Tell Me About Your Halloween One-Shots

[Easy e]

Tis the season!

I want to come up with a Halloween One-shot for my players BUT I am blanking on what exactly I want to do. System does not matter at all.

This is where you come it. Tell me about your Halloween/Horror One-shots. What was it? How did it work? How did the players respond? Was there a resolution?

I am all ears and eyes! Thanks in advance.

[ShadowSandbag]

There was a long-running joke in my Mouse Guard 2e campaign where we would do one-shots about different Mouse Holidays. I can think of three halloween-based ones we did, each kind of focused around a different aspect of Haloween proper.

The actual adventures were pretty low-stakes and consisted mostly of the players getting to explore these festivals and solve some minor problems along the way.


All Hollow’s Eve - During Harvest Season, a number of birds were frequently tearing up fields and running crops. The players decided to make a big scarecrow to do this, and ended up finding a huge pumpkin to make a scary face with. Everyone in the town worked together to carve the pumpkin. They then put some sort of bird-repellent inside the pumpkin and lit it so that smoke with this bird-repellent spread out around the fields. After this success, the village decided to make this an annual celebration.


All Howl’s Eve - A celebration held at the edge of mouse civilization. It started as a ritual in which mice would create and wear the masks of predators to scare them away for the coming year. It also became a time for mice along the border to meet up before the harsh winter to trade supplies and have one last celebration before needing to shelter through the coming months.


Al/Hollis Thieve - Two neighboring towns have a tradition where they sneak into each other’s house and leave small gifts of candy and other sweets. Named after the lovers Al and Hollis who were forbidden to see each other and so would sneak in the night to leave each other love notes. Mice also participate in Trickster’s Treat, where a platter of Sweet Pastries is offered to a group. However, one of them is actually an equally-tasty savory pastry.

They were all a lot of fun, and are some of my strongest memories of the game.

[Easy e]

Well, I guess we are playing some module called Tasha's Kiss or something for Halloween.

[Bulhakov]

One fun one-shot I did (that stretched into a two-session game as the players enjoyed it so much) was actually based off of an episode of Charmed. The players investigated missing children that regularly disappeared on Halloween for the last few years. Witnessess spotted an ice-cream truck. One of the PCs with psychic powers heard eerie music he felt drawn and only he could hear it. The followed it and found a child getting into the ice-cream truck, but when they ran over, there was no child in the truck, though there was something out of place a strange large mirror.

Plot twist the players needed to figure out - the ice cream man was actually a demon hunter. The eerie song could only be heard by demons and some paranormal creatures and on Halloween it had an irresistable strength, at least for young demons. The missing children were demon changelings that were masquerading as human kids in rich families. The mirror was a demon trap that teleported the demon kids into a snowy parallel dimension.

I used the plot in a VtM game (the PCs were basically a vampire police unit), but it could probably work in almost any setting.