Haunted’s Double Feature: When Ravens Attack

The final thing a raven player can do is quite vicious. First, let’s review which raven formerly Vincent’s player drew.

Raven players can “Harrow A Child” which is a direct attack on still surviving child character. Formerly Vincent’s player decides he wants a little payback and target’s Jack’s player. Jack’s player plays a card from his hand and describes what Jack is up to in that location.

Jack is down on the beach wading through The Tide Pools. He’s collecting interesting looking stones and seashells.

Raven players use the smaller upside-down raven number on their cards. When Harrowing a Child, a raven player can normally only play up to two cards to try and beat the location value of their target. But The Raven Who Perches On The Chamber Door has a special ability. They can play up to three cards.

With these three cards, the raven player has a total 11 vs Jack’s player’s 10. The raven player take’s The Tide Pools into his hand and discards the three he played. A high cost but he’s deprived Jack’s player of a high value card. Even worse, his special ability lets him include physical injury in his final narration of the attack.

Jack sees an unusually black shell in the sand. He reaches down to pick it up and meets resistance. He begins to try and dig it out of the sand and then stumbles back as he uncovers the head of an angry raven. The black bird screeches at him as it frees itself from the sand. Shaking the wet sand from its feathers, it flies at Jack with its talons fully extended. It claws at him leaving deep scratches in his face before flying off.

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow will be available as a Double Feature reward tier with Haunted on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter launches on Monday and I hope you’ll consider supporting both of these horror games about murder. The digital versions will be delivered about a week before Halloween with hopefully enough time to get them to the table for a spooky terrifying evening of storytelling.

Haunted’s Double Feature: Raven Sight

A raven player may “Reveal Omens.” Similar to “Brood in the Graveyard” this makes things harder for the surviving children but in a much more immediate way. The raven player discards a card from their hand, and adds an adult to the suspicious adults. Narratively, this newly suspicious adult encounters dark portents.

The Innkeeper is in The Hunting Lodge cleaning his rifle. He looks up and sees a raven sitting on the bear skin rug. As he approaches to get a closer look, the rug lifts it’s head and speaks, “Vincent’s death was no accident!” The innkeeper flees The Hunting Lodge in terror.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about the most vicious thing a raven can do.

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow will be available as a Double Feature reward tier with Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted’s Double Feature: Cemetery Ravens

The third thing a raven player can do is “Brood In The Graveyard”. Mechanically, this makes things more difficult for the last surviving child when end game comes around. Narratively, it’s about a ghost story. The raven player takes a card from their hand and places it on the grave of any dead adult. If you recall, The Baker died in the first turn of this hypothetical game.

The Baker’s ghost wanders the corridors of The Catacombs. She stops occasionally to examine a skull and whisper a name. Jack? Agatha? Desdemona?

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the most ominous thing a raven can do.

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow will be available as a Double Feature reward tier with Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted’s Double Feature: A Kindness of Ravens

Yesterday, I posted about the most passive thing a raven can do. Today, I’m going to post about the friendliest. A raven can “Befriend A Child.” The raven player (formerly Vincent’s player) wants to reward Agatha’s player for at least attempting to help him the prior turn. He hands Agatha’s player a card form his hand and narrates a vignette about his raven giving Agatha a gift at that location.

Agatha is down at the crossroads deciding which way she’ll go exploring today. There’s a raven perched on the sign near the side of the road. The raven has a small pentagram pendant in its beak. It swoops down and drops it at Agatha’s feet.

As I said, raven turns tend to be short. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the spookiest thing a raven can do.

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow will be available as a Double Feature reward tier with Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted’s Double Feature: Ravens in Waiting

Haunted’s Kickstarter starts next week. So, I’m going to post each day this week about the ravens in Raven’s Hollow. Think of it as a count down to Fall. I’ll be exploring what the ravens can do in increasing order of viciousness.

In my last post Vincent was crushed under the bell from the tower of The Ancient Abbey. Vincent’s player sets aside his child card and draws a raven card. This is effectively his new character.

When a child player is eliminated, they take a free raven turn immediately. Ravens have several options. The first is to “Remain Watchful”. The raven player (formerly Vincent’s player) opts to do this and draws a card from the location deck.

He also reveals the top two cards of the suspicious adults and narrates a short vignette about them at this location.

The Butcher and The Priest are having a drink together at The Crossed-Keys Inn. It turns out, Vincent was The Butcher’s son. The Priest is desperately trying to console the grieving (and angry man). The Butcher picks up a giant meat cleaver off the table and vows that he’ll find out who killed his boy.

Raven turns tend to be fairly short. Tomorrow I’ll post about the friendliest thing a raven can do.

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow will be available as a Double Feature reward tier with Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted’s Double Feature: Horrible Children vs. Each Other

Last week, I posted about what happens when The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow decide to do dreadful things to a suspicious adult. Let’s look at what happens when they turn on each other.

Jack is the youngest of the horrible children and likes to follow his older enemies friends around. Jack’s player doesn’t like that Vincent’s player helped the The Baker in the previous round and so decides to have Jack target Vincent.

In a child vs. child situation, the victim plays first. Vincent’s player puts down The Extraordinarily Comfy Bedroom. This sets Vincents defense value at 12! Vincent’s player must now describe what Vincent is up to in this location and it should already be a bit precarious.

Vincent is extremely bored and would much rather be outside. He’s jumping up and down very excitedly on the bed. It creaks under the repeated pounding and seems as though it might crack at any moment.

Jack’s player doesn’t like that card. He decides to use his special ability.

Jack’s player takes The Extraordinarily Comfy Bedroom into his hand and replaces it with The Ancient Abbey. Per the instructions on his special ability he must describe this change in scenery.

Jack watches Vincent through the bedroom window patiently. Vincent’s boredom eventually gets the better of him and he wanders out of his house. Indeed, he wanders out of town and out to The Ancient Abbey. Jack follows closely behind, moving from tree to tree to keep out of sight.

Jack’s player then plays another card from his hand and describes how Jack is endangering Vincent at The Ancient Abbey.

Jack decides to try and spook Vincent by ringing the abbey’s old bell tower. Vincent arrives to investigate and looks up into the old tower. The swinging bell strains the rotting crossbeam from which it hangs. It is perilously close to falling.

At this point, Vincent’s player has the option to request “adult supervision”. One of the suspicious adults might be lurking about and could possibly aid the endangered Vincent. Looking at the 10 to 7 in Jack’s player’s favor, Vincent’s player does decide to call for adult supervision. He draws the top card of the suspicious adults and describes them into the scene.

The Candlestick Maker occasionally comes to The Ancient Abbey to collect the wax from old candles that once burned here. By secretly recycling the wax he can cut costs. He hears the old bell ringing and starts heading toward Vincent to investigate.

Unfortunately, when it comes to helping children in danger, The Candlestick Maker is not very effective. He adds 0 to Vincent’s 7. Only can Vincent’s enemies friends save him now.

Despite Jack’s help and Vincent’s betrayal against The Baker, Agatha’s player can’t resist the lure of adding a 10 to her hand.

Agatha’s player takes The Fairy Circle into her hand and replaces it with The Catacombs. This shifts Jack’s total to 4 versus Vincent’s total of 7. She now describes how Agatha is helping Vincent escape the dangerous situation.

Agatha happens to be playing on the bell tower’s stairs and sees Jack pulling on the rope. She calls out to him but Jack can’t hear her over the ringing of the bell. She climbs up the rest of the stairs and pulls Jack away to get his attention.

Desdemona’s player is now in the power position. If she does nothing (or can’t) Vincent will escape with his life. But Desdemona is indeed an extraordinarily horrible child.

Desdemona’s player takes The Ancient Abbey into her hand, and replaces it with The Bottomless Pit bringing Vincent’s total down to 3 and Jack’s total to 4. She must describe how Desdemona’s actions are further endangering Vincent.

Desdemona often comes to The Ancient Abbey because the various rafters are excellent places to hide and explore. At this precise moment, she happens to be practicing her delicate balancing on the crossbeam from which the bell hangs. Her added weight is only straining the rotted wood crack and crumble faster.

The final totals are Vincent’s 3 (plus the 0 from The Candlestick Maker) to Jack’s 4. Jack’s player gets to close out the vignette by describing Vincent’s untimely demise.

As Jack lets go of the rope and turns to see what Agatha wanted there is a horrible cracking sound and the bell plummets past them. Desdemona lets out a scream but manages to grab onto another rafter barely managing not to fall herself. The three children then stare down the tower where they see poor Vincent crushed beneath the bell.

But wait! The Candlestick Maker is lurking nearby. Since he was unable to help, he witnesses this tragic scene and informs another adult.

Jack’s player pulls The Priest from the unsuspicious adults and shuffles him and The Candlestick Maker back into suspicious adults. More adults are beginning to suspect something is horribly wrong with the children of Raven’s Hollow!

Vincent’s players child has been eliminated but he isn’t out of the game. Vincent’s player now takes on the role of one of the watchful (and judgmental) ravens from which Raven’s Hollow gets its name. Next week, I’ll tell you all about playing ravens.

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow will be available as a Double Feature reward tier with Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted’s Double Feature: Horrible Children

Last year, I released the “Bare Bones” edition of my storytelling card game The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow. To my disappointment it received little attention. So, I’ve decided to tack it onto Haunted’s Kickstarter as a special “Double Feature” reward tier. To be clear, by backing the kickstarter you can get the POD version of Horrible Children at a substantial discount.

I’ve posted about the history of The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow before. So, I’d like to focus on how it plays instead. Let me introduce you to one of the Horrible Children

This is Agatha. If you run out of cards in your hand, your horrible child becomes lost in the woods forever. That can’t happen to Agatha. She’s an intrepid explorer and knows the woods very well.

While playing a child, you basically have two things you can do on your turn. You can either play an extraordinarily horrible (and potentially lethal!) prank on a suspicious adult or on another horrible child. Since adults are basically NPCs, doing horrible things to them is often the socially safer option. Let’s look at how that works assuming it’s Agatha who wants to do something horrible to an adult.

Agatha player’s turns over the top card of the suspicious adults and see’s it’s The Baker. The target number for The Baker is 9. That’s going to be tough to beat without either a very high card or help from the other horrible children.

Agatha’s player plays “The Graveyard” from her hand with a value of 7. Agatha’s player now tells the story of how Agatha is endangering the The Baker in The Graveyard.

The Baker is visiting the grave of her dead father. Agatha pops out from behind the gravestone and screams like a banshee frightening The Baker. The Baker stumbles back and falls into an open grave just behind her.

Now each of the other horrible children have a chance to intervene. Let’s say they’re Desdemona, Vincent and Jack. Desdemona’s player knows Agatha’s 7 isn’t good enough to beat The Baker’s 9 and decides to assist.

Desdemona’s player play’s “The Flooded Mine” which adds 3 to Agatha’s 7 for a total of 10. (The location is ignored and all action continues to take place in The Graveyard.)

Desdemona, who happens to be playing nearby, sees The Baker trying to crawl out of the grave. She thinks her friend Agatha has done a most excelent prank and decides to join in. Desdemona creeps up and pushes the headstone above the open grave onto The Baker!

Vincent’s player sees the opportunity to get the better of his rivals and doesn’t play a card from his hand. Instead, he draws the top card of the draw pile.

This is an opportunity for Vincent’s player to play The Baker defending herself. In this case, the upside down raven value of 4 is added to The Baker’s 9 for a total of 13.

The Baker sees the headstone coming down upon her and manages to step out of the way. The headstone is now lying in the bottom of the grave. The Baker steps up on to it to give her a little more height for crawling out of the grave.

