In the darkest time of the Medieval Era, the vile warlord known as Vlad the Impaler underwent a demonic metamorphosis. Having forged a bloody pact with the secret powers of the deep, he was transformed into the most powerful Vampire to ever walk the earth.

The scholar Eschenbach, a renowned Vampire Hunter, set out to destroy him, but was overcome and slain by his enemy. Eschenbach’s followers set into the woods to avenge their master.

After discovering clues from a forlorn graveyard caretaker and almost having been slain by a female Nosferatu posing as a prisoner of the Impaler, the followers found their way to Vlad’s empty coffin, but the mad villain had laid a trap for them! Appearing suddenly, he used his arcane powers to enchant them into submission.

Fortunately, a worthy hireling freed the heroes from the spell by slapping them as hard as he could. Freed at last, the Vampire Hunters were able to force the abomination back into his coffin and thrust a large stake into his heart, ending his menace for all time....

Centuries later, in Victorian Transylvania, Mayor Hans called upon heroic personalities to enter the woods surrounding his village to stop the mad Dr. Frankenstein and the undead Monster he had brought back to life.

What the heroic Guides learned was that the Monster had actually slain his creator, Dr. Frankenstein. The Monster had then named himself Kronos the God and had set about creating an army of undead to destroy humanity.
 

Fighting their way past the Monster’s terrible followers, the Guides discovered the reanimated corpse of Dr. Frankenstein himself. Apparently, Kronos still lacked one vital secret to keep his monstrous followers from decaying, and was torturing the doctor to discover it.

After putting Frankenstein out of his misery, the Guides continued on to the Monster’s lair. There they found Elizabeth, the doctor’s deceased fiance, who had been reanimated by the Monster and had become his ally, even going so far as to reveal to him the secrets he desired.

Before she could explain that she had convinced Kronos to leave humanity in peace, the heroes attacked her, and were soon facing the wrath of the Monster himself. After a pitched battle, Kronos was slain by gunfire, and the wretched Elizabeth was left alone to suffer in torment....

One generation later another Transylvanian village, plagued for years by werewolves, hired a notorious Hunter to go and destroy the beasts. The Hunter, accompanied by his faithful Manservant (whom the Hunter beat and abused constantly), discovered that the wolves were the haunted remains of the ancient Wilhelm family.

This family had secretly practiced the forbidden rites of the netherworld for years. The family had betrayed their innocent kinsman Sebastian (who resisted their practices) by convincing the village it was he who practiced the black arts. The village hunted Sebastian down and cast him off a steep cliff. Desiring nothing more than revenge, Sebastian heeded the call of the Wolf God and was reborn as a powerful wolf-like creature. He returned to slay his family, and then transformed them into hungry wolves who preyed upon the villagers for years to come.

Now, after nearly a century, the arrogant Hunter dared to overcome the supernatural menace. After consulting the mysterious Oracle of Necron, the Hunter learned that only the eldritch dagger, Wolf’s Bane, was powerful enough to destroy the family of werewolves. Having purloined the dagger from an absent-minded aristocrat named Baron Bruno Alzheimer, the Hunter seemed prepared to complete his adventure. But alas, the Hunter was bitten by the youngest member of the Wilhelm family, a young girl named Leeza.

So it was that his trusty Manservant, not the Hunter himself, ended the Wilhelm curse by plunging Wolf’s Bane into Sebastian. Soon after, the Manservant was forced to shoot a silver bullet into his former master’s head, for the hapless Hunter had succumbed to the disease Lycanthropy from his cursed wounds, thereby becoming a werewolf himself.

Now that he was freed from his enslavement to the Hunter, the Manservant declared that the village would not have to pay for its newfound liberation, for which they heartily thanked him.

Several decades later, the renowned Egyptologist Dr. Hoffman crashed his plane into the woods surrounding a tiny Austrian village. Hoffman, who had been en route home from an archaeological dig, survived the crash and fled the woods screaming in horror. He claimed that the tragedy had been caused by an artifact he had discovered on his expedition: the Ankh of Ra.  The mysterious Ankh, reported Hoffman, held the secret of eternal life and had resurrected the withered bodies of Pharaoh Ramses II and Queen Cleopatra, both of whose sarcophagi were on board the plane.

