D&D General Favorite Halloween One-Shots

[jayoungr]

Continuing with some highlights of the Ravenloft Adventurer's League season...

Title: The Marionette (DDAL04-04)
Edition: 5th
Starting Level: 3rd (but includes suggestions for anything from 1-4)
Link(s): DDAL04-04 The Marionette (5e) - Wizards of the Coast | Ravenloft | Adventurers League | Dungeon Masters Guild
Summary/Why it's Great: This has been compared to "Death House, part 2." Like many good horror adventures, it's built on a tale of loss and family tragedy. I love the creepy dream-vision ritual at the beginning and the chance to revisit the house as it is now. A haunted house, animated dolls, and a mad necromancer! (Shameless plug: if you choose to run this, I recommend checking my notes on running the adventure: here, here, and here.)

Title: The Tempter (DDAL04-09)
Edition: 5th
Starting Level: 5th (but includes suggestions for scaling up to level 10)
Link(s):

DDAL04-09 The Tempter (5e) - Wizards of the Coast | Ravenloft | Adventurers League | Dungeon Masters Guild

DDAL04-09 The Tempter (5e) - The people of Oranou are desperate. The village is on the brink of starvation and has little chance of surviving the har

www.dmsguild.com

Summary/Why it's Great: The PCs are invited to a lavish party at a prosperous estate, hosted by a beautiful but vain noblewoman. At midnight, all the guests drop dead/turn undead, and the lady of the house becomes a banshee obsessively protecting the family treasure. It turns out they've been reliving this same scenario every day for years. You can really play up the gore for groups that revel in that sort of thing or tone it down for groups that don't.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

If I may also engage in some self-promotion:

Title: Good Little Children Never Grow Up
Edition: 4e or Pathfinder 1e
Starting Level: 3-5
Link(s): Good Little Children Never Grow Up (4e) - Sneak Attack Press | DriveThruRPG.com
Summary/Why it's Great:
Probably one of my favorite adventures I've ever written. Characters go into an abandoned and haunted orphanage to find some missing children. While they are there the heroes also work to uncover layers of mysteries about the orphanage's past. Player handouts represent different hauntings that only some of the characters can see. This gives them each different clues, and none of them get the full picture.

Title: Bonedigger
Edition: 5e or Pathfinder 2e
Starting Level: 1
Link(s): Seasons of the Runewild: Bonedigger - Sneak Attack Press | DriveThruRPG.com
Summary/Why it's Great:
The adventure starts with a harvest celebration that goes wrong. A witch's ghost is returning to seek revenge on the town that executed her. She works through mortals pawns and a ghostly hound that served her in life.

 

[jayoungr]

Bumping this thread because it looks like I'll be running a one-shot for a Halloween party this year, and I could use as many suggestions as I can get!

 

[Voadam]

Title: RQ1 Night of the Walking Dead
Edition: AD&D 2e
Starting Level: 1-3
Link(s): RQ1 on Drivethru
Summary/Why it's Great: Ravenloft means it can take PCs out of a normal game for a one shot if desired or used as is for a one shot. a 32 page adventure can be done in one long night (I did). Building D&D gothic horror weirdness, babbling madman whose gibberish makes sense at the end, zombie problem, slasher madman, a mystery to uncover, zombie apocalypse climax. A great Lousiana bayou-ish swamp backdrop.

I had a lot of fun running this as a Halloween one shot 26 or so years ago. It lead to a year long campaign.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Good call. It's a tightly woven tale that doesn't have too many locations to, ahem, bog down the adventure. And the artwork is great. That cover is one of my favorites from the Ravenloft line.

RQ1 Night of the Walking Dead

One of the things I'm looking at is using one of the encounters from the last two years' Adventurer's League Liar's Night encounters. My one group only plays for two hours at a time, so they seem a perfect fit for a Halloween-themed side-adventure as we do Dragon of Icespire Peak.

Another option I'd recommend is one of the adventures from Uncaged Volume 3. I've been working through reading it and both The Necromancer's Brother and The Haunting of Coldwood Manor spring to mind. Though really a bunch of the adventures are suitably spooky.

 

[WolfhillRPG]

Just released yesterday and only on-sale for one month to raise donations for the William Fox Fundraiser. This mini board game is designed to be added into any RPG campaign.

 

[RangerWickett]

I need to remember to write up ZEITGEIST's "Bonds of Forced Faith" when I get to a desktop. It's got witches and blood magic and curses. Maybe not horror, but definitely spooky.

 

[jayoungr]

I need to remember to write up ZEITGEIST's "Bonds of Forced Faith" when I get to a desktop. It's got witches and blood magic and curses. Maybe not horror, but definitely spooky.

Please do--I'd really like to hear more about this.

 

[RangerWickett]

Title: Bonds of Forced Faith (one-shot bundled with the adventure path ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution)
Edition: 5th (also 4e and Pathfinder 1e if you buy Act Two of the adventure path's compilation)
Starting Level: 10th (pregen characters)
Link(s): https://www.patreon.com/posts/9012627 or Roll20
Summary/Why it's Great: The PCs - a king, his advisors, and two foreign allies - have a mission to stop a witch known as the Red Contessa, who intends to use the power of a lunar eclipse to link her life force to the lives of everyone in a city, effectively making her invincible. The party ascends to her mountaintop lair, facing members of her coven along the way. The witches all know a suite of curses, and all have used a lesser version of the Contessa's ritual to link them to a group of innocents, so any injuries that would befall them instead kill bystanders and hostages.

Every fight is a bit of a puzzle, and all the enemies do gruesome things to evoke a horror vibe. For instance, the party starts with a stack of 'remove curse' scrolls, but the witches throw out curses like candy, so eventually they'll have to just deal with being cursed. Also, the mayor of the city is a deva (a race from 4e that resurrects a few days after you kill them with most of their memories gone), and over the years of the Contessa rising to power, she has come to really enjoy killing the mayor over and over. So during early fights, the enemy minions all refuse to attack him, because their boss called dibs.

And all this happens with the backdrop that the king's popularity is waning after a recent war went badly. He's not trying to look like the hero, though. He wants his preferred successor to be seen as a hero, because in this country the monarchy is not inherited, and the ruler must have the people's support.

Meanwhile, the various pre-gen PCs all have their own agenda during the mission -- they all want to beat the witch, but there might be small betrayals, especially in the climax when the Contessa reveals the real reason for her ritual.

---

An early mission in the ZEITGEIST adventure path involves a haunted mountain called Cauldron Hill, the site from which a coven of witches had ruled the city a century earlier. Halfway through the adventure path I had a need to run a one-shot at a couple conventions, so I devised Bonds of Forced Faith, which takes place a hundred years before the campaign starts. I've run it four different times, and each time a different person ended up king.

 

[Jediking]

I do an annual Halloween one shot. This will be the 6th year

Last year was heavily inspired by Coco, Dias de muertos (mexican culture+day of the dead), and School of Rock

The party ended up winning the (literal) battle of the bands and defeated the dark Baron Samedi, finally allowing the spirit of Jaime Hendrico to rest.

this year: my inspiration will a bit more serious. The Purge, Get Out, Us, and Strangers. Should be tense