Tags
Estate House, Floorplan, Free RPG, Ghastly Affair, gothic game, Gothic Gaming, Gothic Horror, Gothic Literature, Gothic Romance, Gothick, Great House, Haunted House, Manor, Mansion, Map, role-playing game, Romantic Horror, rpg
Highdark Hall is a fictional eighteenth-century estate house suitable to be the primary location for an entire Saga of Gothic roleplaying. It features five floors and over 100 rooms, with many possibly intriguing locations to stimulate your creativity.
The Maps are intended to be further developed by the Presenter (or Game Master). Its for you to decide if Highdark Hall is a cursed hive of supernatural evil, or actually just a leaky old house with somewhat eccentric inhabitants.
Although primarily intended for use with the Ghastly Affair role-playing game, there’s no reason why Highdark Hall couldn’t be adapted to your favorite game system as well.
Those who play Victorian-era, Steampunk, or other Horror games might be able to use Highdark Hall, simply by advancing the assumed time-frame. You could even use the maps for an uninhabited structure being explored by modern day paranormal investigators!
There’s plenty to explore and uncover, whether the Player Characters join the house as servants, are travelers stranded there by a fearsome storm, or are members of High Society attending a Masquerade Ball or Salon. You might even have Players portray members of the family that inhabits the House – there are parts that are mysteries even to those who live within its walls.
The ideal place to locate Highdark Hall is on the bleak moors of the northern Peak District in the English midlands, but it could also work well on the English-Scottish border, in Ireland, or in the middle of Wales. The date is assumed to be in the late 1790’s, but those adapting Highdark Hall for use in game systems other than Ghastly Affair might want to set a later date. If you decide to incorporate Highdark Hall into a fictional setting, simply change the names of the people and places referenced.
The estate grounds and outbuildings will be developed in a future series.
The Engine of Oracles 
The Hall maps are very good. I am interested in the rest of the estate too. Outbuildings, secret passages and hidden entrances, forests, tilled land and pasture, nearby village and maps to those houses also.
Thank you. I have plans to detail the strange parkland around the Hall, the cursed village of Lowhaven, and the gloomy moors that surround the estate. Also, I am currently working on a general guide to 18th century chateaux, castles, and manor houses, structured so it can used to spontaneously create historically plausible locations for Gothic role-playing, without hours of prep work.
Outstanding map! Thanks for the great work.
You are very welcome!
Awesome map. You actually remember fireplaces (a pet peeve for me on maps) and WCs. My only criticism is that the kitchens seem to be a long way from all the dining rooms (well, the breakfast room is ok). Surly you don’t wan’t his lordship to have cold bacon and warm cucumbers would you? Trolley’s and chafing dishes would help, but do you really want to go through the Rocaille Room for every bit of coq-au-vin? If you ever get back to it, a dumbwaiter shaft in the NW corner of the servants courtyard would connect the kitchens, allow for snacks in the sewing room and cavalier drawing room, and help keep the state dinners from growing cold. It would also enable the trusted to servant to feed the madwomen in the attic without the rest of the staff being exposed to her condition.
Question: What application did you use for the drawing?
Thank you for the compliment! Regarding the distance between the kitchens and the dining rooms, it was on purpose. They actually would be that far apart in a real 18th century grand house. Often, the kitchen(s) would be in a completely separate building, and footmen would have to carry the food across an open courtyard (and through several rooms). Keeping the smell of the kitchen out of the dining room was considered more important than keeping the food hot. And this at a time when a formal dinner would be served in 3 or 4 courses, with up to 20 dishes on the table for each course. A dumbwaiter shaft would be a good idea, but unfortunately anachronistic for the 18th century. However, it seems like an obvious modification that might be done to the house in the Victorian or Edwardian era.
The maps were drawn in Inkscape, with some secondary processing in GIMP.
Mr Hanley,
I post on RpgGeek as Abraham Gray aka “Purple Broccoli”. I would like to post your maps of Highdark Hall on rpggeek.com for a community “Let’s design a Haunted House” project. In this we’ll populate the mansion with all sorts of creepy, bizarre and twisted creatures, traps and phenomenon, and then release the completed work as free (no charge) gaming supplement on Rpggeek and Rpgnow. You of course would get credit for your maps.
May I please have your permission to do this?
The short answer is “yes”, you may use the maps for your project on Rpggeek. The Highdark Hall maps were meant to be developed by different people for their own games. I look forwards to seeing what you come up with! Concerning formal publication of the completed project on RpgNow, please send me a private message through the “Ghastly Affair” Facebook page, or to Clavis123 on RPG.net, and we can work out the details.
Excellent. For now we will stick to the rpggeek project only until such details are worked out.
I uploaded the images to be used in the project.
This is the adventure development thread:
https://rpggeek.com/thread/1857716/lets-make-haunted-house
I forgot my manners: Thank You for letting us use these maps.
I’ve taken a look at the thread, and I can’t wait to see the results! To answer a question raised on the thread, in my head the house was built in 1720, and the “current” time is the 1790s. However, such a house might have remained relatively unchanged well into the Edwardian era, so a Victorian setting is entirely possible. In Georgian times the “Mistress’s Bedroom” would have actually been occupied by a live-in mistress. By the Victorian era such a thing was no longer acceptable, however, and the name would simply have memorialized the chamber’s former use.
