Planeswalker's Guide to Duskmourn
The door stands open, inviting you in. Step through and see what awaits you … but be careful, because you may never find your way out again.
Welcome to Duskmourn, a plane steeped in pain and fear, driven by the unrelenting hunger of its demonic ruler. The plane exists entirely within the House, an endless trap of malevolence with a single goal: to keep survivors trapped within its walls in an infinite loop of terror and fear. Every shadow hides monsters, and every breeze whispers the promise of a fate worse than death. Within its endlessly shifting halls, survivors desperately try to stay alive against a house full of entities all intent on destroying or devouring them.
We've updated our guide to include more information about the House's true nature. So read on, weary traveller, and discover what horror truly lies behind these unhallowed doors.
Duskmourn: The House
Little to no knowledge remains about the original plane that became Duskmourn, only that things weren't always this way. Remnants of ancient artifacts scattered throughout the House hint at a plane both magically and technologically advanced that was just starting to become aware of the existence of a wider Multiverse, but all of that has since been lost. Even the plane's original name has been forgotten.
Originally, the House was an ordinary dwelling, within which the demonic entity known as Valgavoth had been imprisoned. Unable to break the binding, he found a way to work around it instead by redefining and expanding the boundaries of what counted as his prison. Eventually, he was able to swallow up the entirety of the plane within the walls of the House in a period known as the Ascension. The House isn't technically alive, but with Valgavoth's consciousness threaded throughout, it has gained a base level of sentience and awareness of everyone inside.
Prior to the Ascension, there used to be at least three separate realms of existence: one physical realm and two immaterial realms where demons and spirits resided. As the House grew, the demonic realm was folded into the confines of the House and the spirit realm squeezed out to the edges as much as the plane's space in the Blind Eternities allowed.
Origins of the House
When the Vendrell family moved into their new home, an old, stately house in a nondescript town, they were hoping for a fresh start: new employment, and for their daughter Marina, a new chance for friends. Marina was a shy, bookish girl who struggled to make friends, but her family hoped a new environment would be just what she needed to find her place.
Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. From her first day at the local school, Marina was the target of frequent bullying. She grew increasingly isolated and withdrawn, spending her free time at home, exploring the nooks and crannies of the new house.
During one such exploration, she discovered a small, strange entity living in the basement. At first, she was wary and distrustful, but she soon came to view the entity as a friend. It was always sympathetic and understanding, and as the bullying grew worse, she came to rely on it more and more as her only friend.
One day, after a day filled with particularly vicious bullying, Marina returned home distraught. Screaming and crying, she poured out her pain and rage to her friend in the basement. Her friend listened in patient silence, and when her words finally died down, he offered to fix the matter for her.
"I can make them pay for what they did," he told her. "I can make them suffer, just as you have."
In that moment of misery and anger, she agreed. Following Valgavoth's instructions, she lured her bullies to her house and took them down to the basement …
Where he was waiting. Hungry.
Marina watched, horrified, as the entity came alive and devoured them. Too late, she realized that her "friend" was something far more malevolent than she could have realized. She fled the basement and locked the door, vowing that she would never have anything to do with the entity again. However, it was already too late.
People around Marina began to meet sudden, unexplained, and terrifying ends. The neighborhood began to warp as well, twisting and growing strange and terrifying. But most disquieting of all, the house itself began to warp and grow.
At first, Marina tried to pretend nothing was happening, even as the zone of influence increased and the occurrences became too obvious to ignore. But then, her parents vanished. Unable to deny it any longer, she delved into research and the history of her family's house and discovered that the entity in the basement was actually a demon. Previous owners of the house had summoned the demon but quickly lost control. To stop themselves from being devoured, they'd bound the demon to the physical structure of the house and fled. Trapped and unable to feed, the demon had sunk into hibernation and bided his time—until Marina came along and unwittingly loosened his shackles.
Faced with the full truth at last of what she had done, Marina confronted the entity and demanded it stop. If it didn't, she would burn the entire house down. Powerful though he was, the demon was still bound by his original summoners' curse. Destroying the house would kill him as well. With no other choice, the demon agreed to give her back the world as she remembered it. Marina accepted, relieved that she had bested the demon and restored the world to normality … as far as she could perceive, anyways.
