I would do the same nonmagical hand-waving later on when the party fought a ghost. I waived the gargoyles’ nonmagical resistance as it would’ve made the fight drag on too long (only one of them had a magic weapon – and gargoyles are immune to Filkur’s poison from the Dagger of Venom). They were immediately suspicious of the Gargloye statues flanking the inside entryway – as they should be! Filkur the spider investigated by waving a leg in front of one of them from above, and they sprang to life and attacked.Ī pair of CR 2 gargoyles is a solid combat encounter for five level 3 PCs, and I got several solid hits in. Once they began exploring around the other edges of the house the doors flew open and they went inside. The front doors are designed to open only once the party has essentially given up trying to open them, but they tried their damndest, including Filkur the druid using a Wild Shape spider form to climb up to the second story. My players took a hell of a lot longer investigating the outside entrance than I planned. I didn’t have time for any actual role-playing here so I railroaded the players through an intro cutscene until they were in front of the house, at night, with a single light in an upstairs window. Since we were mostly using PCs from our last one-shot, “ Den of the Rotten Kings,” I modified the Elderly Wizard Looking for Magic Shit hook by using an overwizard of Luskan to send the party on a mission. The published adventure provides a few hooks to get the PCs directly in front of the haunted mansion. We skipped some fights and a few rooms and still took an additional 40 minutes but we got it all in and had a great time. While I wanted a horror one-shot to be challenging, the original adventure was written for a party of 4th-5th level, whereas the PCs we were using were only going to be 3rd level.įurthermore I needed to run the whole thing in a single evening, which for us is ideally around three hours.

I built the entire two-story mansion from scratch in Roll20, and also needed to make several adjustments for both time and difficulty.

I used a one-shot adventure from the DM’s Guild called “ The Haunt,” by P.B.

How to play a spooky character dnd