Would your group play in a session that had Santa Claus in it? Sure, you can write off the legend of Santa Claus as nothing more than a myth used for entertaining children with, but let’s look at some of the finer details:
- He has an arctic base of operations.
- He passes judgment on others and decides whether or not to reward or punish them for their deeds.
- He has an amazing industrial complex at his disposal to build whatever he needs.
- He has an army of elves under his command.
- He is capable of spying on anyone at anytime and anywhere.
- He has magical beasts of burden that can fly him to any location in the world.
- He can manipulate time so as to complete his dastardly work all in one night.
You can write that off as a mere children’s story, but as far as I am concerned Santa Claus can be summed up in two words:
SUPER VILLAIN!!!
Do not give me that “But he loves children!” crap. Does he feed them? No. Clothe them? No. Care for them? No. I do all of that work and my kids still do not listen to me, but if my wife utters the words “Santa is watching.” suddenly my son and daughter turn into model citizens.
Obviously Santa Claus is brainwashing the youth of the world in an attempt to make them do his bidding. That devious bastard!
Your GM’s Challenge — Use Santa Claus as a Villain!
In the fine holiday literary tradition of The Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special make an adventure where Santa Claus is the bad guy (and the PCs probably are not much better).
Leave a comment of 250 words or less that provides the overall premise of your Santa Claus as nemesis adventure concept, and I will pick my favorite one and give the creator a $25 gift certificate for Drive Thru RPG. This not an official Gnome Stew contest (I am acting on my own here), but fellow gnomes are not eligible to win because I want this prize to go to a reader of the stew.
Only one entry per person, and the deadline is to have your comment posted by December 21st 10:00pm (CST). I will announce the winner on December 23rd which will be just in time to spoil everyone else’s holiday. How will I decide who the winner is? The idea that strikes me as the most appealing to run a game with wins.
Have fun with this readers! I look forward to seeing what kind of bizarre ideas you will come up with, and good luck to all who dare to compete in this ludicrous contest of geeky gamer mayhem!
I ran a one shot Gamma World 4th Edition adventure last Christmas. It started at a furnace complex being run by an animatronic Rudolph. He was in the process of destroying all the presents as an act of rebellion. All the ash turned the terrain white to give it that Christmas feel.
The PC’s follow the plot back to an old run down Malls Grotto where the players prepare to face Santa. With a sudden plot twist it turned out to be the Easter Bunny who along with his lover (Rudolph) had corrupted the animatronic Santas programming. Apparently they were tired of him getting all the glory at Christmas.
After the final boss fight the players found presents inside the Grotto. Fighting Fantasy books were the pay off.
Ah, the Santa Clause, a good reason to beware of entering into any contract with St. Nick. (I think you might mean Santa Claus)
@Drunken Goblin – You know Rudolph can never be trusted. He’s never gonna’ forgive them for not letting him play in those reindeer games…
@dorward – I suffer from busybloggeritis. One of the symptoms is to press the “Replace All” instead of the “Ignore All” button on the spellcheck, and then failing to proofread the article again after running the damn thing. Embarrassing! But thanks for catching the mistake, and it has been corrected.
@Patrick Benson – See, nobody trusts Rudolph. Its because he’s a cyborg and it just unnerves everyone.
Terminator = Red glowing eyes.
Rudolph = Red glowing nose.
(Ding Dong) The front door opens slowly and there stood on the porch is a reindeer with a red menacing nose. He looks down at a scroll of paper…
RUDOLPH “Sarah Connor?…”
SARAH CONNOR “…Yes?…”
See it works perfectly…
I was at Rural King yesterday. They had a display of standup Santa ornaments: In blaze orange and camo, dangling antlers horns from a trophy rope. If you think about it, it makes ye ole Burgermeister Meisterburger kind of a lightweight.
Is Black Pete lurking anywhere in these proposals?
I remember going down this road before – Santa Claus as an obese, mentally cracked elven necromancer. The flying zombie war reindeer. maybe they were wraith reindeer… in any case, they were to be feared. Anyway, he delivered gifts to this city as a cover, so that he could steal souls at the rate of one a year with a gift-wrapped box that worked like some variation of a magic jar spell. I don’t the game ever got played, though, just planned.