In reality, the house continued to expand. The horrors continued to increase, drowning all who lived within in terror. And the demon grew in power, until the entirety of the plane was swallowed up in the walls of Duskmourn.
The purpose of the House is singular: to feed Valgavoth's hunger for terror and fear. But not even an entire plane's worth of terror can slake his insatiable appetite, especially when the survivors that are the source of that fear keep dying.
Previously, Valgavoth was able to temporarily force open doors to other planes, which he would use to lure in unsuspecting victims. But doing so cost him a lot of effort, and he could only manage to open one door every few years. Now, though, with the Omenpaths crisscrossing the Blind Eternities and making connections between planes easier than ever, Valgavoth has been able to reach other planes with much more ease. More and more people have been disappearing as Duskmourn's doors have become an increasingly common sight across the Multiverse.
Valgavoth
The demon Valgavoth is the linchpin of Duskmourn. Though technically still bound to the physical structure of the House, this limitation has little meaning anymore. His psychic connection to the House lets him track anyone he wants and command the monstrous entities who live inside. As he grows older and more powerful, Valgavoth molts out of his older form and into a new, larger body. Some believe he's doing this because he's still trying to break the curse that tethers him to the House. Others believe that these molts are just the natural way that demons grow.
Harrowings occur whenever Valgavoth molts out of his latest form and into a new body. The surge of malevolence that comes with this rebirth extrudes a fresh wave of cellarspawn into the House. It also sends out a psychic ripple that incites cultists, razorkin, and other monstrous entities to increased viciousness, bloodlust, and paranoia. Harrowings typically only last a few days.
Harrowings are offset by Quiescences, which occur right before Valgavoth molts. With all his attention turned inwards to focus on his new growth, the House falls into a temporary lull that's as close to safety as it ever gets. Quiescences typically last a few weeks, giving survivors much-needed time to recuperate and prepare themselves for the upcoming Harrowing.
Marina Vendrell
The last surviving member of the Vendrell family continues to live in the House—sort of. As part of his promise to her, Valgavoth swore to restore the House to its normal state. Or rather, he restored her perception of the world, encasing her in a bubble of warped unreality that transforms the House wherever she goes so that she only sees a normal world, not the horrific environment it's become. It's unclear how much Marina is aware of the truth, if she truly believes the world has been restored, or if she's willfully allowing herself to be deluded so that she can ignore the world that she, in part, created.
Geography of Duskmourn
The geography of the House can be summed up in one word: impossible. It's a place where the inside is always changing and outside doesn't exist. Staircases lead to nowhere, bedroom doors open up in the middle of a forest, hallways transform from marble into fetid mire beneath your feet. Doors that seem like they would lead outside, or into outside environments, just lead to other areas within the House.
The House is segmented into areas that are referred to as rooms. That name is deceptive though, because what's contained within a room can vary wildly, from normal-looking bedrooms to vast expanses of seemingly endless heathland. The only rule is that there is always a door, window, or other aperture that connects between rooms. There is no discernible logic to how rooms connect, and interior-seeming rooms and exterior-seeming rooms blend together.
The House's geography is constantly changing, making mapping and navigation a difficult, if not downright impossible task. Most changes occur naturally, without Valgavoth's direct supervision, but he can always directly command the House to rearrange itself, usually when he's targeting a specific survivor.
The House can be loosely categorized into five zones, each with its own temperament and characteristics. These zones are not hard limits. Rooms frequently connect and bleed into each other across zones.
The Mistmoors
Empty foyers that ring with eerie silence. Corridors lined with uncanny marble statues and draped with white fabric that ripples in unfelt breezes. Cobwebbed attics beneath towering arched eaves. Stacked terraces drowning beneath ceaseless eroding sand.
The Mistmoors is full of vast, echoing spaces that unsettle and unnerve. Rooms in this zone are typically characterized by white stone architecture, billowing drapes, drifts of windblown sand, and flat gray skies with no visible sun.
The Floodpits
Frozen subterranean lakes. Screen-lined corridors that breathe a cold, obscuring fog. Twisting staircases that you can walk onto but never off of. Libraries where waterfalls pour into waist-high lakes of sodden pages. Damp, musty bedrooms mottled with unsettling water stains.
The Floodpits is home to the most physics-defying environments of the House, full of surreal passages and impossible architectural juxtapositions. Rooms in this zone tend to feature water in some form—liquid, solid, or gas—as well as water stains and wall-spanning banks of staticky screens.
