GW20192 Halls of Horror.pdf

HALLS OF HORROR

Gothic Floorplans

Scanner’s Notes

This set of 25mm scale floorplans was published in 1986 by Games Workshop. At

the time the UK FRP scene was at its height and GW was still a roleplaying

company. The cover art is recycled from Steve Jackson’s 1984 foray into cheesy

Hammer horror, the Fighting Fantasy gamebook House of Hell .

Alliteration and cover art are not the only things that link the two. Both present us with

the classic horror location of the old and sprawling English country house. While

House of Hell presents the reader with a quite linear and frankly dreadful plot

involving a cursed family and devil-worship (the butler did it, incidentally) Halls of

Horror provides GMs with the pieces of a brooding old mansion ready to be stocked

with devil-worshipping cultists, virgin sacrifices, demons, vampires, ghosts, mad

scientists and the terrible Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath.

The box was aimed very much at the Call of Cthulhu Keeper, as GW at the time

enjoyed a good relationship with that game, even publishing the second edition in the

UK along with several original supplements, including a sourcebook for the British

Isles.

The idea of a country House of Hell is a peculiarly 1980s one. With teachers and

parents taking seriously Jack T. Chick’s warnings that Dungeons & Dragons would

draw their kids into devil worship and cases of non-existent satanic ritual abuse in the

papers the idea of faceless hordes of satanic cultists living among us and gathering

at the remote country house of their patron to conduct their hideous black mass

seemed compelling, and even plausible. People go missing all the time, right? 1986

was also the year the story broke that convicted rapist and conman Derry Mainwaring

Knight had convinced an East Sussex vicar that he was trapped in a satanic cult and

needed money to escape, netting over £200,000 from local Christians over three

years. Bodysnatchers for the 80s, the satanic cultist is an alien, incomprehensible

enemy living undetected among normal folk.

Tempting as the cult theme must have been to novelists and moviemakers, it had an

additional frisson for the RPG gamer. This was a time when a sizeable chunk of

Middle England genuinely believed gamers were closet satanists themselves.

Meanwhile, gamers themselves were often just as freaked out by the tales of

supposed Satanic abuse as anyone else. To them, the cultist was still alien,

monstrous and incomprehensible, but also familiar. At the time the phrase “By the

way, I play Dungeons & Dragons” was in many circles practically synonymous with

“By the way, I worship Satan.” The 1980s gamer had training in being part of a

shunned and widely feared cult.

Have fun. And don’t have nightmares.