Chuubo's can be a tough game to understand. The core book is jampacked with the rules, a bit of the setting, and all those arcs, and... and how do you put it all together?

This is the missing piece. Or one. Or really nothing was missing, but this is like the Cliff Notes to How You Could Play Chuubo's. Fairy Tale Style... as in horrible Grimm fairy tales. It's also an adventure revolving around how the Halloween world descends on a small "university" town.

There are 4+ character playbooks. The main 4 are fleshed out with Moran's signature writing style, and they bleed with the nature / demeanor of the characters. I think as a player it would be so easy to just glance at the playbook and understand how that character would act (like responding to a question about why you wear your blindfold with "your face"). They are all so well done that honestly I find it really hard to pick a favorite. I would want to play all 4 (well actually maybe 3, I'm still mad at Jasmine from the Fable of the Swan novel though it would be interesting to pull people's hearts out).

My favorite part of the book is the chapter breakdown because in such elegant simplicity it shows, instead of tells, how much railroad track the HG/GM should lay. For example, Chapter 3 is "The sky is different today. There are swirls of purple, orange, and darkness moving among the stars." The rest is largely up to the players wishes. Yes, there is this whole Halloween is coming and the world is about to become invaded by the mirror-world where a false Halloween King rules, but the HG/GM sets scenes and REACTS to the players.

Finally, the supplement wraps up with a detailed look at the Fairy Tale genre (genre in Chuubo's having mechanical parts to the RPG), and the book nicely wraps things up with handy handouts so that the table can easily remember things like actions and what not.

Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine is one of the coolest games I've ever played. The Halloween Special continues the greatness. it has everything you need to play through a creepy Halloween story, where mists close around the edge of town and strange monsters live behind mirrors and the sun hangs dead in the sky. There are four player characters pre-written, (along adaptations for characters in other books, albeit not all of them are published yet) and the nature of Chuubo's makes it very easy to just pick up the character sheet and dive into telling a story. A bitter principle with bleeding hands and a dark past, an elf-eared child from the Halloween world who talks to a boy in mirrors, a bishounen dog—what more could you ask for? There are excerpted rules hand-outs and reminders specifically for the campaign's Fairy Tale genre, which minimize the need to flip through the very big corebook. It also has an HG chapter that immensely helps to streamline running the game. There's a loose narrative schedule for tracking the progress of each player's quests, advice and inspiration directed at the particular parts of the character's quests that directly ask for your input, and in-depth focus on responding to the XP Actions and Issues in the Fairy Tale genre.

The second reason this book is great is that it's a primer on structuring your own stories using the very, very flexible game system and setting that underscore all this. All of the material in the HG chapter lends itself very well either to being used as a prototype or blueprint for designing your campaign, or providing useful ways of thinking about setting up a narrative. Even if you never ran the Halloween campaign, I think this book is still well worth your time just on that alone.