By Peter Chiykowski
It's always fun to do a special holiday session for your D&D players, but it's not always easy to find an adventure that fits.
Fortunately, the homebrew explosion of quality D&D 5E content over the past few years has yielded a lot of very cool material.
After I wrote my own holiday adventure—a one session Krampus-inspired romp that DMs can use to punish their players for all their horrible moral choices over the past year—I decided to poke around and see what other adventures were out there.
I've compiled 7 adventures that really caught my interest.
Also, if you'd like to receive a free copy of my Krampus holiday horror adventure, just sign up to receive the PDF and join the mailing list for The Story Engine, my deck of endless GM prompts that have been recommended by multiple writers for Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.
Krampusnacht: A D&D Adventure of Holiday Horror and DM Revenge
We teamed up with DM Pedro Galicia and Nat 21 Workshop to release a free Krampus-themed adventure: Krampusnacht.
Krampus comes to punish the party for all the horrible things they've done in the past campaign year, and we offer plenty of advice for personalizing the encounter to your players' particular brand of misdeeds.
As a tool, The Story Engine Deck offers a ton of ways to build or improvise new adventure hooks, NPCs, and campaign concepts that connect to what your players care about. It's worth checking out, especially if you love homebrew!
Winter's Splendor
Released by Wizards of the Coast in Dragon+ Magazine, Winter's Splendor is a full-fledged holiday adventure for parties of 1st to 4th level.
It's 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
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 adventure in this list by a fair margin, and features some delightful artwork.
UPDATE: The original hosting link for this 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.
The Darkest Night
From Tribality Publishing, The Darkest Night is a holiday-themed adventure where players battle an ancient evil to save Kringlefest.
This adventure can be played in a system-agnostic way, but it comes balanced for four 1st-level adventurers.
You can get it for PWYC here.
Slay Ride
This is a loosely outlined adventure that 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.
Available for free in blog form here.
The Night Before Wintermas
Created by reddit user /u/jmanc, The Night Before Wintermas has a bit of a twisted premise.
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.
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
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!
Cantrips of Festivus: Featuring on-demand magical tricks like Magic Mistletoe and Heavenly Choir, this list of holiday-magic-powered cantrips are supposed to be accessible to all players (even non-casters) during the holiday season.
The Santa Warlock Pact: Want Father Christmas as your Warlock's patron/sugardaddy? Icy Geek has you covered.
Stat Block for Santa: After holding a Twitter poll about what class Santa would be, Death by Mage put together a really impressive set of builds for Santa 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 holiday adventure.
Stat Blocks for Holiday Monsters: The folks over at the World Builder Blog put together a stat block and scenario notes for battling Santa in his lair, as well as additional stats for Santa's elves, animated toys, and even hot chocolate elementals.
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.
And if you're looking for a D&D holiday gift, especially for folks who love homebrew, might I recommend you check out our holiday gift guide. Sign up below for 10% off your first order from The Story Engine.