MichaelGhelfi - Halloween collab! Monsters, a song, map and a new portal app!

The sun is long forgotten. A sickly moon leaks through the twisted canopy as your party follows a faint scarlet light. The path widens into a slope of brambles, where swollen pumpkins bulge from knotted roots like tumours. Below, something impossible floats a few feet above the dry grass: a ring of stone blocks, turning slowly in the cold night, its runes flaring green one after another in no order you can follow.

The air hums as you approach, and the ring spins faster with every step. Before it stands a carved tablet. Curiosity wins. You touch a symbol, and it lights up. Then another, and another, until you press the center tile.

The wind rises. A seam of light splits the ring as it whirls, the runes blurring into a green glare that floods the valley. Then it stops dead. Where the vortex was, another world now stretches before you.

And something on the other side is already staring back. It grins, wide and delighted, and rushes for the opening.

For Halloween, we joined the Worlds Collide Collab with some fantastic fellow creators, all built around our Henge portal. Stained Karbon Maps drew a perfectly spooky Halloween map of the portal, summoning tablet included. Fluffy Folio unleashed what crawls through it: a Huge Pumpkin Faerie, along with the Grim Crop, the Pumpkling and the Shrunken Pumpkling. Rudok’s Tavern brought Simon the Misstepping Summoner, a brilliant arcanist turned living portal after one very unfortunate stumble, statted for 5e. And Sol’Kesh released the Infernimps, undead goblin pranksters escaped from the underworld to spread chaos. Everything is free in the collab zip files, so go grab them and check out their Patreons!

At MGS, we made a song and an app, Henge. The app is a Stargate-style portal ring that your players dial themselves, on their own phones.

It was successfully tested at my table. I'll share the whole scenario in November. A Groundhog day style scenario. My players LOVED it.

The patch is published on the Other Shore, the part of Henge where GMs leave addresses for everyone.

1. In Portals, set The Other Shore to Open on your portal, then click Save.

2. Click Open the ring.

3. Dial: Other Shore -> Cursed -> Green -> Beyond and press Activate. The Other Shore glyph always comes first.

The ring opens on a vegetable patch under a russet moon. You get the Pumpkin Faerie's art at the centre, a cursed forest ambience and a text to read aloud. Press Roll an encounter and the patch sends Grim Crops, Pumpklings or, if your players are unlucky, the Pumpkin Faerie herself. Keep The Fluffy Folio's stat blocks at hand.

The ring has glyphs on it, and each one means something: Deep, Fire, Cold, Cursed, Ancient… An address is a string of 3 to 9 glyphs, and you read it like a sentence. Deep · Stone · Shadow is a cave.

The players press glyphs, the ring turns and locks each one under its chevron, and then someone presses Activate. The portal opens on a picture and an ambience, and sometimes on whatever comes through from the other side. By default every address leads somewhere, and the same address always leads to the same place.

Open Henge: HENGE. Your first portal is already waiting in Portals.

Set it up. Choose medieval fantasy or science fiction, then what the ring is made of (stone, demonic, druidic, celestial, necromantic, fey, ice, or the gate metal). Pick the rules (D&D 5e, Pathfinder 2e or none) and enter your party's levels, so whatever comes through is sized for your players.

Click Save, then Open the ring.

You get a link and a QR code. The link stays the same from one game to the next, so you can print the QR code and leave it on the table.

You can try everything without an account. Your portals stay in your browser until you sign in, and then they move to your account.

The players scan the QR code (no account needed) and press Step up to the ring. From then on everyone can press at the same time, and every press counts. If five players tap their phones at once, the ring takes the glyphs in the order they arrive, and one player's Activate can go off before another player's last glyph. The portal opens wherever that sentence leads. That's on purpose, and it's often the best moment of the night.

The players never see the name of the place. They see the ring and the picture, and they hear the sound. You tell them where they are, using the read-aloud text the app gives you.

You stay in control. You can hold the dial yourself, mute the sound for everyone, close the portal or reset the ring. The Dials list shows every address dialled during the session and what it opened.

You decide in the portal's settings, under "And an address nobody wrote?". The ring can:

open a place close to its glyphs, so a misdial lands near the place they meant;

open nothing (the chevrons drop);

let something come through; 

always open the same address;

show a text of your choice on the ring.

You can also hide the glyph names. The keys then show only the shapes, and the table has to dial from memory or from your clues. The possibilities are endless!

Your own addresses

In the Address book, create your own places. Each one gets an address, a name, a picture, an ambience from the MGS Audio catalogue and a list of what comes through, and it can link to a Biomes page or a Hearth city. Your addresses come before the catalogue's. You can share one with another GM by link, or publish it on the Other Shore so that every portal opened to it can dial it.

If you need ideas, the Directory lists every place the ring already knows, with its address. Copy one onto a handout or a treasure map.

Free, and more for patrons

Everything is free: portals, the live ring, the whole catalogue of places, the Other Shore, and 3 addresses of your own. Patrons keep as many addresses as they like. They can also link an address to a Fantasy City Simulator town and put a picture or one of the site's skins behind the ring, which the whole table sees.

The how-to guide and the guided tour are in the app's menu (press Esc). If you try it at your table, tell us on Discord where your players ended up.

Happy Halloween

PS: We'll share the song on the MGS Database tomorrow. I added it to the post in the meantime (Guardian+, like the rest of the collab.)