Happy Halloween! What's the scariest thing that ever happened to your party?

[the_brazenburn]

Happy Halloween, everybody!

I was wondering what frightening stories you have to share, from either DMs or players. For us I think it would be an overgrown hedge maze stalked by a redcap wielding garden shears (El Snippo) and his corpse flower "children".

[solidork]

My War Cleric summons the legendary spirits of his ancestors when he casts Spirit Guardians. There are three of them, and they've got names and backstories, etc. The stories about these heroes are profoundly important to him and he is always thinking of ways to relate them to his current experiences. There was a point in the campaign where we decided to destroy this evil, dangerous altar. Our sorcerer used her most powerful spell (Disintegrate) and nearly died from the backlash. My cleric decided to call upon his ancestors to destroy it and they got one attack each, and I had to make a saving throw each time. My ancestors destroyed it, and my GM revealed that had I failed the saving throws, my character would have lost all memory of the ancestor in question.

I was, as they say, shook.

Another time we were trying to deal with a demon infestation in the borderdark under Waterdeep and our Kobold Rogue went ahead invisibly to do some scouting, only to get spotted and charmed by a Cambion. We ended the session immediately afterwards and everyone was convinced that we were all doomed and would be swarmed by demons and killed.

[UrielAwakened]

I had a monster that hunted by smell and sound once, inspired by the RE4 blind prisoners. That was a fun one. They threw a dead, rotting harpy at it to confuse it.

Also had a monster that hunted by infra-red vision, sound, and smell in a pitch-black area where even darkvision was limited to 10 feet.

I find that the monsters that are the scariest are the ones that can see you, but you can't see them. However you accomplish that.

[dmteeter]

My bard once entered a tavern with no beautiful women to seduce which lead to him having to go to bed alone.....

[Dr. Cliché]

Recently, our party finally managed to kill a vampire that had been haunting my character's dreams for as long as she can remember. Properly killed - we found his coffin and put a stake through his heart.

That evening, he somehow resurrected himself by crawling out of my character's stomach.

There was a lot of blood.

[NecroDancer]

Our party had to fight a bunch of sorrowsworn in an enclosed space (so no fireballs or flight), a bunch of us got grappled/paralyzed/blinded so a lot of your fighting power was negated by us trying to remove the afflictions. Lastly to top it off we had an invisible attacker dealing psychic damage and making us afraid (so we could move forward and start healing the various debuffs). We almost TPKed and only won thanks my character making a heroic sacrifice.

[ProsecutorGodot]

A friend of mine ran his first 5E campaign as a one shot extra dimensional maze where we encountered characters and NPC's he had seen or played as in his years of DND.

He put a trapdoor in the dungeon that, when opened, displayed images of a burning city being assailed by a cult of dragons. Vaguely heroic looking nobodies fleeing underground and being run ragged through the town until eventually they couldn't run anymore and were overcome by the cult and their kobolds.

That was how the first game of DND I played ended, being TPK'd in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. The players and the DM of that game were all at the table still and it was definitely surreal to have that brought up again.

[JakOfAllTirades]

"Scariest thing" is kinda subjective.

But it was probably a Jeremy Crawford tweet.

[ImproperJustice]

I think our spookiest was when our party camped outside a major spooky dungeon.
We were awakened in the night by screams in the dungeon. (Even our watch had dozed off due to exhaustion caused by the climb).

We warily entered and began exploring. It quickly became just another dungeon crawl. Except things were a little off. We would have a room with a single monster and then lots of treasure. Then some empty rooms except for some repeating dungeon dressing. We kept encountering like the same ornate chair, or mirror as we progressed. We always kept fighting the same monster. All the doorways were the same and closed but unlocked with a distinctive squeek.

Then the GM started using the wrong words for things, like referring to AC as hit points and mixing differnt roll modifiers.
Then he started repeating flavor text at innaproproate times like the midle of a combat. And he just kept making rolls and looking at his watch.

Finally he got up from the table with no explanation got a soda, sat down and read out that we were at the entrance of the dungeon again.

I finally figured it out and shouted: “We’re all still asleep!!!”.
Then he smiled as we had to make rolls to “wake up”.

Some kind of brain slug critters had come upon us in the night and put us to sleep. The GM had put us on a real time clock before we succumbed to them, and had been following a schedule of events to give us clues.

All in all, it was super unnerving and very cool.

[Spore]

Look up the (Pathfinder) adventure Carnival of Tears. It is honestly a great book that focusses on the cruel and uncaring nature of (Winter Court) Fey. It has fun encounters like the Swine-o-mancer that uses a pie filling cannon with somewhat spoiled meat paste (Pig Man Wizard). It has a bit of social encounters like the girl that was given a dog face in order to present her during the fair. And its final boss is one of the coolest (pun intended) Dark Fey: A cold rider.

The cool thing about the adventure is that you have a few fun mini games during the carnival that give the players small doodads for participating. Slowly but surely you give the players small hints towards that something - might be wrong with the carnival but they don't have to act on it. People start vanishing, the lines at the food tents start getting shorter. You imagine it is because people are sated.

So naturally my Oracle (basically a favoured soul) buys and eats a pie. The carnival turns to crap, the dog faced girl is the major hint at the players. You assume a pretty sane and sterile D&D adventure right? The fey start attacking. The ferris wheel starts grinding bones. A minotaur is released into the hedge maze. Said swinomancer appears - its pie filling machine sickens you. No biggie, it could just be spoiled meat. But no.

Soon you discover fair goers have been used for the meat pies. And my character just ate one...honestly we had to take a break for fresh air after that one...

Another cool thing our DM did in a post apocalyptic game but is easily transferrable to D&D was the following: You are trapped in an underground compound (dungeon). You are starting off as skilled soldiers (high level heroes) with the best gear the game has to offer. Think using anything below Holy Avengers for starting gear. You tear apart the first mutant (basically this game's equivalent of a dragon, so think a big bad). You feel powerful, nothing can stop you. But then, there's a second encounter like that. Your ressources start to dwindle. And there are FOUR more of these things coming down the hall. Your only hope is to escape.

[DarkKnightJin]

The creepiest thing my Cleric's party fought was a goo/slime/ooze monster that had devoured most of the small fishing hamlet's inhabitants by the time we managed to get back there after learning something was unleashed from the campaign's version of the Shadowfell.

Whenever we attacked it, it reared up and showed a face of someone it'd eaten. I don't remember the mechanics of the fight, but it was rather unnerving.

The scariest thing my EK's party faced is probably the 'Ruskalki' homebrew monster we tangled with not too long ago.
Underwater Undead, with a glamour that charms like how a Harpy/Siren or Succubus might do so.
Didn't help that thanks to a low Perception roll my EK had to roll the (DC18) Wisdom save at Disadvantage.. At 5th level as a character.
Long story short, I got to basically watch as my EK slowly drowned because I wasn't able to break the charm.

Thank heavens that the Cleric had Revivify and the diamonds to use it.