Rumors of his mad ravings reached the ears of the Fuhrer in Berlin. Hoping to secure this precious artifact for himself, the evil dictator sent his agents to the village. Mayor Gustavus called upon heroic friends of his to help him resist the Nazi presence in his village. Gustavus, alas, was murdered in cold blood before his friends could help him, so the heroes set into the woods to destroy the Ankh lest it be brought to Germany.

The Nazis themselves met cruel fates in the woods at the hands of the resurrected Pharaoh and his Mummy servants. The friends had to overcome the lascivious queen Cleopatra, who desired a consort to mate with her, before they could make it to their final confrontation with the powerful Ramses. After a mighty battle in which Ramses resorted to using the Nazi’s automatic weapons to attack them, the heroes were able to destroy the Ankh by following a special ritual. Without the Ankh’s power to sustain him, Ramses fell to his death.

Although the heroic friends mourned the death of their friend Gustavus, they were happy they had freed the village from the Mummies, as well as the more horrible monsters: the Nazi agents.

Fifty years later, in the newly restored Somerset Village in New Jersey, another plane crash led to supernatural phenomena. The plane had been carrying highly contagious disease samples from the Center for Disease Control. The FBI sent its special agents, the Men in Blue, to contain the problem. The Men in Blue brought along new recruits with them to assist in the clean-up, but it soon became apparent that the problem was far larger than most people had realized.

Decades earlier, a UFO had also crashed into these fateful woods, and the U.S. Government had made arrangements for the Alien crew to live peacefully in the forest. Unfortunately, the viral strain let loose from the newly crashed airplane caused the Aliens to become voraciously hungry for human flesh. The new recruits following the Men in Blue beheld ghastly horrors in the woods, including human victims from the Somerset Village attached to trees, their entrails bleeding out from Alien spigots!

The recruits’ true horror began when they discovered that the Alien Leader had made pawns of the very Men in Blue who led them through the Forest, and that the Men in Blue were actually serving their new recruits up as meals to the hungry Aliens. All seemed lost until the Mistress of the Dark, who had existed in this forest for untold millennia, sent her servants to rescue the recruits. The Men in Blue chased the recruits to the Dark Mistress’ lair, intending to murder them at gunpoint and return the bodies to their Alien masters.

Fortunately, the Mistress of the Dark used her great powers to send bolts of pure energy to slay the villainous agents. The Mistress then conjured up a potion that would free the Aliens from their cannibalistic frenzy. She gave the potion to the recruits so that they could accomplish their mission of restoring the Somerset Village to a state of relative normalcy.

Soon after the Alien Incident, the surviving citizens of Somerset Village left their homes long behind them. The government converted the abandoned town into a National Park which offered daytime and evening nature trails.

During one evening trail, a string of bizarre events are rumored to have taken place, although no one is sure as to their authenticity. Apparently, a band of stalwart hikers made their way into the woods in spite of numerous televized warnings that a serial killer known as the Somerset Slasher was in the area, and that many nearby cemeteries had been mysteriously emptied of their bodies.

During the tour, the hikers claim to have been attacked by supernatural monsters such as shambling mounds of filth, undead zombies, and enchanted statues. To their horror, the hikers also state that they beheld a young woman sacrificed to a mighty Demon, and that this same Demon reappeared later during the hike to save them (albeit unwittingly) from the Somerset Slasher, who was actually one of the rangers of the park.

Unfortunately, the hikers’ own Ranger Guide had first been murdered by the Slasher. The machete-wielding Slasher soon paid the price for his crimes, however, as the Demonic creature tore off his head and carried it hungrily into the woods. The survivors of the party returned to civilization with these and many more tales of horror, but within a day the government reported that a thorough search of the woods turned up no substantiation of their claims.

Our epic now turns back nearly two centuries to picturesque Sleepy Hollow, where the populace was held in fear by the Headless Horseman, a spirit who rode through the night chopping the heads off all who crossed his path. Local bravo Brom Bones wanted to lead his Sleepy Hollow Boys after the specter, but Ichabod Crane, the village schoolmaster, insisted on going along, as did the mayor’s beautiful daughter, Katrina.  Brom stalked off in disgust to mount his own search, while Ichabod, Katrina, and the town’s inebriated Constable led their own group.

Soon after their journey began, Ichabod’s group was attacked by a Scarecrow, but it was soon revealed that the creature was merely one of Brom’s henchmen. Ichabod and the Constable then agreed that Brom must secretly be the Horseman. A later encounter with the Horseman himself ended with the Constable’s death by beheading.

