For some reason, horror based entertainment lends itself to telling really interesting stories. When you strip away the jump scares and gorefests, which keep me from watching more horror movies, there is something about the framing of a horror movie that can be used to tell a really good story. Movies like Happy Death Day and the Scream series (especially towards the end) take the trappings of a stereotypical horror film and use it to tell a gripping story. Even in board games, Arkham Horror the Card Game is one of my favorite games because of the detailed stories it tells.

So it makes sense that Horror roleplaying games could do the same thing, right? If you've played games like Bluebeard's Bride or the Harlem Unbound sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu, you know that is definitely the case. What if a game company known for telling gripping stories decided to make a horror adventure….?

What if said horror adventure took the premise of a haunted house megadungeon and flipped the concept around, trying to affect the character arcs of the PC's instead of a murderhobo-loot grab….?

What if you could use said adventure no matter what game system your current campaign is using…?

Enter Sandman The Darkest House

Monte Cook Games (MCG) is no stranger to abstract ideas & surrealism. Their Invisible Sun RPG is famous for using these types of surreal ideas in a RPG campaign. Personally, I enjoyed what I saw of the game and the character creation session I took part it, but I could never see me running a campaign of it with my group. It's a game that you really need everyone onboard with and I doubt my group would be interested in it for a long campaign.

Then there was Gen Con 2023. I was looking at some of the new books in the MCG booth and Charles Ryan the COO of MCG starts talking to my friend and I about The Darkest House. I remembered hearing a bit about the game when they launched it during COVID, but Charles talks about how the adventure is designed to be inserted into an existing campaign game. One where characters already have backstories and arcs that are defined/in development. He says this is key for the game because one of the aspects of The Darkest House is that no character that enters the House leaves without having been changed for the better or worse. Of course, I'm instantly intrigued.

So what is The Darkest House? It's a haunted house adventure in the style of a megadungeon - in fact, it's THE haunted house. Every haunted house you've seen in movies/shows/games? That's this house, or at least that's the way the adventure sets up the game. Legend has it that "The House" used to be just an ordinary house at one point in time, but something…dark…happened along the way. Now, The House slips from universe to universe, enticing in players/heroes into it and then moving on. What does this mean? It means that The Darkest House can be used no matter what RPG system you are using. Scifi/Fantasy/Cyberpunk/Modern - The House is in all of them.

….And The House hates you. (Well, you the PCs, not you you).

Turn The Page

How does The Darkest House fit into any game system? Well, by making its own game system. Granted, that's a bit of a cheat, but it's a system called "The House System" that you use to translate your characters from whatever game you are playing into The House where it makes sense. Basically, all your stats and abilities get rolled together to give your character a Rating between 1 and 10. Each task in the game also has a Rating. When a character needs to perform a task, they roll 2D6 and then add their Rating to the die roll. If the total is higher than the task Rating + 7, then the task is successful! If not, all is not *necessarily* lost.

"What about all my other stats/gear/abilities?" You might be thinking. That's where Boons and Banes come in. If you have something that would help you in a certain situation, such as a rogue lockpicking a door, then you get a Boon. This means you roll an additional D6 and discard the lowest. Likewise, a Bane would be if you had a disadvantage, like being chased by a monster. Then, you'd roll an additional D6 and discard the highest dice. And if you have both Boons and Banes, then the two cancel out.

But that's not the only dice you roll.

There's also a separate D6, one that needs to be a different color than the rest of the dice. This is The House Die. Most of the time, you will roll the house die with the rest of the dice and nothing happens. However, if the house die is the highest die, then The House acts. By "acts", I mean bad stuff happens. Most of the pages in The Darkest House are filled with all the rooms in the house, and there's guidance in each room on what can happen if the House acts. Where you are in The House will dictate on how bad it will be when The House acts. Sometimes, you might want The House to act. Why? Because if you "call upon The House", you can *add* the house die to your roll instead of it just being there. Things must be pretty dire though, as The House doesn't help for free - remember The House hates you.

Master of Puppets

As I mentioned before, The Darkest House is essentially a megadungeon, filled with tons of rooms for players to explore. Each room is filled with all kinds of things: secrets to the backstory of the house, strange creatures and spooky locations, or even items to help characters escape the house. The majority of the pages inside the hardcover/PDF are simply the corresponding room pages with all the information laid out for the Game Master. The pages are grouped together into different "Sections" of The House, which is less about where the players are physically in The House and more about what portion of The House's story the characters are in.

Some locations are more straightforward like "The Library", which has the classic Scooby-Doo spinning bookcase. This room also has a ton of quirky magical books that the players can take with them. One of them keeps the player who carries it from ever dreaming. Another one is alive and will "talk" to the players about things as long as they treat the book well. Other locations are a bit more surreal - "The Interior Courtyard" can cause a player to get yanked up and out of the house by a giant sinister hand (think the final boss in Super Smash Bros). Or in "The Sitting Room", players can get phone calls from dead NPCs from their past, until the line goes dead and they hear "Mother is very cross. You should probably hide".

In true MCG fashion, The Darkest House book is laid out in a very helpful way, providing the GM with plenty of resources to help the gameplay. In the back of the book, there is a map laying out how all the rooms connect together. But it goes beyond that - you can tell this book was designed/debuted during COVID lockdowns because it is one of the first books I've seen that lends itself to online play. Each room page contains a QR code that GMs can you for bonus content. That phone call I mentioned in the last paragraph? There's an audio clip of it that you can play for your group. There are maps, pictures of details that might grasp the players interest, along with "artifacts" that play into the story of The House. Also, there is a standalone program that you can run that has all of this content hyperlinked, so you can easily get to it without having to flip pages in the book and scan the corresponding QR code.

Lastly, the artwork in this game is phenomenal. The cover sets the tone of the book, with a house that begins to look like a skull the more you look at it. As you flip through the pages, the different styles of artwork combine together to create this dark horrific tone. It makes you feel like the book is one of those cursed items that should be locked away and never opened again. Heck, I'll admit that there was one photo that creeped me out so much that I had to cover it up so that I could focus on the opposite page enough to actually read it.

Conclusion

1. There are a lot of story-based Horror games out there, but if you are looking for something that is a bit more impactful on your gameplay than a one-shot adventure, then I suggest taking a look at The Darkest House.

2. I definitely want to run this game come Halloween season. In fact, I really want to run a "Dirtbags All-Stars" game with my friends taking their favorite characters from the various The Dirtbags of Holding games that we've run and throw them all together into The House at the same time.

3. The House Hates You…

Notes/Disclaimers: This review is based on the product itself, I have not had the chance to play this adventure. Some of the links in this post contain affiliate links, which help support the site. Also, I generally assume I know nothing. So if I've missed something, let me know in the comments. Or let me know on Facebook. If you like these types of posts, consider subscribing to our patreon. Lastly, thanks to Monte Cook Games for providing a review copy of this book. Once again, The House Hates You...