Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="brunswick" data-source="post: 5576711" data-attributes="member: 70189">Hiya folks, I'm at the early stages of writing a 'Haunted Manor' adventure for my players (i.e. I have drawn the maps of the Manor and surrounding grounds). The gist of the adventure is that the house has attained a certain amount of evil sentience, because of an ancient vampire trapped within the cellar (a holy order sealed and blessed the entrance to the vampire's crypt a century or so ago).  The barrier to the crypt is beginning to disintegrate, and the more that it falls apart, the stronger the vampires influence is becoming, hopefully culminating with an encounter with the Vampire himself towards the end of the scenario. The reason that the PCs are here is because they need to access a portal hidden within the ancient attic of the manor.  A number of magical crystals are required to activate the portal but the house, controlled by the Vampire, has scattered the crystals throughout the house and grounds, more out of perversity rather than to consciously stifle the heroes.   Here is where I need some help.  My players are all experienced gamers and I fear that they would be underwhelmed (to put it mildly) by the cliched 'haunted' effects I might throw at newbies - animated furniture, 'sheet ghosts', blood dripping from the walls etc.,  Not only are some of the above cliched, I think they would lend an almost comedy atmosphere to the adventure and, ideally, I'd like the characters/players to get a bit of a scare when playing the adventure.  I'm not necessarily looking for CoC levels of fright (e.g. SAN type checks etc.,) but I'm trying to come up with some sort of original 'haunted' effects to make the adventure memorable and frightening. Any ideas welcome! Thanks,  Bruns. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification