The Definitive Guide to Haunted Houses in DnD

Haunted houses in Dungeons and Dragons have been a hallmark of the game for a long time. It’s the classic horror adventure, a quick jaunt into a horror-filled house searching for something or someone. Of course, once the characters step inside the door they find themselves in a world of pain, psychologically and physically. Ghosts or ghouls or shades of sorts haunt the halls, knocking over brooms and slamming windows as the characters investigate, a lantern quivering in their hands as they climb higher and press deeper into the house.

But designing a haunted house like any other dungeon would be a mistake. Haunted houses are entirely different beasts. The only similarities are that dungeons and haunted houses are enclosed spaces typically filled with monsters. What you need to remember is that the best part of any haunted house is the story behind it, the depth of the lore, and the reason the house is haunted in the first place. It needs to be specific, take charge of the story, and help guide your players through the house and give them a reason to investigate. If the house just belonged to Derrick Spook of the Spook Clan and he died and now haunts the place, your players will groan and roll their eyes. But if Derrick sold his soul to a powerful demon who now haunts the house after killing Derrick and his family… now we’re working with something.

So let’s dive in and see how you can take “just another haunted dungeon” and turn it into a truly harrowing experience your players will remember for years to come.

Scare Your Characters: Consent

This has been my go-to saying for years whenever someone asks me about designing horror adventures. We as DMs want to tell amazing stories with our tables, we want them to engage with our world, our characters, and our villains and feel compelled to risk life and limb to explore. But when tackling horror stories in any way, particularly when the players are both telling the story and are in it, we want to ensure everyone’s comfortable.

That means starting with the number one rule for running any TTRPG: consent.

Horror deals with some touchy subject matter, and haunted houses in 5e aren’t an exception to that. Look at any classic horror story in DnD. There are usually ghosts, skeletons in a closet, and other tropes of horror like spiders. If you have a player around the table who’s particularly scared of spiders, don’t put spiders in your haunted house. If this player is so scared of spiders that even imagining one is going to induce real-world anxiety, they’re not going to engage with the story. Sure, they might remember it later, but not for the right reasons.

Consent is such an important subject that it could be an entire article. There are already articles on this subject written by people more qualified than me that I recommend you look into. Click here for a form-fillable PDF to help your players find lines they don’t want to cross. And click here for an article on different safety tools you can use in your DnD campaigns.

However, for our intent here, only use content your players are happy to engage with. If they’re uncomfortable, move on. Dungeons and Dragons is a game. Everyone at the table wants to enjoy the session and tell amazing stories together. Your job as the DM is to make sure they have the space, time, and comfort levels to do so.

Create a Compelling Backstory

Every good haunted house has a killer backstory that makes people want to know more. Death House from Curse of Strahd shows the players a dark history of neglect, cults, and worship towards an uncaring and malicious master. Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House presents a house few people can walk away from with so much mystery that we still view it as a top-tier example of a haunted house. Both of these examples show us that backstory is important, and while I don’t think Death House does a tremendous job as a haunted house, it is still a useful case study on how to build them.

For your haunted house to work, start with the past inhabitants. Ask yourself who lived there, what they were up to, and any darkness they might have harboured openly or in secret. In “Death House”, the previous inhabitants were cultists worshipping Strahd. They neglected their children, performed profane rituals in the basement, and created a semi-sentient house that would devour the characters if given the chance. As the characters move through the house they find portraits of the family, heirlooms, secrets hidden in the artwork along the walls, and get a glimpse of what the house may once have been. Letters and secret rooms show that they worshipped Strahd, and ghosts and other traps offer an idea of who they employed, the presence of children, and tell a dark story of neglect in the name of an uncaring false god.

We need to go deeper than that. My problem with Death House as a haunted house is that it runs more like a dungeon than a haunted house. There are standard enemies scattered throughout, traps to slow the party down, and the tension is mostly presented through powerful enemies. The backstory is almost secondary to the real threat: Strahd and the monsters within the house. It’s also not apparent that the house is alive until the very end when the players are trying to escape.

The story of your haunted house needs to be front and centre. It needs to show up constantly and provide just enough information for the players to start making their theories based on limited information. That story should become clearer as they progress, solidifying their theories and ultimately helping them escape, cleanse, or vanquish whatever is causing so much horror. To do this well write your haunted house as a character itself. Who lived there? How did this impact your house? How has this changed it? What caused the hauntings to start? How can the players succeed? What happens if they fail?

Once you’ve answered these questions and have a deep story for your players to get excited about, it’s time to add in the horror.

Use the Rule of Three

Everything in writing is always better in threes. For some reason, the human brain loves threes of things more than any other number. It’s why a lot of popular phrases use three words (veni, vidi, vici), why high school essays are written with three main points, and why sentences like this one have three items. It makes things easier to remember, which is incredibly useful for storytelling.

In horror, we can use this common writing rule to create moments that gradually build tension until we release it with a credible threat. Three moments will be easier for your characters to remember and cause a more direct link to something scary happening around them as they explore the house and learn its secrets.

For example, let’s look at a common trope of haunted houses: shifting shadows. This trope is great because it plays on the common fear of not being able to trust what you’re seeing. If we were going to work the rule of three into this trope, we’d want to start with something small and mundane that can be explained away as a trick of the light.

