Another Old Dark House

Here's another map from the early '90s: Stewart Manor.

Originally created for a player character I made for Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic, Sgt. Maj. Reginald Stewart, Ret., it didn't see play until many years later (the good Sergeant Major - an older gentleman with a bad leg - didn't play as well as I thought he would, so he was retired after two or three game sessions), when it became the family home of Miss Scarlet, a long-dead serial killer whose ghost had picked up where she left off.

The PCs had first encountered Miss Scarlet as a mummified corpse hanging in a haunted house. In life, she and other evil-doers had been attracted to the house by a powerful, evil force that resided there. ("Do you believe that a thing can be inherently evil?") Upon their (untimely) deaths, their ghosts became trapped in the house. For 150-ish years, the house had been collecting evil wraiths - then, one of the PCs had to take a room there while his apartment was being fumigated. It was only a couple of nights before all Hell broke loose, during which the PCs discovered Scarlet's body where it had been since she hung herself decades earlier. Her right hand still clutched the straight razor - now rusty and jagged - she'd used to murder several boarders.

The PCs knew me too well, though. Before I could even finish describing the scene, one of them said: "I hack off her hand - the one with the razor - with my hatchet and carefully fold the blade over. Then, I use a whole roll of duct tape and wrap the whole hand and blade into a huge, harmless ball." He then glared at me. "I know you. As soon as we turned our backs, that body was going to come to life and--" He acted out the corpse raising the blade, slicing the rope, and dropping to the floor, ready to cut someone.

I couldn't deny his accusations.

The PCs finally got to feel Miss Scarlet's blade years later, when the spirit of the serial killer - having been freed from that evil house - returned to her birthplace and started her killing spree anew, this time unfettered by the bonds of mortal flesh...

Stewart Manor, Arkham, MA

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