The Balemurk
Lightless foyers of rotting floorboards knit together by unpleasantly dripping spiderwebs. Bogs riddled with gravestones and punctuated by withered, grasping trees. Basements sunk in ominous gloom, whose shadowy corners seem to move when glimpsed from the corner of your eye.
Dimly lit and ominous, the Balemurk is filled with shadows deeper than they seem like they should be and unsettlingly organic shapes and substances. Jagged crevasses and rotted floorboards dominate, along with septic marshes and withered flora.
The Boilerbilges
Furnace rooms full of suffocating heat. Stairways that end in abrupt drops into vents of sulfurous fire. Hallways whose walls are slashed with rips glowing a vivid, infected red. Scorched, blackened, fire-ravaged junk rooms.
The Boilerbilges is characterized by the most overtly treacherous terrain in the House, full of precipitous drops, jagged architecture, and belching flames. It's also prone to violent, destructive events, like earthquakes and fire twisters, making survival in this zone an even less likely prospect than normal.
The Hauntwoods
Hallways choked with thorny vines and brambles. Overgrown greenhouses full of specimens both venomous and carnivorous. Isolated cabins in the middle of dense, lightless woods. Crumbling domes strung with wicker hexes and strangled by trees shaped like human hands.
Out of all the zones, the Hauntwoods is where the line between inside- and outside-seeming environments is most blurred, as trees, plants, and other vegetation invade dining rooms and corridors and even act as support beams for ceilings lost somewhere amongst the canopy. In some cases, plants appear to be decaying the structure of the House itself through voracious, unrestrained growth.
The Below
Deep within the heart of the House is the Below, a lightless underground chamber where Valgavoth himself resides, and from where he extends his tendrils throughout the rest of the House. The location of the Below is the only fixed point in the whole of Duskmourn. To reach it, you must go through the basement of the original dwelling that was the House, located in the depths of the Balemurk. A tunnel formed of the shed husks of Valgavoth's previous bodies extends deep underground, burrowing deeper with each molt. It's rumored that the only true exit to the House exists within the Below, but no one has ever ventured there and returned to confirm it.
Manifestations
Thanks to the way Valgavoth's influence is threaded throughout the House, the lines between thought and matter have blurred. Steeped in Valgavoth's essence, soaked in his influence, a psychic phenomenon known as manifestation began to take place. Thoughts, fears, and dreams are spontaneously manifested and given living form.
Nightmares
"For as long as I could remember, I'd had nightmares of being eaten alive. I'd wake up screaming, drenched in a cold sweat, convinced the lower half of my body was being chewed on by a giant, hungry mouth. And then the other day I saw it: a being all teeth and tongue and appetite, that appeared to have been pulled right out of the depths of my mind. And it was coming straight for me." – Mangrove, survivor
Nightmares are manifested embodiments of individual terrors and fears, spawned spontaneously from survivors' minds. All nightmares are individual and specific to the fear they symbolize; no two nightmares are ever the same. If multiple people have the same nightmare, rather than multiple entities being manifested, the nightmare in question will increase proportionally in size and power. A person can be responsible for contributing to multiple separate nightmares.
Most nightmares are manifested subconsciously, but sometimes a cultist of Valgavoth will deliberately feed their fears to the House to birth a new nightmare. These nightmares are some of the most terrifying and warped, as the cultists have willingly opened up their repressed subconscious minds for the House to scour.
Nightmares are single-minded entities that only target those who created them. They don't aim to kill their victims. Instead, what they want is to cause the person to relive the fear they embody. A person caught by a nightmare is pulled into the nightmare's body, where they're forced to live through their fear endlessly.
Each nightmare has a weakness specific to its core concept, and thus a different method of overcoming. A nightmare that embodies teeth falling out might have to be glued in place, while a nightmare that embodies mocking laughter might need to be gagged shut. Overcoming a nightmare diminishes its hold on you; by exploiting its weakness enough, you can eventually break free of that nightmare once and for all.
