The House of Lament

Taking a break today from my normal posting to share a bit about our Torchbearer game here in the Senkowski household. The kids and I have played games on and off since they were little, but we recently hit that age sweet spot. Here is a little after the action report of our recent journey into Ravenloft.

Middle earth got boring for my oldest. They love it desperately, don’t get me wrong, but they had gotten bored. We had been playing a Torchbearer RPG campaign set around Bree before the War of the Ring, and it had been good fun. They were down on their luck near-do-wells trying to pay off the debt they incurred by their abortive theft of goods from a Barrow Wight in the Barrow Downs, but it had run its course.

I think we ran into the weight of the setting. I have seen it before. When you try to play something around the edges of a formative story. Formative for you, not for the world mind you. I always ran into it with Star Wars, the ur story of my generation. For him and his siblings it was Peter Jackson’s interpretation and later the books.

They wanted to keep playing Torchbearer, and I wanted to keep playing with them before the parent-child clock ran out, so we cast about for something else. Years ago, at the beginning of the lockdown, we tried to play through Curse of Strahd. Attempt to send Mr. “I Am The Land” himself to hell. We got through two sessions.

I will say it right now, 5th edition kinda sucks for tweens and grade schoolers. We had fun in all the unstructured time. One of them even tamed one of those magic eating cats with clever uses of the rules. But the second combat showed up, attention was lost despite all the miniatures on the table.

I later learned that the oldest, who played on occasion with their friends, did what most kids I think do with these games, ignore the rules to tell stories. Their generation has a very broad definition of role play, that permeates everything from Minecraft to the YouTube videos they watch. So if the rules suck, they don’t care, they are with their friends telling stories.

So the secret love of the 90s, Ravenloft, went back on the shelf.

Fast forward to a week ago, and the oldest suggests it as an option. They had been flipping through one of the AD&D 2E books I had out in my art studio thought using Torchbearer to hunt down and kill that old fool would be a grand idea. That one basically has the life attitude of Moon Knight, so was super curious to see this play out.

We opted to start with the House of Lament1 adventure again. They barely remembered it when we started, but their vague memories actually had some fun implications on how they thought about the place. We also started from scratch with new characters.

We bandied about the idea of using the mists to transport their Halfling Burglar and Human Theurge with their various hangers on to Barovia, but they were up for something new. This meant rolling an elf Dreamwalker, a dwarf Stoneteller, and a human mage.2 This translated into a nice combination of capabilities, while still under clubbing, gives me some options on how I modify the game to accommodate an under clubbed party.

Now, one thing I cannot stress enough that we learned in just our first session. Dungeons & Dragons traps are just terribly designed to translate into Torchbearer. In D&D, your stakes are basically Hit Points. Yes, some do poison things that require a save and tax Constitution or what not, but by and large, you either get hit or not. Even things that are fear inducing like “haunted traps”3 do Hit Point damage. That dog won’t hunt with Torchbearer.

So I had to go through and reimagine the stakes for something that is supposed to be spooky, but not rely on just the Afraid condition, which is brutal, and the thing the kids hate more than any other condition in the game. Traps are a lot of work, so many went away entirely cause they didn’t serve much purpose. Also, I always hated them, so replaced many with more haunted consequences or narrative clues as they figure out what the hell is going on.

So we made characters, used the cryptic note hook, and off they went looking for an address of a house that didn’t exist wherever they were. The mists showed up, they meandered in the woods, encountered a spooking figure who dropped a crystal ball when he fled, then found the house. It is a little odd that the adventure begins with a random stranger or strangers meeting you at the door, but the kids hadn’t seen the movie4 this adventure was lifted from, so didn’t matter.

The strangers I picked from the list was the detectives looking for details on heirs to the estate. Occult detectives like Scully and Mulder. Seemed the best version of a plot device from the list. The other was so boring I can’t recall what it was, and fake Van Helsing5 is automatically out for personal reasons. So they broker a deal for our broke adventurers, 2D of gold coins each to help find anything that will sort out this heir to the estate business.

And so we were off and they began to do the exploration and mapping of the first floor. One thing that makes Torchbearer particularly effective for a horror game is how you can use Twists to continue to amp up the creepy and move things along. Most horror adventures are these contrived plot lines that if somebody misses some key clue the whole thing falls apart, so game masters are constantly throwing up big ass signs point to the scrap of paper.

Not with Torchbearer. I want to make something more creepy, throw a clue around they might have missed, make some shit up on the fly to respond to something interesting they did, just wait for them to fail rolls. They will. It is a game. Twists don’t have to be punitive. They are a tool in the game master’s toolbox to mix things up as a consequence.6

Lots of fun at the table with the kids began to unfold as they encountered ghosts, made some roles, and made sure they got some checks by letting their Traits work against them early. Then they entered into their first Conflict of the game.

It was magical. They absolutely understand, at this point, the core conceit of the game:

If you make the stakes of the moment “to the death”, death is what you will find.

In the adventure, in the wine cellar off of the kitchen, there are those weird magic eating cats. Gremeshka or whatever they are called. They hear the meowing as they enter the wine cellar, then see the bobcat sized critters, and decide right away discretion is the better part of valor. And that is where, I think, Torchbearer really shines.

I modeled the Magicats on the Troll Rats entry found in the Scholar’s Guide. That means they had the most Hit Points in Kill conflicts, middle of the road in drive off, and the least in Flee. So success is going to be easiest if they book it out of there, which they declared they wanted to do. And that is the magic, only their intent really matters.

I may have wanted the Magicats to attack them, or trick them, or convince them to give them Friskies. Doesn’t matter. They get to decide the stakes very clearly, and I have very clearly articulated tools to navigate the moment right there in the entry of the monster. Fun stuff!

So they got away completely, not compromise, bolted the door to the basement and moved on to join the first seance, which act as sort of progress markers in the adventure. Five turns on the grind, a Trait check, several passed tests, and a new skill opened, and everyone is spooked by all the ghostly crap going on. I count that a successful first session.

As we continue on with this new adventure, I will continue to take a minute here or there to post about it. In the future, I will be better prepared and will drop in stats for things like the traps and monsters I am modifying for the game.