@Troy E. Taylor – Black Pete, Frosty, Dominic the Donkey, and whatever else floats the boat of those who decide to participate.
@Tegemea – Why not play that game now? 🙂
Okay, here’s my entry:
The players (a group of super-powered elementary school students) race to discover who is sending PS-204 students emails telling them who is naughty or nice, based on race, religion, etc., and inspiring a rash of bullying and playground violence that leaves one child hospitalized. And final exams are only a week away!
Players will be tempted by their fondest dreams come true, tormented by previous “naughty†behavior, and taken on the trans-continental ride of their lives.
Character requirements:
– One or two characters able to fly and carry at least half the group (or one character with long-distance teleportation, mystical or otherwise)
– One character able to resist intense cold
– One tech-oriented character (prodigy or gadgeteer kit suggested)
Suggested:
– One character able to detect poison in eggnog
– One character able to speak to animals
– One Jewish character able to recite entire Menorah lighting ritual
– One character that really, really wanted a kitten last year
Loot:
Kwanza decorations
Singing Menorah +3
Assorted candy-cane nunchaks, fruitcake land mines, antique toy-making tools
Bonus Loot: recipes for gingerbread golems and giftwrap balrogs, access to the most intrusive computer system in the world.
(193 words)
Geez. I’ve had more challenging breakfasts.
Howabout Santa is some sort of uber-technical genius that is putting nano-mind-control-technology into all the toys that he delivers?
The thing is that we all still have this technology in our system, sleeping, waiting for the day he is ready to unhatch his scheme…
The only people unaffected are those who never recieved a gift from Santa before…
So the players are a group of mismatched kids who for one reason or another never recieved gifts…
Their opponents start off as their friends and neighbours but eventually they take over one of the Santa Sleds… of which there are actually millions, with automoton Santa’s which deliver the nano-presents, and they take it back to the north pole HQ to stop the real Santa.
And what does Santa secretly want?
Maybe it is just for people to be blindly obediant in a bland but good way… generally kind consumer drones with that fake plastic feel… and that is what the nano-bots make everyone do… and the PC’s are the rebellious Freedom over Control sort.
Because Santa was picked on at some point and he wanted to stop people from being mean.
The ending that is best is if the PC’s can convince Santa that free will is important, and forced kindness is not great… and it is okay to let loose every once and a while…
Maybe they use the nano-bots against Santa to show him how awful it is to be controlled… just as bad as being bullied…
I dunno…
Likely they would just blow up HQ if they are the type of people I play with.
Still could be fun.
(Did not notice the word count clause)
Santa is an uber-technical genius that is putting nano-mind-control-technology into all the toys that he delivers.
Adults still have this technology in our system, sleeping, waiting for the day he is ready to unhatch his scheme…
The only people unaffected are a group of mismatched kids who for one reason or another never recieved a gift from Santa before… the PC’s.
Their opponents start off as parents,friends and neighbours. Eventually they take over a Santa Sled… of which there are actually millions, with automoton Santa’s which deliver the nano-presents, and they take it back to the north pole HQ to stop the real Santa.
What does Santa secretly want?
Maybe it is just for people to be blindly obediant kind and bland consumer drones with a fake plastic feel. That is what the nano-bots make everyone do. The PC’s are the rebellious Freedom over Control types.
Santa was picked on at some point and he wanted to stop people from being mean.
A good ending would be if the PC’s can convince Santa that free will is important, and forced kindness is not great… and it is okay to let loose every once and a while.
Maybe they trick Santa into playing with his toys and use the nano-bots against him to show how awful it is to be controlled… just as bad as being bullied.
Likely they would just blow up HQ if they are the type of people I play with.
Did anyone else see the Futurama episode with the evil robotic Santa that came out and terrorized the city? Talk about a new perspective for Christmas!
I was just about to play a session with this theme. We are going to play Grimm. Actually, we are going to have a number of games with Santa Claus in it. We organise a meeting of groups that play “not so common” RPGs (at least in Brazi) and this month we asked the narrators to use Santa Claus in their adventures. I am gonna post the plot in a bit.