I’ve been looking for Mansion maps for a while. I try to do my own but Mansions a=can be so complicated. I jsut found this and went..Perfect
Thank you!
A terrific piece of work, certainly worthy of all the attention. Frankly, this map alone would be enough for one to become interested with the game.
Out of curiosity: Third Story – shouldn’t Central Hall be 30′ instead of 20′ below? 😉
Thank you! Now that I look at the Third Story map, the “20′ below” might be confusing. If a character falls (or is thrown) off the “Third Story Balcony” they will fall about 20 feet to the floor below. The ceiling of the “Central Hall” is about 30 feet from the floor, however. If I ever formally publish the maps I should include a cross-section diagram to illustrate it. Especially since the whole reason I designed the “Central Hall” that way was to make it possible for characters to tumble off those stairs, or fall from those balconies!
As an aside, the 10′ ceilings in “Highdark Hall” are actually much lower than would be standard for a grand house of its time. The reason in my head is that the architect was concerned about building the place too tall, on account of the fact that the location is riddled with caves and thus possibly unstable. It would also make “Highdark Hall” feel relatively oppressive to an 18th century aristocrat used to much higher ceilings. Perhaps at the end of Saga, a massive sinkhole might open up and swallow the place!
I see. That’s what I suspected, but still, thank you for clarifications.
The idea of mansion being swallowed by an enormous crack in the ground is great! It could come to reality as either the result of an attempt to summon some abominable Lovecraftian-like entity, or player characters’ attempt to get rid of whatever evil they didn’t want to see roaming the world. Or both. 😉
A question, if you please – didn’t see the answer, but I’m still in process of digesting data – from the perspective of in-game economy, how much such a mansion would cost (both including- and excluding the lands around it)?
An estate house like Highdark Hall might cost about £50,000 in 18th century Britain. The estate land might be worth anywhere from 10 to 20 pounds an acre (possibly more in desirable areas), so the land of a relatively small 1,000 acre estate would be worth 10,000 to 20,000 pounds. Only a portion of that estate would be enclosed parkland, with the rest rented out to farmers (for about £2 an acre per year).
What would the thickness of the outside wall and the average thickness of the inside walls be?
The exterior stone walls are a little over 2 feet thick, and the interior ones about 1 foot. The interior walls are mostly wood and plaster, and not solid all the way through.
For a very long time I’ve been looking for a good mansion to use for a future fantasy setting. I’ve never seen one quite as perfect as yours.
Thank you! My goal was to create a setting that would be plausible from a historical point of view, but which would also be gameable.
You’re very welcome. The mansion worked out perfectly for the game with minimal setting specific tweaks.
I just want to thank you again and really emphasize how much I appreciate how clean the map is. It makes it much less painful to re-label a room or nudge furniture around due to player interaction.
Do you have a collection of maps and structures for purchase?
I’m glad to hear it. And thank you again for your kind words.
My plans are to include maps and floor plans in the “final” illustrated version of “A Ghastly Companion to Castles, Mansions, & Estates”. That might even include some of the locations from the original Ghastly Affair play-test Saga.
I’ve also thought about the possibility of a “Village of Lowhaven” expansion for “Highdark Hall”, which would include maps of the Village, the Lowhaven Lead Mine, and all the land the Altumbers own. Of course, I’ve got two other “Ghastly Companions” (the Gothic Icons and High Society books) ahead of it!
These maps are really cool. I think might use them for a manor house I need for my Bluffside pbp game. I’m assuming it’s okay for me to modify them for my own use. I’ll need to change the names for my setting. The manor will be in a city setting.
Thank you! Of course, you should feel free to modify the material as you want for your own noncommercial, personal use. That’s what I originally made it for!
As an example, besides my own “official” workup of Highdark Hall ( https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/254169/Highdark-Hall ), the maps were also used as the basis for “The Engagement of Adelaide Endicott” ( https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/272712/The-Engagement-of-Adelaide-Endicott ), which originated as a community project on RPGGeek.com .
I personally love to hear about the different ways people have adapted Highdark Hall for their home games. I only ask that you don’t use the maps for any commercial purpose without my permission.
Thank you for creating these, they have gotten me really interested in architecture drawings. I hope its ok for me to use these to model the building out in 3D.
Thank you for the compliment. So long as it’s a non-commercial use, I’m perfectly fine with you using the Highdark Hall plans. Just credit me as appropriate. And I’d love to see the results if possible!
not to sound stupid but are there any bathrooms?
It’s an obvious question for a modern person, and the answer is “no”. Like most Grand Houses of its era, Highdark Hall has chamber pots located in the bedrooms. Every morning and evening the maids must empty the used chamber pots into the Cesspit in the basement. The empty pots are washed in the Scullery, and replaced back in the rooms. The State Bath Room on the Third Story is just that – a room with a tub, for important guests to take baths (a luxury when all the water has to hauled up there by maids). Historically, some houses might have had separate closets where the chamber pots would be located, but it was not the rule. Starting in the late 18th century, “water closets” with flushable toilets came into use, but they were still uncommon in 1795. Many Grand Houses, however, didn’t have anything like regular toilets until well into the 20th Century. And yes, the Cesspit would have to be regularly emptied by someone, a job that was just as awful as it sounds.
Great RPG game!
Thank you!