Jack’s player is now in a real power position. If he does nothing (or doesn’t have the cards to help) the The Baker will catch Agatha and send her off to the orphanage, but The Baker will also tell other adults what happened and thus making more suspicious adults. Jack decide’s it’s better to leave no witnesses.

Jack’s player plays “The Haunted Manor” from his hand adds 5 to Agatha and Desdemona’s 10 for a total of 15.

Jack sees The Baker crawling out the grave and without really thinking about it picks up a nearby shovel. He whacks The Baker over the head and she collapses unconscious back down into the grave.

Since Agatha’s player started the round, she gets to finish out the vignette. Her total of 15 beats The Baker’s total 13. The Baker unfortunately meets their demise. Agatha’s player tells the story.

Agatha, Desdemona, and Jack gather around the decide to play funeral. They each recount a fond memory of The Baker as they fill in the grave, burying her alive!

Next week, I’ll tell you what happens the The Extraordinarily Horrible Children turn on each other!

The Extraordinarily Horrible Children of Raven’s Hollow will be available as a Double Feature reward tier with Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted: Justice (Or Lack Thereof)

Throughout these posts I’ve mentioned how often a Haunted game ends with the murderer going to jail. This usually happens because a player introduces some kind of law enforcement character. Pressure from this character mounts until the murderer eventually breaks and turns themselves in. In practice, it feels a little bit like a supernatural version of Columbo. And to be clear, this is a perfectly fine way to play Haunted.

Remember, very early on I removed the mechanic that represented the police. I did this because it was clear to me that players were perfectly capable of bringing this pressure themselves. In fact, they consistently do so. Unprompted. I’ve had to think about why this is over the years.

Let’s be clear about some context. I’m an American and most the people I play with are also Americans. And we’ve had to take a real hard look at police violence in this country. As part of my own reflections I’ve come to the conclusion that we have a very tortured cultural identity around justice.

On the one hand, it’s a point of pride that people are “innocent until proven guilty” and “everyone deserves their day in court” BUT we also idolize “cowboy” or “rogue” justice where if you catch someone redhanded you’re pretty much free to do whatever you want to them. Look up “castle doctrine” or “stand your ground” laws. This applies to ordinary citizen but almost doubly so for police.

The part we really don’t like to talk about is that this applies retro-actively in a way that defacto makes “criminal” a social class. Whenever something bad happens to someone, people start digging through their pasts and if they find even a HINT of wrong doing, well that pretty much justifies whatever happened to them. Did you sell drugs when you were a teenager? Well that pretty much makes it okay that you were evicted from your apartment at 65 because after all you were a “criminal”. There’s just the unspoken assumption that if you did crime before (even if you did your time for it) chances are you’ve been doing crime all along and just haven’t got caught yet, so you deserve whatever badness befalls you from whomever.

And, of course, this is all tied up in racism so blatantly that I don’t even feel the need to elaborate on it.

A game of Haunted starts with a murder. I believe that on some level this primes all the players to think that he must be punished. Even the murderer player, I believe, is automatically put into an “I am a criminal” mindset and often sabotages their own character. Admittedly, this fascinates me because there are mechanisms in the game that open avenues to other forms of justice than punishment but so rarely do players exercise them.

If you play Haunted, I encourage you to think about this “punishment” assumption you likely have lurking inside yourself. Look at your game setup and ask if there is no other form of justice to be found. Maybe not. Maybe your game of Haunted really is just a supernatural episode of Columbo.

So, this concludes my retrospective on the development of Haunted. I hope it’s been illuminating for you. There’s still a few more weeks between now and when the Kickstarter launches. Between then and now I’ll have a few more things to post about the surprise “Double Feature” component of the Kickstarter that might make your Halloween gaming extra creepy.

Previous Posts In This Series

Haunted will be released by Halloween 2025. There will be a short Kickstarter prior to that which you can follow here to be notified when it launches: Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted: You Can’t Step In The Same River Twice

Once I finalized the adjustments I made for math reasons, I went back and looked at the two texts I had. The longer text with lots of explanations and examples and the shorter text with just instruction. I figured all I had to do was merge my revisions from the shorter text into the longer text and I would be good. But I was wrong.