The characters are kids about the age of 10 from the same school. They all go on a field trip to a place where a Santa’s workshop is set up.
Once they arrive there, Santa seems to know a lot about them and gives them exactly what they wanted as gifts. He asks them if they would like to know his works better and asks them to accompany him on a magic trip. They get on the small train, go into a tunnel and never get to the other side, at least not the real them.
They were taken to another world, where Santa Claus makes them slaves. They have to work with other slaved kids to make something they later realised are copies of children he kidnaps. Elves were replaced by goblins, and Santa intends to substitute all children with his perfected copies. Now they have to try to escape. But they will have to make a hard choice, they will either have to chose between saving all the kids from this insane Santa Claus and satying in this other world, or only being able to save themselves getting back to the real world (since the portal they managed to find would only allow a small number of people to pass through it before it closes).
This scenario calls upon older European versions of Santa Claus (AKA Father Christmas, Father Winter) where the mythic figure is more like a Catholic bishop who travels with angelic helpers or a demonic figure, Krumpus. I think this would be most appropriate for Grimm, d20 Victorian, Steampunk, or Pulp settings but could easily be converted to fantasy or superhero settings, and pits the PC’s against an evil “Santa Claus” and aligns them with a good Krumpus:
Things in New London have gone from bad to worse, in addition to the unnaturally cold weather that precedes this winter’s solstice celebration, ghosts haunt the streets, hideous monsters stalk the rooftops, and now children are disappearing. Add to this the assassinations of several prominent police investigators & clergy members, and the city is about to descend into Hell — literally.
The evil arch-bishop, Klaus Vinter, desires to bring Hell to earth by opening a portal to the Abyss in service to his dark master. In his study of diabolerie in the ancient crypts beneath his church, he has learned vile demon summoning rites, powerful transformation invocations, and the powers of fire scrying and Pyro-portation, in which the caster can see or teleport through large fires. Armed with these abilities, a congregation of corrupted elves, and a small horde of fiendish monsters, he kidnaps the victims he needs to fuel his portal.
Recently, however, several members of his own order and the police had to be killed when they got too close to the truth. Further, a suspicious nun knowing her allegations against the arch-bishop would never be believed, dawned the guise of a ghostly angel to protect her identity while she investigates. Additionally, a victim of Vitner’s physical experimentations broke free and the now demonic-looking Gruss Von Krumpus stalks the rooftops at night attempting to sabotage Vinter’s plans. Vinter, who controls the newspapers has painted these two interlopers as supernatural threats in an attempt to redirect focus.
This is my entry:
Santa Claus is dead and transferred long ago his mind into his supercomputer at the norh pole, developing multiple personalities. All of them loves children, but most of them hate the people who polluted the planet. And they all have agendas.
I did this last year with Santa actually being a troll, with goblins as ‘elves’, kidnapping children and feeding them to their Santa Troll so he can become strong enough to take on the local village (the goblins wanted their snow shoes. They’re goblins, I don’t know…)
This year I’ve got a new plan. Santa Claus is a blood-soaked necromancer obsessed with zombies (an enemy my PC’s have met before.) He’s constructed a large toy factory, and spent a lot of time bigging up his reputation with rumours of a huge free-toy-giveaway to all the children of the local city on Christmas Eve (something I’ve alluded to over the last few sessions); his red clothes and bell-topped hat only benefitting his image.
Behind the scenes he’s been trapping and capturing dozens of rogue zombies wandering the wastes (it’s a post-apoc-esqe environment), chaining them up to the machines, and infecting all of the toys with the highly contagious zombie virus; breathing on them, dripping blood and saliva on them to dry, etc, etc.
The plan is to infect the children through the toys and turn the whole town into a zombie-infested lair for him to rule over as supreme Necromancer.
When the toys go viral and the children start getting infected, he intends to ride through the town, his sleigh pulled by nine zombies (I thought zombie reindeer was a bit too cliche), throwing out mush and filth from the torn-open bloated stomach of an infected fat-man.
(My players are going to meet an old friend as an ally, a pro-Zombie [some are conscious, living creatures] activist named Young Santos. The whole idea came about through a horrible pun I could hear him saying; “Just call me Santos Claus!”)
