Interview: Tom Sweo's What Remains of House DuCrane

It's Halloween. Get spooky.

Tom Sweo is the creator of the fine zine known as The Ashmore Herald and he’s back! He’s been working on his new adventure, What Remains of House DuCrane, for at least a year and its almost here! I even ran a playtest of this adventure earlier this year. We all had a great time and I know its been polished even more since then. Here’s got awesome cover art by Marc Moureau, who is a fantastic artist that I’ve had do a bit of cartography for me in the past.

But before we get to that, I’ll just a take a moment to remind you that today is the very last day for the DCC Spooktober Bundle! Get 13 different adventures, zines, and more for just $35! Without further ramblings, here’s my interview with Tom:

What Remains of House DuCrane is a haunted house style dungeon crawl. I love a good haunted house story. What were your main influences when you began creating the adventure?

So the module actually started way back in September of 2022 with Chris Bissette's In Search of Adventure Game Jam. The goal was to build in a lot of things featured in the B1 - In Search of the Unknown. Suffice it to say I hit a wall and decided to pivot, but once I did I pulled a lot from my wife's love of Disney's Haunted Mansion. We were in peak spooky season and she was watching some of those 4k ride-through videos of the various forms of the ride around the world. The second inspiration was playing through Bride of the Black Manse and wondering how a haunted house funnel might feel to run. I know DCC has the Horror line and I have a few modules from it, but at the time I didn't feel like any fit that traditional haunted house feel.

This is a funnel where the PCs are all members of the staff at the mansion. That clever use of an alternate occupation table also gave you a way to give each PC a special rumor and a reason that they're at the mansion. Did you find that player get more "in character" with these more specific roles than in a more typical funnel adventure?

Oh! Absolutely. In one of my very first playtests, a player had the Butler and was like "I'm the butler, wouldn't I have the key to my own office?" So when I was revising the occupation table, I threw the key there as equipment, but also left it in a room to be found in case a player didn't get occupation. Over the course of playtesting I definitely found that players that were kitchen maids were a little bit more willing to play with the idea of kitchen equipment as weapons. Last year I had three of the kitchen staff in 3 different playtests use a rolling pin and every time that character nearly survived, but the rolling pin always dealt out some major damage and often turned the fights towards the players. The occupations being a little more recognizable and structured also helped players get into character. Though I did notice that the Butler often led the group and the cooks tended to be drunkards. I didn't get to see some of the "lower" occupations in the pecking order rise up and tell the Butler they were in charge now, but hopefully that can happen once this is in people's hands. Honestly the hardest part was trying to think of a reason why a Level 1 Party might be at this mansion.

Haunted House stories can be a hard kind of story to create in a ttrpg. What did you do in order to help that story keep a good pace when the PCs get involved?

The story in this case comes from the Haunted Mansion inspiration. In the ride, you travel through this mansion where there's hundreds of ghosts, but they're not really willing to come out because they don't know what you're going to do, but once they do it's parties and frivolity, and spooky stuff happening, and eventually you meet the ghost of a woman who has been married several times before and her husbands always seem to lose their head. So I started there, I thought about some of the scenes that really appealed to me about the ride, and I thought could be evocative for players to experience. In my first couple of playtests there were a few ways players could move through the house, and that honestly led to some aimless parties, wasting some time when the whole idea is to get out with something of value, so I shut down some routes, and tried to create a "perfect route" through the house for parties that wanted to get their stuff and get out. It's entirely possible to get to Lord DuCrane's study, find the macguffin, and leave through the attic without fighting or really dying. Now that's not a very fun funnel, so I tried to entice players with a lot different haunts that can be deadly if you try to resist or deadly if you participate, and just some good old fashioned "sorry this trap is just going to trigger" but I wanted to make sure that they weren't just pit traps or the like.

Dungeon crawls can often have somewhat illogical map layouts. Did you find it hard to create a fun map for the PCs to explore? What tips do you have for others trying to do the same?

So I wanted to make the map feel more like a blueprint for a building, and so a lot of my map doodling was on 3 separate pages and I would overlay the second floor over the first floor while I worked on the room layout for those, and same with the attic. So once I had a working blueprint of the house, I started to fill out the rooms based on what you might expect in an 1800s mansion. It definitely felt tough to make the map fun and realistic. Eventually I had to remove a couple of rooms or re-adjust them because they didn't make sense. Like in an early draft there was a bedroom and playroom for Lord DuCrane's children, but I couldn't make it work and still be fun, so I scrapped it.

I tried to give players a lot of reasons to explore the house, sometimes when they entered a room, they would be punished by losing 1 or 2 of their characters, but I tried to reward that risk and interaction with items to help the remaining characters survive.

As for tips? I think before you set pencil to graph paper, you should really think about the type of module you want to write. If you want something that can be more open ended or works well with Jaquaysing you need to think about how the rooms can interact with each other, have multiple entrances and exits, but for this I wanted to get the players up to the second floor and then realize their only escape might be a dangerous jump from a window, so I had reduce the number of rooms floor by floor. It certainly helps that a house kind of naturally does that. Also if you like to draw your maps, don't be afraid to erase the layout inner layout. I found what really helped me was since I needed this to be a house, I set the outline of the building and then worked and worked until I found a layout that worked for me and the adventure.

So here's a few photos from the second floor. The first image is from November 2022 (marked as 3 because the basement was initially keyed as 1) and you can see some rooms, a bunch of secret passages and a bathroom right over the grand ballroom, not much of a ballroom if it's only 12ft tall or so. The second image is the un-keyed map from the artist Helicity Boson. You can see how I changed the rooms around in some cases, and tried to keep that "blueprint" feel, you can see where Helicity had some of the previous floor below it visible, which I think helps make the map fun for players and Judges alike.

Anything else that you want people to know?

Besides the kickstarter? Not really, but I hope people will come out and support it. I have a few stretch goals listed but I have a few I'm keeping close to my chest in case we do really well, but I just want people to play this adventure. Also, I guess if people want to see me rant into the void about games and what not they can find me on bluesky @Traitorous Alf or can snag my first zine The Ashmore Herald Vol 1 at Goodman Games or DriveThruRPG.

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