By Eric Weiss
It's the holiday season - and that means that it’s the perfect time for some Christmas D&D!
The question is: what does the perfect DnD Christmas campaign look like for your group?
After all, it’s always fun to do a special holiday session for your party of D&D Christmas adventurers. It's not always as easy to find a DnD Christmas adventure that fits the style of play everyone is looking for.
Thankfully, the homebrew explosion of quality D&D 5E content over the past few years has yielded a lot of very cool Christmas Dungeons and Dragons material. We even wrote our own free Christmas D&D one shot called Krampusnacht, a romp inspired by one of the most iconic Christmas villains that DMs can use to punish their players for all their horrible moral choices over the past year.
You can get a copy of our DnD Christmas one-shot free if you join our mailing list to receive the Krampusnacht PDF. We also went ahead and compiled a list of other free Christmas DnD one shots that captured our attention.
Krampusnacht: the best Christmas one shot for DMs who want payback
We teamed up with DM Pedro Galicia and Nat 21 Workshop to release a free Krampus-themed adventure: Krampusnacht.
Krampus comes to punish adventuring parties for all the horrible things they've done in the past campaign year. The full Krampusnacht campaign comes with plenty of advice for personalizing the encounter to your Christmas adventurers' particular brand of misdeeds.
As a tool, The Story Engine Deck also offers a ton of ways to build or improvise new adventure hooks, NPCs, and DnD Christmas campaign concepts that connect to what your players care about. It's worth checking out, especially if you love homebrew!
Download the Krampusnacht PDF for free AND get 10% off The Story Engine with our welcome offer!
Winter's Splendor: for classic Christmas DnD
Released by Wizards of the Coast in Dragon+ Magazine, Winter's Splendor is a full-fledged Christmas Dungeons and Dragons campaign for parties of 1st to 4th level.
This free Christmas D&D one shot is well written, elegantly structured, and unlike a lot of holiday content, not so silly that you can't lose yourself in the roleplaying aspect.
Saving Christmas: for kid-friendly Christmas DnD
Designed by Dream Realm Storytellers, Saving Christmas features a party of children defeating monstrous Christmas trees, cookies, and other holiday monsters that return to their normal forms when they take enough non-lethal damage.
It's the most family-friend Christmas adventure in this list by a fair margin, and features some delightful artwork.
The original hosting link for this DnD holiday adventure is under maintenance, so here is the free DriveThruRPG link and the Dungeon Masters Guild link (with an alternate cover) and also a Google Drive of the original.
Build your own DnD Christmas campaigns and traditions
One-off Christmas themed campaigns are fun - but true holiday traditions are things that you want to come back to year after year. These homebrew activities can help you start the kinds of meaningful in-world traditions that the whole party will look forward to when December rolls around!
Play magic item Secret Santa with your characters
Magic item Secret Santa is just like regular Secret Santa, but instead of buying gifts for the players at the table, everyone has to homebrew an in-world gift for another player's character.
On that front, The Story Engine Unique Items Expansion has everything you need to create bespoke gifts for any member of the party.
The deck turns mundane items into magic ones with all kinds of special properties, like a wand that plays theme music whenever the wizard casts a spell.
What gift would your character get for the other characters in the party? Use the Unique Items Expansion to fill everyone's stockings with magical presents!
Build (and explore) a new holiday setting
Why go to the North Pole when you can create your own quaint holiday village? Try collaborative worldbuilding to create a winter wonderland (or a workshop warzone), and to figure out what kinds of winter features, creatures, and festivities they have there!
Deck of Worlds and the Arctic Worldbuilding Expansion can help you come up with ideas for the Christmas town (and the celebrations) in your Christmas Dungeons and Dragons campaign!
Create an in-world winter holiday
What do the people in your world celebrate instead of Christmas? Try creating a seasonal celebration that everyone in the party would look forward to! You can even ask the them to participate by suggesting festive ideas based on their own real-life traditions!
If you need help, the Culture Keyholes and Emblems Expansions can create new holiday customs and symbols. The Deities Expansion generates the powerful figures behind them, and the Lore Fragments Expansion inspires ideas for in-world carols, myths, and legends.
The ultimate Christmas D&D toolkit
If you want to try any or all of these ideas, you can get all of the necessary decks as part of our Holiday Homebrew Bundle.
The bundle has all of the essentials for a festive and/or frozen DnD campaign. Grab any of these expansions (or any of our main decks) to start planning your own DnD Christmas!
The Darkest Night: for low level Christmas DnD
From Tribality Publishing, The Darkest Night is a holiday themed adventure where players battle an ancient evil to save Kringlefest.
This DnD Christmas campaign can be played in a system-agnostic way, but it comes balanced for four 1st-level Christmas adventurers. You can get it for PWYC here.
Slay Ride: for stealthy Christmas themed shenanigans
This loosely outlined Christmas DnD one-shot has a fun twist: you don't introduce it as a holiday adventure, and you wait to see how long it takes your players to figure out that the story they're participating in works as a weird origin story for a bunch of in-world Christmassy traditions.
This free DnD Christmas one shot is available in blog form here.
The Night Before Wintermas: for a party on the naughty list
Created by reddit user /u/jmanc, The Night Before Wintermas has a bit of a twisted premise for a Christmas D&D campaign.
You play a neutral/evil party tasked by a powerful tobacco company with breaking up Santa's charitable do-gooder operation.
If you're in a grinchy mood, it's the perfect way to roleplay your Kringle-crushing fantasies without actually ending up on a naughty list. Just click the link to get this DnD Christmas one shot free!
Krangel's Workshop
Krangel's Workshop reimagines Santa's workshop as a nightmare factory run by a misanthropic gnome artificer. Designed for 10th-level adventurers, this fight is one that not every party will make it out of alive. (Keep an eye out for the Slaughterstone Slicer!)
Honorable Mentions and Magic Items
These aren't technically full adventures, but if you get some fun holiday homebrew going, it might help to pull in some of these resources to enhance your game!
These aren't full Christmas Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, but if you get a fun holiday homebrew going, you might want to use some of these resources to enhance your DnD holiday adventure!
Holiday-Themed Magic Items:
Cantrips of Festivus: Featuring on-demand magical tricks like Magic Mistletoe and Heavenly Choir, this list of holiday-magic-powered Christmas D&D cantrips are supposed to be accessible to all Christmas adventurers (even non-casters) during the holiday season.
Stat Block for Santa: After holding a Twitter poll about what class Santa Claus would be, Death by Mage put together a really impressive set of builds for Santa Claus as a Bard, Wizard, Warlock, Cleric/Paladin, and Druid/Paladin. Definitely worth checking out!
Holiday-Themed Magic Items: This list of holiday-imbued magic items by Halivar in the EN World forums include spellcaster aids like the Globe of Snowing and animated edibles like the Gingerbread Man that would make a fun addition to any DnD Christmas campaign.
Stat Block for Krampusnacht: Also, here's the stat block for Krampus we developed for the Krampusnacht adventure. You can download the full PDF by signing up here.
Best DnD Christmas Gifts
AAnd if you're looking for a D&D Christmas gift, especially for folks who love homebrew, we recommend checking out our holiday gift guide.
Sign up to get 10% off your first order and a PDF of our Krampusnacht DnD Christmas one-shot free!