The Kringle Mind-Parasite has escaped it’s crystal prison in the Netherzone and made its way into Parallel-101, where it has spent centuries collecting and feeding off the belief-energies of its denizens. It plans to grow strong enough to release the other imprisoned Elder Ones into the multiverse and restart the Continuum War.
Under the guise of a kind and generous benefactor named Santa Claus, Kringle has held that world with an iron grip for generations by handing out gifts to susceptible children. Unknown to them, the gifts serve both as energy gathering and surveillance devices: the compliant are rewarded, the free-thinking and rebellious are severely punished by the genetically engineered Krampus beasts.
Its massive base of operations lies atop a ley line convergence point in the North Pole. Kringle uses the output of eldritch energies to power up the factory and its machines (including the time-dilation machine it uses to deliver gifts all over the world in a single night), manned by a loyal army of elves brought in from the twisted Faerie dimension.
This Christmas night Kringle will achieve its goal.
You are top agents of F.O.R.E.V.E.R, a multidimensional police force tasked with the protection of the space-time continuum. Your mission is to apprehend the Kringle Mind-Parasite and place it back into its prison. Due to the stronger vibrational frequencies of Parallel-101, only your consciousnesses can be sent through. You will be uploaded into your counterparts’ physical bodies.
There’s a catch though: in that reality, you are still children…
Title: The Last Noel
Every year all the good little boys and girls receive presents from Santa and, experience has shown, so do many of the bad ones! Santa is a forgiving sort, apparently. No one suspects the toys he delivers – the gifts a caregiver doesn’t remember buying, the ‘bonus’ package at Secret Santa parties – are surveillance devices and that the cast-off detritus of last year’s gifting frenzies are spies that help Santa compile his nice-naughty database. Santa identifies the worst of the worst then sends forth his strongest minion, Krampus, to kidnap them away to his frozen base for experimentation… and breeding.
In this adventure, Santa is a science villain with mastery of incredibly advanced technologies: life extension, transportation, surveillance, manufacturing and genetics. Having bred humanity’s worst for centuries, Santa’s now ready to release his army of mischievous, fanatically loyal ‘elves’ on the capital and achieve global domination in one massive shock and awe campaign. Characters can be almost anyone: superhero children, a troupe of department store Santas out to set things right, government agents, competing villains, neopagan magi immune to Christmas’ saccharine charms, et cetera. They learn of the plan via appropriate means and must take action to stop it. Do they travel to the North Pole to confront Santa, wait for him to strike and stop him in the act, convince a skeptical public to fight back or something else?
This concept suggests a modern-day sci-fi/horror/fantasy setting but is easily adapted to other genres.
(My word processor says that’s 249 words, so I apologize if it’s over!)
Excellent entries so far! Keep ’em coming!
Out of curiosity, are we limited to one entry? I can think of plenty of ways to
abuse Santa. 🙂Suspecting a nexus of power, the Dwarves sent Jolnir Langbardr to the Ceiling of the World garbed head-to-toe in bloodstained furs, armed with a sacred bludgeon-bell and a mistletoe spear (an elf once tricked a dwarf into killing his twin with mistletoe; the morbid dwarves since adopted it as the only wood rivaling stone and steel). His magebred mountain goats leapt from glacier to glacier ’til he reached the pole.
The lone dwarf never expected to find an isolated tribe of frost elves there. He placated them with gifts from his bottomless sack of provisions and struck a bargain: help him build a home. Too late the elves realized that the cold cave was remodeled under their noses. The home became a dungeon.
Perhaps magnetic north amplified his strength– after all, dwarves are people of the earth. He enslaved them in that stronghold, forging cold iron blades to gift to the dwarves for a war against the elves.
On the eve of the gift-giving a few clever elves realize their time is running out, and the prison might be a cold grave unless they act fast.
Will the players battle Langbardr? Craft gifts so extravagant, sweets so delicious that they could plead mercy—or set the dwarves’ sights elsewhere? Dash through the snow for a moonlit goatback getaway? Or can they turn the tables with his own scrying stones, and warn the warm-weather elves far south?
This cookie could crumble any which way in “YULE BE SORRY,” the pagan prison break.
