Who: ‘Lazarus Sauveterre’ (L Lawliet) and select friends
What: L’s Depraved Escape Room Hellromp
When: October 31st
Where: A reclaimed house in Gaze

Content warnings: Underage drinking, psychological horror, eventual cosmic horror, suggestive MSPaint drawings (displayed in tags)



At an abandoned house towards the edge of Gaze, although not that one, someone has been extraordinarily busy on very short notice. Directions to the party may only be obtained from the guest of honour himself or the chief planner, hand drawn maps distributed on scrolls tied with black ribbon. These maps lead to a dilapidated seeming two story home constructed in a typical Trench style, festooned with towerlets and dark, leering windows.

Inside the house, however, the first two rooms of the house will be what most people might expect of a party: in contradiction of the exterior, the sitting room and the dining room have been thoroughly cleaned and redecorated in an elegant black and grey theme.

In the sitting room, a fire crackles invitingly at one end, surrounded by comfortable couches and chairs, while the other half of the room is open for mingling or dancing near the old-fashioned looking (but thoroughly modern in its interior) phonograph, into which requests from the musical library of DeerNet may be fed.

The dining room is dominated by a long table of desserts of all kinds, from rainbow bowls of hard candy to sculpted chocolates to stacks of little cakes and pastries on serving towers. Those in search of savoury fare will come up nearly empty-handed, save for a cheese plate or two interspersed throughout. On the side tables, bottles of liquors and liqueurs alternate with tea and coffee services, along with a selection of juices, sparkling waters, and other mixers.

The adjoining restroom even has little charcoal soaps carved into whimsical, seasonally appropriate shapes, to complete the welcoming and convivial atmosphere, which is a good thing, because there’s one catch that the invitations failed to mention:

After the guests have all arrived, none of them are leaving through the door they entered through, because it (like the back door, and the windows) has been altered to only open from the outside.

Welcome to Lazarus Sauveterre’s birthday puzzle box. Enjoy your exploration of the rest of the house - or, if so inclined, stick to the front rooms. After all, someone is sure to figure it out before morning.

(Costumes are optional, but encouraged.)

The Ceremony Room

The first room down the hall from the sitting and dining rooms is full of the obvious remnants of an invocation: half-melted black candles, a runic circle carved meticulously into the bare hardwood floor, a stone altar topped with bowls of salt, water, and iridescent oil.

It is also obvious from the char marks and smoke stains on the peeling wallpaper that something may not have gone as planned. Keen eyes will notice that among other piles of flaked off paper are scraps of notes written in runes that match those on the floor.

This room will be most easily solved by party goers familiar with the occult and ritual.

The Library

Further down the hall lies a modest library. The bookshelves here are in disarray, with no immediately obvious rhyme or reason to their organization. Even the books themselves are at all angles with each other, crammed sideways, upside down, and backwards between mismatched bookends and musty, half-dead potted plants. Three tables of differing make are centered in a triangle at the library’s heart, covered in loose papers filled with a script that does not lend itself to easy deciphering.

Fresh paper and pencils are stacked on the small, cleared desk by the door, evidently for guest’s use.

The secrets of this room are best discerned by those with an interest in linguistics and cryptography.

The Study

Just off of the library, this smaller room is dominated by a massive wooden desk, heavy cabinets, and a squatting iron-bound chest. All of them are locked, and the keyhooks beneath an oil painting of the sea and above the back of the desk are conspicuously empty. If the investigators wish to rifle through the home owner’s hidden items and correspondence, they’ll need to be deft of hand and sharp of eye - and perhaps, if all else fails, thoughtful about construction.

What is hidden here will be quickest found by sneak thieves and the mechanically inclined.

The Laboratory

On the second floor, to the left of the stairs, lies a room neater than most left in the house. Racks of glassware compete with disassembled clockwork mechanisms for space on the counters lining the walls, and those familiar with the scientific (or pseudo-scientific) process will notice swiftly that it seems a series of experiments were being documented on the blackboard that dominates one end of the room. Other notes are scattered throughout the room in disorder, inviting the guests to piece together this mystery in both time and space.

Those with experience in rigorous study and the natural sciences will find this room a surmountable challenge.

The Observatory

The largest room on the top floor boasts a telescope mounted in a rotating dome that may be turned by the means of a hand crank on the wall, which spins a central platform via some cunning hidden mechanism in the floor. Those who put their eyes to the telescope will be treated to a dazzling view of Trench’s night sky, dotted with stars.

On the walls of this room hang a series of clocks of various makes and models, not one of which is set to the right time, and all of which are paired to a star chart that depicts no night sky that may be seen through the telescope.

Those who star gaze or devote themselves to numbers will have the best luck here.

The Guest Bedroom

What was once a modest guest bedroom adjacent to the observatory has been rifled through by someone on a less delicate mission than the puzzle solvers. The armoire hangs open with the spare sheets and towels inside ripped out and discarded, while the sunken mattress has been slashed with a blade and divested of fistfuls of tufted fiber in search of something. The knife in question may be found at the dressing table tucked into a corner, sticking out upright above the drawer someone pried apart with it.

Next to it: a guest book, of the old-fashioned kind, intended for each visitor to the room to add a greeting and a few memories of their stay. Between its leather cover, it seems the guests of this house prior to this party had a great deal to jot down, and some of them even seemed to have used it to discuss a certain upcoming matter between themselves…

The secrets of this room will reveal themselves most readily to those with profiling and associative skills.

(The master bedroom across the hall is only a comfortable room, cleaner than the rest of the house, with a soft bed and a door that locks from the inside.)

The Hidden Chamber

Beneath the house, the last room may be found once all the other rooms are solved, concealed at the bottom of a narrow staircase. It is a small, spare room, all of it one apparently seamless stone enclosure, and in its center rests a plain white cloth, an empty silver bowl, a hand mirror in a silver frame, and a fresh white candle set into a candle holder made of a black crystal geode.

No special skill is needed to solve this room. Only a clever mind is required to apprehend the room’s purpose and locate the key.

[The mystery spreadsheet for clues and solutions is here. The purpose of these prompts is not to create a mystery for you, the players, but an in character framework for setting up puzzle solving for the characters.]