The Haunting of Hargrave House is a D&D 5E one-shot horror adventure for up to six level 3 pre-generated characters.

Yes, you’ve got that right: pre-generated characters.

The main conceit of this adventure requires them. Normally when reviewing adventures, I give an overview of the story and happily spoil many areas of the plot. This time? I’m not going to do that. Because the chance that a player will read this and be spoiled is problematic. This is an adventure you want to play unspoiled. Although you could just read the blurb of the adventure on the DMs Guild.

If you want to give your players an evening or two of great entertainment, this is the right product to enable that.

The adventure focuses on the exploration of a house, and there are horror elements. You might have picked that up from the adventure’s name.

Throughout the exploration, the players come across various clues that begin to unravel the mystery. Although I don’t think “Clue” is quite the right term. Perhaps “Revelation” would be better? The order you get them in is always fixed, regardless of where the players find them.

There are more traditional clues allowing the players to discover more of the house’s history as they explore. So, while the players are learning the revelations in a predictable order, they are also uncovering more information to aid them as well – and that, in not so predictable an order.

Traps, tricks, hauntings, and the occasional monster make up the encounter areas in the House. In all, there are 34 areas, and the players will not have to explore them all to finish the adventure. My quick count is that there are 9 revelations, and 12 places you can find them; the final encounter unlocks when the last revelation is found.

All of this is excellently written and presented. The adventure is by Greg Bilsland, who worked at Wizards of the Coast for nine years and of this writing works at Bungie. It’s a joy to read, with many encounters that brought a smile to my face. One rather amusing “trick” is a set of cigars, the smoke of which turns into smoke mephits that attack the party. Greg’s note to this encounter? “The lesson: Don’t smoke, kids, or mephits will appear and try to kill you.” How could I resist humour like that?

One rather excellent presentation method is used here: The adventure has boxed text, very well written, describing each of the encounter areas. In that text, certain words are marked in bold. Each of those items then appears as a feature for the players to explore in the DM’s notes. Having these explicit links from the boxed text to the notes helps the DM immensely, helping them draw the players’ attention to what is important. (If you’re writing an adventure, consider using this. And it also helps you check if the features in the room are described in the boxed text: they should be!)

There are a couple of light proof-reading errors in the text. A “page XX” made its way into the document, and I spotted one or two other minor errors. They do not detract from the adventure.

There are suggestions as to how to make the adventure finish when you have a limited time, mainly by altering the pace of revealing the Clues. The adventure is light on combat. I am not quite certain how long a standard group would take to finish it in full. I’m leaning towards 4 to 6 hours, which makes it likely a one or two session affair, but I may be mistaken. Personally, I’d suggest running it in a single longer session if you could. Any investigation is tricky when split over separate sessions, and especially one like this, which also wants to set up a mood of horror and unease.

This is one of the best adventures I’ve read of late, excellently constructed and with a brilliant concept behind it. I highly recommend The Haunting of Hargrave House.