I’m actually working on a short Christmas one-shot adventure for my 4e game.
The PCs will be from an Elf Tribe that lives at the base of a mountain. A few weeks prior, a large dwarf appeared; a traveler from another plane. He constructed a citadel in the snowy peaks. Then he kidnapped some of the elves to work for him, created twisted and evil magic items. The PCs are recruited by the village elder to save their peers.
The monsters include snowmen (ice elementals), toy soldiers (wooden constructs with a mean bite attack) and Santa Claus himself (who features an attack that can trap a player in his beg of holding).
Santa is villainous, but he has no evil scheme beyond his usual machinations of his elven industrial complex and an international network of spies.
The “heroes” are an Ocean’s Eleven-style team who are raiding the Workshop for the toys they never got. Good archetypes include child geniuses, grizzled old curmudgeons, renegade elves, and holiday rivals like the Tooth Fairy. Victory sees the characters flying away on a VTOL craft laden with Christmas cheer; failure sees them chained to an assembly line or smeared across the bloody horns of an angry reindeer.
Hi there, long time lurker and reader here 😉
I’ve done this last year, on the web plataform, as “Evil Santa!â€
Basically, Santa is an Evil entity since time has began to be called time, and before as well. This game was meant to be satirical/histrionic, so I put together a whole background on Santa, including his inventing trade to feed on greed and betrayal, then inventing coins (money) to get out of a debt by paying simply with shells, backing every mayor war to kidnap people for his plans and complex, inventing all kind of weapons and distributing them to the world to create greater strife. And then, of course, being the owner of every mean super-company, from MS to Hasbro and Coke, designing Barbie to make it an impossible model all girls will try to emulate, and the whole “be nice or you will be punished!†(another impossible). Also, reinventing his image through the Coke commercials as a nice old man in red (just check Wikipedia and it flows naturally).
The game was about Santa’s archi-enemy, Chuck Norris, sending a team of heroes to infiltrate his polar base to retrieve evidence of his wrong-doings to expose the fat bastard. It plays as a dungeon, basically, being a massive manufacturing complex with guards (penguins with rifles, angry elves, zombie cats… whatever was funny at the moment). Do not hesitate to include anthropomorphic animals, undercover CIA agents (Agent Snow White, google “hot elf†images), etc.
Good for more than a few laughs if you can keep the bizarre and fun topic going.
Heck with it, I’m posting another before I forget it. I don’t care if it’s “in competition” or not, I just find it an amusing idea for a story!
Title: I’m Dreaming of a Fright Christmas
A la David Sedaris’ “Santaland Diaries”, the characters are a group of people (supernaturals?) who have taken work in a department store’s Santa’s Village as elves. Their last customer on Christmas Eve is a child who strikes them as strange: wide, unblinking eyes and nervousness beyond the norm. She stops, staring, until her distracted parent scolds, “Now, remember: Santa’s always watching! Best behavior! Hurry along, he needs to make his rounds!”
As the staff stay late on Christmas Eve to break down Santa’s Village, they suddenly find things have turned surreal as they exhibit odd (or simply different) powers: one finds eggs that contain weapons, magic or other surprises; another can interact with ghosts; a third finds herself able to command Christmas (or other) trees; one is even suddenly clad in armor and weapons decorated with the national flag. The child appears before them, staring eyes now terrified and pleading: Save me from Santa!
The child is a powerful psychic, natural mage, etc. Asleep, her powers have reached out to those she saw as her last chance to save her from the man she’s told monitors her 24/7 and she’s trapped them in her nightmare. Turning them into other holidays (Easter, Halloween, Arbor Day, Independence Day, etc.), she’s imbued them with her childish understanding of them and made the staff into her army. They must fight/sneak/cajole their way through a dreamscape North Pole until they face a Santa as melodramatically villainous as any Disney villain.
Kris “Santa†Sinterklaas is many things. Among them is an international criminal mastermind, kept alive on a life-extending alchemical mixture. For centuries he has schemed to bring the world under his jolly boots of doom, earning the trust and admiration of people the world over so that none would suspect until it was too late.
