I usually run a game around halloween for my buds and came up with this for tomorrow.
Open to any and all criticisms,witticisms,and any other isms.
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Awesome! I’ll try to give it a read over the weekend! What system is it for?
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we’ll be playing in 5e (not the latest) since it’s what we know best
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Looks good after giving it a short overview 
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@bryansmiff reading through this now… I’ve got some nits I’m picking at that will probably have absolutely no bearing on the fun of the adventure but I’m going to throw them out anyway! 
A question on the setup-- what do the devils need with the wagons?
The overview makes it seem like the circus arrives and deploys magically which would make the wagons seem superfluous.
Alternatively, are the devils masquerading as ordinary circus folk? Then they’d want the wagons to pass cursory inspection of seeming normal and they might have a purpose as well as a trap.
I like the pipe wagon, for example, but who sets it off when the party gets there, and what is it normally for? Is it an alarm of sorts that can get tripped? If so, the noise should attract something…
Is there a payoff to the dead cultists? If not, what purpose do they serve?
The farmer boy… just gives the game away. This is fine but I think there’s a fun puzzle to solve here if the boy doesn’t know all the answers.
The tavern… I’m not familiar with pit crawlers to know if they have much intelligence, but is there any reason any of the devils would prevent someone from taking a golden ticket? They want everyone to go in.
Does the circus disappear at dawn or something similar? How long can the party dilly-dally in the town before they must go in.
I like the thunderdome but it doesn’t entirely make sense. It feels like, as written, that this whole thing is geared to get the adventurers in for a battle royale.
All those rounds, the intermissions, make no sense if they’re just destroying commoners. HOWEVER, I wonder if, assuming you had the inclination, you could lean into this as a deliberate trap for the party. That this is all for them.
Why? I have no idea. Some strange version of respect? Revenge? An infernal wager?
Then some of the setup makes a bit more sense as the devils, knowing the party would be hesitant if they just handed them the way into the tent, know that they have to resist and fight to convince the party that they don’t want them to go in, when they really do.
(What if the farm boy is really a devil under a spell?)
Disregard any and all of this! Great job and I will await the post-game report! 
Oh and why do the devils let the party and local folk leave? I think that there should be some sort of bargaining or reason. Otherwise, why let them go?
EDIT: I also just recalled that you’ve probably run this already! 
Looking forward to reading what happened!
We managed to get through about 99% of it in a little over 4 hours and the guys had a great time, success!
My thoughts with the wagons and the cultists is that these are the “mortal” agents that physically go around to little villages, hand out these tickets, and then perform some kind of ritual or something to create the tent, which is essentially a portal to hell.
Once the townsfolk enter it they find themselves at the mercy of the devils who “play with their food” by putting on a show.
No devils masquerading as normal folks since they are only encountered in hell.
The Imps and the Snatcher are sort of the “cleanup crew” once the portal is up and running, they find anybody left over and take care of them.
The pipe wagon triggering was kind of ambiguous, mainly just have it kick off whenever you think is best, I had it go off when a PC was near it alone, and the other two had just revealed the Rot Grubs and were being attacked. It’s normally there just to draw attention perhaps to have people gather around if they are setting up in a busier city or something that would need to have an attraction element. I WAS going to have the noise call the Snatcher over, but I figured it would be better to get them into town for the sake of pacing.
The cultists really didn’t pay off haha. I was surprised that a PC had Speak with Dead and asked a few questions like what happened and what’s going on. In my mind the two cultists were tasked with handing out the tickets and then staying out of the way, they had one ticket left and fought over it (both wanting to see what hell was like) tearing the ticket in half and getting themselves killed (one stabbed the other in the back, and then got killed by the Pit Climber, just a hellish giant spider, while it melted the bars and escaped.
The Pit Climber DID get to play a fun part in the tavern when the Artificer PC grabbed the ticket and got pulled into the chimney face to face with it. I imagine it’s not particularly intelligent, but cunning enough to recognize the humans like the shiny tickets.
The reasoning I had for the spare tickets lying around was just that some people had left town or ended up not going for whatever reason. I improvised that the shopkeepers had two tickets in their shop along with letters from a family member about their upcoming visit to kind of explain they were leaving town anyways and just didn’t use their tickets.
The duration of the tent in town is one of many things I didn’t think much about haha, I would kind of play it like it stays up while there are still souls getting consumed, then once the “show is over” down below it goes away in some gross way (maybe faces press out against the fabric until it bursts with thousands of gallons of blood flooding the streets and the fabric is gone ala the Shining Elevator scene).
The “thunderdome” vibe to me was more of a way to keep the crazy hordes of hell OFF the giant devils “food” while having fun torturing the souls trapped within. The PCs were not planned for and obviously much more powerful than the usual folk who end up in there.
Since it’s put on as a show, the rounds and performers are just ways of letting different devils get a chance for some mayhem, of course they’re all consuming helpless commoners, but that’s what the hordes want Todd! lol. I tried not to try to get into the minds of the devils really and maybe I should’ve used demons for the lore of it all, probably.
For the ending, once the heroes defeated the Ringmaster (who is essentially the end of the devil lord’s extremely long tongue) it was severed, spraying the whole place with devil ichor and causing the huge devil to “bring down the house” and smash the entire dome and horde through it like a garlic press , then I cut to black and back in Sallowfield as the sun rose everybody they saved emerged. So why did it let them go? I don’t know haha, I thought of it more like the connection just got destroyed and they still had their tickets so it brought them back.
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It sound like everybody had an awesome night, kudos!
As I mentioned, I was definitely picking some nits!
The group also REALLY took to the little farmboy, they wanted to find him immediately and once they pulled him out of a barrel of potatoes and he told them his name was “Muckie” because he mucked the stalls and was clinging to one of the PCs. I had him refer to himself as “head muck boy” and they somehow got onto the topic of what his aspirations were haha, so I said he dreamed of a shovel with a scoop on both ends so he could be done mucking in half the time. The artificer took this as a personal quest and they went to the shop to find another shovel and as he was crafting a dual shovel they got jumped by imps haha. They stuck Muckie in their carriage outside of town with his “weapon” while they went into the tent.
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Good ol’ Muckie! Everybody loves Muckie!
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