Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol...

[TheAuldGrump]

I was wondering about people who have done Winter Holiday scenarios for their RPGs.

I used to do them every year, generally Call of Cthulhu (Yule being the center, as opposed to Christmas). For the last four or five it has been a simplified D20 wargame (I started this before the remake of Chainmail came out, let alone the Miniatures Handbook.) The CoC games were serious, while the D20 games started off as a way to use the Christmas Village that I had set up as a display.

The first went the best, with the hill giant changing sides and helping St. Nick. (First hint the orcs had that things were going wrong - the hill giant waving and yelling 'Hi Santa!' with a big smile. So far the orcs have failed every year, despite having a young red dragon last year. The hill giant has been with Santa every year since the first. As for the Christmas Treant... well...

The Auld Grump, and I'll bet you thought that this was going to be about trolling posts...

 

[The_Gneech]

Back when I was in college, I planned to run "How Dr. Destroyer Stole Christmas!" as a light-hearted follow-up to my Champions campaign on Christmas break, but alas it never actually happened.

(I have had a bit more success running Halloween-themed adventures, however. Somehow, it's easier to set up creepy events that actually work.)

-The Gneech

 

[kenobi65]

One of our DMs did "theme adventures" for Christmas for several years.

The first year, he sprung it on us by surprise.

10' hallway, leading to a 10'x10' room, with 1 orc (1 HD)....
leading to a 20' hallway, a 20'x20' room, with 2 gnolls (2 HD)...
leading to a 30' hallway, a 30'x30' room, with 3 bugbears (3 HD)...

This was, obviously, "The 12 Dungeons of Christmas." Thank Gawd the numbers of monsters started shrinking after about 7...no way we wanted to face 12 red dragons.

The next year, he did an adventure about 3 wandering magi, looking for a baby king. He did a few more, all of which were fun, but the details have been lost to the mists of time.

 

[jester47]

For a while when I went back to Texas I would run a Christmas "Slay." Alas that is rarer nowdays.

A.

 

[UniversalMonster]

I have a "mini-campaign world" called Snowglobe that I was using around the holidays in 2000 (I prepped it briefly for a big return in 2001 but then 9/11 happened and I lost interest in gaming for a while).

Anyhow, the whole point of Snowglobe is that it's a genie prison set in one of those Christmas snowglobe things. But- insidethe genie has used all of these wish spells to transform the place into it's own weird little world full of animated toys, snow-boarding halfling eskimos, wooly mammoths, anthropomorphic animals and a kingdom of penguin-people. As the seasonal epic goes- time floes differently in the Snowglobe- so you could spend only a few minutes there and have several years pass in the "real campaign". In this case- I rolled it out again this for the first time since 2001 and the characters found themselves at the giant candycane monument where I have started the campaign before. Last time I ran it- one character even elected to have his character remain behind in the Snowglobe. I got psyched to do it again this year after seeing Polar Express.

So anyway, last Friday was the return to the Snowglobe. We'll have 4 sessions of an adventure in Snowglobe and then when they come out, 60 years will have past for the PCs. And the snowglobe itself will be discovered to have been sitting innocently and forgottenly on the desk of one of their npcs who will be a very old man when they get out.

 

[Abstraction]

Didn't get to this year, but next year I am definitely running "There's No Race Like Gnomes for the Holidays", possibly with a follow-up of "I'll be Gnome for Christmas"

 

[Stormrunner]

(I have had a bit more success running Halloween-themed adventures, however. Somehow, it's easier to set up creepy events that actually work.)

-The Gneech

Do the Tim Burton thing and combine them!

Then one smoky Halloween
The Night Hag came to say,
Rudah with your mane so bright,
Won't you be my steed tonight?
Then all the nightmares were jealous,
And they shouted out with glee,
Rudah the bright-maned nightmare,
You'll get yours, just wait and see!