Halloween hijinks for our happy heroes!

Our group

Brus Reckoner

Male half-orc Inquisitor of Yog-Sothoth and slayer of old ladies.

John “Angel Eyes” Wilmarth

Male Aasimar Cleric of the mad idiot god Azathoth.

Fág an Bealach (Faugh)

Male svirfneblin Brawler of archetype Mutagenic Mauler.

Bill the Bard

A lost male human bard with his donkey Bottom.

Picklick

Male hobgoblin rogue, absent this week.

Happy Halloween

“WELCOME! TO MY WORLD! MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Last session we ended with the showboating of a mysterious illusory wizard. This session we continued with his dialogue. He welcomed them to his world and encouraged them to join the festivities. Festivities? What?

A bag with a ghost painted on the side flopped into existence in front of them. After marvelling at the solitary door in the clearing they came through, they picked up the bag and travelled along the only road north.

When they crested a hill and left the forest, they could see a small village teeming with people. They could see some knocking on doors, and running around in costumes.

Halloween!

A large bonfire lay at the center of town. Just beyond it was a large gothic mansion enclosed in high fences. The keyring indicated the exit was through a gate, but there was a sign: “120 candy to enter!” Ah, so the bag was a trick or treat bag!

As the others scoped out the area, the Bard prepared a makeshift costume and told a ghost story to the crowd. He was rewarded with a shower of candy.

The festivities on offer included:

• A Haunted House
• A gypsy fortune teller
• Bobbing for apples
• A kissing booth hidden in shadows
• Pumpkin carving
• Visiting an orphanage

And of course, trick or treating!

The gang decided to explore the haunted house first. A lanky freak at the front door welcomed them: “Do you dare run through the haunted house and claim the prize? Line up! Line up!”

The PCs lined up at the front door and then bolted into the haunted house. Just inside the lobby was an animated rug that attempted to trip them up. Poor Brus got bounced a few times as the cleric and the brawler raced ahead, dodging blow darts from mummified pygmy warriors lining the main hallway. A few of them got stuck at a hallway where the walls reached out to grab them. Brus tried to duck around the side, dodging a stuffed polar bear and a room with shifting perspective.

The staircase slowed them down a little as the steps bounced up and down randomly. On the second floor, the PCs split. Bill the bard took the straight line down the hall, getting stuck on an insane puzzle box (which claimed his fingers with trap razors!) Faugh jumped through a room with reversed gravity but didn’t break a sweat. Brus and the cleric ran through a room covered in fungus spores with the Inquisitor taking in a lungful.

John the cleric got stuck swimming through the air in a room with no gravity, as Faugh dragon-punched a skeleton in a walk-in closet and ran to claim the prize. For his swiftness, Faugh won the PCs a big bag full of candy.

John was keen on pumpkin carving, so they went there next. But wouldn’t you know it, they were all out of pumpkins. If they went and grabbed some from the nearby vegetable patch, the stall owner promised them free pumpkins and some free candy!

Well aware that they were walking into trouble, the gang made their way to the vegetable patch perched on the top of a hill, illuminated by moonlight. They spotted a scarecrow at the end of the row, and eyed it warily.

Except for Faugh… he flipped off his dragonball pauldrons and bolted towards the scarecrow.

Faugh punched at the straw scarecrow, but didn’t connect. Did it move out of the way? Or was that a trick of the light?

A fight broke out as the scarecrow answered that definitively by hopping off his perch and smashing Faugh before fascinating him with visions of terrors from the darkest of Halloweens. As the others ran in to save him, pumpkin vines grabbed and whipped them. Soon after a pumpkin sprang to life as a lanky Jack o’ Lantern.

This ambush was almost too effective. The fascinated fighter gutted their combat effectiveness, and vines entangling the Inquisitor almost killed it (and the Inquisitor). The bard did well shaking the fighter to, and stabbing the Jack o’ Lantern with a long spear. Luckily they managed to band together and hack the vines to pieces, and gang up on the farmyard constructs.

The PCs returned bloodied and battered with armfuls of pumpkins. Once they healed up a little, they decided they’d donate their carved pumpkins (including the head of the Jack o’ Lantern) to the children at the orphanage.

But the PCs needed healing, quickly. This of course brought them to the gypsies, who encouraged them to come in and have their fortunes read. The future of the PCs looked… weird.

The Inquisitor was destined to be the voice of a people (he drew The Megaphone). While he didn’t notice a difference, his voice was really loud as if he was always shouting.

The Brawler came from the underdark and may never truly shake that off. He drew The Beetle.

The Cleric was fated to spycraft and espionage, allegedly. Extra eyeballs grew out of his forehead, scaring the others.

The stars were a little off-kilter for The Bard. They spoke of a scarecrow in his future… or maybe his past.

The gypsies provided some mysterious brews that healed much of their danger.

What’s spooky about an orphanage? Especially an orphanage inside a dark, crumbling gothic building. Oh, that…

The PCs crept in and after some fumbling around, found a few doors with plaques on them. The doors read “Nice Girls”, “Nice Boys” and, on a rope leading to the attic, “Naughty Children”. Simultaneously they opened the attic stairs and wandered into the first room labelled “Nice Girls”.

The cleric found a thin little girl sitting in front of a cold fireplace, holding a moth-eaten teddy bear. Although, on second inspection, the little girl didn’t have so much shoulders as wooden ball sockets… She was a doll! It looked at him. The cleric gave her a carved pumpkin and some candy. Wordlessly she accepted them.

Meanwhile the bard and Inquisitor were fighting over who would ascend into the attic first. When they pulled the stairs down, they could hear sobbing, which grew closer. Brus turned around and asked the bard if he heard that… And found there were two identical bards!

A confused fight broke out. The Inquisitor and Brawler beat up who they thought the imposter bard was (they were wrong). Soon a tiny, emaciated girl shuffled down from the attic, tearing strips off the Inquisitor and sobbing loudly. The Inquisitor lost his voice and much of his vim and vigor.

That’s when the cleric heard something from his nightmares… scrabbling in the walls… A wave of rats burst out of the floor and walls, engulfing the Inquisitor.

The emaciated girl hit the Inquisitor again and he fell asleep on a sea of vicious rats. The others tried to drag him outside, whilst fending off the emaciated girl and the imposter Bard, who now looked like Faugh!

After a heroic tactical retreat whilst under fire from orphans, rats and doppelgangers, they decided against throwing fire into the orphanage, tooled up and charged back in to destroy these foul beasts. The boy and girl were vanquished quickly, and the rats disappeared into the floorboards. Heavily wounded and out of resources, the PCs rested as the remaining mannequin girl ran about the orphanage, scrounging up handfuls of candy to give them.

With more than enough candy to escape, but more festivities to attempt, we cut it short there, hoping that the player playing Picklick could have some fun next week.

GM’s notes

The guys really seemed to like this little module. It took a bunch of work, but seemed to pay off for this week. Quite a variety of things to do, and the combats were exciting. I had golden hands that night (I rolled something like six 19s in a row on a few dice). I almost killed the Inquisitor twice, which wasn’t my intention but brought my average up.

Fascinate is a amazing way to completely nullify a front-line fighter. I wouldn’t want to bring it out too often, because it’s no fun to the player. It’s like the issues they went through with stun effects in TF2 - while it might be fun for the attacker, the defender has a sad, boring time.