Crow’s Corner

Halloween One-Shots: Read, Played, Reviewed

Two weeks ago I told you about a Halloween indie game and we’ll continue the trend, with some Halloween one-shots for various games. Here you’ll find elderly ladies investigating a murder on a Halloween party, various spooky challenges for enterprising edgerunners, a haunted house trapping children, as well as awakened scarecrows and pumpkins.

In this review I will tell you about the following one-shots.

All Hallow’s Scream for Brindlewood Bay

brindlewood bay book, suspect cards, some clues

Game Designers: Jason Cordova, Steffie de Vaan, Calvin Johns, David Morrison, Petra Volkhausen (the whole book - I couldn’t figure out who wrote the adventure specifically)

Publication Year: 2022

Mechanics: 2d6 + stat, PbtA

Genre: Mystery, Crime, Detective, Eldritch Horror

Content Warnings: adultery, drug abuse, murder, sex

All Hallow’s Scream is one of many adventures that can be found in the core book of Brindlewood Bay, a narrative game about elderly ladies solving crimes, inspired by Murder She Wrote. In the game there never is a predetermined solution to the mystery - players make a theory and roll to see if it's correct. It's a storytelling game and making it up together can be just as satisfying as figuring something out that's predetermined. It’s also a lot less prep for the GM - it's enough to read through a few pages and you’re ready to hop into a game.

In this particular adventure, the characters find themselves at the Halloween party of a B-movie filmmaker. Soon there is a death and it's clear that the police are not competent enough to solve it themselves.

This was the fourth time running Brindlewood Bay for me, after running the starter adventure Dad Overboard for three different groups, and I enjoyed it immensely. It veers a lot more into themes of sex and also has quite a few jokes in there. I had a lot more fun picking out clues in this one, than I did in Dad Overboard.

What I struggled with the most, was to introduce all of the suspects naturally right at the beginning of the session. There are suspect cards for the adventures, though, which helped players keep track, and we were able to get over some initial confusion quickly.

Running this has definitely sparked some new joy about the system for me and I'm looking forward to running a few more sessions in the future.

Halloween Screamsheets for Cyberpunk Red

halloween screamsheets

Game Designer: Melissa Wong

Publication Year: 2023

Mechanics: 1d10 + stat, class based

Genre: Cyberpunk, Halloween, a dash of Comedy

Content Warnings: bullying, gun violence, involuntary body modifications, stalking

The Halloween Screamsheets come with three adventures: The Haunted Vendit, Vampyres vs Adams and An American Werewolf in Watson. They’re relatively short, as most Screamsheet adventures are. So these are three reviews in one! You can also find my thoughts on Cyberpunk Red as a system here.

In The Haunted Vendit, the characters are called by corporate to investigate a Vendit machine that’s moving on its own, selling bootleg sodas. It’s a good combination of challenging, silliness and a somewhat meaningful choice in the end.

Vampyres vs Adams is about a family-friendly Halloween festival from the poser gang known as The Sinful Adams, that is being crashed by the Philharmonic Vampyres. The crew is hired as security and instructed to keep the festival safe without resorting to violence. This one took the most work for me to run, as I didn’t like many of the suggestions. It’s mostly bullying, a poop joke and vague descriptions like “You don’t want to know what the Vampyres have planned here” (Yes I do. I’m the GM). When I ran it, it was with a lot of tie-ins to our campaign and a bit more meaningful challenges (being, among others, a soapbox derby), while keeping the skeleton of the adventure and it went well overall.

My favourite of the three, An American Werewolf in Watson is about investigating a “Werewolf” sighting, which quickly turns into a mystery to solve. It introduces yet another spooky gang, the Dragula Racers, which were great. I was kinda sad to not have a werewolf fighting encounter in there, but with some tinkering you could easily put one in.

All three adventures play more into the goofy side of Cyberpunk and I greatly enjoyed running them as short, little Halloween episodes.

