Horror One-Shot and My First Player Character Kill

 With our usual DM feeling sick this weekend, I volunteered to run a one-shot I'd cooked up (intending to play it in October, but oh well) which was largely inspired by a particular "Haunt" in the game Betrayal at House on the Hill (whose Avalon Hill publisher is actually owned by WotC, so... there you go.)

Anyway, as the adventure begins, the players arrive at a charming inn within a town that's a day's travel from the imperial capital in my homebrew setting. When they fall asleep, though, they are magically transported to the Shadowlands - my version of the Shadowfell - into the "Cutter House."

Here's the conceit:

The characters arrive inside wooden boxes in the attic of the house. They're all wearing the same three-piece suit, and don't have any of their equipment.

The house gives off a very haunted-house vibe, with spooky magical effects and such. Worst of all, the party finds other groups of adventurers who have been gorily slaughtered, as well as a few mentions of Bloody Oleg. The party must use the exploration time in the house to gather equipment - usually sub-par stuff (Padded Armor, Greatclubs, etc.) - as well as spell components if they are casters. The moment anyone sets foot in the front hall, the grandfather clock on the second floor landing begins to chime (despite clearly being broken - there's a dead halfling stuffed inside) and after 13 chimes, Bloody Oleg, an undead dwarf berserker dripping with blood, walks in and attempts to carve the party to pieces.

The trick is that if they kill Oleg (and it's easy to do this the first time as he only starts with 10 health) he'll disappear after a few moments and once they go back to exploring the house, he'll arrive again, this time with 5 extra health (capping at 25.) The only way to permanently kill him is to do so on a circle of infernal runes in a secret room in the basement (the players can find this room without checks if they just go into the basement and look around, finding a secret door).

Only by killing Oleg permanently can they escape from the house.

Exploring the Cutter House, they can discover a strange and ultimately inconsistent story: Darion Cutter and his husband Samuel ran a shipping business about a hundred years ago. They had an argument, Darion worrying that Samuel had made some reckless decisions. The players can find letters that indicate this conflict, surrounding a ship called the Mary's Mercy, which Samuel purchased apparently in defiance of Darion's wishes. Eventually, the party can find the master bedroom, where a note from another sea captain claims that Samuel died when the Mary's Mercy sank, and in the master bathroom, they find a skeleton, presumably Darion, with sleeves rolled up, and there's a razor blade in the tub (well, if they look in the murky water.)

They also find references to Bloody Oleg, as well as some children's drawings in the nursery - presumably for the girl the couple intend to adopt, named Henrietta, though the drawings are by "Darion, Age 7."

The truth is that they are not in the material world, and instead in the Shadowlands, and as such, the house represents not an actual tragedy that took place, but instead the extreme worries that Darion held, which bled into the Shadowlands. In truth, he and his husband were perfectly successful, and lived long and happy lives, but the worst case scenario that played out in his head manifested in the Shadowlands. Furthermore, his childhood boogeyman, Bloody Oleg, also manifested here as a violent undead dwarf. At some point, the monster made a deal with a number of fiends exiled from Infernus (my version of the Nine Hells, which was conquered by the Angel of Death and literally froze over to become The Necropolis instead) in order to keep coming back - only he didn't actually fulfill his end of their bargain, so they manifested their trap to kill him once and for all.

All the while, the vampire Lord Valdarren has used the Cutter House as a sort of audition for adventurers he wishes to bring under his employment.

While my party were able to find the infernal shrine in the basement before facing Oleg the first time, the older human druid Velthe, who had kind of spearheaded the plan to lure him down to the basement, ultimately fell to Oleg's greataxe, and given that this monster lives to murder, he chopped off Velthe's head - literally the turn before he was destroyed.

Given that it was a one-shot and that it felt motivated by the monster, I didn't feel too bad about this, though in now five years of running D&D games, this is actually the first time I've killed off a player character.

I guess if it had to happen anywhere, a one-shot specifically in the horror genre is not a bad place to do it. At this point in my Ravnica campaign the characters have so much access to resurrection magic that it's not until I start throwing monsters that can cast Disintegrate that I think they're in any real danger (and there's always True Resurrection.)

(Oh, and there's one character who might summon a Nightwalker if they succeed on a Divine Intervention... so there's that.)

Anyway, the one-shot was a bit of a back-door pilot, as I've been thinking of running a campaign set in the Shadowlands, which certainly has spooky Shadowfell-feeling locations but is more of a broader fantasy "Dark World" akin to the Dark World from Zelda: A Link to the Past. I don't think this adventure would be the first session - we'd likely go about things differently, and maybe make an entirely different starting point for their entry into the Shadowlands (possibly even have it start in the material plane.)

While I think the risk of danger makes a game like D&D an interesting challenge, I also tend to focus on the group storytelling potential of it, and I want players to feel that they can invest in a character with a reasonable expectation that they can explore their story - basically, I like to give players an out should something befall them.

And yet, I've only really come within killing range of a character once before, and I sort of fudged things (letting someone do some mage-hand healing potion shenanigans that probably should have cost more in the action economy) in the players' favor.