Howdy, Farmhands!
During the last couple months of 2025, Prismatic Wasteland's Discord Server, the Prismatic Waystation, hosted an event wherein the authors and bloggers present participated in creating single hexes of a fantastical North Pole themed around the classic claymation Christmas specials from Rankin and Bass. The final product had 60 total hexes containing monsters, dungeons, NPCs, and references to judeo-christian mythology.
I participated with my own hex, which was then pieced together by the project operators to create a cohesive map. Seeing the final product and knowing there was not enough time left in the Christmas season for 2025 for me to properly run it, I promised myself that I would run it for my friends the following year. As of this writing, It is officially the Christmas season - (Fuck, you. November counts. I'm tired of saying it doesn't.) - and I have assembled five of my bravest Warriors to play through it, using Cairn. We will be playing every Tuesday for three to four hours from the first week of November until the Tuesday before Christmas Eve. The pitch I gave them was as follows - they would be playing normal folk from the modern day who had found themselves mysteriously isekai'd into the North Pole, and above anything else, their goal was to find a way back home.
This blog post will cover the events of the Session Zero, held November 3rd, as well as write-up the conversion process that I performed in taking these disparate hexes and turning them into notes that I could use to actually run the thing. I won't be offended if you jump to the relevant section and ignore the other. I'm not your mom.
Section 1: Prep
As my players do not regularly read blogs, Nor do they have significant experience in a hex crawl. This will be an interesting experience for everyone involved.
I have run hex crawls before. They've been of the "Move into a blank hex and Generate what's there" variety, so playing with a pre-written hex map is a novelty to me. On the other side of the table, two of my five players were in those previous hex-crawls, a third has played in a hexcrawl, but not for some years, and the remaining two have played a Dungeon and Dragon once or twice, but never something like this. None of them regularly read blogs except for when I link mine with a silly enough picture as the thumbnail (which is my excuse for the thumbnails, thank you very much.) Because of this difference in experience, and the general disorganization in the project's writing process, I have needed to do some, shall we say, editorial work before we start play.
The problem with getting 30 to 40 bloggers to work on a project with the direction being "Make it like the Rankin bass Christmas specials" is the distinct lack of cohesion in both tone and organization. Some hexes contain sub-hexes, making them their own hex crawls within a single point on the original map. Others wrote Adventure sites without the additional details needed for me to run each hex identically, such as encounter or weather tables. A few were textually meant to be read as jokes, more "blog shaped objects" than actual gameable content. Some hexes I have had to rewrite entirely as they are too dark or contain content that my players have requested we not touch upon. As much as I wish I could say I ran this as written, the project was a bunch of friends slapping together a bunch of ideas and then combining them all into a single map without a second pass.
Wayspell wrote his hex for His Majesty the Worm, for pete's sake. Who does that?
My job in preparing the map for this game is to allow the hexes to exist more or less as they were intended while expanding them to increase cohesion and replacing content that would make my players uncomfortable and ruin their fun. Should be simple, right? Right?
Step 1: Read every hex. Read them again. A third time. There's 47 hexes with content in them, and while I can't memorize all of them, I need to be able to have a vague understanding of the big tentpole experiences within them. When one hex makes a big declaration about the setting, I should note it down and think of how that truth will change the content in another hex.
One hex introduces a roaming encounter, which requires a roll each day to determine the location of. I COULD have waited until they players reached that hex to start caring, OR I could make it a daily procedure. Another hex introduces a magical train with stops in specific hexes. Those hexes were written without knowing this train would have a station in them. I marked those stops on a map for me to add that point of interest to the notes of that hex. Red-heads in one hex are explicitly werefoxes. Now every Red-head has a secret. Coal is declared to be a social taboo as it relates to sin and "naughtiness." Suddenly, any reference to coal takes on deeper meaning. These inferences alter a lot of other content, deepening their meaning without me having to re-write a thing.
Step 2: Fill in Gaps. This is primarily an organizational issue, as some hexes are missing encounter tables, structured lists of NPCs, or other things I would need to run the game smoothly. This isn't a fault of the author; these hexes were written mostly in isolation and stitched together after the fact. (Some actually have TOO MUCH information that i've had to trim down.) The format I've landed on is as follows-
- Entering this Hex: Immediate location descriptions, sights, sounds, smells. Line of sight data for what's noticable in surrounding hexes.
- Point of Interest summary. The title of upcoming sub-paragraphs, with a one line description to quickly refresh myself before we start play in the hex proper.
- Tables or Mechanics unique to the Hex: I have a basic weather table to use in every hex that doesn't include a bespoke one- this is where I'll place that so I can immediately adjust my procedure to make use of it. One hex has a unique travel mechanic that needs to be known before I even start resolving moving into said hex. Displaying this prominently is important.
- The POI sub-headings. Usually organized in order of how immediate players were engage with them, Hidden points are lower on the list. If the Points are isolated or meant to be run as seperate from the larger hex, I will put specific NPC's statblocks within the sub-headings instead of a seperate NPC section.
- That Seperate NPC Section. I've organized them to include physical data and names first, a paragraph of their story and aims, followed by three bullet points summarizing their Wants, Fears, and Mannerisms in as few words as possible for proper quick skimming.
- And finally, Encounter Tables. It might feel like this should go somewhere closer to the start of the pages, but while I will require this table often, it isn't an IMMEDIATE need to resolve things. When an encounter is triggered, I can flip to it, roll, and resolve it in the moment. The data at the start of the section is more important to consistently have in mind while the party is in the hex, I can erase the encounter table from my memory until I need it again. Cognitive load is an important consideration.
