Let’s Play D&D With Ghostface from ‘Scream’
Hide the knives, ignore that ringing phone, and keep an eye on your party members. This week we’re playing D&D with Scream‘s Ghostface.
We love an over-the-top villain in D&D. The weirder, wackier, sillier, and more based on a franchise we know and love, the funnier and more fun the session is going to be. Even if that villain is trying their hardest to kill your entire adventuring party with a knife. Sometimes, sort of like when you go to the movie theater to watch the same sort of thing happen to other fictional characters, that’s half the fun. So with all of that in mind, let’s bring a little slasher film to our next D&D adventure and give the players someone to avoid calls from. This week we’re playing D&D with…
Ghostface from Scream
Making a horror movie slasher-style monster for Dungeons and Dragons is always just a little bit of a challenge. On one hand, they’re pretty straightforward. Stab, hide, repeat. But that can make them feel a little generic. And there wouldn’t be an entire genre of these bad boys if they were all exactly the same.
From a DM and game-running perspective, making sure players recognize the iconic Scream mask will do a lot of the leg work. And past that having somebody with a knife for players to run away from covers ninety percent of the schtick. But there are also a few things that make Ghostface his own thing.
The most obvious of which is the voice changer. This item has been around since the beginning and is almost as central to Ghostface as a monster as the mask. Depending on your game and DM, there may or may not be phones or communication stones in your particular world. But if you do, Ghostface will be giving players a call from time to time, sometimes with a generic disguised voice, sometimes with the voice of somebody the party has encountered. Without these items, they just get called at from across the building. But regardless of how your game gets this done, the call and mysterious voice are a key part of the Ghostface experience so we had to include them.
Ghostface is also known for being relatively but not supernaturally strong. Punches and people have both been thrown throughout the Scream franchise, so he has a pretty decent strength as well as a generic punch attack. There’s a decent chance that somebody in your party will be physically stronger. But that’s the danger of bringing a normal stab guy to a magic fight.
Finally, I have Ghostface a dramatic reveal. This isn’t central to the character nor does it happen terribly often. But slasher movies and D&D are both nothing if not full of unnecessary pageantry. So take your dramatic reveal and the final blow that comes with it!
How would you make Ghostface for D&D? Which Scream movie is your favorite? Does your D&D world have communication stones of some kind? Let us know in the comments!
Happy Adventuring!
