Tales of Renaissance Wizardry is a series of short adventure outlines for use in tabletop roleplaying games. Since Halloween is coming, we’ve offering a ghost story this month! ©2020 Shewstone Publishing LLC. You are permitted to use, modify, and redistribute this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike (CC BY-SA) license.
attributed to Lucan Horenbout, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Content warnings: Blood and gore, false accusations of incest
A minor nobleman, Henry Stoke, is embarrassed that the ghost of the Queen's mother appears in his hall occasionally. It's a reminder his ancestor helped with the plot to have her executed. The Queen appears as a decapitated corpse, carrying her head in both hands, and glows with a ruddy light. He finds it terrifying, and his servants keep leaving. He asks the player characters to banish the ghost.
Anne Boleyn* is unusual, in that it intermittently haunts six different places in England.. The player characters can determine her schedule. She appears at Stoke Hall only at the new moon following the anniversary of the day in late April 1536 on which the current lord's ancestor signed a deposition against her.
Many ghosts follow a routine, often ignoring their surroundings. The player characters need to prepare a way to catch Anne's attention, so they can communicate with her. She appears in the master bedroom, then walks down the stairs, through the main hall, and across to a little private chapel. This is the path she took on her first visit, following Henry's ancestor as he fled her, seeking the refuge of the Divine. No-one remembers why she follows this path, save Anne.
Her route through the house is known by the servants. The information is, however, tangled up in a complicated, oral tradition about how to avoid the ghost. Other parts of it are far less accurate – for example each of the servants carries a feather inside their clothes. They say the ghost never attacks someone carrying a feather, because a falcon was the badge of Anne's family. This is superficially true, but only because Anne has never attacked anyone. One of the ancestor's servants was in the ghost's path, and he didn't understand why the ghost ignored him. He thought it must have been the feather he carried for luck, and passed this on to the rest of the servants.
Anne wants to be vindicated of Henry's claim she was unfaithful, particularly the charge that she had an incestuous relationship with her brother, which the original Stoke swore to. She doesn't want to terrify the player characters – she's not even aware of their presence at the beginning of the encounter. Anne doesn't control how or when she appears. One simple way to let her rest is showing her a coin with the Elizabeth Regina mark: her daughter has been legitimised. As a less sweeping solution, if Henry Stoke speaks to her, cursing the memory of his ancestor and saying that all men know he lied, she will leave this particular hall alone in future.
If the player characters lay Anne to rest, she disappears from the minor hall, but also disappears from the rest of her haunts , including several royal palaces. When the royal ghosts go missing, powerful people become concerned. The queen's advisers want to know she hasn't been put in a bottle by the Spanish. This adventure may bring the PCs into the Queen's service.
Adapting to Other Game Systems
This adventure is much more connected to a historical setting, specifically a fantasy version of England, than it is to a particular rule set or magic system. If your game is not set in an Earth-like setting, you can of course make up your own tragic story of a queen or high noblewoman who was executed on trumped-up charges. You’ll need a way to deliver that story to the players without a long lecture. The first thought that comes to mind is to have a minstrel sing a tragic ballad about the incident: make up a stanza or two of the lyrics and summarize the rest.
Pay attention to what spells and powers your game system provides for dealing with ghosts, and make sure to give the player characters a reason to investigate and talk to the ghost instead of simply attacking it.
Editor’s Note
I requested this adventure outline to be about 500 words long. That’s a bit shorter than some other articles in this series. Timothy did a great job fitting an entire evening’s game session into a very brief word count.