Through AURORA (Arctic United Resistance Of Recognized Authority), he sends his elves out into the world to carry out his means of achieving and maintain the finance of his operation, namely counterfeiting of patented and trademarked material.
As special agents of the World Intellectual Property Organization, charters under top-secret provisions of the Berne Convention, you have been tasked with bringing down Sinterklaas’s elven crime ring before he can amass enough of a fortune through his knockoff goods that he can buy sufficient influence to guide United States policy and with it the reluctant cooperation of the rest of the world.
The players will encounter Santa’s minions in a transport hub in a small town in Germany, an undersea logistics center in the ruins of Atlantis, a candy cane-styled space station for distribution of production materiel, and a bleeding-edge (especially for the PCs!) high-tech factory in the jungles of South America before following the trail to Santa’s lair in Egypt. What, you think he’d be in a place as obvious as the North Pole?
“Do you expect us to talk?â€
“No, Agent Krampus. I expect you to jingle all the way… to Hell!â€
http://santaslittlesecretservice.org/ ‘Nuff said!
Let’s keep these good ideas coming, readers! Nothing like some awesome RPG adventure ideas being shared to get gamers into the holiday spirit! 🙂
@mcmanlypants – The contest rules clearly state one entry per person, so only your first post will count. So what? Share your other ideas anyhow! They may not be eligible for the prize, but others might be inspired by them nonetheless.
After years of shrinking market share, Santa’s got a problem. If more kids don’t believe, his magic will fade. If his magic fades, he will wither away like so many liches of ages past. While his brethren were being brought to slow rotting ends with science and evolution, Santanagua devised the ultimate plot to last through the holidays. What better place to preserve a corpse than the arctic; secluded, cold, and right on top of a Ley line nexus. It was the perfect place for a modern eternal to call home.
But things are changing. In this market-saturated holiday that he helped to create, parents don’t tell their children about Santa. The kids that do believe lose faith much earlier than in generations past. All the while, the Naughty List has been steadily growing in respect to the Nice List for decades. What’s Santanagua to do?
After centuries of biding his time in the north, only one option remains. Santa Claus is coming to town to take a Yule log to the heads of past Naughty List offenders. When word spreads that naughtiness requires a price, people will harken back to the days of folk tales and tell their children of the man that rewards the nice and punishes the naughty!
—
In the sleepy town of Wentzville, two bodies have been found; onehung from a lamp post with tinsel, the other beaten with a Yule log. Both had a paper found clutched in their hand, which read, “NAUGHTY”.
I did some historical research a bit twisted but I hope you enjoy.
Santa has become so powerful that the Catholic Church has decided offer him Living Sainthood as long as he testifies he is a Christan and shows his allegiance to Christ. . They fear that society has decided to worship Santa more than Christ and by showing the world Santa bowing before the Pope and Christ, the church will regain creditability.
Archangels were sent to the north pole to negotiate the terms. They have not returned with Santa. The adventures a group of Epic level Templars who are sent to the North Pole to find the archanglels and escort them and Santa back to Rome.
What they do not know is Santa is really Odin seeking revenge against the religion that massacred his followers. His goal is to overthrow the church with his generosity, persuasion and sabotage. The Archangels are imprisoned in Midgard and his loyal children are currently disguised as them.
Santa will not expose himself as Odin unless it is absolutely necessary. Odin’s plan is to show the world the church uses force and does not practice what they preach. if he is escorted back to Rome. Thor will attempt to destroy the Catholic Church at Vatican city but Loki will appear is Christ. Will the skill and faith the templars have be enough to defeat Odin or will they side with him?
The evil Santa Claus uses his toy distribution operation to allow him to pass unmolested throughout the world’s kingdoms. In reality he has been supplying both sides of an armed conflict with weapons!
The PCs, having been dragged into the conflict, notice that a shipment of weapons bear the same insignia as those on the presents!
As they investigate the PCs discover that Santa had planned on letting the two sides fight until exhaustion and would then sweep in with his army of elves and beasts to conquer both lands!
The PCs must stop him and will ultimately confront him in his workshop fortress! However, Santa will be a load-bearing boss and his defeat will cause the workshop to start to sink into the icy waters beneath the north pole forcing the PCs to flee to the surface.