In an old stable, Ichabod and Katrina found Brom, who confessed that he had asked his friend Tom to scare Ichabod, but who denied killing the Constable. They were interrupted by a family of hags living in the woods, who told them that to end the curse, they had to restore the Horseman’s own head to his haunted body.

Ichabod and Brom obtained the head from an old town cemetery, and later found a tree decorated with severed heads, guarded by the Headless Horseman! Brom tried to fight off the creature, but finally fell before its furious blows. The monster then attacked Ichabod, who desperately presented the head to the uncanny thing, who took it, politely bowed, and stalked off. Ichabod and Katrina mourned the misunderstood Brom, and led the party back to the village.

Back further now we travel, to the magical Kingdom of Somerset in 1501. On All Hallow’s Eve, a band of hags called on their Mistress, who produced a casket which held the mysterious Heart of the Forest.

Fearing the worst, the brave Sir Colgrevance and his companions seized the casket and attempted to bring it to the Merlin for safekeeping. Although Colgrevance was joined by Merlin’s apprentice, Arabella, some barbarians of the wood set upon them and seized the casket. Arabella learned that the man behind all this villainy was Sir Agravain, a lackey of Morgan le Fay!

The stalwart group pushed onward, though they were chased by the Master of the Hunt’s horde of werewolves and attacked by giant spiders, wailing banshees, and an invisible warrior of Morgan le Fay. During their journey, Arabella explained that if Agravain destroyed the Heart, the Dark Fay would be able to cross into their kingdom.

The group was then attacked by the Knights of the Spectrum, but they were rescued at the last moment by the Brown Knight, a woman who had left the Spectral Order. She gave Sir Colgrevance the enchanted sword Faery’s Bane, which could be used to control the Spectral Knights.

Colgrevance then defeated the Dark Elven Keeper who guarded the way to the Paths of the Dead, and entered the ancient home of the Sidhe kings! There he confronted Agravain, who prepared to destroy the casket. Using Faery’s Bane, Colgrevance summoned the Spectral Knights to assault the powerful villain, but all seemed lost when the werewolves suddenly caught up to them and fell upon Sir Colgrevance.

Arabella led Sir Colgrevance’s companions to safety, where they mourned the loss of their friend. The forlorn group was soon rejoined, however, by the valiant Sir Colgrevance, who had overcome his foes and carried the casket out of the dark realm. Colgrevance then gave the casket to Arabella to bring to her master.

Back to the modern era we return as we depict the radical television station X-TV’s attempt to resurrect an ancient carnival. A hundred years earlier, the carnival’s Ringmaster, Devlin the Magnificent, had shocked the world with his grotesque side show, The Menagerie of Oddities. In time, Devlin and his creatures were rounded up and burned alive by those in the surrounding villages. Also destroyed in the fire was the deranged clown Chuckles, called the Chiseler for his deadly use of that artistic tool.

Now X-TV was sending a college dropout named Stan into the carnival ruins as the lead contestant in its latest reality show. Accompanied by a brash X-TV executive named Rita Harper, Stan led the group into a commercial facade created by X-TV to look like the old carnival. One enthusiastic member of their group, Robbie, who managed the official Menagerie website, was quick to point out that the area hardly seemed authentic. Within moments, however, they were greeted by the charismatic figure of Devlin himself, who swiftly ushered them away from X-TV’s hokey set pieces and into the carnival’s true ruins.

Soon they beheld amazing sights, including the spirits of Devlin’s most famous Oddities and the death of one of X-TV’s mimes at the hands of the infamous Chuckles. The group continued on to Devlin’s secret laboratory, where they learned the mad Ringmaster had created his Oddities through bizarre acts of torture. Stan was then assaulted by Devlin’s most grotesque creation, Turpis, who carried the hapless Rita away to her death. The group soon came face to face with Devlin himself, who planned to transform them into a new generation of Oddities. Robbie attempted to become Devlin’s protégé and carry on as the new Ringmaster, but the jealous performer rewarded his efforts with a face full of acid.

Finally, Stan was able to turn the Oddities against their master by pointing out that they would become obsolete if Devlin’s scheme to create new Oddities succeeded. Turpis led the Oddities in a revolt that ended with Devlin being torn apart by his own vile instruments. As Stan tried to lead the group away from this chaos, Chuckles returned to challenge him. While fighting for his life, Stan recovered an old pistol that had belonged to the carnival’s lion tamer and used it to destroy the deranged clown. He then led his companions the remainder of the way out of the carnival to safety.