RiftWalker Halloween Special 2024
This week I play tested RiftWalker with a new group of friends for a Halloween special session. Some of these friends had only played TTRPGs a handful of times and so it was good to get some fresh perspective. Theme that was quite frightening. The premise of the game was that a group of “b-squad” holiday world characters were brought in to find the Lord of Halloween - Lord Pumpking Head. They had been abducted by an upstart who wanted to take over the role of Lord. After drawing some cards, the group is then lead through many Rifts to search through the Chaos of Shakes. As the main holiday helpers like Santa and the Easter Bunny were busy, b level characters such as the following were brought in:
A Valentine’s Day Cherub
One of Santa’s Reindeer
A tired but really enthusiastic union representative for Labour Day
The main chicken who lays the eggs for the Easter Bunny
A Knight who looked after the King’s Birthday
A tattoo artist who gets most of their work on Australia Day
These characters were of course, very silly and Australian centric by design. It is not meant to be serious in nature. The group was brought in by a Ghost who had found a calling card, with a d deck of playing cards:
The calling card of Shakes the Clown.
SPOILERS
The enemy ends up being a deranged clown, whose stats are changed and added to based on the card suits that are drawn.
The rifts are made based on drawing cards and pulling from a list of encounters with a simple scenario in each.
These secret is that you should allude to where the Lord and Clown are, throughout the other scenarios. This an be that the Clown was seen coming through, or that they get ‘visions’ of the world as they pass through.
It is fun to give out randomly determined treasure - and the secret is that the use of the items makes the PCs have a detriment to checks made against the boss.
OVERALL
The game ended up being a lot more scary than I had expected, with the addition of low lights, and scary movie music; I was able to set a consistent mood. The game is great as if you have more time to fill, you can draw more from the deck, or the reverse if you have little time. This is easily alluded to as the items are obviously cursed in nature. It was a fun little repayable adventure that I was pretty proud of. It was easy to note (see below), and the only difficulty of the adventure is that it is pretty improv-heavy. So it is certainly not for all GMs out there. I have included my notes and the character sheets, if you want to give it a go. The best part in a lot of ways, was that I focussed on handwriting my notes, so that I could have that physical feel. It had been so long since I had played in person and it was super fun to do so again. If you want the on-page rules check them out here.