The Dare for Call of Cthulhu 7e

softcover edition of The Dare

Game Designers: Kevin A. Ross, Bret Kramer

Publication Year: 2020 (originally from sometime around the 1990s)

Mechanics: 1d100, roll under stat, rules simplified from Call of Cthulhu 7e

Genre: Haunted House, Eldritch Horror

Content Warnings: bullying, cannibalism, childbirth, domestic violence, extreme harm to children (including death), gore, harm to animals (including death), mental sanity, occult rituals

The adventure, set in the 80s, starts with the characters being dared by a local bully to enter a supposedly cursed house. Sooner or later they're gonna find out that they're trapped within and they're not alone. The Dare is definitely one of the more unsettling games I've seen; as the content warnings might suggest.

There is a lot of advice on how to run it effectively or in different ways, which I highly appreciated. There are often suggestion for either PG-13 or Rated R versions of the adventure as well as advice to make it run shorter or longer. Generally, the adventure is extremely well described and filled with plenty of content to make each session unique, player choices meaningful and it gives a lot of room for clever tactics to employ. Keepers will have to improvise how to guide characters through the house, trying to separate them and slowly bring them towards the basement. While the sandboxy nature is an upside for me personally, it might prove challenging to less experienced Keepers.

The game includes simplified The Call of Kid-thulhu rules, adjusted characters sheets, as well as ten premade kids, ready to go. The simplified rules are perfect for those new to Call of Cthulhu 7e (or those weary of the dozens of skills in default Cthulhu). They are specific for adventures with kids, with skills like “Gym Class” (which encompasses physical skills like climb, jump, throw) or “Be A Pal” (similar to Psychology).

There are some missing page and map references, and some discrepancies between the text and the map, but nothing major was missing for me. It’s also worth noting that you'll need the Call of Cthulhu Keeper's Rulebook for some creature stats and spells.

Overall this was a neat bit of horror I'm excited to run for groups that are into that genre. Along with The Haunting, it’s on the top of my list of Cthulhu adventures I love to run.

Mr. Husk for Shiver

The Cursed Library, a supplement of five Shiver adventures, also has an adventure about kids in a haunted mansion on Halloween. Since that’s pretty close to the previous one-shot, I went for Mr. Husk instead, even though it’s strictly speaking not Halloween specific. But there’s awakened pumpkins!

Shiver core book and Mr. Husk printout

Game Designer: Charlie Menzies

Publication Year: 2021

Mechanics: dice pool, class based, special dice

Genre: Slasher Horror

Content Warnings: body horror, harm to children (including death)

Mr. Husk is universally praised in Shiver communities and I was really looking forward to running it. It’s about a group of people stuck in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields and soon find themselves hunted by something.

I ran Shiver one-shots before and read their Secrets of Spireholm gothic horror campaign. While I like Shiver as a source of adventures, I was never particularly impressed by it as a system. I chalked it up to not being aware of all of the rules at first, but universal feedback from players (all of them experienced GMs in various systems), as well as other GMs who have run it, echoed my feelings about the game. It’s close to D&D 5e, it’s encouraging fights a lot for a horror game and it’s overall not as satisfying to play as it could be. I wish HP were more abstracted than they are. It gets better when you know all of the rules by heart, but for me, a good system also needs to be able to fail gracefully when some rules are forgotten.

We played for three hours, but used about half of that for character creation. It’s more of a short story than a movie (which is cool if that’s what you’re looking for). The story itself is pretty brutal and I would have adored it in the form of a written story. As a game, it felt somewhat railroaded, in the sense that there’s literally nothing else to do but visit the three presented locations or sit around in a cornfield.

With some rules revisions and a meaningful choice or two, this could be great. As it stands, I won’t pick it up again, though.

Other Halloween Games

Below are some more games, dedicated to Halloween:

Also, some games in German:

Previous Spooky Review Collections

Below you can find two of my other blog posts about various kinds of horror games:

2025-09-30 “Horror One-Shots: Read, Played, Reviewed”

2025-10-14 “A Taste of Tabletop Roleplaying Games about Vampires”