What would be in your perfect Halloween setting?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

A few years ago, I ran a deeply mediocre Christmas adventure and then, last year, an even bigger wet fart of a special adventure. However, I made a great town the first year and it occurred to me that what I probably ought to do is return to that setting each year and just add extra holiday adventure stuff onto it.

But this is spooky season. If one was making a Halloween setting, what would you put in it? Assume you'd want a (relatively) safe village for the player characters to work out of as a home base, but what other stuff would you add to such a setting? It doesn't need to be as robust or "realistic" as a regular D&D setting, since this would be mostly used for Halloween-specific adventures and include those tropes.

 

[GMMichael]

Assume you'd want a (relatively) safe village for the player characters to work out of as a home base, but what other stuff would you add to such a setting?

Aw! The only safe place in the village might be the chapel, and even that's risky!

Halloween should be the one time, if any, that PCs have zero expectation of destroying the BBEG.

As for stuff to add, I nominate Black Phillip as the emissary...

 

[payn]

Gotta have a headless horsemen. Gotta.

 

[JEB]

Gotta have a headless horsemen. Gotta.

Seconded. The one full-fledged Halloween adventure I ran had that and scarecrows as major foes.

 

[payn]

Lot of good ideas to take from Paizo's Carrion Crown. Namely haunts and spirit planchettes, so much good flavor. That Haunted prison Harrowstone, yeap.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Spooky graveyard mandatory, preferably with a run-down, possibly abandoned church connected to it.

If it's rural, an old farm with half-collapsed outbuildings, rusting machinery, and a crumbling well is a good choice. Either surround it with disused fields going to seed, or more mysteriously have an excellent crop of corn growing despite everything else. Cornfields are great for scares and chases and can easily conceal disturbing details like a family burial plot, perhaps with recently-dug unmarked graves. Half-overgrown orchards are also pretty creepy.

Urban areas are more likely to have to make do with abandoned buildings that maybe aren't as unoccupied as they seem from the outside. You can get some good mileage out of making the exterior and ground floor seem pretty normal, then have the rest of the place all torn to pieces and rebuilt into chambers and passages that no sane human being would make. Cities also have larger public buildings like museums and libraries and courthouses, which are spooky as heck outside of their normal opening hours. Even places like hospitals can feel strange in the wee hours of the night, more so if they've been closed down. Hard to top your average shuttered ex-police station for creep factor too, they're practically a nexus of residual human misery and oppression even at their best.

 

[Ulfgeir]

Ghosts in one form or another. Maybe vampires and werewolves.

I expect lots of mystical mists shrouding the landscape, full moons (probably a blood moon)

 

[Tonguez]

• A brooding and isolated Manor out on the wily, windy Moors
• a desolate, windswept Moorland, with isolated stone circles and ancient crags, and boggy fens
• The tangled fens, filled with sucking bog and tangled mire.
• An abandon cemetery, overgrown and neglected, its tombstones faded and cracked.
• dense and twisted forest, heavy with mist and shadow
• the vast pumpkin fields, creeping with vines and whispering with terrible secrets

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Oh, and if you're doing fantasy (and maybe even if you're not) throw in some seasonally appropriate stuff from my blog:

Ghost Blossom Trees - Not only are they common in untended graveyards, finding a patch of them growing wild is probably a very bad sign.

Grandmother's Candies - Good trick for greedy kids who insist on too many treats.

Toothsome Curse - Another nasty trick from irritable spellcasters, and there are legends about the affect occurring "naturally" to particularly gluttonous children.

Grim Rider's Spurs - Extremely thematic item to loot from a defeated headless horseman or other undead corpse-cavalry type. Do NOT warn your players about them unless they really do some serious research about them, their darkest secret is not well known even among specialists and those who talk too freely about it may wind up cursed by whatever shadowy entities think these things are hilariously ironic.

 

[Bayushi_seikuro]

Serial stalker who is creating real humanoid scarecrows

EDIT: Or recreate/base it on the original The Fog