Table Tales - Happy Holiday Adventures

By Mark Morrison

With all my gaming groups I’ve always tried to run a special themed game as the last one of the year. There’s something about getting together just before the holidays that brings on a special mood: eating great snacks, exchanging small gifts, reflecting on how much we’ve enjoyed telling stories together this year, and looking forwards to another twelve months of adventure when the calendar clicks over. Naturally, I mark the occasion by trying to kill them all in a special one-night adventure, usually with some variety of homicidal Santa.*

Basic Roleplaying or some version thereof is the ideal game system for a one-shot. Everyone already knows the rules, so it’s easy to change up the genre and get on with the seasonal story.

In games of yore the player characters helped get a young expecting couple to the last hospital during a zombie apocalypse (Santa got a bit chompy in that one), and one year I ran a particularly grisly Call of Cthulhu game set in an Aussie suburb in the 1980s. That one started with a dead partridge thrown at their door. Next day there were two doves stuffed down their chimney, and so on. You know, something festive.

Pendragon has so many religious virtues at its heart that it’s near-perfect for end-of-year stories. Player-knights are inherently moral characters so there’s something pure about the stories that Pendragon tells.

Last year I ran a special winter court in which the player-knights ventured out into a deadly frost on Christmas Eve to find King Pellinore and bring him back before he froze to death. Stir in some Charles Dickens, add a few murderous Picts, and you’ve got yourself a festive brew.

This year I wanted to introduce my group to Age of Vikings. They’ve been enjoying RuneQuest lately so everything was very familiar to them mechanically, and they knew enough Viking mythology and culture to get the setting.

I was really struck on how instantly the game quickly became all about family: the family you have, the family you lost, the family you want. Icelandic lore is also full of some particularly lively Yuletide stories to dig into: there’s the Yule Lads who get up to all kinds of mischief, from slamming your doors to stealing your sausage (not a euphemism), and my favourite, the Yule Cat, a murderous feline the size of a mini-bus who devours any child not wearing new clothes at Yuletime. I keep telling people that cats are assholes but nobody believes me until they’re caught wearing old socks on an Icelandic winter’s night.

We used the Age of Vikings pregenerated characters, with marvelous art by Ossi Hiekkala. My favourite moment of the game occurred when they got into the penultimate fight but it was clear that they were hopelessly outmatched. Rather than cut them down and having a real downer of a Yuletide game, I paused and asked the players “Your wise woman, the völva, chose you of all the assembled warriors and said that only you could succeed. What did she see in you?”

That made the players dig deep into what they had learned about their characters. Ísgerður had already tried her Charm skill supported by Þrymur's three carved runes, but it was the foolish Sigmundur who stepped up and spoke Poetry so powerful the foes withdrew in shame. It felt so right at this time of year to have words of peace save the day. It was a great session and everyone is keen to play the characters again.

This of course has just made new problems for me in the new year when we start up again: when everyone is up for Age of Vikings, Pendragon and RuneQuest, what to run? As long as we’re together rolling dice, it will be a good time either way. Happy holidays, all!

* Under the Christmas tree for me this year is a copy of The Fright Before Christmas by Jeff Belanger, which should give me some seasonal beastlies for many years to come. Basic Roleplaying: Creatures already has many things to go bump in the night so I'm pretty sure I can adapt these with malice aforethought.