I was dithering about whether or not to include the famous optional opening of Curse of Strahd, the Death House. It’s essentially a dungeon crawl in a haunted mansion that has some tidbits about the plot, but is mostly just a way to level up the characters if you want to start at level 1. My party loves story and roleplay, so I was on the fence about whether they’d enjoy the Death House much or if I should just throw them right into the beginnings of the plot.
I was also concerned that as functionally a dungeon crawl/exploration puzzle, it was a little too technical, and would immediately expose the seams of trying to play a D&D module in the Daggerheart system, which is less crunchy and more narratively free-form in its spells and abilities.
But I asked some friends their opinions on it, and while the universal response was that DMs and players alike enjoyed it, the thing that really convinced me to keep it was a reminder of its power for setting the tone of the game to come.
Death House is the actual name of the house and the mini-adventure, but it would probably get called that anyway because it’s infamously deadly for the level 1 and 2 characters it’s designed for. Daggerheart makes it even harder to kill a PC than the already-hard-to-kill 5e PCs are, so I wasn’t extremely worried about balance, and I trusted that if worst came to worst, this was the type of party that would just run away anyway. However, I really wanted to get the feeling that they could die. Having to flee the scene would actually be the ideal outcome, in many ways.
I’ve spent a lot of the pre-game time trying to hammer home the tone of Curse of Strahd, because this group has sometimes struggled to engage with serious stakes in our past games together, and I wanted to be sure they understood what they were in for. But the conversations about Death House made me realise that that was sort of a waste of time. I had to look to the old writing adage: show, don’t tell. Let them see and feel what deadly stakes are like, and only then will they really be able to say if they like that tone or not.
(And yes I could just change the tone, but then why would we bother playing Curse of Strahd?)
I think I really shouldn’t have been so surprised to find that this section of the module does exactly what it intends to. While I never leave a session feeling 100% confident, the gratifying thing about aiming for a scary tone is that you can see when people are startled or nervous or excited. They did want to turn back and run at one point, but were prevented (and I don’t think really would have… but we’ll see what happens when they find the basement).
I’ve been watching a lot of videos lately about the things D&D does and doesn’t do well, and one of the top ones on the list is always horror. A recent creator I was watching compared D&D to Call of Cthulhu, specifically in terms of balance. In D&D, GMs put a lot of effort into balancing encounters to make them hard but fair; in Call of Cthulhu, you’re up against cosmic entities you could never hope to comprehend, much less match, and that is a key element of the horror. Something I’ll talk about next week is whether it’s possible for Strahd himself to feel the same way. But the Death House does, for the exact reasons it’s famous: it’s pretty damn hard for PCs of that level, and they very well may die. There are mysteries within it that only go half-explained, and it does a really fantastic job of creating a sense that the characters have stumbled into something much, much bigger than themselves.
Next week we’re talking a break, but ironically, actually beginning has given me lots of thoughts about endings, so stay tuned for that next Monday.