Every year, as the nights draw in and the weather turns properly miserable, the annual group chat ritual begins. Someone drops the inevitable question: What are we playing for Halloween?
Instantly, the shortlist appears, and the table splits into entirely different kinds of panic:
- D&D: Someone always suggests running a spooky gothic one-shot. It’s familiar, comfortable, and warm. But let’s be honest; by the time you’ve fought off your third pack of skeleton archers or argued about spell components, the terrifying eldritch atmosphere has usually devolved into a tactical superhero brawl where the wizard tries to set a ghost on fire. Fun? Absolutely. Terrifying? Rarely.
- Dread: The complete opposite end of the spectrum. You drop a Jenga tower right in the middle of the table, and suddenly everyone is sweating just trying to pour a glass of water. There are no dice, no stats, just character questionnaires and the agonising, physical terror that the next block you pull is the one that brings the whole structure crashing down. It’s peer pressure distilled into a tabletop mechanic.
- Ten Candles: For when you want to lean entirely into pure, unadulterated tragedy. You play in a pitch-black room by the flickering light of ten tea lights, burning character traits as you go, knowing with absolute certainty that by the end of the night, the candles will go out and nobody survives. It’s less of a game and more of an emotional exorcism.
- Paranoia: Because sometimes, instead of facing cosmic horrors or a collapsing tower, you want to spend Halloween maliciously betraying your best friends in an underground retro-futuristic dystopia while a deranged computer cheerfully explains that treason is a punishable offense. Nothing says “spooky season” quite like executing your teammate for having unauthorised access to the colour yellow.
- Call of Cthulhu: And then, inevitably, someone leans back, points to the classic percentile system, and reminds everyone how good it feels to slowly lose your mind in a damp 1920s library. Dusting off the investigator sheets, rationing flashlight batteries, and watching a Pushed Roll turn a minor typo into absolute, irreversible catastrophe.
Every single one of them is a legitimate contender. Do we want tactical comfort, physical dread, poetic doom, corporate paranoia, or investigative despair?
After all the debating, after weighing the physical terror of a wobbling Jenga tower, the bleak poetic doom of burning tea lights, the chaotic backstabbing of a dystopian supercomputer, and the comfortable familiarity of just rolling soem damn dice. we almost always wind up right back where we started. We grab the scratchy fountain pens, clear a space for the percentile dice, and dust off Call of Cthulhu. Because when it comes down to it, nothing beats the slow, agonizing descent into madness in a damp 1920s library while the rain lashes against the glass.
Let’s run some Call of Cthulhu for Halloween!