&D 5E challenge: rewrite Death House to avoid a key feature (spoilers)

[Unwise]

The children are actually dream projections. When you get to the childrens room, you find that the nanny has put them under a sleep spell, there is a magical mobile above them, putting them in suspended animation. The children dream projected to get you there to wake them. The undead nanny fights you to stop you waking them, thinking you want to hurt them.

She put them into a sleep spell when she realised what was going on and that they would be starved to death or worse. She saved them with her witchy magic.

 

[Sunseeker]

The children are actually dream projections. When you get to the childrens room, you find that the nanny has put them under a sleep spell, there is a magical mobile above them, putting them in suspended animation. The children dream projected to get you there to wake them. The undead nanny fights you to stop you waking them, thinking you want to hurt them.

She put them into a sleep spell when she realised what was going on and that they would be starved to death or worse. She saved them with her witchy magic.

That is probably the nicest solution I've seen all thread. Not entirely out of place in Ravenloft, but certainly softer.

 

[evilbob]

The children are actually dream projections. When you get to the childrens room, you find that the nanny has put them under a sleep spell, there is a magical mobile above them, putting them in suspended animation. The children dream projected to get you there to wake them. The undead nanny fights you to stop you waking them, thinking you want to hurt them.

She put them into a sleep spell when she realised what was going on and that they would be starved to death or worse. She saved them with her witchy magic.

I like this one, too. It also requires even less changing. Although the after-effects are more severe: what do you do with two children from two centuries ago who just woke up? Especially since this is likely the first place you'll visit in town. Honestly, reading through the rest of the book, what do you do with the children kidnapped by werewolves or hags if you're playing the campaign with no changes, especially since the hag-children specifically should not return to their homes? (Start an orphanage?) Heck, what do you do with the multitude of NPCs that you find ALL OVER THE PLACE that want to stick with you for a while? Off-stage NPCs don't tend to have a good track record, and keeping them around is just more fodder for traps. Not to mention that's a lot for a DM to keep up with. Then again, maybe the children help solve the problem: you find good NPCs and then also keep them off stage by making them watch the children? Tricky. This may need a new thread.

Walter would still need to be edited in this version as well, although now I'm liking the cat idea. Maybe the nanny was a witch and the cat was her familiar - still somehow alive and locked in the room with the kids, watching over them? It's how she keeps watch on them (seeing through her familiar), as she can't otherwise leave the room she's in. And the kids at the start can still mention "Walter" being in a nursery, but just giggle and say "he's silly" instead of talking about him being a baby (or they could say, "he's her baby" talking about the nursemaid and be ambiguous about it). The nanny still made a pretty stupid mistake in sleeping with the Mr., and maybe the Mrs. still killed her and stuffed her in the attic, but maybe she's actually not really a bad person and did, in fact, care for the kids (maybe the only one). Maybe she's a ghost instead of a specter, and she gives you more of the plot and possesses you if you try to leave and don't help the children. Once you get the children out of the house, she can finally rest. (Sidebar: I don't think the nursemaid is even given a name in the module - ouch. Also, you could redo the main painting downstairs to show the cat in the frame, rubbing on the Mr.'s leg, and the Mrs. cutting her eyes at the cat - the symbol of her jealousy. Still not as punchy as a portrait of a DEAD FREAKING BABY but I am ok with that. Oh, and once you defeat the house and rescue the kids maybe the children and the cat are gone from the portrait and the Mr. and Mrs. look angry and like they're trying to escape through the frame?)

However, once you find the children the motivation to visit the basement is gone. Hmmmm. Maybe the key to the children's room is actually on the dad's body (now a ghast)? Nah, thieves' tools would bypass that easily. Maybe the house just straight-up won't LET the party into the children's room (the master wouldn't have wanted it!). There isn't even a door to find, for example (although a careful examination of the map of the house would reveal a space there). But once you defeat the house, its magic is weakened and that allows you to find the door? Except that the final escape from the house is supposed to be a crazy dash - you are escaping a monster that a 2nd level party should not be able to stop (although technically it won't leave the basement). Then again, an extended rescue might be interesting. And assuming they couldn't get into the children's room, it would make sense that they would have to find the ghost in order to find the secret door to the basement. Maybe the ghost is only in the room with her body, and not her bedroom - that would delay you finding her. And it would make the path more like the linear one we started with. So you find the ghost, then the way to the basement, then you defeat the house (one way or another) and then you find the children. When you open the door the cat is in there and hisses, but then treats you nicely and leaves with you when it realizes who you are. (The kids keep the cat.) Also maybe the ghost only refers to the cat as "Walter" or "my baby" ("my baby Walter is watching over them") and you never know he's a cat until you get there. (She could even possess a character to show them the children through Walter's eyes; the vision is still from a person's height - because the cat is on a bookshelf or something - but curiously it's easy to see even though there's no light source...) And as suggested, the children you initially meet outside are dream manifestations - something the nursemaid makes happen from time to time so the children can play together while they sleep.

