September 12, 2024 -

I made this Death House as a starting point for my CoS campaign and my players absolutely loved it! (Also used u/MandyMod's suggestion of renaming it Durst Manor so as not to alarm the players) Having a 3D space with interior of the walls visible really helped to flesh out the building as a lived-in space. Plus the cardboard was lightweight so really easy to transport.

Instructions,supply list and printouts below!

Supplies Used:

• Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop (if that counts as a supply)

• Cardboard 

• Soda Box

• Acrylic Paint

• Fine tip pen

• Hot Glue

• Mod Podge

Here's How I Did It:

1. First I cut up pieces of cardboard matching the scale of the floors and walls listed in the CoS book with 1 inch = 5 feet. For simplicity, I made each of the walls 15 feet in height.

2. In Adobe Illustrator, I recreated the map to scale using mostly just images I could find on Google. While doing this I made sure to mimic the vibe of each floor from the book (floor 1 and 2 being relatively normal looking, with floor 3 and attic looking progressively disheveled). These were then printed. 

3. While designing in Illustrator, I'd hop over to Photoshop to design a few painting for the house. One example was a portrait of the Durst family which I made by just altering the colors of a renaissance family portrait. 

4. I painted the inside of all cardboard walls and floors black. Then painted the outside of the walls using a pale green. While painting the pale green I used very little paint without water mixed into it so it would be very tacky like a weathered facade. 

5. Once the paint dried I used a fine pen to draw thin lines for the boards and nails on the outside of the house. 

6. For the roof tiles I cut open a soda box and painted the inside black. (I chose the inside because it didn't have a print or laminate on it so my paint would stick better.) Once dry I cut them horizontally into long strips about 1" in height. In these strips I cut a series of vertical lines going up about 1/4". In the end I had a bunch of long strips that each looked like a row of tiles. These I then layered onto an unusual shaped box and voila! I had a roof. 

7. The Illustrator printouts were then applied to the appropriate floors and walls using Mod Podge (I did the same for the windows and door on the exterior of the house). The trick is to put down a very thin layer of Mod Podge onto the cardboard, then stick the printout to it and let it dry, making sure to flatten out any air bubbles. Then add a thin layer of Mod Podge on top of the printout to seal the whole thing in. Less is more, adding to much can cause wrinkles and tears. 

8. Last step was to use hot glue to get all the walls and floors sealed together. I chose to keep each floor separate so that it would be easy to go between them during gameplay.

9. BONUS: the basement, I made a simple mockup of the floor’s layout to scale. To save money I went to Staples and printed this out as a blueprint which ended up being about $3 for a giant print. Fun fact- If you use a thin marker to draw a 1"x1" grid before going over the whoe thing with colored pencil, there will be a subtle but noticeable groove in the paper. Really helps make your grid feel like tiling so do that. Next I put the print into the bathtub and soaked it in tea and coffee for about an hour to give it some aging, and also to make the colors bleed together to really make it feel like a found artifact. Once dry I went back over the grid with the same marker just to make the lines a bit more visible. The edges were torched and the levels were separated so there would be some reveal as the players delved deeper. 

Printouts below for each floor (NOTE: I used images pulled from Google and Roll20 so all rights to those images belong to the original creators)

Please feel free to use these steps to make your own Death House for your campaign!

August 31, 2025 -

I've always wanted to do this! I had some scrap cardboard and cardstock laying around and decided to design and build a miniature haunted house :) I only made the facade but I'm thinking I could tackle the inside next season. The base walls were made using foam core. I used clear folder dividers for the window glass, cardstock for the siding and trim, foam for the stone at the bottom and did a few rounds of paint until I was happy with everything! Still not sure about the purple door. What do you guys think? How could I improve it?