Spooky D&D Games For Your Halloween One Shot

Check out our recommendations and ideas for Halloween DND games [Art: ‘Scouts around campfire' by WillowsQuest for Cryptid Creeks]

We're officially in spooky season now, which a perfect time for a Halloween D&D one shot! A spooky D&D game is perfect for Halloween parties (or even just an excuse to get some friends together). And there are so many great resources out there: D&D horror one shots, spooky D&D campaigns, and a plethora of Halloween D&D one shot ideas. Here are a few of our favorites we recommend for your D&D Halloween game!

Run A Fun Dungeons & Dragons Halloween One Shot 

Tools like the Deck of Player Safety can make sure everyone has a good time in a DND Halloween campaign.

If you've already played games like D&D, you already know that there's not a traditional way to “win” the game – no Victory Points, no Monopoly money, no Battle Royale. But around here, we like to say that you win at D&D if everyone in the group has fun. And, especially with games that run on the spookier side, it's a good idea to make sure everyone's having a good time. And lots of D&D players have created tools to help you do just that. The simplest one is the X-Card (by John Stavropoulos), which involves placing an X-marked card down on the table to people to tap when things get out of hand. Another for use mid-game is Script Change (by Beau Jágr Sheldon) which has a set of cards with video-playback terms like “pause” and “fast forward” to communicate needs in a moment.

If you're planning a spooky D&D game in advance, there are more systems you can put in place ahead of time. One is Line and Veils (coined by Ron Edwards and developed by the indie gaming community). In it, players write down “lines” (things they don't want to see in a game) and “veils” (things that can be in the game, but should be glossed over or faded to black), and the GM adjusts accordingly. Another is the Deck of Player Safety (by Tom Nelson). This is a deck of cards players pass around the table. Some have common icks (like “characters dying” or “excessive bleeding”), but some are completely blank. Everybody has to choose a card, so nobody knows who picked what!

Fight Monsters In A Spooky D&D One Shot

Monster of the Week is a great choice for a DND Halloween game

Monsters are aclassic staple of Halloween costumes, movies, and more. Whether witches and werewolves or ghosts and ghouls, tabletop RPGs like D&D are full of creepy monsters to battle. In Monster of the Week (by Michael Sands, Steve Hickey, and Fred Hicks), that's the entire game! In each one shot, your crew of monster hunters hear about some spooky or unusual phenomena, solve the mystery of the monster behind it, learn about its habits and weaknesses, track it down, and get ready for combat in an epic showdown! Rather than traditional D&D classes, it lets players build a character based on classic monster-hunting tropes, like the Snoop (a curious investigator), the Monstrous, (a half-monster themselves), and, of course, the Chosen One (self-explanatory). Both character creation and gameplay are flexible and open to creative ideas and improvisation – but don't worry, there's plenty of dice-rolling and min-maxing for that true RPG crunch!

Channel Stranger Things In This Spooky D&D Game 

Kids on Bikes is a great resource for DND Halloween one shot ideas

If you made a Venn Diagram with Halloween stuff on one side and D&D stuff on the other, Stranger things would be right in the middle. Both the vibes and the game of D&D are a central part of the show, which features young residents of Hawkins, Indiana making friends, investigating spooky happenings, and, of course, playing Dungeons & Dragons. It's also set in the 1980's, which gives it an iconic aesthetic from the times of the original D&D – and the mystery of an era without GPS, smartphones, or the internet. Kids on Bikes (1st and 2nd ed by Jon Gilmour & Doug Levandowski) is exactly that: young people in a small town trying to solve a supernatural mystery. There's even an Eleven-style superpowered character who's friends with the player characters!

Run A D&D Halloween One Shot in Cryptid Creeks

This game can also support a full spooky DND campaign!

Stranger Things is just one in a long legacy of spooky coming-of-age stories about exploring the wilderness. 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!

Best Picks For A Kids Halloween D&D Game

TTRPGkids has great DND halloween ideas for young kids

Many elements of these tabletop roleplaying games lean heavy into the spooks and scares, which is no good for little kids. But one of the awesome parts about these games is being able to make them whatever you want – scary or not! TTRPKids (a.k.a. Young Dragonslayers Dungeon Master Steph) left out the giant spiders and haunted mansions but kept the general spooky vibe with The Fall Fright Express. The train in the title is built from magical train cars with Halloween-themed puzzles (like a corn maze to navigate), events (like a mysterious abandoned campsite), and characters (like adragon who hoards candy instead of gold).This is a prebuilt spooky one shot, so you can use it with any of the games we've mentioned (or even create your own)!

Play In A Spooky D&D Campaign

If all this talk of Halloween games has left you itching to roll some dice and battle some monsters, we're here to help. Here at Young Dragonslayers, we run games of Dungeons & Dragons entirely online. These are run by professional Dungeon Masters like Steph (creator of The Fall Fright Express), Hannah, (creator of our Gravity Falls D&D Homebrew), and Jaclyn (writer of this very article)! We put players in groups with similar schedules, ages, and play styles and run custom-built games with whatever elements you'd like: spooky, sci-fi, cozy, comedy, you name it. Click the link below to check out our games and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to share your stories of spooky D&D games!