Good Bones: Haunted Houses in Recent Indie Roleplaying Games
Tabletop designers have added their own commentary to well-worn foundations.
Historically, if you were lucky, you beefed it in the comfort of your own living room (or cabin or tent or cave). But especially in the context of European and American media, haunted houses have evolved into an iconic trope—down to their creaky hinges and mysteriously-fluttering curtains— which indie RPGs are happy to play with. It makes sense; a dungeon is simply a haunted house pre-horrific backstory–but recent designers have gone beyond the traditional staples of haunted house legends and added their own commentary to well-worn foundations.
The origins of the contemporary haunted house began in English Gothic horror—Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, as well as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. At the end of the 19th century, Irishman Bram Stoker would set the standard for both the haunted house genre as well as vampire fiction at large with his 1897 novel Dracula. The gloomy castles of these early books served as a reaction to the excessively-communal Enlightenment, and gave authors an excuse to go off alone to brood on such irrational things as ghosts and feelings. The transformation from castle to mansion occurred when this literary movement spread westward, and Americans, sadly castle-less, adapted English settings to fit their environments. Gilded Age aristocrats were the only people in the United States who owned anything close to medieval fortresses, with their massive mansions built by industrial monopoly money.
When the Great Depression tanked the US economy, these mansions were no longer affordable, and laid in disrepair until local mortuaries took them over, creating the term “funeral home” and associating domineering houses with death in the minds of creatives. The stories that emerged in the following decades expanded the connection further, imagining those homes as the sites of ultimate vengeance for the exploited and abused. Entering a haunted house to brave the angry spirits within became a gauntlet, a test to be overcome for protagonists to prove their mettle or earn a prize (House on Haunted Hill, 13 Ghosts).
