The Quarantine House

Nine rooms, three days short of the border, built to hold a caravan that looks wrong.

Eight of them have been empty for nine years, and everyone on this road can tell you the number.

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🚪 SIX DAYS AGO

A caravan went in and will not come out.

They are not sick. They are not mad. They are not hiding anything.

They have barred their own door from the inside and asked the warden not to open it. She has read every page of the illness chart on her wall and found nothing that fits.

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⏳ NINE ROOMS, FOUR OF YOU, TWO HOURS OF DAYLIGHT

Every door you bar is a door somebody else is not barring, and the house has fourteen ways through it.

⚖️ The choice is not whether to hold the building. It is which part of it you are prepared to lose — decided before dark, while you still have hands to do it with.

It will not be reasoned with and it does not stop coming.

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🕯️ THE DARKEST ONE ON THIS ROAD

And the only one written that way on purpose.

If your table wants a night with real dread in it, this is that adventure.

🎲 A 43-page one-shot adventure for D&D 5e — 3 hours, 4 players, level 3.

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📦 WHAT YOU GET — 42 pages, nothing left for you to invent

▪ 5 scenes, every one written out in full: read-aloud text, what happens if they fail, what to do if they skip it

▪ 2 battle maps in three versions each — DM, player, and a copy with no grid. 70 px per 5-foot square, so it drops straight into Roll20 or Foundry already aligned

▪ 4 ready-to-play 3rd-level characters, finished — ability scores, armour class, hit points, attacks, spells and gear. Hand them out and roll

▪ Every character in it, player and NPC alike, has a drawn portrait

▪ A plain-English glossary of the basic rules words — DC, saving throws, advantage

▪ A section for your first time running a game

▪ A summary up front listing every scene with its page and how hard each fight is

▪ 11 secrets, tables and printable handouts

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🧂 PART OF THE SALT ROAD

Sixty miles, sixteen stops, each a day apart. Every one of them has noticed the same thing and not one of them has said so out loud.

This adventure stands completely alone — it needs nothing from any other — but a table that plays four of them starts comparing notes without being prompted.

Sister Wren is in this one, and in five more of them.

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✨ THIS IS FOR YOU IF

▪ You want a dnd horror one shot that is actually frightening, not just dark-themed

▪ You want a dnd one shot that fits in an evening and finishes

▪ Your table likes a siege, a clock and a decision made before the clock runs out

▪ You are new to running games and want the read-aloud text already written

▪ You run on Roll20 or Foundry and want maps that import at the right scale

▪ You want to hand out finished characters instead of spending session one building them

⚠️ Not the one to pick if your table wants a light evening. This is the dark one.

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📄 THE FILES

Four PDFs, plus the maps.

▪ A4 — 43 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ US Letter — 45 pages, colour and printer-friendly

▪ 6 map images

🗺️ The battle maps also print at table scale — two extra PDFs, A4 and US Letter, lay every map out at one inch per five-foot square across numbered sheets with a cut line. Print them at home, tape them together and put miniatures on them.

The printer-friendly build is the same book in pure white, nothing removed.

⬇️ Instant digital download. Nothing is posted to you.

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📜 THE SMALL PRINT

Compatible with Fifth Edition.

Made with AI assistance: the text and maps of this adventure were written and generated with AI, then edited, checked and laid out by hand.

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🕯️ ONE GOOD EVENING

Games for a table, and for a chair by the fire.