5 Great Modules for Halloween Gaming
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the leaves are changing color, the nights are getting cooler, and our RPGs are getting spookier. It’s so close to the Witching Month that we can almost hear the cackling from here.
Speaking of Witches, our Kickstarters have by now received their copy of Worm Witch: The Life and Death of Belinda Blood. Despite being a module dedicated to witches battling the horrific and the monstrous, it’s not, in all honesty, imminently suitable as a Halloween RPG. The fact that we are releasing a module about witches so close to Halloween is sheer coincidence.
There are many great options for those looking to spookify their gaming sessions. Of course, classics like Ravenloft or Call/Trail of Cthulhu is always going to be appropriate. I’ve never played Don’t Rest Your Head, so can’t recommend it, but it seems very appropriate. Dread lends itself to the season as well.
But there’s so much more than the classics. I’m developing a scenario for my players using bits and pieces from the below modules. Each of them come highly recommended.
Witchburner – SN 
Krevborna – SN 
Scarecrow – LotfP 
Village & Witch – LotFP 
Sleepy Hollow – S&W
Witchburner: Halloween Edition
The Blurb.
Witchburner is a novella-length tabletop rpg adventure. It’s an intimate, tragic adventure of witch hunting in a town huddled between rivers and mountains and forests one wet and cold October. This Halloween edition includes a detailed breakdown of how to run the social investigation adventure, simple rules for time, alcohol, love, fear, the mob, and, yes, torture, a breakdown on how to adapt OSR stats for play on the fly, some “inexplicable witchcraft related phenoma” and a massive, watch-by-watch breakdown of a whole 30-day month.
Why I like it.
It’s beautiful and bittersweet, filled with quirky, flawed characters and the ever-present fear of the mob. If the Cohen Brothers directed a Hammer Horror film, it might look something like this.
The Blurb.
The blood moon rises above the haunted lands of Krevborna! Once a country of picturesque villages, deep forests, and sublime mountain ranges, Krevborna is now a land of Gothic ruins preyed upon by fiends, ravening beasts, and the unquiet dead. Shadows triumphantly lengthen across Krevborna; the great powers of darkness work to usher in the dread dominion of an everlasting empire of night.
Why I like it.
The author Jack Shear has several modules that could fit, including Hexmoon Sabbath and Dirge of Urazya. But for those Gothic feels, Krevborna is where it’s at. So vividly written, you practically hear Peter Cushing reading the prose to you.
The Blurb.
Another twisted experiment in turning your game on its head: A house in the center of a cornfield contains horror, magic, and complications for any unwise enough to investigate. It’s not so much an adventure as a hostage situation.
Why I like it.
This is from the time that Lamentations products were actually daring and did new things. Death Frost Doom is kind of the module that put Raggi on the map, but this one does a lot in 7 or 8 pages. Of everything on this list, it’s the one you could grab and run at the table with zero prep.
The Blurb.
“A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and to pervade the very atmosphere.”
With these words Washington Irving introduced the world to the tiny town of Sleepy Hollow and forever changed the literary world. Now revisit this tiny hamlet and its most famous residents with Sleepy Hollow! This 30-page source book is designed for use with Labyrinth Lord (and other old-school fantasy role-playing games) and inside you’ll find all kinds of resources for your campaign!
Why I like it.
James Spahn gets a lot right in capturing the feel and the tone of Sleepy Hollow. I think it’s best mixed with another flavor–bringing in demihumans into a world their players slowly recognized would be a nice twist, for instance. As a bonus, you get the actual Sleepy Hollow story with this purchase.
The Blurb.
This adventure is designed for low-level characters and is intended as an encounter to run in one or two sessions, between other adventures.
This module is designed to generate a Village, a Witch, and some additional weirdness: two pages with die-drop tables to outline the village (map and content), and two pages with a series of random tables to generate a Witch and its connection to the village.
Why I like it.
It takes the ideas from Scenic Dunsmouth to generate a town and a witch by dropping dice onto a piece of paper. It’s very cleverly written and honestly the process of rolling up communities is just as fun as rolling up characters. This isn’t a fully complete adventure but it’s a very nice tool to have in your kit.
Those are the books I’m using this year. Let me know what your favorites for the spooky season are.
