Halloween one-shot ideas?

Hello Playgrounders! I think I'm going to run a spooky session for my players next week, and I need some help thinking of ideas. Following stipulations:

1) I'd like the concept to be... irregular. Not your average scenario. Doesn't necessarily have to be spooky, but that would be preferred.
2) My players play 5e, but I could teach them Justified Anxiety (essentially Paranoia Lite), Monster of the Week, Dread, and if you have any recommendations I could learn before Halloween, let me know!

Plot ideas, system recommendations, even a spook monster idea, anything would be helpful! Thanks!

this thread, some of the first tale here, there's a really cool idea for a low level necromancer boss fight somewhere between here and 5e, but I can't find it.

Tomb of Horrors, but properly updated instead of the sad, lazy excuse for a conversion that was in Tales From The Yawning Portal.

Or there’s always Call of Cthulhu, for a system meant for horror and madness.

For a one shot, my group once did a GURPS game, where we made ourselves as characters, and then played day one of the Zombie Apocalypse. The only gear you could have to start, was what was actually in the apartment (or your car) at the time of the game.

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Originally Posted by JAL_1138

Tomb of Horrors, but properly updated instead of the sad, lazy excuse for a conversion that was in Tales From The Yawning Portal.

Or there’s always Call of Cthulhu, for a system meant for horror and madness.

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We played the 3.5e conversion of Tomb last year for H'ween. They made it surprisingly far, but missed some vital clues along the way.

Inspiration struck me over the weekend. I decided to go with a more surreal horror adventure: the characters are recruited by an ancient psychic entity from the other side of the universe to descend into a maze that predates the universe to stop to godlike horrors from escaping and not go mad in the process. Thank you for your suggestions! I really appreciate it.

I'm planning a one shot where the PCs are trying to contain a mind control fungus that seems to be everywhere, in the face of various bureaucracies that don't know it exists - which the PCs are going to be asymptomatic carriers of. Basically the idea is to play up body horror a little, and the idea of loss of control and knowledge a great deal.

I also recently ran a game of Unfinished Business, where the players play ghosts trying to avenge their own murder. In this particular case they were playing North Korean ghosts trying to take out a bomber crew on the other end of the world that had saturation bombed Pyongyang, because apparently when you let your players pick things they decide that avenging ghosts isn't enough on its own, we also need the depressingness of life in North Korea.

I just started a new campaign and went with an adventure I've run many times. My players played Night of the Living Dead. Started in the graveyard on the anniversary of a PC's grandfather's death and right to the house with the NPC family in the basement. Since I'm not running a zombie apocalypse I created my own ending/solution, but for a one-shot you can do whatever. Because of what the players did one time when they left the house then ended up on Herschel's Farm from The Walking Dead.

The idea is play a horror movie. Players may or may not know of it your choice.

I came up with a one shot idea for my current group involving a small town with a haunted corn field that is surrounding it. Each night it draws in closer, and anyone who goes in never comes back out. The remaining townsfolk are divided into several factions, the most prominent of which believes that the situation is the result of their harvest gods being displeased with them.

There are a lot more details, but most of those are way too specific for me to list out here, or are specifically tailored for my campaign and it’s story. But basically for the first half of the session, the horror element is the tension created by the corn getting closer, and the townspeople’s increasingly irrational and erratic responses. They rush to blame and all that fun stuff you expect from a panicked mob, and that ends with the murder of an innocent man. But the night after that, the players get chased into the corn by a mutated villager, where each one is confronted by the twisted and corrupted remains of a prominent NPC who got taken by the corn one way or another throughout the session. Each one is tailor made to defeat their specific character and attack their worldview, but they also have a weakness that can be exploited by one other specific party member.
I feel like that basic situation and setting could be changed a lot too, making it a versatile idea. I’m hopefully running it Friday, if anyone wants to hear how that sort of thing ends up being like.

You could use the premise of every classic FPS. A group of wizards trying to set up a Tippyverse style network of teleportation circles did something wrong and accidentally let something bad in from outside of their plane.

Or you could subvert the classic start in a bar. They start in a tavern, but the tavern is in the abyss and the characters are its demon patrons. And the "adventure" is just the everyday violence and brutality of the abyss. They're doing ordinaryish errands but what would be minor conflicts elsewhere instead escalate into bloodshed and dismemberment (like in the game Postal 2, especially the later stages)

Halloween one-shot? Steal the plot from your favourite horror movie and see how long it takes your players to figure out what you're doing. :smalltongue:

While my game itself fell through, I was all set to run a game from a system called Don't Rest Your Head, which is fairly free-form but uses madness and exhaustion as resources for players to call upon so it has a lot of themes suitable for Halloween.
With that, I was going to run the plot to Bubba Ho-Tep, a movie about an ancient Egyptian mummy that wakes up and starts feeding on the life-force of the residents of a Retirement Home.

I happen to know that none of my friends have seen that movie, so there would be a triple-threat of horror; the insanity and desperation encroaching through the mechanics, the unspeakable evil of the antagonist... and the existential terror of each of the Player Characters being elderly people with aching hips, bad vision, poor hearing and occasionally having to run to the lavatory in the middle of a fight....:smallbiggrin:

A friend of mine has done something similar in which I played; he ran the plot to the movie Unforgiven, in which we all played ageing cowboys. That worked particularly well because it was in the Savage Worlds system which let us take perks/disadvantages to mechanically represent "being old" - my guy had a wooden leg and had terrible vision unless he was wearing his spectacles, for example. Not a lot of horror in that game, but the premise is easy enough to translate into other films.
Something like Aliens would be obvious but easy to replicate, but you could also do Predator, especially if you don't tell your players that they're playing a sci-fi game and bill it to them as a "military simulator". For more of a mystery story you could do Ghost Ship, or you could even do something completely without combat as in Th13teen Ghosts... lots of potential for plots even before you look for something utterly obscure. :smallsmile:

Just last night I ran a one-shot using the system Haunt, and it turned out pretty well!

Haunt's mechanics are very niche, but they work well for a spooky (if not actually scary) game. Both the GM and the players have a number of secrets, and they use the mechanics to try to figure out those secrets. When the Haunt's (GM's) secrets are discovered, the plot progresses, but when the player characters' secrets are discovered, their rolls become harder and the GM has more chances to learn about the characters. The ruleset is fairly light, clocking in at around 30-40 pages, and it's fairly easily understood. I did find that there was a lot of prep required, as it's not easy whatsoever to improvise as GM, due to the investigative nature of the game.

Our game ended up running about 4 hours, with a little rushing at the end, and all of my players really enjoyed themselves. We did decide that the secrets are a little tough to get right the first time, so future games will have a bit more guidance regarding choosing secrets. (Although, to be fair to the system, only one of my players read the book at all to prep, and they didn't spend a ton of time creating characters.)