Real pages from the book. Click one to read it.
A Gauntlet for 0-level servants
You are the servants of Mr. Dorian Gray. It is past one in the morning, the last guests linger, and you are clearing up. Then, at the top of the house, a cry, and a crash. Every mirror turns over, and behind the glass stands the same house, rotten.
Taking a treasure is usually a DC 9 WIS check. This one needs no roll.
In the last chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the servants hear a cry, break in through the balcony, and find their master dead on the floor. This module asks what happened to them. The players are the staff of the house in Grosvenor Square: the valet, the housekeeper, the scullery maid, the hall boy, the hired musician. The knife cut the canvas instead of the man, and eighteen years of stored sin are leaking into the house.
The worst of it drags its gilt frame up the front stair. Every mirror opens onto the same house as it really is: fog, nitric acid, the night Basil Hallward died. The master can’t be hurt, and he would like you to keep the Constable at the door. Somewhere upstairs, behind a barred door, is the thing that has to be put right before dawn. How to put it right is the table’s choice.
It’s a dungeon crawl through a Mayfair townhouse, built for a GM who has never seen it before. The house rules fit on one page. The first fifteen minutes are scripted, and each chore teaches one rule. The GM tracks three things: a phone timer, a Rot tally, and a die.
Twelve pages from the book and the print sheets. Scroll sideways, and click a page to read it.
Nine reviews, all written in character. Everyone below is fictional, and several of them are dead. Quoted lines are Wilde’s own, with chapter and paragraph.
I read it in one sitting, which is the only way to read anything one intends to disapprove of. The servants do all the work and have all the ideas, which is how every good household is run. I am told that amusing me earns a coin. Several people tried. One of them managed it.
Which is more than can be said for some households. A great deal of running about on the front stair, which I don’t allow. I have taken one star off for the schoolroom.
It is not fit for you to see, sir.ch X ¶4
I let a gentleman out at eleven one foggy night, and I have never told a soul. Card number one knows. I would rather it didn’t, but I can’t fault the research.
In my experience the gentleman of the house is in the right, and I put that in my Report. The book lets the servants argue with it. Two stars, for the part where I stand in a portico and watch, which is true to life.
I don’t believe a word of it.ch XV ¶19 Still, I sent four servants on errands and every one of them came back, which is more than my own people manage.
I held every face in the house under the lamp. Scullery maids, a hall boy, a man with a fiddle. Not one of them was him. I’m told that is the point.
Someone brought a basin, and nobody asked me anything.
I am quite happy here.ch XVI ¶34
Four of my small canvases are in it, and for once the people who dust them get to step inside. Echo is not mine, but I would have painted her. I ask only that you pray for the man who owns the fifth.
I have never looked better. I would ask you not to leave any more reviews.
If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.ch IX ¶3
From the master’s collections. Not for sale, but they can be taken.
Read a page and ask anything: the book answers truly. Every page costs you a turn, and the last one is the novel’s last paragraph.
Counts as leather armour. The wearer can’t lie, and words meant to deceive are a lie. No returns if you try.
People can’t see you while it’s held in your mouth. Mirrors still can, and so can the thing on the stair. Listing photo may not show the product.
Casts out demons, once: it sends the Misshapen to the farthest room. After that it’s a red stone.
Yes, the Shadowdark RPG core rulebook. The module points to its pages (core p.116 and so on) and reproduces none of its rules text. Everything the module adds fits on one page.
That’s what it’s built for. Prep takes ten minutes, the first fifteen minutes of play are scripted, and the GM cheat sheet is the back cover. The GM tracks the Dawn timer, the Rot tally and, in the finale, the Drag.
No. They play the servants, and nobody ever told the servants anything either. Readers will find the last chapter turned inside out.
The print sheets: 24 servant cards to cut apart, optional card backs, 35 vail coins, the Constable’s Report and four player maps, on seven A4 pages. The book itself reads fine on a screen.
It’s a horror game with a forgiving streak: nothing on the Face side of the house costs hit points, and killers warn first. The content note is murder, body horror, drowning, period policing and class violence. The book includes the X-card and lines and veils.
Only if you let the novel end the way Wilde wrote it.