D&Dr on Halloween

This image was made by Keith Parkinson. For today's fourth (!) countdown to Halloween blog post, I am sharing a memory of our old Dungeons & Dragons campaign. We rarely played on Halloween, in fact I remember only playing once on Halloween night, and then we were often distracted by children going on their trick or treat run. However, Halloween was an important element of our game within the campaign itself. In our most important mission, we had to retrieve the Scepter of Volgoth, an artifact that the badguys wanted to obtain to invade the world (think the One Ring), from the clutch of the Masks of Curifan, a group of mystic assassins wearing said masks, that were also artifacts. Long story short, the only time when the Masks were vulnerable was on Halloween night, when one of them, a nobleman, was giving a masquerade ball called "the Ball of the Damned". We had rechristened Halloween the Day of the Dead, but it was basically the same holiday, on the 31st of October. There were plenty of living dead that fateful night, but we were protected from them on Halloween night, as a reward from the Grim Reaper itself on a previous mission. Bottom line, we got the Sceptre. It was epic and one of the best D&Dr games we ever played.