As I began to lay in the revisions, the longer text didn’t sit right with me. It wasn’t wrong, per se, but it didn’t ring true anymore. I realized that between all the classes I had taken, and all the play I had done in the intervening time, I just wasn’t the same person who wrote that original text. It had really only been about a year, and yet I just wasn’t happy with that approach to Haunted’s text. I couldn’t go back.

It would be another year before I took another run at the final text. I decided to start with the short version and see if I could layer in sufficient examples and explanations to address the few concerns I did have about communicating effective Haunted play. While doing so, I did realize that there’s a vital skill to playing Haunted that I don’t think a lot of rpg players spend enough time developing.

A lot of RPGs are built on an obstacle course model. You encounter some threat, you knock it down, you move onto the next threat. In investigation based games this is done by extracting clues that tell you where to go. Even a lot of so-called “narrative” RPGs work on this model where we’re constantly adding something new to deal with even if the responsibility for introducing new content is shared around the table.

Honestly, it’s a content consumption model of play. New information, new threats, new unexplored areas, new twists, new reveals, new, new, new, more, more more until you know who/where the bad guy is and defeat him (or whatever other kind of climatic event the game may have). But Haunted doesn’t work that way.

In Haunted, almost everything there is to know, is known upfront. A few new characters often get added during play but not many. Players need to develop what they have, otherwise the game can become “stuck”. I realized that it was this “stuck” feeling that I really wanted to address in the text because it isn’t (solely) about the design, it really is a play skill.

The obstacle model of play tends to train even the most character/story focused players to think of characters are barriers to things another character wants. In Haunted, this manifests as the murderer going to each supporting character trying to make progress. Because the dice are harsh, these early attempts often fail and players have these supporting character dig their heals in and become even more obstacle-ly. Even if the murderer succeeds, the players frequently just have the supporting character move the goal posts so that they have some other reason to stand in the murderer’s way.

You can’t play Haunted this way. You have to treat the supporting characters as whole people both with nuance and the capacity to change and grow. You have to develop the characters based on the dynamics play. You have to listen to how the other players play their characters and have those things influence and change the character you’re playing. Sometimes that change is signaled by a die outcome, but sometimes it’s signaled just by how something another player says or does moves you.

In a previous post, I mentioned that Needs had accidentally turned the game into an emotional stoning. Well, it doesn’t work if the supporting characters are walls the murderer dashes themselves upon either. Disposition helps soften this up a bit, but really players have to be open to genuine change and development. After a lot of reflection, I think I know why that might be harder in Haunted than it seems. I think there’s a hidden agenda that tends to develop among Haunted players that speaks directly to the core question Haunted is asking. I’ll post about that next time.

Previous Posts In This Series

Haunted will be released by Halloween 2025. There will be a short Kickstarter prior to that which you can follow here to be notified when it launches: Haunted on Kickstarter

Haunted: Controversial Math

In my last post, I mentioned how in the game where I finally played the murderer myself, I felt that the dice weren’t behaving as expected. You see, mechanically, the murderer is as at an extreme disadvantage. This is intentional. I want the murderer to be desperate and need mechanical support from either the ghost or the supporting characters. But I also set up the resolution system so that even an unaided murderer would succeeded at unexpected intervals. I was not seeing those sudden reversals as frequently as I would have expected in that particular game.

Haunted’s core die mechanic is a combination of two games: Sorcerer & The Pool. In Sorcerer you are always rolling opposed dice pools and the side with the single highest die wins. Tied dice are simply discarded and you move on to the next highest. There are some unexpected properties of this system I really like.

  1. Once you have more dice than your opponent, each additional die has diminishing returns on the overall outcome.
  2. If more than two people are rolling, two high rollers can cancel each other enough to allow an unexpected victory from a third party.
  3. The underdog (player will less dice) wins more frequently than you would expect.