Cellarspawn
"No matter where I went, that … thing was there. Lurking in the corner of my eye. Leaving claw marks on the walls. Every shadow was spying on me, it was waiting behind every closed door. I couldn't take it anymore. When it finally got me, I almost wanted to cry with relief. Anything, I thought, would be better than the suspense." – Nialle, former survivor
Cellarspawn are manifestations of Valgavoth's daydreams, entities that embody his vision of a world of never-ending terror and fear: beautiful to him and terrifying to everyone else. When a cellarspawn catches a survivor, it overwhelms the person with pure terror until their mind collapses or their heart bursts like a rabbit's. The resulting harvest is a dense, delicious morsel of terror that's considered a delicacy by cellarspawn. People harvested this way are reduced to spindrells, stripped-down psychic remnants of the victim that retain only a base level of consciousness, steeped permanently in terror.
Cellarspawn have an innate connection to the House and an instinctual understanding of the House's geography. They can sense impending shifts to the House's geography and take advantage of them to spring surprise attacks upon survivors.
Like other manifestations, most cellarspawn are unconsciously created by the House. The main exception to this are the overlords, which Valgavoth deliberately created to help enact his will and carry out occasional targeted campaigns of terror. There’s one overlord for each zone of the House.
It's almost impossible to outmaneuver a cellarspawn or defeat it in open combat. The only way to escape is to evade it long enough that it loses interest in you. Cellarspawn have practically no sense of perseverance or memory, so if a survivor can avoid drawing its attention for long enough, eventually it will drift away on its own.
Glimmers
Glimmers are one of the only benevolent manifestations within the House. They are physical manifestations of survivors' hopes and persistence. Glimmers can take the form of treasured childhood objects, fondly remembered pets, or even friends—whatever keeps a person from giving up. Glimmers offer magical protection against Valgavoth's insidious malice and help keep survivors from succumbing to the House's influence.
Other Entities of Duskmourn
The Cult of Valgavoth
"They brought us into a haven of plenty that seemed unreal, so idyllic was it. They gave us food. They welcomed us into their community. Smiling—always smiling. I had never felt so free of fear before. I wished I could enjoy this peace forever. When I told this to them, they took me to the other room and showed me the cocoons and said, 'There is a way.'" – Carl, former survivor
The Cult of Valgavoth is a cabal of worshippers dedicated to promoting the glory of Valgavoth, the Devouring Father. The core of the cult's belief is the Gift of the Threshold. According to the cult, Valgavoth's fear-eating is not a curse but a blessing: by devouring your fear, he can cleanse you of that fear and grant you protection from it. True paradise will only exist when Valgavoth has devoured all fear in existence, creating a world where all are safe and protected—even from death itself.
Central to the cult's practices is the Rite of the Threshold. Participants in the rite ensconce themselves in cocoons that grow from the walls of their altar room, allowing Valgavoth to directly feed on their minds. Some cultists have given so much of themselves to Valgavoth this way that they've drifted out of touch with human emotions, becoming little more than empty husks of flesh, hollowed out of anything but a desire to serve.
The cult views itself as steward of the House, responsible for maintaining it and ensuring its smooth running. Attendants make up the bulk of the cult's members and are tasked with basic maintenance. They patch up cracks in the walls, exterminate pesky gremlins, and repair architectural damage caused by invasive plant growth. Strictors enforce the cult's rules and schedule of participation in rituals. At their discretion, cultists who display undue fear or weakness of faith can be assigned extra time in the Rite of the Threshold. Cocooniers are keepers of the cult's rites and beliefs, in charge of the actual running of all rituals.
The Imagora is the seneschal's inner circle of hand-picked advisors. They are charged with carrying out secret assignments that even the rest of the cult can't know about, sometimes occasionally even culling other cultists. The cult is led by the seneschal. He is the only person in the entire House who communicates directly with Valgavoth, and the only one who knows the true path to Valgavoth's lair in the Below
Coercion and deception are the cult's preferred methods of gaining membership out of survivors. Outwardly, the cult presents an appearance of welcome and safety. Their village is located in the Valley of Serenity, a series of pastureland rooms that stretch across the Mistmoors and the Balemurk. At first glance, the valley seems peaceful and idyllic, free of many of the overt terrors that lurk throughout most of the House. Many a survivor who stumbles upon the valley is lured in by the promise of clean beds, safety, and friendly faces. It isn't until the survivor has been lulled into complacency that the cult then reveals their true face and presents the survivor a choice: join of your own free will, or be forced to.
