Activity Introduction
Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2025 12:26 pmIt began at the end of a golden October evening.
The sky was bruised purple and orange, the sun already dipping low. You and your friends were running. Not fast, just enough to feel the air bite your cheeks, hearing the crunch of leaves underfoot while chasing that electric something that always stirs over Halloween.
There was a dark house you’d never noticed before. It loomed at the end of the lane. Tall and crooked, leaning toward the sky as if whispering secrets to the stars. Its windows were hollow eyes, and the breeze wouldn’t pass it but paused as if even the gusts were gasping to have a look.
You stepped closer, drawn in while your chest twisted and thumped. In the yard stood a great tree. Vast and black against the twilight sky, and gnarled like a hand raised from the underworld. But it wasn’t the tree itself that stopped you.
It was the pumpkins.
Dozens of them. Hundreds. All lit from within, glowing like captured souls. Each one carved with a different face: laughing, scowling, weeping, monstrous, human. They flickered in rhythm like the tree was breathing. Watching.
A bald man with very pale, yellowing skin and an exceptionally extended nose stepped out of the shadows wearing a long coat and a bone-white grin. He didn’t introduce himself, but he didn’t need to. His name became incepted into your minds: Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. You felt there was to be a journey ahead.
“Do you know,” the man said, “what Halloween really is?” The pumpkins crouched toward the group as the tree rustled in a haunting chorus.
That instant everything teetered before you jolt upright in bed, waking up the following morning.
…What the? you think. Knowing this wasn’t a dream, you scour your memories for missing pieces.
Halloween had come and gone in a whirl of masks and shadows, candy and laughter. Ghosts at the window, skeletons rattling in the wind. The last jack-o’-lanterns guttering and smoking on porches. The last trick-or-treaters stumbling home, their bags sticky with sugar and faces painted with fading smiles. But somewhere in the heart of the night, something shifted.
At the stroke of midnight, your best friend Pipkin vanished from the group.
One moment, he’d been there, running faster than anyone, laughing louder than anyone, the one who holds you all together. The next, he was gone. As if the night itself swallowed him whole.
You searched. You called his name. You swore you heard echoes in the trees, in the wind, in the rustle of fallen leaves, but the answers did not come. And then somehow it was dawn, and you’ve awakened to a new day and a foggy head.
It’s November now. The air is sharper, the light thinner, the shadows longer. Costumes are being tucked away, the candy piled high, but your chest still feels heavy. Something unfinished lingers at the edges of Halloween.
Because there in the fields rises that great tree. Not merely any tree, but The Pumpkin Tree. Its branches hung with the spectacle of glowing lanterns, each carving alluring and alive. Their light is warm and terrible, a harvest of souls burning in the newly born November wind.
You know this is where the path begins. If you want to find Pipkin, to understand what has been lost and what can still be saved, you know what you must do.
By end of day you gather your friends for one more fearsome night and step beneath the boughs of the tree, ready to tread wherever Moundshroud sends you. Splitting into two teams to follow and light up a range of pumpkins: the Veil Walkers, and the Lantern Bound.
The real adventure starts now.
Will you fly through time and memory? Through dust and fire and shadow? You sense that you might dance with the dead and break bread with the ancient. That you will visit temples and tombs, catacombs and cornfields. Learning what it means to remember. And be remembered.
The pumpkins show the faces you imagine you’ll find along the way. Faces of terror, celebration, ritual, and hope. And at the center of it all, The Pumpkin Tree stands. Its branches heavy with the weight of every autumn that ever was.
The sky was bruised purple and orange, the sun already dipping low. You and your friends were running. Not fast, just enough to feel the air bite your cheeks, hearing the crunch of leaves underfoot while chasing that electric something that always stirs over Halloween.
There was a dark house you’d never noticed before. It loomed at the end of the lane. Tall and crooked, leaning toward the sky as if whispering secrets to the stars. Its windows were hollow eyes, and the breeze wouldn’t pass it but paused as if even the gusts were gasping to have a look.
You stepped closer, drawn in while your chest twisted and thumped. In the yard stood a great tree. Vast and black against the twilight sky, and gnarled like a hand raised from the underworld. But it wasn’t the tree itself that stopped you.
It was the pumpkins.
Dozens of them. Hundreds. All lit from within, glowing like captured souls. Each one carved with a different face: laughing, scowling, weeping, monstrous, human. They flickered in rhythm like the tree was breathing. Watching.
A bald man with very pale, yellowing skin and an exceptionally extended nose stepped out of the shadows wearing a long coat and a bone-white grin. He didn’t introduce himself, but he didn’t need to. His name became incepted into your minds: Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. You felt there was to be a journey ahead.
“Do you know,” the man said, “what Halloween really is?” The pumpkins crouched toward the group as the tree rustled in a haunting chorus.
That instant everything teetered before you jolt upright in bed, waking up the following morning.
…What the? you think. Knowing this wasn’t a dream, you scour your memories for missing pieces.
Halloween had come and gone in a whirl of masks and shadows, candy and laughter. Ghosts at the window, skeletons rattling in the wind. The last jack-o’-lanterns guttering and smoking on porches. The last trick-or-treaters stumbling home, their bags sticky with sugar and faces painted with fading smiles. But somewhere in the heart of the night, something shifted.
At the stroke of midnight, your best friend Pipkin vanished from the group.
One moment, he’d been there, running faster than anyone, laughing louder than anyone, the one who holds you all together. The next, he was gone. As if the night itself swallowed him whole.
You searched. You called his name. You swore you heard echoes in the trees, in the wind, in the rustle of fallen leaves, but the answers did not come. And then somehow it was dawn, and you’ve awakened to a new day and a foggy head.
It’s November now. The air is sharper, the light thinner, the shadows longer. Costumes are being tucked away, the candy piled high, but your chest still feels heavy. Something unfinished lingers at the edges of Halloween.
Because there in the fields rises that great tree. Not merely any tree, but The Pumpkin Tree. Its branches hung with the spectacle of glowing lanterns, each carving alluring and alive. Their light is warm and terrible, a harvest of souls burning in the newly born November wind.
You know this is where the path begins. If you want to find Pipkin, to understand what has been lost and what can still be saved, you know what you must do.
By end of day you gather your friends for one more fearsome night and step beneath the boughs of the tree, ready to tread wherever Moundshroud sends you. Splitting into two teams to follow and light up a range of pumpkins: the Veil Walkers, and the Lantern Bound.
The real adventure starts now.
Will you fly through time and memory? Through dust and fire and shadow? You sense that you might dance with the dead and break bread with the ancient. That you will visit temples and tombs, catacombs and cornfields. Learning what it means to remember. And be remembered.
The pumpkins show the faces you imagine you’ll find along the way. Faces of terror, celebration, ritual, and hope. And at the center of it all, The Pumpkin Tree stands. Its branches heavy with the weight of every autumn that ever was.