D&D General Prepping today's adventure with Roll & Play's holiday products

I'm going to run a holiday one shot as part of my ongoing Radiant Citadel campaign, specifically Blessing of the Drake from One-Shot Wonders: Holiday Adventure Pack.

We just finished the Fiend of Hollow Mine from Radiant Citadel last session (everyone loved it), so everyone's level five, but I have a player with a high level of rules mastery, so I'm not sweating a level 5-6 adventure, as I can rely on our party's optimizer/tactician stepping in if things look rough.

The real issue I need to address is that the Holiday Adventure Pack is all very British/American secular Christmas themed, with pudding monsters and snow, and a generic Winterfest holiday. This adventure centers around the unnamed local village's relationship with the missing Great Fir Drake. The Concord Worlds associated with the Radiant Citadel don't really have an Alpine Christmas card vibe. It's possible that I might be able to make it work with Yeonido, the Korea-coded Concord World, but an easier solution for me is using Roll & Play's Christmas Essentials, which I backed on Kickstarter back in 2021 and which forms the partial basis of the Holiday Adventure Pack. (Most of the ancestries in the new product appeared there first, along with the magic items and monsters.)

Unlike the One-Shot Wonders, the earlier Roll & Play products were books of random generators -- I used the sci-fi one in my playthrough of Notorious last year and the fantasy book is my back-up generator when players surprise me and I can't come up with an answer on my own.

The adventure tells me that Ysilwen, the Great Fir Drake, guards a territory 50 miles in diameter around the unnamed settlement. The dragon is supposed to appear to bless Winterfest and collect the tribute gifts offered to it at the festival, but there's no sign of the dragon and the local druid fears there's a problem. The names that we get in the adventure, like Pineshelter Cave, point to a classical Alpine vibe for the setting.

So, let's flesh this out with the Christmas Essentials.

The Festive Campaign Builder PDF has six sections to create a festive campaign setting using the roll tables.

1. The first section is Celebration. We know from the adventure that it's called Winterfest, we can set it at the winter solstice, and we know that people tell stories about Ysilwen, the Great Fir Drake, who blesses the festival in return for trinkets, many of them themed around pine forests.
2. The second section is Location. We need a region and location name. We already know the town leader (Gram Iceback, the orcish druid) and that the celebration takes place around a stone statue of the fir drake. On page 3 of the essentials PDF, we have a roll table for winter village names. Rolling 2d10, we get "Sleighbranch" for the village. The bonus Winter Settlements table (which I believe was a stretch goal or a freebie during the original Kickstarter campaign), tells me the townsfolk compete to have the most elaborate decorations and festive performers roam the streets in costume.
3. The third section of the campaign builder is People. Going off the choices, let's say this is a medium sized town, with comfortable residents and a general jolly atmosphere. Let's go ahead and lean into the Hallmark Christmas vibes here.
4. Section four is Traditions. Consulting the tables, a longstanding tradition is residents exchanging bags of dried fruit and nuts (and sometimes a silver coin for luck) and sweet-smelling candles are placed in glass candelabras. Villagers like to eat a wreath of chestnut stuffing, honey-topped oatcakes and drink hot, cloudy apple juice (what we call apple cider in much of the US). At Winterfest, they like to dress up with knitted red sweaters, sing a song called "A Little Fall of Snow," have snowball fights and play guessing games.
5. Section five is the Party, which explains how the PCs get involved, which we know most of already, between the Radiant Citadel background and adventure information. But I do roll about transport around Sleighbranch. On this adventure, the PCs will use a horse-drawn snowplow, which I'm going to change to a sleigh, because when else will I get a chance to have PCs ride around in a one-horse open sleigh?
6. Section six is Problems. The adventure has this stuff covered, but it does make me think I need at least one name for the four kobolds the group will encounter -- you never can tell when the PCs will want to converse with someone instead of fighting them or chasing them off. So I put the words "frostbite," "frozen," "icicle" and "shiver" into Google Translate, change the language to Swedish and now have kobolds named "Frostskador," "Frusen," "Istappar" and "Skjutning," should I need names.

The adventure, by default, rewards PCs with 300 gold pieces and a Staff of the Python, which is pretty boring and not at all seasonal. Both the One-Shot adventure "book" and the PDF have seasonal magical items -- mostly themed around the 12 Days of Christmas -- including several uncommon treasures. The most fun magic items for a Radiant Citadel campaign appears to be the Calling Quills, a set of four quills and writing pads that each display what was written on one pad on all four pads for the next 12 hours. which I know my players will find uses for. I will also roll on the PDF tables for a personal gift for each PC, for things like a stuffed toy owlbear or a silver pocketwatch with an engraved snowflake design.

And so that's it. We play in an hour and 15 minutes, so I'm going to run to the grocery store and then run Blessing of the Drake as our holiday adventure, which has more dragon-on-dragon combat than most holiday adventures do.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

We play in an hour and 15 minutes,

Click to expand...

Good luck!!

The adventure went well. It's not the most complex adventure, as written -- it took us about two and a half hours to complete. Dragon on dragon action is fun, but since the friendly dragon has a massive bonus to initiative, the players do have to watch it beat the crap out of the other dragon for three attacks before doing anything.

But everyone had a ball and I expect we'll use the remaining four adventures for future holiday games.