Merry Pissmas to all! (bonus ep character sheets)

Seasons greetings from Christopher (Frederick) and Ali (Cordelia), your New Years Eve special one-off adventure Dungeon Masters! If you didn't notice the holiday special in your feed, tricksy Taylor (Taylor) titled this ep "Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night" and added a delightful misdirect of a description. It'll all come together when you start the episode. In fact, go do that now! Spoilers ahead.

CHRIS: Ali and I both are normally the players in the various games we've been in over the years, but occasionally we've each had the chance to run a one-off when our normal DM couldn't make it. So we were both excited to give it a shot for the podcast, and give Branson a chance to be a player.

If you play D&D and you've never experienced a co-DM'd adventure, I simply must recommend you try it. NPCs being able to talk to each other without one person doing all the voices makes it worth it all on its own, not to mention the convenience presented when one DM can be in character handling the action or conversation while the other checks notes and keeps things running smoothly.

I'll let Ali take over the introduction of the materials in a sec, but first I want to tease all the UNKNOWN choices that could have happened in this episode. I'm a big believer in "short and wide" D&D game planning, where you have a short distance from the start to the finish, and a whole lot of different ways to get there. In this game, each of the three party vendors had at least three solutions prepared, with the opportunity for the cast to suss out a solution with clever conversation or puzzle solving, execute a stealth-based solution, go for a combat-based solution, or just... give the vendor the money they want and "skipping" that vendor's challenge, essentially.

So, some things that could have happened...

- Sedating and kidnapping the hydra barbershop group, or beating it into submission. (They just paid for that one.)

- Pulling off a catering wagon heist (They figured out how to get a discount.)

- Fighting ghosts of Pissmas Past, Present and Future in the haunted basement of the event hall. (They figured out the solution to the black door.)

ALI: Hell yeah! Co-signing all of what Chris said above. Short and wide all the way. To be entirely honest, the only thing I really wanted to do for this campaign was to reskin some spells with holiday stuff, but building a whole one-off campaign with Chris from the ground up was ridiculously fun. 

We've attached here for your supreme enjoyment all of the player character sheets that Chris built with my holiday-ified spells. We randomized the character backgrounds and naughty/nice alignments, so none of that stuff is in here. 

We hope you had a good time listening to the party-planning misadventures of Cardboard Jr., Bold Henry, Surfboard, and Boys Night from the PR department of Flammable Rock Holdings. 

Merry Pissmas, everyone! And happy birthday, Daddy Time. xo

PDFs attached via the wee text links below V V V