Ask your players to solve this the night before; (Tell them it has a valuable clue.)


I hate to say it, but there are some great creep stories for Pathfinder done by Kobold Quarterly. It would be an effort to translate them, but definitely very Halloween. Most of the Midgard setting is steeped in European fairy tales.

In Court's Of the Shadow Fey, the elves are quite out to get you;


Lots to draw on here. Dinner? Fresh Lamb? Cut from a live animal. Skull Wine? Made from fermented brains. Puff Pastry? contains molten gold.

Old Margeve


You see, The Margreve forest is alive, but it doesn't like you. Sometimes it moves to keep you lost. Maybe devour you. The things that live there... aren't right. Old Margreve's stories are better than Courts of the Shadow Fey.

Hollow Man (unsolvable unless the players think)

Knock, knock, knock;
The Hollow Man calls.
Swing, swing, swing!
His greedy scythe falls!

Chop, chop, chop;
He takes another head.
Burn, burn, burn!
The Hollow Man is dead!

Music: Amazon has - 99 very good pieces for $6.

Food: .

The Auld Grump, awake, but barely....

Just in time for Halloween: The Madness of Gardmore Abbey from WotC for 4e -
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/product.aspx ... /355930000

Haven't played it, but there should be early reviews/unboxing videos since I saw a copy for sale earlier in the week...

Also, I can't find it now, but someone posted a picture of a game map they were working on to use role playing Plants[Players?] vs. Zombies, like the video game. That sounded fun!

If you do not mind converting from Pathfinder then The Haunting of Harrowstone is excellent - very much a Hammer horror movie feel.

The climax is a haunted prison, haunts, ghosts, etc.. The place was destroyed in a fire during a riot, killing prisoners, guards, and the warden... or so the story goes, the truth is a bit darker.... Harrowstone is destined to be a classic, I think, though the rest of the Path is nowhere near as good. Decent, but Harrowstone is head and shoulders above the rest.

The Auld Grump

interesting concept UHF. at this point i'm thinking about combining several different things into my potential Halloween themed adventure. right now the players are in a brand new realm that is a winter location. they just had the first encounter in an ice cavern, and thats where they are now. what i may do is have them get outside and get blinded/lost in a snowstorm (thanks joydyhee) and their only hope is a small remote village. they'll explore several cabins but find no one there. they'll get to one where there will be a (gnome, tiefling, elf, dunno) who has cast an illusory spell over the cabin. it makes it look all warm and inviting. roaring fire with the "days' first kill" roasting

he'll have some casual conversation, and all the while the players will actually be eating (steak, hamburgers, don't know yet). after they've all eaten whatever meat we have prepared (my wife will "offer to cook" and i'll just tell them last minute that she wanted to cook )...i'll go back in-game and the illusory spell will begin to wear off. the players will notice their surroundings changing ever so slightly. and then they will eventually see the human corpses and body parts on the table, as well as a human torso roasting on the fire. and finally, they'll look down at what they just ate...mwa hahahahaha. hopefully, they'll have a gross out feeling here.

i'll then probably put them on some kind of weird adventure where maybe they are drugged or some kind of spell has been cast on them to render them unconscious, which will maybe put them into the dead/dream state where they wake up in coffins, without weapons and character sheets (thanks UHF). i may try to find a way to make the "wake up" part of a separate session so i wont have to take their character sheets away mid-game. anyway, they'll have to kind of wander through the dream state (every played Max Payne?) and wander a long hallway of doors. the gelatinous cube idea is a great one, love it.

awesome ideas guys!

I ran an adventure about a hag a whiles back, based in part on this poem -

La Llorona - from the Mexican folktale.

Don’t go down to the river, child,
Don’t go there alone;
For the sobbing woman, wet and wild,
Might claim you for her own.

She weeps when the sun is murky red;
She wails when the moon is old;
She cries for her babies, still and dead,
Who drowned in the water cold.

Abandoned by a faithless love,
Filled with fear and hate.
She flung them from a cliff above
And left them to their fate.

Day and night, she heard their screams,
Borne on the current’s crest;
Their tortured faces filled her dreams,
And gave her heart no rest.

Crazed by guilt and dazed by pain,
Weary from loss of sleep,
She leaped in the river, lashed by rain,
And drowned in the waters deep.

She seeks her children day and night,
Wandering, lost, and cold;
She weeps and moans in dark and light,
A tortured, restless soul.

Don’t go down to the river, child,
Don’t go there alone;
For the sobbing woman, wet and wild,
Might claim you for her own.

The Sobbing Woman in the adventure was a hag, who still drowned children by throwing them off the top of a quarry, into the stagnant waters below.

The party was too late to rescue the children that they had come to save.

Hinterlands Cliffs would work well, long with a few water tiles.

The Auld Grump, the grey lady is a common myth, crossing many cultural boundaries - Slavic, Celtic, Asian, Spanish....

What about a kindly 'bad guy'?

He honestly thought you'd like to eat dead humans. I mean, its good enough for him, right?

"But you cooked him!"
"Well you wouldn't eat him raw would you?"

okay guys, my halloween themed game is coming up on the 15th and so prep has begun for it. i've taken ideas from you guys and here's what i've got so far:


1. party just blasted out of an ice cavern with the help of a redneck type miner character named Rusty...he's also a cleric though (they'll need him later)

2. they are going to be stepping out of the cave and into a blizzard (winter region) and they will take environmental type damage. i'll probably run a short skill challenge to endure the bitter cold. i may introduce a "frostbite disease" as i saw an article on a blog about this. they'll be looking for shelter, and that's where i'll send them to the cannibals' house. (i'm debating on how to introduce this as i don't want them to know obviously that the dude is a cannibal.)

