Halloween one-shots in PbP

The Halloween one-shot is an RPG tradition. All you need are a short adventure, spooky music, disposable clichéd low-level characters, and a DM with a visceral craving for a deliciously drawn-out TPK (not to mention a visceral craving for viscera).

But has anyone tried to run one PbP?

How does that work?
Start it in late September, with an eye to devouring the last vestiges of the PCs' ragged and debased souls on Oct 31st?
Do you restrict entry only to those players who post actively?

Asking for a depraved lord of twisted darkness friend.

Active proactive posters are a must for seasonal one-shots.

I have made the attempts several times in the past, but they usually run longer than the season due to this fact, unfortunately.

I'll trust KCC to run one, based on the speed of all their games 😄

Less facetiously, I think the main facotr to make it work is to have everyone commit to fast gameplay. One or more posts per day expected if you want to get through a short adventure in the span of ~1 month!

I'd be up for joining if somebody wants to run one 😁

I was going to run something like this last Halloween but Nov came around and I wasn't even halfway through prep. I don't have the speed to run or take part but I love the idea and would gladly read along.

I don't think I've ever successfully run a game at a sustained high speed pace, even for a month. Definitely love the idea, though.

I’d love to get in on this, depending on the game being played

It being a Halloween premise, I think one of the aspects written into the recruiting blurb as posting expectations should be at least Once/Day and a disclaimer stating up front that failure to do so, WILL result in the heinous demise of a player's character after a defined number of absentee days/hours (suggestion: 2 days/48 hrs.)

Considering myself a fast poster, I would be interested in such a game should it get a green light.

I've seen conversations elsewhere on the internets about doing Dread via PBP.

Sounds like someone needs to figure it out here!

Ooh this is a great idea. I think I'll take up the challenge. Dead of Night is one of my favorite systems and is perfect for this. Hm what kind of horror movie to run...

When I was planning it I was going to shamelessly rip off the 1999 version of the House on Haunted Hill. This movie seems made for a one-shot like this.

A group of strangers invited to take part in a game where they win a million dollars if they survive the night in a haunted house.

So simply and yet so many possibilities. I really love that movie.

I'd be up for this and can post reliably daily.

I didn't mean this as a recruitment thread (although if it were, with a name like that? Gnome_Chomsky would definitely be top of any list).

I was just after some ideas about how the tradition could be adjusted to work with PbP.

We can't have a Halloween one-day one-shot, but I think autumn equinox (Sept 22nd) is nice to symbolically mark the start of the adventure - the light begins to falter, darkness rises, one way or another this adventure concludes at Halloween. Perhaps open the adventure for character creation and introductions on the new moon before the equinox (or the full moon if that's not enough time).

I've checked the Candlekeep Mysteries game and my first two chapters each lasted a month - so provided the game is tight, it is possible to complete it in time. I'm sure DMs could check their own history to get a feel for what is a six-week-sized adventure.

Maybe DMs could coordinate so there's a choice of Halloween adventures that all open and close together? Bagsy House of Lament.

To OP:

Well where there's a will there's a way.

I think premise and a faster mechanics system works better than a crunchy system.

For games in September I'm recruiting now and giving people time to plan something out for a PC, ask questions about the system, the game, genre, setting, etc.

So it sounds like a 2 month game so in game maybe a long 3-4 day weekend?

I wouldn't put restrictions on posting but I think there should be an agreement going in and real life time constraints should be taken into account. Like if you'd only have time to post once a week, probably not the game to say you can commit to.

But with that said and to riff off RageRed I'd bake post frequency into the game as a mechanic:

For games in September, you're recruiting now? Wow! That's the headline.

I think either 5e or me give a much shorter lead time. If I advertise on Monday, I expect to have the party by Tuesday, characters by Thursday, and adventuring by Friday. Or perhaps I'm misremembering? Hang on, let me check.



No - that's right. Huh. Perhaps I'm really impatient?

So now that raises another thread question. How long do you all give for these steps of the process? Or does it depend on the system (e.g. I think it's easy to recruit 5e players)? I don't think 5e character creation is particularly easy (if anything, I think it's unnecessarily complex).

Or perhaps my games are like fast food and yours are like slow-cooking.

Recruiting this early seems unusual to me as well 😄 Not saying it's wrong, though, obviously
I ususally assume two or three days for recruiting and then a week or so to get all the characters in order.

But I usually don't start recruiting until I've set up everything in the forums, including all setting, rules and OOC threads

I remember Chalrytharendir doing a Christmas game last year. It took place over the week before Christmas.
Linky link for those curious.
I think a week was a bit too short, but I did have quite a lot of fun.

Can you recruit way more players than you need, then if a player doesn't post after a required time, just say that the Miner Forty-Niner got them? Then you can just have challenges every few days that they have to pass/solve of the Ghost of Redbeard gets them. All this can lead of to facing the big bad near the end of the month.

I've thought of the idea of doing a Hallowe'en one shot on pbp using D&D or similar variant. I would run the Ravenloft One-Shot as described by Sly Flourish, where Level 10 PCs start in Castle Ravenloft with the various anti-Strahd items of Ravenloft fame scattered randomly throughout Castle Ravenloft. In the in-person version, Strahd attacks at midnight however ready or not the party is. For PbP I'd start the game October 1st and Strahd would attack on October 31st, ready or not.

The biggest challenge is the dungeon nature of the adventure, which requires a lot of preparation from the DM, as well as a lot of micro-decisions on the players' behalf. It could be streamlined into a point-crawl but that's also a lot of work.

Disclaimer: This is not a recruiting post. Please feel free to use this idea, most of it isn't mine anyway :D.

How about using the location map of Castle Ravenloft and running a House on Haunted Hill style-party that takes place over the weekend of Halloween in-game (Thursday night, 28 October - Sunday midnight, 31 October). Maybe toss in a dash of Masque of Red Death and Vault of Horror?

The world setting could be any of those from D&D, Victorian, Modern, just about any real or imagined timeline.

Is it just me who finds the Castle Ravenloft isometric map really difficult to follow?

No. You're not the only one.

Let me fix that in MS Paint for you.

I also came actoss this some years ago: Strahd Must Die Tonight! How to Play Ravenloft in a Single Night I've never really gone through it though, so I don't know how different it is (if at all) from Mike Shea's.

I am by no means good enough for a short game like this but that is how I think it would work.

Maybe even set a "inactivity timer" of sorts where turns can be lost or maybe if IRL passes X amount of days, after the encounter Y amount of time passes in game. This will mean players constant feel the time crunch in on them as they get closer to the finale which hits at a certain time no matter what.

Someone had set up a Halloween Game and I've just noticed it's gone. Anyone know what's happened?

It's still going on but I think it's full, so it might not show up on the Games page anymore unless you deactivate the filter that hides full games.