Bite-Sized Dungeon Crawl #5 - Sleighing Song Of The Murderclaus

In all the layered slices of reality, there exists only one place dedicated to housing the energies of winter solstice celebrations.

The Lesser Semiplane Of Festive Remnants is a vast and trackless snowy waste with a large, dense forest at its center. Within that forest, solstice gods and their hangers-on dwell.

Of course, the Semiplane is not a permanent home for these wintery beings, and the more widely worshiped a solstice god is, the less they are present on the plane.

For example, Oogolorx, the widely popular mosquito-riding solstice god of dimension 47, is almost never found within the forest.

And inverse to that, creatures which are all but forgotten are quite present and powerful.

Which brings us to a problem.

What happens when only one aspect of a god is worshiped?

Saint Nicholas is but one of the many names and faces of the syncretic being known colloquially as 'Santa Claus.' He is worshiped for his goodness and his light, his humour and his kindness, his generosity and his indulgence. And he is worshiped so constantly for these traits, and so rarely for anything else, that they have been drawn out of his form in the Semiplane like blood through a syringe.

And the thing that's left behind?

It's not very nice indeed.

For over a century, the Semiplane has been ruled by this cruel, carnivorous master. Confined as it is to this space, the husk of the Claus has few entertainments. They mostly consist of the people it can catch.

And unfortunately, you're just entered the semiplane in search of treasure.

In a warm, well-constructed lodge in the middle of the woods, something that is only shaped like holiday cheer has begun to chuckle.

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Sleighing Song is a 25 page hexcrawl adventure for Bite-Sized Dungeon (https://kumada1.itch.io/bite-sized-dungeon) or any adventure game system of your choice.

Sleighing Song does not include specific stat blocks or DCs, but it does give pointers on how to stat out creatures and challenges in different systems.

Sleighing Song should be suited to one or two-shots for adventurers of medium power.

It follows naturally from Bite Sized Dungeon Crawl #4 - Exiles From The Interplanar Trash Zone---but it can also be run as a standalone or spliced into an existing campaign as a sidequest or an optional adventuring location.

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Updates:

• 12.16.22: Standardized text color, resized all illustrations, fixed a typo in the intro.