Lightning crashes against the fortress’ stoney exterior and rain cascades down upon a dreary garden overlooked by a single window, silky red curtains drawn. Inside, a group of five sit around a black wooden table draped with crimson cloth, their dark hoods all drawn, and they speak in tongues which do not belong to them. One screeches, “We should kill ‘im; good-fer-nothin’ barkeep is overchargin’ us!”, while another in deeper tenor warns with fist clenched, “Careful young one, else I shalt dash thine innards across the wall.”
Two of the other hooded figures join in on the confusing debate, but before their squabble can descend into violence, one figure sat behind a wooden screen leaps up from the table, arms outstretched, and yells: “Enough!”
Everyone holds their tongue and whips round to look at the dramatic pose of their leader. The standing individual lowers one of their hands to pick up a book, from which they read: “The barkeep, who until now had been terrified of the group discovering his true identity, draws a longsword from behind the bar, bears his bloody vampiric fangs, and leaps into an attack!”
The 4 bickering friends gasp and grab their dice, ready to roll initiative.
TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games) are incredible for building connections with your friends and even with people you’ve never met before. I’ve been playing D&D (the most popular TTRPG) since the start of my teens and with each new group of friends I’ve made at each new stage in my life, D&D has always been there to bring us closer together.
The thing all TTRPGs are good at is putting people in those situations we see in our favourite movies, video games, and books. Whether that’s hunting down the man who slaughtered all your loved ones like Kill Bill, learning the names of every person in town before robbing the potion store like Skyrim, or uncovering the secrets of a long-abandoned dwarven mine like Lord of the Rings, TTRPGs are the perfect place to craft both epic and personal stories between friends.
In this article, I’ll be giving you some quick tips to help you run a single Halloween-themed session of D&D (sorry, NoDDSoc) to give your friends a glimpse of what TTRPGs have to offer.
Firstly, you need to work out what spooky stories your friends already like so you can rip them off wholesale. I’m not kidding. Do they like World War Z? Then this session is about curing the rapidly-spreading zombie virus. Do they like slasher flicks? Then come up with a cheesy bad guy in a ski mask and start killing some NPCs. Whatever fiction they’ve experienced before, you want to replicate that because people, especially new players, will have a pre-existing relationship with the material for you to exploit.
For new players, D&D 5th edition’s rules can seem dense and daunting, so don’t stick to the rules too harshly and use low-level pre-generated characters to ease them into the process. Obviously outline the basic rules, if you have access to a starter set or other reference material let them use it often, but be lenient enough to get your friends making creative choices and thinking outside the box. This will make them engage with the game you’re trying to run better because they’ll feel like they are genuinely impacting events, even when you have things running tightly.
Make your bad guy memorable and full of tropes. There’s a reason everyone loves Count Dracula: he’s sexy, charming, and he’s really good at counting up to one hundred! Stuff your baddie full of tropes and silly voices and let them wreak havoc on your friends. Much praise is given to Curse of Strahd as a campaign and I think that is in part because the villain is so good that the book encourages you to regularly have Strahd (the titular vampire) show up. In your one-shot, this could be achieved by having the villain taunt your players as they explore their evil lair, or by leaving calling cards for the heroes to find.
Nothing will engage players more than having a good soundscape or soundtrack to accompany their heroic deeds, so use music your friends recognise from all types of media to control the mood. Only do this, however, in private games – don’t try to pass off the opening theme to Game of Thrones as something you have the rights to use in a livestream; you will get sued. That said, video game soundtracks are the perfect source for all manner of audio because they face the same challenges you do when it comes to engaging a player with every possible sense. My favourite soundtracks for D&D come from The Witcher 3 for it’s fantasy-action emphasis, Bloodborne for a mixture of creepy atmosphere and epic orchestrations, and Hollow Knight for low moments filled with lingering dread and subtle beauty.
