The Cursed Chateau

Fourth Time's the Charm?

Over at Grognardia, I’ve launched The Ensorcellment of January, a series of posts dedicated to pulp writer, Clark Ashton Smith. Along with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, Smith is one of the Big Three of Weird Tales during the 1920s and ‘30s. He’s probably the least well known of the trio, but he’s probably my personal favorite for a number of reasons. I won’t go into those reasons in this post — I’ll save them for Grognardia — but I wanted to mention my affection for CAS as a prelude to talking about a project that has suddenly shot up to the top of my priorities, a revision of The Cursed Chateau.

I first wrote The Cursed Chateau back in the early days of Grognardia. In the Summer of 2008, Fight On! magazine and Otherworld Miniatures co-sponsored an adventure contest to which I submitted a haunted house scenario I called The Cursed Chateau. That original version won an honorable mention, which encouraged me to revise and expand on it for publication. This second version appeared in 2009. Then, in 2016, a third version of The Cursed Chateau appeared, this one much expanded in scope. This third one was published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess and was set in that game’s version of 17th century Europe, in contrast to the two previous versions, which were set in a “generic” fantasy setting.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Though it might not be clear from the text of the 2009 version, it’s actually set in Telluria, the setting of Dwimmermount and Urheim, as you can see from this regional map:

Map by Rob Conley

I know it’s hard to see, but, if you look closely at the map, you’ll see the Cursed Chateau in the Adleigh Forest, a little southwest of the City-State of Adamas. The original playtests of what became the adventure explicitly took place within Telluria and it was always my intention that the locale had connections to Dwimmermount, Urheim, and other places listed on the map above. Even the LotFP version, though set in 1600s France, still retains a few clues as to its origins in Telluria, if you know what to look for.

Anyway, the 2016 version of The Cursed Chateau was published under exclusive license to Lamentations of the Flame Princess. That was a decade ago and, while the LotFP version is still available for sale in PDF form, it’s no longer available in print (or at least not in large quantities — I am unsure). Regardless, the exclusive license is now at an end, which means I am now able to produce a new version of The Cursed Chateau on my own, which I plan to do in the coming months.

I should be clear that this is not due to any dissatisfaction with the 2016 version, which I still like a great deal. However, as originally conceived, The Cursed Chateau was meant to be a “generic” fantasy adventure, one any referee could pick up and drop into his ongoing campaign. Though it has, as I said, connections to Telluria, they can be easily excised with a little creativity. I want The Cursed Chateau to be easy to use and accessible to anyone refereeing an old school fantasy class-and-level campaign, whatever rules set he is using.

That said, the 2026 version will be written with Old School Essentials in mind. OSE is my retro-clone of choice these days, but one of the reasons I like it is that it’s a straightforward restatement of the 1981 Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition of D&D and hence easily convertible to your own preferred version of old school fantasy. That made it a no-brainer to write this new version of The Cursed Chateau, the fourth, will OSE in mind.

Work is already proceeding briskly. The manuscript is mostly done. I have some art but will need to commission some more. Likewise, I need to redo the maps and that should take a little time. Nevertheless, progress is happening and, while I’m reluctant to put a date on its release, I am nevertheless quite confident that it’ll appear sometime this year, probably in its first half.

I’ll have more to say about The Cursed Chateau and related projects (of which there are several) in the weeks to come.