The cult prefers to avoid outright violence, but they aren't against wielding brute force if that's needed to keep a survivor from fleeing. Facing the cult head-on is a difficult proposition due to their numbers, though individual members can be lured away and overpowered.
Glitch Ghosts
"They came through from the mirrors—from the windows—from the cracks beneath the door. Phantasmal beings, the dead from another era, from a place outside the House that no longer existed. Some of them were filled with rage and hunger. We learned to hide and run from those. Others were kinder, and helped guide us through the new terrain of what our world had become. Those dead still remembered what it was like to be alive, and tried their best to keep us that way." – Jax, survivor
Glitch ghosts are the spirits of people who died outside of the House prior to Valgavoth's Ascension. Whether by accident or design, the walls of the House are all but impervious to penetration. Those who died in the House can't leave it, while those who died outside of it find it nearly impossible to enter. Instead, these ghosts must squeeze in through weak spots: cracks in the walls, screens, mirrors, or doors that don't quite fit in their frames. The effort of doing this corrupts the ghosts, giving them a warped appearance that's a reminder that they are no longer part of the plane but intruders from outside.
Glitch ghosts are trapped in the moment of emotion they experienced when they died. Sometimes a ghost will haunt a particular person they might have affinity or some kinship with. They can also haunt locations, such as a patch of woods in the forest or a particular room.
Glitch ghosts are the last remnant of "outside" the House, relics of what the plane of Duskmourn used to be. When Valgavoth started consuming the plane, he found that there were places that he couldn't subsume or destroy. His solution was to simply push and compress them to the very edges of the space that Duskmourn occupied in the Blind Eternities. Instead of compressing these spaces into nonexistence though, they ended up pushing back on the House. This pressure stresses the structure of the House, causing cracks and fractures that must be constantly repaired. In some of the more decayed sections of the House, whole sections of walls might be crumbled away, revealing an unyielding, impenetrable canvas of the same warped, corrupted texture as the glitch ghosts themselves.
It's almost impossible to defeat glitch ghosts off with conventional weapons or force. The only way to successfully fight one is with specially designed tools, typically cobbled together from salvaged remnants of pre-Ascension technology. Ghosts captured this way are neutralized long enough that they eventually lose their connection to the House and dematerialize back to the outside—for the time being, until they find another way in.
Razorkin
"I first heard the whisper as I huddled under a bed, weeping. It directed me to a closet full of bright, tattered costumes. The whisper bid me to put one on. I obeyed. When I left the room, I encountered my former friends, the ones who had left me for dead in the jaws of a mawk-wing to save themselves. The whisper told me to look in my pocket. Inside was a rusty pair of scissors. The whisper asked, wouldn't it be right that they suffer as I had? And you know, it wasn't right. It was glorious." – Fixer, former survivor
Razorkin are former survivors who now hunt the remaining survivors for their own twisted amusement. They thrive on pain and suffering, deriving special pleasure from subjecting their victims to elaborate, punishing maze-traps or inventing new ways of keeping victims alive and in constant agony for as long as possible. When they can't find survivors to torture, they will turn on each other, or themselves, to satisfy their cravings for pain.
Their territory is a series of elaborate death-trap rooms and torture chambers within the Boilerbilges known collectively as the razor mazes. Here, the House's geography has been modified to be even more convoluted, making it nearly impossible for anyone to escape from playing a starring role in razorkin tortures.
Though razorkin don't function as a cohesive group, most of them will listen to the directives of the Lord of Pain, who claims to be the first-ever razorkin. He's only ever seen as a figure on screens throughout the House. Most of the time he's content to simply watch the other razorkin as they do their work. Occasionally he intervenes or issues directives that inevitably lead to House-wide carnage sprees. He frequently moves through screens throughout the House, whispering and coaxing vulnerable survivors to join the path of the razorkin.
Escape from a razorkin is rare. Once a razorkin has you in its sights, it will hunt you relentlessly. The only real way to fight back is to attempt to overpower and kill them instead—and even then, you have to make sure they stay dead for good. Many a razorkin has been stabbed presumably through the heart, only to reappear later, when the survivor has thought they've escaped for good.
