There's a house that's in every world.
The House hates you. The House awaits you.
Maybe it's an apartment no-one ever moves into, or an abandoned house that's never torn down. Maybe its a castle avoided due to an ancient curse, or a space station no-one dares dock with. Whatever form it takes, when you enter, you'll be in the Darkest House.
And it hates you.
The Darkest House is an 2021 online tabletop horror roleplaying game made by Monte Cook Games, run using a simplified variant on the Cypher System. It’s designed to be inserted as is into any campaign, with the player characters stumbling into the Darkest House from their setting and struggling to escape with their lives and souls intact.
It’s also designed specifically for online play, with an app rather than a rulebook that's designed to be easily accessible through clicking and on screens, and the setting designed to incorporate instant messenger and other aspects of online play to build horror.
Now. The Darkest House awaits...
The Darkest House contains examples of
- Abusive Parents: Philip Harlock’s parents were intensely abusive to him before their deaths. They continue to exist – literally or metaphorically – as the Mother and Father of the Darkest House
- Alien Geometry: Even the most normal rooms of the house don’t fit together in a coherent way. There are rooms like the Boundless Room (which repeats in every direction) and the Twisted Room (which has wildly variable gravity) which are even worse.
- Always a Bigger Fish: While the Family are the primary threats the Players will face, they’re not the most powerful beings here – the Spirit Of Violence can override the Father and make him leave you alone, and the Brother will flee in terror from the Ravendream. On a larger scale The Enemy Of Light completely dismisses the Darkest House, is unaffected by anything in it, and strongly implies that its “bindings” aren't actually doing anything to stop it leaving.
- Always Night: Through the windows of the house it’s always midnight, no matter the time. If they can get the angle, they can see the moon is blood red.
- Ambiguous Situation: In the notes of Philip Harlock, he notes that his memories and the house no longer line up – he recalls his sister, who he never had. Are his memories being altered, or is history? Or both?
- Arc Words: “The House Hates You”
- Apocalyptic Log: The notes of Phillip Harlock are left around the house, giving insight into one possible backstory for the house and providing some context for what’s going on.
- Antagonist Title: The Darkest House, rather than any of its inhabitants, is the Big Bad of the game.
- Closed Circle: It’s almost impossible to leave the Darkest House, whether through lockpicking or teleportation magic, with every attempt simply ending up back in the house. There’s only a few ways around this, and none of them are easy.
- Complete Immortality: Unlike most creatures of the house, the Family cannot be permanently killed. No matter how thoroughly they’re destroyed, they always return eventually.
- Creepy Doll: The Doll Room is full of these. If the players enter or mess with the dolls nothing happens. They’re just dolls, and the doll room is one of the few places that is safe from the monsters of the room.
- Deal with the Devil: You can always add the House Dice to any roll, giving you a much higher chance of succeeding at the cost of intensifying the terrifying supernatural phenomena in the House.
- Demonic Possession: While there’s several ways this can happen, the most notable is the Lurker, who can possess you if you answer the door in the Foyer. It usually lets the player act normally, only taking control to collect the Mystic Tools, possess the foetus in the nursery, and escape into the real world at any cost.
- Epiphanic Prison: The most pain-free method to leave the house is to overcome its attempts to undermine your reality and undergo true Character Growth from who you were when you entered.
- Fission Mailed: If every character suffers a grievous wound (one equal to their rank), they pass out and wake up in the blood fountain. This heals their wound and might even get them a way out, if one of them is willing to stay behind in eternal agony.
- Genius Loci: The Darkest House is sentient, sapient and hates you. Not people in general, to be clear. You, personally.
- Gotta Catch Them All: The Mystic Tools are one way out of the house – collecting all of them lets you build a door to anywhere. The Blueprint helpfully tells you where they are. Just be careful— you’re not the only one looking.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Implied. The Smiling Man has some connection with the house’s history, with images and depictions of him scattered all over the house, and the binding of the Enemy of Light in the basement appears to have had a radical effect. What exactly either of those entity’s actual role in the Darkest House becoming the Darkest House is, as with most things about the House, highly ambiguous.
- Haunted House: The Darkest House, obviously. It might be the Haunted House, the platonic ideal of which all other haunted houses are just shadows.
- Healing Factor: The Darkest House has one. Damaging the house permanently is impossible – the rooms slowly revert back to normal no matter how damaged.
- Hero of Another Story: Philip Harlock may or may not have created the house, but he did survive it, and you find the pages detailing his attempts all throughout the house
- The Heavy: While the Darkest House is the Big Bad, it’s primarily a background force for pretty obvious reasons. Most of the direct attacks on the players are performed by the Family, the manifestations of toxic love that each hold dominion over a different wing of the house.
