Trick or Treat
By Cape Rust
The holiday season is fast approaching. I know this because my local stores are placing Halloween costumes and bags of overpriced candy on the shelves. This starts the slippery slope of a succession of holidays. Yes, these holidays can interfere with your gaming, but they are ripe with opportunity. The key to Halloween gaming is to make the experience a Treat, not a Trick for your players.
Horror games are a must for this season. I covered running horror games a few weeks ago, but implementing those horror games is almost as hard as running them. If you are involved in a long running campaign, it can be challenging to interject a Halloween event into your game while staying true to your storyline and having that event feel right.
I had one DM who did a great job of interjecting Halloween into a long running Shadowrun game. Our group had been hired to undermine one of the megacorps by disrupting some of their lower level operations. This included taking out key players and raiding some of their facilities. The actual game session occurred two days before Halloween so the timing was great. As players, we had no idea what was going on. We all arrived, had our normal pre-game banter, then the GM started the session. He let us know that our Mr. Johnson wanted to meet with us about our next task. It turned out that Mr. Johnson wanted our crew to takedown a cybernetics research facility. Pretty run-of-the-mill for Shadowrun. We accepted the job and then the Mr. Johnson mentioned that the guy who ran the place was strange and that the facility developed cybernetic pets and “smart” toys. The plot thickens!
I know you can guess what happened next. The run went bad and we found ourselves in a building full of cyber clowns and smart toys ready to do nothing but destroy our group. The GM threw in killer toys that had pumpkin heads and a few that were black cat-like. At one point we even had to fight a mobile vending machine that launched soy candy corn at lethal velocities. Getting hit by a few pieces of the iconic Halloween candy wasn’t harmful, until the machine went full auto. Luckily, none of the players were killed in this manner, but the thought of a troll street samurai lying in a puddle of its own blood and candy corn makes me giggle like a little school girl.
I do recommend halting your normal campaign and planning a one- or two-shot adventure. I have seen people who have successfully integrated a seasonal “event” into their normal game, but success in this arena is difficult to achieve. I like taking a strategic pause, taking a break, and spending a few sessions feeling the season. Halloween has so many horror tropes associated with it. When planning one of these games it shouldn’t be a matter of are there any good games to run on Halloween, it should be which game would be the most fun. I had a blast during a Halloween game where the PCs were children going out to trick or treat. Their choice of costume determined their “class” or “template”. The adventure included getting loot, avoiding older kids, and of course dealing with the local haunted house. While this seems kind of canned, it was awesome. This game happened over three sessions and ended the weekend before Halloween. It was a fun game and it gave us all a break from trying to save the world from a recently awoken ancient god.
Zombie and Vampire games are always a great choice for Halloween games. I lean towards a good zombie mall crawl rather than the sometimes complex politics of the vampire world. There are plenty of video games out there that will give you hundreds of great ideas that will easily translate into interesting tabletop situations. Be careful not to try to recreate a portion of a video game frame by frame. This can easily lead to the players who have played the game breezing through the entire adventure using the same solutions they used in the video game. Besides, you are not worth the card stock your GM screen is printed on if you can’t come up with something original.
An added advantage of running short Halloween games is that these short games only require you to maintain the heightened sense of fear and high octane action for a few sessions. Theses games are a sprint, not a marathon. If you are running the game, sell out, make it fun, make it short, make it count. Now is the time to start planning and remember to have fun. Don’t be afraid to make your seasonal game a treat for you and your players.