Just gotta gush here;

I'm DMing my first oneshot next Friday and I am SO excited and SO scared! It's for my fellow grad students in the lab, including one newbie who has never played any TTRPG before, so I'm. Very Nervous about that. But she requested a Christmas theme, so even though I don't care for the holiday I had Ideas and I'm just.

Having SO much fun trying to balance encounters around a low-level, inexperienced party, and making battlemaps, and instead of minis we have candy instead (I've got a surprise Big Chocolate Santa to destroy if they decided to go for a boss fight), and loot tables for Santa's Workshop (with cheeky references like a Ring of Invisibility addressed to one Frodo), and integrating backstories into this as best I can, and figuring out how I'll vaguely keep things on track, and preparing some music (including old favorite Wrath of the Lich King and Narnia tracks) and JUST!!!

WOW this is so much fun but so nerve-wracking!

Santa's elves unionized, so he sacked them and replaced them with gingerbread men constructs... which attracted mimics.

Seeing the cookie-carnage, Santa fled with his bare-minimum number of reindeer, abandoning the workshop a week-ish before Fantasy Christmas.

A dragon, finding this wealth of gold and toys unclaimed, decided to move in with her goblin entourage, and obviously everyone thinks she ate Santa. The dragon, meanwhile, is quite happy descending into her deep winter slumber knowing her hatchling has a toy-hoard to keep it occupied. And as for the goblins, they have gotten in touch with their artistic side and are throwing themselves into making toys.

Also the mimics are all very small toys and keep eating goblins that are out of sight. And really want to eat that baby dragon.

So that's what three adventurers are going to walk into after braving the blizzard to 'save Christmas'. What happens next? Up to them!