Halloween RPG Adventure Hooks Sure to Get Your Gaming Group Screaming

Nerdarchy is doing a Halloween one shot special with our monstrous friends from the McDonner Manor! Whether you’re running Quest, fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons or another tabletop roleplaying game we’ve got you covered with some ideas for you guys and ghouls! With the most spooktacular time of year in full swing it should come as no surprise many Game Masters are looking for ideas to run a quick and easy one shot for Halloween, Day of the Dead or a number of other holidays to incorporate into their campaign settings. To assist, I thought it would be fun to come up with a few prompts to help springboard your twisted imagination!

Spooky RPG adventure hooks

Lantern Festival

This first story idea works really well if you have an Path of the Ancestral Guardian barbarian or a College of Spirits bard in the party — or better yet, both!. The inspiration for this particular adventure hook comes from Kubo and the Two Strings and Tangled, then veers wildly into a Legend of Korra vibe, possibly going a bit Pan’s Labyrinth on them.

The Lantern Festival is a yearly event in a small town. Attendees play games (possibly some minigames), eat deep fried confections and look at all the beautiful lanterns. Each person is encouraged to make a lantern in honor of a bygone ancestor. At 3:00 a.m. of each festival night attendees send their lanterns soaring into the sky to guide their ancestors back to the Spirit Lands.

However, this year’s festivities are disrupted by a terrible monster of kaiju proportions. The monster terrorizes the festival, destroying buildings. Any NPCs stricken by the monster vanish in a puff of swirling mist. The party can then choose to face the monster head on (using the statistics for a tarrasque) if they’re high enough level, or they can choose to be hit by the creature and transported to the place where the missing NPCs have been taken.

If an Ancestral Guardian barbarian or Spirits bard are in the party you can use one of their spirit contacts to drop the new questline on them. Alternatively, you can use one of the party’s trusted NPCs they met during the festival, especially someone with a high degree of spiritual insight.

The party must navigate a spirit maze (possibly a Domain of Dread). During this jaunt they must rescue missing villagers as they face monsters representing the party’s flaws. If a character in the party is cowardly for example then pit them against a monster that uses fear or is born of fear, such as a shadow. When the party completes the maze or slays the monster, the missing citizens are returned, and the group receives a ghost lantern.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

This adventure was actually played by Nerdarchists Dave and Ted, Nerditor Doug and me on Nerdarchy Live, which you can check out here. In this 5E D&D adventure a woman named Madame Holiday asks the party to get an anniversary gift for her wife. However, Madame Holiday doesn’t want just any gift — she wants a special jewel found in a burned down mansion on the outskirts of town.

If you choose, you can deliver the quest with a riddle or you can deliver the quest more directly. Either way the party trek to the infested, charred remains of a noble’s manor. The manor itself is a prime location for creepy crawlies and encounters galore, as is the path toward the manor. In our game I inserted an encounter with a band of lizardfolk.

In the manor the party finds various diary excerpts painting an image of a family torn apart by the physical maladies accompanying their daughter’s sorcery. These diary entries are a great way to seed flavor and subtle hints at what’s to come. However, the gist is the daughter possessed an alien mind (Aberrant Mind sorcery) that scared her secretive, politically corrupt family.

Eventually the party finds a mad scientist’s laboratory with creepy machines designed to transfer a mind. While in the lab, the characters are likely to encounter a death kiss. While not immediately known to them this death kiss houses the memories and mind of the Aberrant Mind sorcerer. Her brain was transferred into this creature as part of her father’s horrid experiments. The anchor for this ritual was none other than the jewel the characters seek, embedded within the death kiss.

If the players successfully identify the machinery used to perform the transfer and also manage to find the woman’s body held in stasis, they might attempt to transfer the mind back into the proper body. Upon returning to Madame Holiday the adventurers may or may not learn that Madame Holiday’s wife is none other than the sister of the Aberrant Mind sorcerer. From there the ending depends on whether or not the characters bring the jewel to Madame Holiday, if they reunite the sisters or if some other event transpires.

Tricky Treats

If you’re less enthused about a spooky adventure and more focused on giving players some flavorful magic items then try these wonderfully wicked treats!

Carriage of Carnage

Wondrous item, rare

This carriage built of bones and rotting flesh is summoned by a single, clear chime of a bell once owned by a powerful necromancer. The carriage appears from the ether so long as it is night. In the sunlight, the carriage ignites in a blaze of purple and blue fire until it transmutes to smoldering ash. If the carriage burns up in this manner, the next summoner must endure 1d4 hours of ranting by the zombie footman.

The carriage is manned by a single zombie driver and is pulled by a skeletal horse. The carriage is capable of flight and underwater travel, though it does not afford those within the ability to breathe underwater. The carriage can accommodate up to four medium-sized creatures comfortably, or eight small-sized creatures.

Pumpkin Bomb

Wondrous item, rare (requires attunement)

This pumpkin is the size of a baseball and ignites with a command word of the attuned owner’s choosing (no action required). When thrown as an improvised weapon, the Pumpkin Bomb deals 4d6 fire damage and ignites all flammable objects that aren’t being worn or carried. With a bonus action, the attuned can speak the command word after explosion, summoning another Pumpkin Bomb to their hand. The Pumpkin Bomb has a short range of 60 feet and a long range of 120 feet.

What dark plans have you concocted for this time of year?

Drop us a comment and a like. If you prefer, tweet @Nerdarchy about your Halloween ideas, and connect with us on Facebook! For more whimsically spooky ideas consider the possibilities within Wild Beyond the Witchlight, the newest module for 5E D&D!

*Featured images — In One Crow, Two Crow, Three Crow, Scarecrow the eponymous icons of the harvest season prey upon the party with sudden, terrifying and confusing abilities for a remote and frightening scenario to kick off any spooky RPG session along with 54 other dynamic encounters ready to drop into your games with Out of the Box: Encounters for Fifth Edition. Check it out here. [Art by Kim Van Deun]

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