It was that third property that I was not seeing happen as frequently as I would expect. So, I went back and ran some numbers and realized I had made a mistake. Sorcerer is usually played with d10s but I wanted Haunted to use d6s. I actually had assumed that this would increase the underdog victory rate because the odds of the high dice tying and canceling are higher thus making it more likely your next die was a winner. But that’s actually wrong.

What actually creates that property is the larger number of sides. When you do roll high, there are more chances the opponent rolls under you. With a d6 if you roll a 6 there are only 5 values lower while if you roll a d10 and roll a 10 there are 9 values lower. What I discovered is that raising the dice from a d6 to a d10 increased the underdog’s chance of success by as much as 5%. That’s a whole +1 in a D&D game! As much as it pained me, Haunted now uses d10s.

You see, that sudden underdog success is critical because of the properties Haunted inherits from The Pool. In The Pool when you enter a conflict the GM gives you 1-3 base dice (d6s) and then you can gamble dice from your “pool”. You’re hoping to roll a single 1 across all the dice rolled. If you succeed you keep your gambled dice and gain a die into your “pool”. If you fail, you lose all the dice gambled.

This caused quite a stir back in the day because there’s an intuitive, knee-jerk reaction that you should always gamble all of your pool dice to maximize your chances of success. And, at the time, I kind of bought into that idea which is why early drafts of Haunted used what was known as the anti-pool. That is, you lost your gambled dice on as success but kept and gained dice on a failure.

I keep bringing up the classes I was taking at Adept Play, one of which, is an entire course on The Pool. It’s basically a five week updated and expanded version of this: talk. The course challenges the knee-jerk assumption I wrote about above on the following grounds:

  1. Dice rolls are not made without fictional context. Whatever situation might be at hand may very in importance to the player or the player’s perception of their character.
    • Therefore, it isn’t just about the current roll but also the next roll which is unknowable in the present moment.
  2. Like Sorcerer, each additional die has diminishing returns toward success. There’s a point where the value of holding that die back for later outweighs the increased chance of success.
  3. While it’s technically true that putting all your dice in maximizes your chance of success on a single roll, it is also means that you will eventually lose ALL your dice when that small chance of failure eventually turns up.
    • And in the face of that next unknowable roll, that’s a pretty undesirable thing to have happen all at once.

Example: It would really suck to lose all my dice in an argument with my character’s mom over attending my least favorite uncle’s birthday party only to have the next roll be a major confrontation with my nemesis over our shared love interest.

After taking that class I really thought about how that applied to my application of The Pool within Haunted’s mechanics. I realized that it had always been a compromise because I don’t like “consolation” mechanics. That is, mechanics that give you some kind of reward for failure as if it were some kind of salve over a wound. I think the idea that, “failure in RPGs sucks” is a myth. In a well designed game, you should be able to fail every roll and still have a great (albeit tragic) time. (And no, I don’t mean “fail forward”, I mean things should be able to spiral into irrecoverable defeat and that should be fine).

The idea that the players need some kind of apology for failure that will “make it up to them later” is extremely patronizing. It also robs the game of any sense of narrative momentum. When you get kicked hard and you are down, it is harder to get back up. When you succeed, you can capitalize on that success and keep succeeding.

The fact that I was using the anti-pool method of gambling and gaining dice is what was masking the flaw in the underdog effect I wanted to inherit from Sorcerer. The murderer would build up enough dice eventually to succeed periodically. By switching back to The Pools original method of gambling and dice loss the murderer has a much tougher time but more tough than I was anticipating.

After fixing the math but switching from d6s to d10s and spending a lot of time reflecting on Haunted’s inherited properties from The Pool, I realized that a really successful Haunted game relies on the players developing a set of core skills that I don’t think a lot of RPG players typically exercise. I’m going to get into those skills in my next post.

Previous Posts In This Series

Haunted will be released by Halloween 2025. There will be a short Kickstarter prior to that which you can follow here to be notified when it launches: Haunted on Kickstarter