This adventure is about heirs, betrayal, prophecy, and murder, which in essence are the drivers of history. Unlike most adventures, the story is grimy, visceral, and reveals the impact of jealousy. This version is a total conversion of my original Pathfinder Second Edition and OSRIC releases, modified and updated play for play with Decimation – Kingdoms and Empires as an RPG adventure.

On the pages that follow, you’ll find a story, characters, and conflict along with detailed information about how to handle encounters, how enemies think, act, and decide their next action. I’ll create non-player characters for you that are memorable with their own personality and in some cases, deceitful agendas. I include tips on how to handle all sorts of common player behavior and psychology at the table to ensure everyone has fun.

The adventure’s design allows the player(s) to dictate the play style the session takes while also serving as an accessible one-shot easily integrated into your campaign. In addition to this, the adventure taps into common ideas that even a first-time player can understand with no prior gaming knowledge (Christmas, cold winters, abductions, family, mystery, murder, and unquestionable evil with a big reputation) which will prompt them to action without understanding the intricacies of the rules.

As a one-shot with simple themes unbound to any specific setting, this adventure helps you recruit inexperienced players to your table or experienced players to try something different from the standard adventure blueprint.

Once you have all your player(s) and their characters assembled, read the next section, Prologue: A Sprig of Holly to your players. This sets the scene, handles moving the players to the Lake Unterfallen region.

Have fun!

T. Elliot Cannon – July 2023