- Heroic Dog: Buddy, in the dog room, is one of the few genuinely positive forces in the house, and will do his best to help players who adopt him.
- Humanoid Abomination: The house is full of these. The Family are the primary ones actively threatening the player characters, but there’s also the intensely creepy Smiling Man and the lock-ridden Doorman. There’s also various other creatures ranging from creepy helpers to active monsters.
- Inn Between the Worlds: A very sinister example, but the Darkest House can be manifest in any home in the multiverse. Creatures from countless worlds are still wandering its halls.
- Invisible to Adults: A good number of things in the Pater section of the house. You can make a deal in the Gallery to get the eyes of a child, letting you see them, for better or worse
- The Legions of Hell: The previous inhabitants of the house were occultists, and several of the demons they’ve summoned are still bound around the house. It’s implied they’re at least partially there to keep the Enemy Of Light imprisoned.
- Living Shadow: The Brother is obnoxious but harmless. His shadow, however, is murderously dangerous.
- Macabre Moth Motif: The deceptive, manipulative Sister is surrounded by (and full of) moths at all times
- Mechanical Abomination: The Lacuna is an unearthly machine in the basement of the Original House. Touching it hurls you outside of time, forcing you to see all reality at once before hurling you back anywhere from seconds to millennia afterwards ...and it’s unfinished. What it does when complete, no-one knows, but options range from “opening a portal anywhere” to “contacting unspeakable horrors” to “destroying the world.”
- Men Use Violence, Women Use Communication: The male members of the Family, the Father and Brother, are openly physically aggressive, while the Sister and Mother are more manipulative and deceptive. The genderless Lover uses both.
- Multiple-Choice Past: The Darkest House might be the Black Bug Room of a traumatised recluse, the multiversal archetype of a haunted house, a Victorian manor corrupted by the imprisonment of an Ancient Evil in the basement or warped by mad experiments with time and space, any combination of those things or something completely different. No-one knows.
- Never Sleep Again: Sleeping in the house causes terrifying and personalised nightmares with an accompanying mental attack, slowly eroding the sanity of those in the house.
- Nuclear Family: The Family are a corruption of this archetype, with the violent and controlling father, the smotheringly affectionate mother, the bitter and jealous son, the spiteful and erratic daughter and the manipulative and exploitative spouse.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: The Darkest House is designed to be this, being a Gothic Haunted House story that can appear in any campaign, completely unchanged. Within the house itself the Guardian is a Dark Fantasy room that wouldn’t seem out of place in Dark Souls, the Gatekeeper room is a surreal, New Weird alien spaceship, and the Backrooms are lifted directly from Analog Horror
- Reality-Changing Miniature: In the Original House, you can find a broken dollhouse of the Darkest House. Not only can you use it to enter any location in the House, you can fix it to permanently shut the house off from your universe.
- Psychological Torment Zone: The Darkest House is designed to play on the character’s fears and backstory, in particular the Familiar Room (which appears as a place from the character’s past) and the Tea Room (which drags one of the character’s loved ones into the house).
- Pre-Insanity Reveal: A very odd one: you can find the Original House, which is the Darkest House before whatever warped it into being the Darkest House, a process often referred to as the House “going insane”
- Through the Eyes of Madness: Philips journal entries start to get increasingly bizarre as the house’s corruption goes on. Whether it’s him or the house going mad is unclear.
- Riddle for the Ages: The GM’s guide explicitly doesn’t provide a concrete backstory for the House, the Family or any of the other inhabitants, only providing hints. The GM Is advised to let the players come up with whatever explanation scares them the most.
- Sadistic Choice: The Gatekeeper will let you out of the house in exchange for the thing, person or even concept you love most.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: The Enemy Of Light is an impossibly powerful Eldritch Abomination sealed beneath the Darkest House. It isn't actually trying to escape, and is happy to wait for the house to decay, but its presence may be why the Darkest House is the way it is.
- Translator Microbes: The Darkest House translates every language within its walls. It's hard to emotionally torture someone who doesn’t know what you’re saying, after all.
- Traveling at the Speed of Plot: In-universe. Time shifts and warps within the house, which means the GM can decide how long things take and how often people need to eat or sleep at whatever rate suits the plot.
- Uncertain Doom: Philip Harlock was last known to be sailing into the dark ocean at the end of the Backrooms. Why he went, what he found, and if he survived is unknown.
- Unreliable Expositor: The Darkest House corrupts any methods of gaining information about it, allowing it to give false information of its choosing.
- Variable Player Goals: In many rooms it is possible for players to be possessed, mind-controlled, replaced with duplicates or otherwise compelled to act against the other characters. In many other rooms, the Darkest House will try to make you think that happened.