Wickerfolk
"Twitching and crackling, the cobbled wooden figure held its hand out to me. It seemed some kindly nature spirit, my first stroke of luck in this accursed place. I reached out. Its hand split into slivers of bark that tore my skin. Spiders poured from within, swarming up my arm, toward my eyes. I tried to scream, but my mouth filled with twigs, and I realized too late that whatever I'd stumbled on was anything but benevolent." – Hammer, former survivor
Wickerfolk are living constructs of wood that used to be human beings of flesh and blood. In the early days of Valgavoth's Ascension, as awareness of the House's expansion across the plane grew, many people sought out ways to ward themselves against fear. Some people discovered a ritual that promised to transform them into a form that would render them impervious to the depravations of Valgavoth's hunger, rendering them immutable, untouchable, and safe from horror forever.
However, people soon discovered that the transformation would change their bodies into living wood—but leave their minds intact. Anyone who went through the ritual would find themselves trapped in an existence where their minds remained intact but shut off from the rest of the world, unable to die and unable to experience sensations. Lacking vocal folds, they can't even give voice to their anguish.
Wickerfolk spend most of their time standing still and are frequently mistaken for lifeless wickerwork figurines, or even trees themselves. They prefer to pick off stragglers one at a time and avoid attacking groups. Wickerfolk often wait for a survivor to get close to them before making their move. Once the victim is in their grasp, they infest the person by sending slivers of leaves and branches into the person's body through any gap they can—mouth, eyes, under the fingernails—to transform the person from both the inside and the outside.
Some wickerfolk produce infectious spores from their bodies. Inhaling enough of the spores causes a person's joints to ossify and skin to harden, effectively petrifying them without killing them. Others will wait until a survivor has gone to sleep before sending out roots and vines to encase them.
Fire is a wickerfolk's biggest fear and the most effective way of forcing a wickerfolk to let go of a victim. Hefty, bladed weapons, like axes or machetes, are good for destroying wickerfolk as well, but they can't help a victim that's already been infested
Quickened Toys
"I found the doll lying discarded on a bed. It was so like the one I'd had as a child that I couldn't help but pick it up. The next morning, I woke up to find my dagger missing. So was Sethra. The doll was lying next to me, its big round eyes staring at me. I could've sworn I'd put it in my pack before going to sleep." – Yew, survivor
Quickened toys are previously inanimate objects that have gained a keen, deadly sentience and an appetite for death, thanks to Valgavoth's warping influence. These quickened toys are cunning entities that take full advantage of their innocent exteriors to lull survivors into a sense of complacency and false safety before striking.
Quickened toys prefer to avoid direct confrontation. They most often come across their targets when they're picked up by someone who assumes they're harmless. They'll let themselves be carried around, waiting for the perfect moment when everyone in the group has dropped their guards before striking. Once that group is eliminated, they'll fall into a dormant state again to await the next unsuspecting survivor to pick them up.
The only way to defeat a quickened toy is to destroy it entirely. Because they lack any sort of real physiological structure, normal methods of incapacitation, such as removing the head or limbs, aren't enough to stop one. If any parts are still intact, even just a single doll's arm, those parts will continue to move and hunt.
Demons
"My new friend showed me that this place isn't just a place, it's an entity—one we can fool, or even kill. If my companions won't listen … well. I'll make them understand. My friend's hand is on my shoulder, guiding me. He shows me where the knife is. He tells me what I need to do." – Damien, survivor
One of Valgavoth's first acts upon ascending was to make sure no other demon could ever challenge his supremacy by systematically hunting down and breaking every other demon on Duskmourn. Most of them died. Those who survived were reduced to fragments of their former selves, with barely a fraction of the power they once possessed. Even so, they remain dangerous entities.
Unable to act directly against Valgavoth, the remaining demons are reduced to venting their hatred on the House itself with acts of petty destruction and defacement. A handful of those who still harbor ambition focus on making pacts with humans like they used to, hoping to regain enough power to one day challenge Valgavoth—and take over the edifice of the House for themselves.
