The Young Dragonslayers DND Halloween Compendium
We have all the resources you need for your next spooky DND one shot
Halloween is the ultimate holiday for Dungeons & Dragons fans. It’s filled with classic D&D elements like witches, monsters and ghosts – plus, it’s the perfect excuse to dress up as our characters! So, naturally, young D&D enthusiasts are on the lookout for D&D Halloween books, spooky D&D campaign ideas, or the perfect one shot for a Halloween Dungeons & Dragons game. Over the years, we’ve gathered lots of resources for spooky D&D games and we’re here to share them with you. Here they are at a glance:
Character Ideas For Your Halloween D&D Campaign
Wednesday Adams is a great character for a Halloween DND campaign
To play a Halloween D&D campaign, you’ll first need to create a character. Luckily, there are plenty of options to fit the spooky season. If you want to craft a character from your own imagination, we recommend playing a magic user like a sorcerer, warlock, or wizard. That way, you’ll be fitting the Halloween vibe no matter what your build is! To really lean into the magical elements of your character, check out our guide to the schools of magic in D&D. Here’s an excerpt where we talk about the spookiest of all the magic schools: Necromancy.
The school of Necromancy comes from the prefix “Necro-.” When that prefix is put in front of a word, the word is modified to mean having to do with the dead (for example, a “necropolis” is a cemetery). Necromancy spells control life, death, and undeath; though they can be pretty spooky, they’re not necessarily evil. If you came across a dead body as a necromancer, you could talk to them, summon them up as a zombie, or even create an army of zombies you can control. However, Necromancy spells aren’t limited to dealing with corpses; they can damage your opponents with necrotic energy or suck the life force out of people. It’s not all death and destruction, though! The most powerful healing spells in the game are in the school of Necromancy, allowing you to bring an ally back to life, growing back limbs and organs, healing wounds, or even making them a whole new body. A particularly paranoid player of mine would often use Necromancy magic to create a clone of themself just in case they died and their soul needed somewhere to go (luckily, they never had to use it).
- From What Are The Types of Magic In D&D?
If you’re a horror-movie fan, why not look to pop culture to inspire your D&D character this Halloween? We crafted D&D character builds for several of our favorite spooky icons. Beetlejuice is a wild-magic sorcerer; Jason Voorhees is a fighter; Wednesday Addams is a divination wizard; Pennywise is a bard; Ghostface and Miachel Meyers are way-of-shadows monks; Winifred, Mary, and Sarah are divination wizards; Freddy Kruger is a college-of-swords bard; and Stranger Things’ Eleven is a sorcerer. We even found a homebrew Ragdoll class for Coraline and Chucky!
Our Favorite D&D Halloween One Shots
These kids Halloween DND games are super fun and not too spooky!
With a character in hand, it’s time to find a Halloween Dungeons & Dragons one shot to play. If you’d like to switch up the vibe, setting, or mechanics, there are lots of other D&D-style games to choose from. We picked out our favorite spooky games to share. One is a Halloween-themed Infinity-Train style adventure written by our very own Dungeon Master Steph! In another, you play as a crew of monster hunters with classic tropes like the Chosen One or the Mundane. Another lets you play in a Stranger Things world as kids investigating mysteries with a super-powered friend. In another, you play as young scouts; we’ll let this excerpt describe it in more detail:
Media like Gravity Falls, Night In The Woods, Lumberjanes, and Hilda inspired Kathryn and Rich Oxenham (who we got to chat with on the blog) to create Cryptid Creeks. In this game, you play as young scouts sailing the waterways and teaming up with their cryptid friends to save their town from the curses of a scheming eldritch figure.This game is particularly well-suited to campaign play. With the larger narrative of the eldritch figure (known as the Peddler), campaigns can string together arcs of player characters breaking the curses and, eventually, taking the Peddler down. The book has this all written out for you with a full campaign called The Peddlers Revenge, a map of the town, and handouts for everything you need!
- From Spooky D&D Games For Your Halloween One Shot
But if your heart is set on the D&D system, we also have three starter adventures for a good old-fashioned Halloween D&D one shot. One has the party fighting giant rats and magic spiders in a spooky underground dungeon. Another features a town curse, the moon-spider queen, and an evil hag. The last adventure takes place in a decrepit inn with the party fending off a gang of thieves and a horde of zombies. We share our tips and tricks on what characters and DM strategies to use for each, along with a primer on how to read a premade D&D campaign for Halloween or otherwise.
Items, Monsters, and More: D&D Halloween Ideas
The Monster Manual is a great place to find spooky DND campaign ideas
For those who want to go totally freeform with a Halloween Dungeons & Dragons campaign, we’ve got some great D&D resources with spooky elements to put into your games. We compiled a whole list of blood-moon-inspired components and we were delighted to find out that D&D is full of lunar content. It has some cool character options like a circle-of-the-moon druid, a lunar sorcerer, and even a werewolf barbarian. They also have awesome spell and weapon options like a sickle, bow, and beam all powered by the moon. And the D&D lore is full of lunar elements:
Dungeons & Dragons’ world also has lycanthropes: humanoids who transform into creatures (usually under the light of the moon). These include weretigers, wereboard, werebears, weresharks, wererats, and, of course, werewolves. Each of these has its own distinct powers, but the coolest one has to be the deathwolf. These are undead werewolves that have been forever resurrected in their hybrid form. On top of the regular ferocity of a werewolf, these creatures have an ability known as Phantom Deathwolf. They create a phantom version of themself that terrifies those who see it. But this fear isn’t just in their mind – the viewer takes a ton of psychic damage each turn! Creatures like this can be taken down by a moonlight guardian. These came into being after a mage on Krynn drew the Moon card from the Deck of Many Things and wished for something to defend against lycanthropes. Moonlight guardians certainly fit the bill; they’re living silver-and-mithryl statues emitting blasts of moonlight to deal epic damage and return shapeshifters into their original forms.
- From Lunar Content For Your DND Games
Especially if you’re playing a combat-heavy D&D Halloween campaign, you’ll want to pick out some cool monsters to fight. When the latest Monster Manual was released, we combed through it to pick out some of our favorites from the land of Middle Earth, including iconic baddies like the Balrog and the Ringwraiths. For mythology fans, you could also pick from among some D&D monsters inspired by Irish mythology, like banshees, changelings, and even the headless horseman!
Play A Halloween D&D One Shot!
Spooks and scares can be a fun part of a DND Halloween campaign, but we’ve got the tips and tricks to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand
If you’re fired up for a D&D Halloween campaign but aren’t sure if you can gather enough friends to play with you, we’ve got you covered. In addition to finding awesome D&D material, we also run D&D games for tweens and teens. These games are 100% online, and we’ll worry about things like schedules, time zones, and play styles to create the perfect group for you. Our professional Dungeon Masters craft custom Dungeons & Dragons campaigns that fit the interests and fandoms of your group. A spooky Dungeons & Dragons game might be in your future!
