In my recent attempts to find a great pre-written adventure to attract new GURPS players I bought a used copy of GURPS Horror first edition in paperback. I did this because it contains the adventure “The Haunting of Langley Manor” which receives praise on the rare forum posts where I see it mentioned. I ran this adventure with four people who were completely new to role-playing.
I have no review rating system, but I’d give this 10/10, 5 stars, 100%. I would definitely use it as the introductory adventure to GURPS before I would use Caravan to Ein Arris, perhaps the official GURPS starter adventure.
Just so we are clear, this adventure is NOT in GURPS Horror PDFs that you can buy online, it is only in GURPS Horror first edition on paper as far as I can tell. Current price for a used physical copy is $13 as I write this. I’m not 100% sure, but I believe IT CAN’T SAY SECOND EDITON on the cover. If it says that, it won’t have this adventure inside the book.
The Basics
There are some strange occurrences at Langley Manor and the PCs are sent in to investigate. This is meant as a present-day adventure but this was published in 1987, so we ran it as set in the 1980s which has also very fun because it added some cheese. It’s an 11 page adventure that includes a few simple maps. It is designed as a one-shot adventure for 3-6 characters that are 100 points. Basically this was probably meant as a no-frills add-on stuck on the end of GURPS Horror. But it’s a great adventure for new players! I am so happy I spent the $12 for a used copy of this book! I strongly recommend it to you!
As opposed to something like the often-recommended Caravan to Ein Arris (which I recently reviewed), I think GURPS newbies are best served by doing a non-fantasy game to showcase how the system differs from the DnD behemoth. I also think that running games that are low-powered and near the present day is best for new players. They don’t have to learn a bunch of lore about the setting and they can just behave as ordinary people would. This helps them focus on how to learn how to role-play and what role-playing games are about, rather than having to look up what a “tiefling” is or something. So Horror is a great fit.
We ran this with 125-point characters generated individually before the game began. (A list of the character sheets is here, toward the middle of the page.) Subtracting the pizza-eating time and messing around the adventure took about 5.5 hours split over two sessions to run.
Note that this review contains spoilers after this point and is for prospective GMs only.
The Structure
The NPCs should be monster-hunter or detective types. They are called to Langley Manor because the newly-rich new owner is bothered by a ghost who has manifested during her weekend-long housewarming party. One of the guests is missing, but the police will do nothing.
The real story: This mansion is the residence of a vampire. Due to some unfortunate events, the ownership of the house has fallen to someone the vampire can’t compel because the new owner is resistant to magical influence.
THIS IS A GREAT SET-UP. It gives the PCs a lot to work with. They can investigate the history of the house, they can figure out how the vampire has managed her property over the decades, they can discover her secret apartment and other strange objects in the house, they can mount a search for the missing person, they can question quite a few different people (including the disguised vampire and the vampire’s minions) about what goes on at the house. This last part feels quite a bit like a Knives Out or Clue movie.
At the same time as the players may take a variety of strategies, the circumstances of the set-up explains the vampire’s motivations quite well and the vampire has some interesting strategies. The vampire does not want publicity, and is hoping to not cause a fuss. She can’t just kill people! So the vampire uses a variety of different gambits against the PCs to get them to realize they should convince the new owner to sell, or to get them allied with her.
It is the vampire that sets the pace of the adventure. As the players fuss around trying to figure out what to do next, if the tempo drops the GM can make the vampire start a new tactic to change the pacing.
The Vampire’s Strategies
The vampire’s big moves are detailed in the adventure text and they work like a menu for the GM. The vampire is given 10 tactics. They are:
- Manifest as a vapor (body of air spell) and parade around to scare people
- Kidnap one of the NPCs to scare people
- Turn into a wolf (shapeshifting spell) and snarl a lot to terrorize people, or maul one
- Command a plague of rats (mammal control spell) to scare everyone
- Get her servant, the butler who is also a werewolf, to scare everyone or maul someone
- Create an ally on the enemy team by magically possessing one of the PCs (charm spell), then:
- Get the compelled PC ally to convince everyone else to leave (this was very fun)
- OR, get the compelled PC ally to marry the new owner, solving the vampire’s property problem. (I did not try this, but it could work.)
- Call in a magical/psionic ally to help her if things really aren’t going well — an invisibility wizard or a mind-reading flying telepath is her preferred ally. (I did not try this.)
- Give up, reveal herself, and make a deal
These work extremely well because of the vampire’s starting situation. The vampire has already killed the missing party guest NPC and turned him into a vampire, and that’s the safe limit to the killing if she wants to avoid publicity. And she absolutely can’t harm the owner of the mansion, if she did, it’s not clear who will inherit the property (the vampire’s home). So a number of vampire attacks can involve the disguised vampire “saving” the PCs or “saving” the new owner because she needs them scared, but not dead.
This creates a lot of interesting puzzles to investigate: e.g., Why didn’t the wolf attack the owner? Why wasn’t the butler surprised by the appearance of a wolf? (Because the butler actually works for the wolf.)
It also creates some neat opportunities for things to go wrong. The butler (as a werewolf who is the vampire’s servant), the kidnapped NPC (who has turned into a vampire), or the vampire’s magical/psionic ally (I did not bring in an ally but feel free to do it) can all get carried away and hurt someone too badly, or threaten the new owner. If that happens the vampire has to reverse course and protect the adventurers. The adventure plot as written has two of these reversals written into it where where these actors get carried away and the vampire has to bring them back in line. It’s a kind of “Damn it, I said BITE him — don’t EAT him!” situation.
The great thing about all this is that the GM can deploy the items on the vampire menu above at any time, and if necessary in any order. If run as written, the gambits are increasingly dangerous as time passes, producing a feeling of progression and a climax.
At the same time, the party is stocked with NPC party guest redshirts who can be picked off one-by-one to increase the tension. I got through three of them. I did not kill any of them, but the wolf sent one to the hospital and two more were frightened so badly they decided they wanted to abandon their host.
Other Voices
I found a few other mentions of this adventure: There was a strange article in Roleplayer #7 recommending adapting The Haunting of Langley Manor to GURPS Autoduel. This seems pretty wack to me — but OK. Do that if you want to.
The adventure received a negative review in Dragon #138 in 1988. The reviewer felt that it was “based on a clever plot, is well structured, and has ample staging tips” but objected to the tone, finding that it wasn’t really horror — the set-up is more like a Ghostbusters joke, in their view. The reviewer compared the adventure to Call of Cthulhu offerings and worried that The Haunting of Langley Manor just wasn’t horrific.
That might be a fair point. This adventure has a lot of camp. But that’s what my group liked, so no harm done for us. Run out and buy it!
Requires Concentrate 