Beasties
"The razorkin's saw-hands snapped behind me. I tripped. I could almost feel the blades slicing into me—but then, miracle of miracles, out of nowhere, a great shaggy beast appeared and tore the razorkin apart. It then turned to me a face covered by a painted wooden mask. I sensed that it meant well. Its forelimbs gestured, and I guessed that it wanted me to go with it. It brought me to safety. In the weeks that followed, as we came to know each other, it was my companion, my guardian—it became my friend, in every sense of the word. But only, I came to understand, if I never tried to look at what lay behind its mask." – Chirp, survivor
Not all entities within the House are malevolent. Beasties are allies of survivors, large, shaggy, furred creatures who protect survivors from harm and safeguard them throughout the House. They do this for one reason alone: affection. Above all, beasties want to be loved and appreciated. The fastest way to make a companion of a beastie for life is to treat it kindly. Beasties are fiercely loyal and won't hesitate to attack anyone who threatens their new friend.
The face beneath a beastie's mask is their most guarded secret. Beasties live in constant fear of their human companions seeing their real faces, which are visages of dried flesh tethered to exposed skulls. Beasties know these faces are terrifying, hideous mockeries of living flesh. If a human does ever catch a glimpse of the beastie's real face, at best, the beastie will abandon them, running out of shame and humiliation. At worst, the beastie will grow enraged and attack viciously, driven in anger to kill anyone who knows its true appearance.
Gremlins
"Day 27. Finally found my way back to camp, but it's no good. Something's gnawed holes in the tent. And the firewood. And all the food's been smeared across the walls in rude symbols. You have got to be kidding me." – Survivor journal entry
Gremlins are chaotic beings who delight in mischief and practical pranks. They indiscriminately antagonize both survivors and other denizens of the House. Though not inherently dangerous on their own, they can tamper with survivors' equipment, causing them to fail at critical moments. On the other hand, their antics can also end up being beneficial. Many a survivor has escaped near-certain death because gremlins have tied the hem of a razorkin's tunic to a nearby tree branch or nibbled holes in the candles of a cultist ritual circle.
Other Creatures
The pervasive malignancy of the House is such that nothing within its walls can escape the House's influence. These range from normal creatures who have been warped into hideous, grotesque forms to those that have become corrupted from feeding directly on nightmares and cellarspawn.
Survivors
Not all the denizens of this plane were subsumed by the House. Groups of survivors remain, the last remnants of those who existed before the House swallowed up their homes. Most survivors survive by adopting a nomadic lifestyle, constantly on the move and never settling down long enough in one place to attract attention. Smart, tough, and resourceful, these remaining survivors are constantly fighting to simply stay alive. However, their numbers are constantly dwindling as the House picks them off one by one. The occasional influxes of newcomers help bolster the survivors' numbers temporarily, but most newcomers meet with swift ends unless they're smart enough to adapt to their new surroundings in time or get lucky enough to get picked up by a group of veteran survivors.
The longer newcomers remain in the House, the more their memories of their home planes are altered, until they come to believe they've always lived in the House. They still retain memories and knowledge of other planes, but become convinced they learned it all secondhand.
Out of necessity, survivors have grown adept at improvising weapons, tools, and other devices from objects and scraps around the House. These can range from simple weapons, like a plank of wood with nails hammered through it, to improvised devices for detecting supernatural entities. Because of their cobbled-together nature, these tools are prone to frequent breakage or failure, making reliance on them in critical moments a dicey matter.
Though survivors tend to be loosely organized in ragged, disorganized groups that band together for survival and little else, a few larger, more organized groups exist:
The House Institute is dedicated to investigating, analyzing, and recording the supernatural events of the House. Their goal is to find a way to end the House by finding its ultimate weakness. They maintain a permanent base in a series of disused operating rooms in the Floodpits, where they dissect and analyze any creatures they find.
The Benefactors are a group of tough, resilient nomads who are the most knowledgeable about the House's geography. They frequently leave caches of supplies and materials around, marked for any other survivors who might need them.
The Doorblades is a small band of ruthless survivors who have decided to turn the tables and execute thorough, strategic assassination plans to hunt and kill the monsters of the House. They frequently collaborate with the House Institute, making use of the institute's knowledge to guide their strikes. In exchange, they supply monster corpses and live specimens for the institute's experiments. Casualties among the Doorblades are high, but so are their kills.
We hope you're prepared to survive whatever horrors the House may bring you. Grab the best weapon you can find, rally up your fellow survivors, and get ready to face Valgavoth and his nightmares when Duskmourn: House of Horror arrives September 27, 2024. You can preorder the set now at your local game store, at online retailers like Amazon, and wherever Magic products are sold.