Taking the words as written and fitting them into this format without losing anything is a lot of copy-pasting. I feel bad for piecemealing the authors work in this manner, but if I tried to run each hex exactly as written, it would take forever to get my bearings and my players would suffer as a result.
This is also where I take the inferences from step 1 and complete them. For example, there's 5 seperate winter wizards based on the same character from the Rankin Bass Films, half of which are sealed away in some manner. Great news- they are now members of a previous ruling class defeated by Santa and his friends, and preventing the return of them is a key concern for basically every faction. The multiple references to a Lord or King in red isn't just santa anymore, but the members of Santa's party from that grand adventure to save the North Pole from the Wizards in Blue. And because each instance of a Lord in Red was a different flavor of despot, seperating them into 3 or 4 underlings, scheming beneath Santa's nose allows me to clarify Santa's character without juggling six different kinds of atrocity he's supposed to be doing.
Basically in the act of melding all of these confident declarations of truth, I have to iron out something in one hex, while sprinkling it's content across other hexes so it's more cohesive. The end result will only MOSTLY play as written, and some authors are recieving more disrespect than others. (Sorry folks, it's nothing personal)
Step 3: Make it Pretty. I'm printing these pages out to hold in a physical binder, despite the game being held digitally. This is something I like to do with all of my big campaigns; having the actual paper to manipulate makes it easier for me to quickly find data when I need it, make notes, or slide in extra pages as the game goes on. It also doubles as a record of games I've run, and lets me reuse prep between different tables. For this game, I want each hex to sit as a two page spread (or two spreads of 4 pages if the hex is particularly large and involved). Editing the text to fit in that space while still being readable means I have to get funky with the formatting. Sometimes I have to cut an entire paragraph down to a single sentence so the data is accessible without ballooning the page count.
For comparison, here is the original hex for 0703 Sleeping Slope, and below is a screenshot of a draft of my notes for it. The core is still there, but a lot has been shifted or removed to fit within my constraints. The final print moved the table to the end and added some detail back in, since I had the space for a few more sentences.
Optional Step: Make it into a Dungeon. Somehow, most of these hexes don't include any actual Dungeons. Adventure sites abound, to be sure, but there's only a handful of square by square, room by room, actual-factual CRAWLING to be had. In and around the above 3 steps, I have found myself stopping, reading a section, and thinking to myself, "Oh this needs a map." Watabou's generator has been a godsend for this, though I'll probably end up hand drawing some stuff during play when I find something that my players want to treat as tactical space puzzle. Unlike the hexes, I'm placing the dungeon maps at the back of the book, in the same general order as the hexes they appear in. Dungeon crawling usually is a solitary affair, and I shouldn't need to refer back to their original hex until they LEAVE said location.
And that's It. "What, no Monsters or Treasures?" I hear you ask, but I'm a Just Use Bears kind of dm. Critical damage effects I'll figure out if and when I roll a certain monster, and Relics... well...
I've kind of been wanting to run a Christmas game for A While. Years, to be honest. I've also occasionaly been bit with the Data Entry Autism Fixation. Collecting lists from Reddit and various 5e homebrewed Magic items, I've produced (Players in my game, don't click on this) an automated method to generate loot, treasure, redwall-worthy meal descriptions of holiday feasts and so on. I'll be making use of this for anything I don't otherwise have prepared. Maybe I'll need to make an analog printable for future sessions after perchance succumbs to it's ai fueled craze, but for now, this works for me.
Section 2: Session Zero
For private games, I like to record the sessions. It gives me a copy of the event to refer to in between sessions for things I inevitably forget, while also doubling as my own personal podcast for later. I do like to hear myself talk, after all. These are not designed to be content, so the recordings are private and not distributed to anyone who wasn't a player in said game. But I'm also an extra little fuck, so I had to make the setup pretty, with an animated background and the discord chat displayed and animated discord avatars to show who's talking, etc etc.
Neb (they/them), playing Gringle Glass "Grin" the Grimalkin (he/him, 22) STR 13 DEX 16 WIL 13 HP 3. His starting kit will contain a Curved Knife (d6), Hex Stone, Pouch of Catnip, Spangle, Blackberry Pie, and Baubles. Grin is an instagrammer, urban explorer, thrifter, and ebay flipper, taking advantage of a gap year in their education to do all of the above stuff while donating most of their income to cats. When asked if Grin was intended to be transmogrified into a cat person or was just a human wearing a cat themed fit, Neb laughed and said they were human, but in a red and white striped Kigurumi, which is perfectly fine but for the record, I would have let them be a furry if they wanted. I would be hypocritical not to. He's also very short, apparently.
- Fascist Local Governments (Only if it's not a parody of the current American government and if the party can kill them)
- Non-consensual Body Horror and Gore (Implication preferred, No Eye Stuff, No Dental Stuff, No description of viscera or exposed musclature, effects on the PCs should be reversible if they are not killed outright)
- Cloning a Slave Race, and the depersonhood thereof (Only if it's not a reference to a real world culture and, again, if the party can kill the slaver)
- Giant Spiders (No, please no.) Ok, but giant insects in general? (Only if they're googly-eyed cartoon characters) I can do that, no problem.
- Cult Stuff/Real World Religions treated as Fictional/Canonically White Jesus and he's Real in this setting (Jesus is fine if he's not blonde haired and blue eyed, The Christian God is fine as part of a larger pantheon even though that's blasphemous, the Evangelical folks who want to convert you are ok as long as the party can kill them if they step out of line) Aight.
- Hivemind Goo that Melts you ("That would fix me" - Sono 2026)
- Government Conspiracies/Experimenting on People (As long as it's not on Children specifically)
- Trench Warfare (Gadda, I thought this hexcrawl was about Christmas) Answer the damn question (Fine I guess?) Ok thank you.