3. atmosphere - the room will be completely dark where we play, and i'll have candles and such for light. i will also have black sheets covering certain furniture in the room with the intention of uncovering it at the right now to reveal zombie-ish props! it's all about the effect

3. i'm going to try to time it so that my players are actually eating burgers or some kind of meat product...and then about half way through eating, i'll be running through the in-game stuff and the illusory spell will wear off at the shack they are in...and they'll find out that they are eating human body parts. at this point i plan on uncovering the various body parts for a good gross out factor.

4. the body parts will be infected of course...i'll describe maggots and puss all over the meat they are eating ...this infection will take a crap load of HP from them immediately and they will die. the players will wake up somewhere in the house of the cannibal (basement i'm thinking) and there will be lots of experiment type stuff down there. the premise at this point will be to make it out of the house and back to the cleric where they can be cured hopefully. the good news is that they've been extra mean to the cleric so far, so they'll have to convince him and the other miners that they aren't "bad guys"...should be fun.

5. the encounters for the house (during zombie time)...i'm open to ideas. i want them to be nasty and gross. i also want to use audio to actually scare them...as in, make them jump in their seats. i have a cool app on my phone called Songs and Dragons thats specifically designed for music and sound fx in d&d games. works great. so any cool encounters (i'll have time for 2 probably) that involve loud scary sounds would be awesome.

6. finally...i want to turn the players into zombies, and i want to give them zombie powers and abilities that are kinda tailored to their class. so the magic user gets zombie spells, the fighter gets brute zombie attacks, etc etc. the only concern for me is the stats for these attacks. do i just take their existing character sheets and change the powers a little? how would you suggest i do this to make them different, but not unbalanced for play?

Music - anything by Midnight Syndicate, especially their "Born of the Nigth" album (which I am listening to now...

Magda - The Black Room (Put this on while they eat.)


Actually give some of her stuff a listen. Her newer album seems pretty dark (From The Fallen Page). All of it is minimal techno.

Dead Can Dance - The Host of Seraphim (Toss this one on when you kill them.)


"I regret to inform you... of your passing. You are all quite quite dead."


Rob Dougan - Furious Angels (Make this an anthem song, and play it when they are winning.)


"Like a sentence of death,
I got no options left,
I've got nothing to show now.

I'm down on the ground,
I've got seconds to live,
and you cannot go now.

'Cause love, like invisible bullet shot me down
and I'm bleeding, yeah I'm bleeding
and if you go, furious angels will bring you back to me.
They will bring you back to me."

i had my halloween game session yesterday and it was a HUGE success!!! thanks to all of your advice and tips guys, it made it pretty epic. here are the highlights (and i'll post pics soon):

1. i needed a way to get them to the cannibal's house and get inside, so since they were in a wintry climate and had just blasted their way (literally) out of an ice cavern, i had that blast start an avalanche during a battle with wolves and bears outside. i had some good music and made them run for it...towards some smoke rising in the distance (house). i also had the bears and wolves running beside and behind them attacking and slowing them down to create further suspense.

2. i built the trust of the cannibal to the players by having him spring a wooden stake trap outside his house to kill the wolves, and then get them to "hurry inside!" before the avalanche got to them. once inside, i described a nice cozy miner's house with a pig roasting over the fire, bread on the table, etc....comfortable. the players to my surprise, immediately starting eating what was offered to them. (i also had a fireplace crackling sound effect)

3. at this point, i had them go outside so i could setup the room. i turned the lights out (windows were blacked out), turned on the flickering candle lightbulbs, and turned down the light on the halogen lamp to set the mood. then i placed the halloween themed food i made on the table. that consisted of (eyeballs - white mushrooms painted, severed hand and hand in a jar - latex gloves filled with bird seed....and then edible stuff....lips/teeth - apple slices with peanut butter and white chocolate chips, severed fingers - cinnamon rolls rolled out skinny with an almond for a finger nail). i covered all that up on the table to look like it was going to be terrain for them to play on i turned on some spooky music and they loved it. after they sat down i described everything turning from "nice" into "cannibal" and that they just ate nasty human meat...and then unveiled the halloween themed food. awesome effect!

4. i had them die immediately and turn into zombies...waking up in a coffin to which they punched out of. i described their skin falling off, jaw falling off, etc etc and they really liked that. i gave them all new character sheets...which essentially were just monsters from the DDI monster creator. i tried to tailor the monsters to the character types the best i could.

5. they came out of the dungeon room they woke up in, and went into another room that contained a really large meat grinder (rolling spike cylinder things). there were conveyor belts on either side of the grinder, and i had the cannibal guy who was also a sorcerer of sorts, kind of doing a mind control thing on caged humans in the room. he was commanding them to mindlessly walk over to the conveyor belt and go down into the meat grinder. once the players entered combat, the cannibal changed his chant and forced the slaves to attack the players. i also had the players take 2 squares towards the meat grinder because they were also feeling the pull from the cannibal's spell...but not as badly.

the encounter wasn't that difficult for them, but it had a good pace and action...and the players liked it. once they got out of the house, one of the players recalled a cleric they met previously in the ice cavern and they decided to head back to him. as they approached the ravene they climbed out of before, they saw the cleric (who is also a miner) and his group of miners trying to climb the ravene as well. at the sight of the players/zombie forms it spooked the cleric who fell down the ravene onto the ground and was knocked unconscious. so that's how i left it until next time!!

overall...everyone LOVED it. thanks for all of the suggestions...this session came together brilliantly.