Set the scene for your player characters. They’ve just reached the first floor and see four rooms to enter. The doors are closed for all of them, but one of your characters (whoever has the highest passive Perception) notices something move underneath one of them. We’ve established something odd happening, but that can be explained away as a trick of the light, their fears playing with them. When they open the door and enter the room everything is fine. Nothing too odd is inside the room and they let out a sigh of relief.

Enter phase two. Things get a bit weirder now. As they leave the room, the same character as earlier spots a shadow move behind a curtain fluttering in the wind. Weirder still, the window was shut moments before. Now they’re realising something odd is happening. The tension is building. If they investigate the curtain or move to shut the window they feel a cold wind move through them but nothing else. The trap is now set.

Phase three is the credible threat. As they move throughout the house some more, this same character, or anyone they’ve mentioned moving shadows to, might see another shadow move from the corner of their eye. When they look closer they spot something they would have otherwise missed: a gold necklace, a letter, a key to the basement. They’ll go to pick it up and carry on their exploration, and that’s when something grabs them and attacks.

Using the rule of three we can slowly build up tension without resorting to dozens of monsters attacking the characters as they entire specific rooms. These encounters should be dynamic and move with the characters through the house or when they explore certain floors. This gives you more freedom to plan the haunts and make ‘jump scares’ to keep your players on edge and their characters terrified.

Build Tension with Puzzles and Traps

Tension can build in many different ways. By using the rule of three, we can organically build it as the characters naturally explore. Another great way to do it is through puzzles and traps. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft offers some haunted traps as inspiration, but you can always create something that better suits your table. If they love puzzles, give them more puzzles. If they hate them, maybe stick to traps.

However, using puzzles and traps in haunted houses can’t be done in the same way as a dungeon. They can prevent the way forward (finding a key to get into the basement) or unlock new options to explore the house (a secret vault behind a half-finished portrait that can only be opened by finishing the painting). More importantly, your puzzles and traps should link to the threat you’re building up and the house’s story.

A haunted house I built a few years ago focused on the events of a single night that repeated inside the walls forever. Puzzles and traps centred around these events, finding ways to break the cycle and usher in a better (or worse) future. The characters had to find pieces of a key to open the tower door, and each piece could only be reached by finding ways to change the past. The ghost of a guard dog defended the missing child on a balcony and would only stand down if they found his name in one of the many portraits around the house and said it aloud. The child would then help them solve the puzzle of the room, recounting how she died and ultimately giving the players the option to set her spirit free. This changed the way the haunts within the house behaved, made the traps deadlier, and ramped up the tension since these changes were immediately obvious.

In short, puzzles and traps can do a lot to add tension without needing to break out the battle map and roll initiative. I would suggest you use monsters sparingly as a way to break tension, not as a way to add it. This is where the threat comes in.

Adding Threat

Monsters are central to any horror story, whether they’re ghosts, demons, or anything else you can think of. Haunted houses in dnd should use monsters a bit differently. They should be a way to build a credible threat, release some of the tension, and remind your characters that the house will kill them if they let it.

That being said, there are two ways of stocking your haunted house with monsters and encounters.

The Dungeon Approach

This is the standard approach Wizards of the Coast uses in their official modules. It’s also the usual way people stock haunted houses they create since the parallels between dungeons and haunted houses are so apparent in DnD. The way this works is similar to how you’d stock your dungeon. Pick a room, write up what’s inside, any traps, treasures, items, and monsters, and then move on to the next one.

That’s a gross oversimplification, but this is how players expect dungeons to work. They enter the room, the DM describes what they see, and if there are any monsters they attack or there’s some dialogue. Rinse and repeat. This is a fine way of using monsters in your haunted house, but it’s not great. When used this way, your tension can fall flat and your players can move through the house just like it’s anything else. Your encounters become stale fast and suddenly you’re looking or better options.

Let me introduce you to the one I use.

The Haunt Approach

This turns the haunted house on its head and gives you so much more freedom. I create a table of possible encounters within the house, usually 2-4 per floor, and then pick and choose to use the ones players are responding to more. If they are freaked out by the moving shadows, I move on to phase two of that haunt. If not, I try another one and see what they do. You should be reactive to your player characters, watching how they react to the first level of the haunts and then taking notes on how to move on to phases two and three.

You’ll need to use every bit of information you’ve just learned to put this into practice. The Rule of Three is fundamental as it corresponds to each phase or level of your haunt. Write down some scary ideas based on your haunted house’s backstory, something that connects to why it’s haunted in the first place. At this point a list of ten-fifteen is great, you can narrow them down if you’d like later to suit your prep style.

Once you’ve got your list, it’s time to start building your encounters. Phase one is something simple but slightly creepy (a shadow under the door, a slamming window, voices in a distant room). Phase two is a continuation of this but much closer to your characters (shadow in the same room as them, voices whispering in their ears telling them where to go). Once they take the bait, move on to phase three and throw a monster or trap at them. That shadow is a shadow demon that tries to strangle a character. The voice leads the character into a secret room, then seals the door and floods it with poisonous gas. The choices are yours, but in this way, each floor feels dynamic and your players will struggle to feel as if anywhere is safe. If the house feels alive and your encounters aren’t limited to set rooms, your table will feel compelled to investigate, stay close together, and find a way to get out alive.

That’s compelling storytelling at its finest.

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