Now in its nineteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2026 took place on Saturday, June 27th. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Unfortunately, due to vagaries of International Customs, Free RPG Day in the UK did not take place until Saturday, 22nd August.
This review is possible due to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham.
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The Crooked House: Folk Horror Roleplaying for Four 3 Characters is a scenario for The Crooked Moon, the folk horror roleplaying game setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition published by Avantris Entertainment. It includes a dark and dangerous mystery and some thoroughly vile monsters and villains, all wrapped up in an atmospherically twisted haunted house.
The first thing that strikes you about The Crooked House are its production values. Against its sepia tones that make it stand out from anything else released for Free RPG Day, the artwork is excellent, especially of the monsters that appear in the scenario. The three dimensional cutaway map of the house is good too, although perhaps a little dark to read proper. The standard maps are really good though, capturing the feel of a lived in house that has gone to seed due to its misuse by the Crooked Queen and her servants, including Vessla Browntooth, the Weasel Hag, and the Crooked Man, Vessla’s minion, who will taunt the Player Characters again and again, before fading away each time.
In fact, the Crooked Man is the first person that the Player Characters will encounter in the adventure, hinting at that the things they will find inside whilst also relishing what might become of them once they are inside. Some of that is also foreshadowed in the paintings that they find in the foyer that in turn unsettlingly depicting the former occupants and the current occupants, and worse, the Player Characters! Even then, the paintings have been cursed and have deleterious effect upon anyone who examines them. They are the first of many things that have been twisted in the crooked house and there is a constant pattern of the familiar features of a family home so twisted and turned to horror. Many of these things are classic haunted house elements, such as the spirit board in the parlour and need to hold a séance, a self-playing harpsichord in the music room, a rich feast that quickly reveals itself to be rotten and then attacks the Player Characters, and so on. Yet there are some little tweaks here and there, like the haunted wooden doll which instead of attacking the Player Characters begs for their help in checking for monsters, and instead of a deluge of blood flowing out of a room and into the hallway a la the film The Shining, the Player Characters are in the bathroom when it fountains up from the plughole! In nearly every instance, the Player Characters need to engage with these in order find a half dozen artefacts connected to the history of the house and its former occupants.
As the Player Characters advance through the house, they are harried by a variety of nasty creatures including a sneak of weasels, which does not give up and they all speak in voice, saying the same phrase over and over, as well as a Boogleswarm, a swarm of fey weasels that covets and collects teeth (like the Tooth Fairy, but without leaving a pound coin under the pillow). In fact, teeth are one of the recurring motifs throughout The Crooked House, the Player Character find them crunched under foot and inserted into nooks and crannies. The weaselly nature of the scenario does not stop there, for eventually, the Player Characters will make their way to the top of the house and manage to open the way to the secret chamber where Vessla Browntooth, the Weasel Hag is performing the ritual she needs to sacrifice the souls of Philip and Adela Druskenvald. Will the Player Characters be able to stop her?
Besides the excellent maps, the Game Master is given full stats for all of the monsters in The Crooked House. Notably, all of them have a ‘secret’, something that a Player Character might know about with an appropriate skill roll. These are suggested, but it would have been nice if there was a way to discover them narratively as part of the playthrough of the scenario. The Treasury details a pair of interesting magical items found the house, but which are actually cursed (of course, they should be). Also included is a quartet of Player Characters. They consist of a Gnarlborn Druid, a Plagueborn Monk, a Stoneborn Cultist, and a Threadborn Reveler. They are not poor example Player Characters, but there is no explanation though how they relate to each other, the scenario, or The Crooked Moon setting. They fit a Gothic horror-fantasy setting, not a modern setting of any kind, and both Philip and Adela Druskenvald are depicted as modern characters, dressed for the Jazz Age of the nineteen twenties. Consequently, they feel out of place alongside the scenario.
Physically, The Crooked House: Folk Horror Roleplaying for Four 3 Characters is very well presented. The artwork and the artwork are both great and the maps excellent.
The Crooked House: Folk Horror Roleplaying for Four 3 Characters is thoroughly enjoyable, Gothic horror, haunted house scenario. What lets it does as a whole are the sample Player Characters which not match the feel of the scenario. That said, there is nothing to stop the Game Master from running the scenario with a slight adjustment using standard Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition or a modern horror treatment such as FiveEvil.