I'd also envision an ending where the party gets out with the children from the house that's been trying to kill them and the last thing that happens is the cat rubs against and then knocks over a lantern or something, to burn it down (assuming the party didn't think of it). Just for added flare.

Thinking on it more, I think I even like this version better than the original: the nursemaid story seems to follow more than just "they had an affair and then the cult killed her for some reason".

 

[evilbob]

Lots more spoilers.

The werewolves are easy - just make them adults - but the hags will take some thought.

So, reading more of the book, the werewolves and the hags appear to be the only other places where there are dead children. The drunk guy on the lake is trying to kill a child, but it hasn't happened yet (the other places have specifically lots of dead children around, including bones and clothes and it's really obvious). If I find more I'll post, or if anyone knows of others please say. But I'm happy to open this thread up to those situations as well if anyone is interested.

The difference is that in Death House, the dead children ARE the plot. In these other places, they are flavor (bad word choice) - window dressing. Much more easily changed.

In the first case, the werewolves can just have kidnapped people, not children. Very easy change. There could still be the fight to the death stuff, but the victors are adults and then they get turned. Secondarily, if you keep the werewolf children, they could be just literally that: werewolf children, the offspring of werewolves. This opens up whole new moral questions for the party, as well as changes werewolf lore: normally (like vampires) werewolves don't age and don't reproduce except by infecting others. It also calls into question why they would even have the battle royale, since they can make more of their own. Maybe they aren't typically able to reproduce or maybe they're dying too quickly and need more recruits more quickly. Maybe they're just evil and they like it. Or maybe the two factions are also arguing over the "natural born" werewolves; the current leader wants to abandon them in the woods since they aren't viable soldiers and the woman wants to save them since they need the recruits long-term. CoS already messes with werewolf lore by making children into werewolves and then having them grow up. So you can either go wild, or just completely edit the werewolf children out entirely, which is also extremely easy. This changes absolutely nothing and makes the whole situation much more morally straightforward. Still, "how to deal with werewolf children" should be interesting; at the very least, it puts the "how to deal with children who just woke up after 200 years" question to shame.

The drunk guy on the lake can be modified to be dumping an adult woman. Literally nothing about the situation changes except the person ages ~20 years. I'm not even sure why they made this a child anyway, other than to make it more plausible that an old drunk guy would overpower her. Or you can change the situation depending on what happens; if she is rescued, keep her as-written age. Depends on how close you want to get to the line. (You could also make her a young man instead and it would have zero impact.)

The hags are a difficult case because while there's no reason you couldn't age their victims, this goes more against the typical Grimm's fairy tale lore of old witches eating children. I'm not sure how else to fix this, though. In this case, the hags wouldn't be getting parents to pay for their drugs via children, but they'd be either: taking the person themselves (seems less likely and also goes against the nature of what they're doing - allowing people to damn themselves eyes wide open), taking someone else in their stead like a spouse (they could force the addict to ensnare the spouse), or telling the person they would have to come work for them - but really they capture the person in a cage when they get to the windmill. The last option makes it slightly less likely that the party would intervene when they first see a hag taking someone off to "work for her." I mean, she's just following a contract she made with this individual, right? The fact that no one ever returns might pique their interest. Forcing people to sell off their spouse or aged parent or something (against that person's will) seems a little closer to the original idea, though. Seeing a hag take a human-shaped bunch of rags from someone should also get the party investigating.

You could also go a more drastic route and just nix the drug addiction aspect of the story altogether. The hags just live out there in the windmill, capture anyone who comes by (maybe the treats just knock you out), and eat them. (They could still have a couple of captured adults in their cages.) Much more bland story-wise, but simple enough to change. If you wanted to spice it up you could change the windmill into something more appropriate, like a cottage made out of candy. Of course, no player is going to fall for that.

Either way, you can change the piles of clothes to be adult clothes and the teeth at the standing stones to be adult teeth. Really anywhere you have piles of things that imply dead children can be changed without any impact.

 

[evilbob]

Looking through the book more, there's basically a neon sign in Krezk that says "deposit orphaned children here," so that actually takes care of some situations. Also, the only other stuff I could find were hints at dead children - like long abandoned nurseries and things.

There are a surprising number of other lycanthropes and monsterous humanoids that are children, however. They are certainly simple to leave out if you don't want to deal with the moral implications of "evil aligned" children.

Edit:
One more quick place to note: the Krezk burgomaster has just lost a 4th child, and the child is noted to be 14. This may or may not fall into the same category, depending on where the line is for you, but once again it's simple to just raise the age of his son about 4-6 years - this changes exactly nothing. The other kids are only ever described as his "children" so once again it's up to the DM to decide their age, and it's easy enough to just make them older.