From Introduction:
The death of the Pumpkin King ushered in chaos and tumult within Halloweentown. The Pumpkin King had groomed young Voodoo Dolly to be his successor, but the on the day of her coronation she went missing.
Unbeknownst to even the most ancient of Samhain elders, an enemy had been watching Halloweentown for years. The Iron Man, the long-exiled Duke of Screamwork, returned with an army of steam-powered horrors to take over Halloweentown. The Iron Man's forces made war against the denizens of Halloweentown, but soon conquered the land of eternal Oct. 31st. Now the denizens of that spooky realm must live under the heavy metal fist of the grim-faced Iron Man.
The Iron Man's aim was simple: in place of the traditional, organic way in which the residents of Halloweentown went about the business of crafting nightmares, planting fears that turn delight into dread, and spinning yarns that contain a nugget of worldly wisdom with a tale of terror, the Iron Man industrialized the purpose of Halloween. Vast, smoke-belching factories now dot the landscape of Halloweentown; where fears and shivers were once made with an artisan's care for the people of the day-lit world, they are now produced on an assembly line. No care goes into their production, no thought or passion goes into their design. And the morbid creatures of Halloweentown must labor at the machines that create these stereotypical and commonplace dreads.
Nevertheless, the very machinery that is reducing the art of crafting night-time thrills to a mere process and the steam-powered weaponry used by the Iron Man's agents might prove to be the undoing of the Duke of Screamwork's regime. A rebellion is brewing amongst Halloweentown's repressed populace. There are those who gather in the shadows to plot the Iron Man's overthrow, who will stop at nothing to break free from the monotonous shackles of the Screamwork factories, and who are beginning to appropriate the Duke's technology for their own ends. This is where the player characters come in.