Ok, this is something I've touched on before, but I think I have a pretty solid plan:
Matt Colville has argued that D&D was originally survival horror - making it through, and out of, a dungeon was a fraught challenge where death stalked every turn. But as the editions have gone on, he argues, the game has sort of kept vestiges of that while then empowering players to be more superheroic. The result, again, he argues, is a game whose mechanics are at odds with one another, where the attrition-based gameplay is meant to give us a feeling of desperation, but the immense power we can accomplish pulls away from that.
Fittingly, MCDM has now made two RPGs, Draw Steel and Crows, which each lean into one idea or the other: Draw Steel is built to make you feel like a badass hero from level 1, while Crows is all about just barely making it out alive if you do well enough.
I think a key aspect to this is that the player characters in a survival horror game are often untrained, normal people. That's obviously not always true: Resident Evil has always had player characters who are badass elite militarized cops (though the Grace half of RE9, which I generally hear is the better half, has someone who is, yes, FBI, but is not at all a combat expert.) But in other examples of the genre, it's frequently just some person, like Harry Mason or James Sunderland (James has one notable experience of violence, but a combat expert it does not him make).
So, how do we square this with D&D?
Well, it turns out that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft actually gave us something just for this: Survivors.
The Squire, Apprentice, Disciple, and Sneak broadly correspond to D&D's four core class archetypes (Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue) but they are significantly less powerful than even 1st level characters of each of those classes. Each of these characters are rocking at most a +1 to any given ability, they have next to nothing in terms of equipment (the highest AC of all of them is the Sneak, who gets to 13 because they get to use a shield).
I will say that I don't know whether the spellcasters are too powerful: the Apprentice has a couple spells (and ironically, because their Burning Hands action isn't part of their Spellcasting trait, they effectively have four spell slots, which is better than a 1st level Wizard). I'd be open to limiting these characters or even just ignoring them and only allowing the Sneak and Squire.
Still, much as very low-level spellcasters have to be very careful about when they use their tiny number of spell slots, perhaps this is ok.
The Survivors can actually level up, but while they get more HP, the features they gain are instead "Survivor Talents," which they get one of per level, and these are fun and flavorful, like Adrenaline Surge, in which you voluntarily give yourself the frightened condition to double your movement speed for a turn, or Desperate Scream, which can give you advantage on a saving throw twice per day, but the scream is audible to a few hundred feet.
I haven't seen these in action, but I think at the very least by lowering the characters' attack bonuses, saving throw bonuses, and spell save DCs, you create a group of people who are not really cut out to be adventurers - which then makes low-level monsters a pretty terrifying threat.
Actually, to be frank, even regular characters at level 1 or 2 have to be very careful. They key, though, is that Survivors never expect to be 5th level adventurers, let alone 20th. The entire game, using these guys, is going to be in those low, desperate levels, where the game feels like a Survival Horror one.
So: what do we put these poor sods through?
I have recently come to realize that I should use the pre-drawn maps from the Dungeon Master's Guide more frequently. These are great when you don't have an amazing vision for a dungeon layout. You take the map, and then you just decide what rooms have what in them. Honestly, you can even change the vibe of a map pretty easily, like how I took the Barrow Crypt map and turned it into a high tech underwater facility.
But here, we've got it already: the Spooky House.
Here's my twist, though: the house is actually a museum. I was watching some behind-the-scenes stuff about Widow's Bay (a show I enjoyed quite a bit - it's a horror comedy, but does truly get scary at times, at least for someone like me). In an early scene, the mayor is showing a NY Times travel writer to the island town's local museum, where hilariously over-the-top relics of the town's horrifying past are on display (the best bit: a docent showing relics of witch trials there, but describes it as a moment of pride for the town: "we found 'em, we burned 'em," which is something of an inversion of the prevailing modern take on things like the Salem Witch Trials). Anyway, it felt like a fitting setting.
I have also, since playing through Control Resonant, been a little obsessive over the brief Alan Wake easter egg there (if you don't read my Remedyverse posts, the Control and Alan Wake series both take place in a shared universe) in which the beleaguered reality-bending writer takes on an identity of a Nightwatchman.
So: the scenario I see: there's a group of people in this small town, local museum late at night. Maybe your Squire is a security guard, your Apprentice is a historian doing some research there, maybe your Sneak is a teenager who snuck in to get away from their parents.
But something in the museum has awoken.
Again, borrowing from Alan Wake, I think our predominant monsters are Shadows. Shadows are nasty low CR monsters, so we probably don't have a whole ton of them. Given that the players will be struggling to fight them, though, we're going to have the following mechanics:
Flashlights (again, an Alan Wake nod). In my homebrew setting, there's a mishmash of medieval/renaissance, 19th century industrial/steampunk, and 20th century/modern technology. I think a flashlight is totally reasonable here. Functioning essentially like a Bullseye Lantern, someone can point this at a shadow, applying its Sunlight Weakness just in any area of bright light (and perhaps removing its resistances).
But while this is a pretty great buff, we add the following downside: Usage dice.
Here, I'm borrowing from Crows (though I think this mechanic originated elsewhere). Each flashlight needs batteries (like in Alan Wake) and each turn you spend with the flashlight on in combat, you roll a usage die (say a d6, or a d4 if we're feeling mean). On a 1, the battery runs out, and the flashlight goes dark.
Batteries thus become crucial resources to find across the house. We might also have healing items (could just be standard healing potions, though maybe we make lesser healing items that give you flat amounts, or just like, 1d6 of healing).
Like any good survival horror game, the key to survival is some kind of puzzle, taking inventory pieces around the museum to get through various things. One of the reasons using the Survivors is helpful is that, while any Rogue worth their salt is carrying Thieves' Tools around, you can really force players to find appropriate keys when the Sneak doesn't necessarily carry them.
I think that one major step will be having to find fuses up in the attic and bringing them down to a fusebox in the basement, which will force the party to traverse most of the map. We might even implement some puzzles that force the party to split up.
While the Shadows on their own will probably be enough to get the party to play very defensively, I think our real horror here is a Shadow Demon, which is probably the cause of all of this. At CR 4, a Shadow Demon can one-shot any Survivor (unless they level up,) so I think that this needs to be a bit more of an implied threat that only actually strikes at them in the climax or if the players are... shall we say, leaning into the trope in which some idiot underestimates the danger they're in.
To keep this simple and doable in a reasonable amount of time, I think making a very linear set of puzzle challenges is totally reasonable here - A leads to B leads to C, etc. If we make the puzzles criss-cross the map, it won't feel like a railroad (hell, isn't this just how Resident Evil 2 works?)
If we have the time to flesh out some lore, we could plant it to be found throughout the house, but I think a real focus on the puzzles and the danger are what will help reinforce the mood of the adventure.
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