Samhain. An old Gaelic festival, marking the end of the harvest season. Later on, the Church tried to take it over, dedicate it to the Saints as All Hallows’ Day. It didn’t take all the way, and the old traditions crept back in, but watered down. Costumes. Tricks. Candy. According to tradition, this is the night that the gates to another place stand open, and all sorts of nasty things are free to pass into our world from theirs. You don’t know how much of that is true, but what you do know is that every year on Halloween, this city loses its goddamned mind.

You’re ${character.name}. You’re a police officer, in the ${Name of your city? Ex: Los Angeles} Police Department’s Crypto Squad. C-Squad’s the special unit tasked with putting down spooks, specters, and general weirdness in the streets. Tonight is the night you earn your paycheck.

C-Squad is fully deployed, on overlapping shifts with double normal coverage in as many areas as the Department can manage. No one knows what to expect, tonight, from shrieking phantasms in the garment district, to a masked slasher who seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once, to something old and foul lurking in a downtown parking garage. But it’s always something. And this year, the Squad’s in-house clairvoyant put out a Department-wide email, rambling on and on about the stars finally being in alignment, or something. You didn’t understand half of it, but it didn’t sound good.

You’re in your cruiser with your partner, a veteran Creep Chaser named ${Your partner’s name?}. You’re behind the wheel, driving down Barker Street, when the first call of this wild evening comes in.

“All units, please respond. We have a Code