The Naughty List is a holiday one-shot 5e Game Masters can run cold: a pulpy urban hunt for two or three players at levels 2 and 3, built for one evening of two to three hours with zero prep. In the harbor city of Gildenhaven, the worst people vanish every midwinter, and the whole city has learned to be grateful. Something is keeping a list, and tonight your table is on it. The chase runs up the chimneys, across snow-slick rooftops, and down into a toy workshop where the missing are sorted, judged, and kept. Where Book One is a quiet mystery, this is the quartet’s fast book, a hunt with a villain who keeps a moral ledger and a party that gets graded on how it behaves. It is Book Two of Krampus: A Yuletide Quartet, and it stands entirely on its own.
A Holiday One-Shot 5e Table Can Chase Across the Rooftops
Gildenhaven is prosperous, proud, and quietly missing its cruelest citizens, one a night, lifted off the rooftops by a thing nobody will name aloud. The city has decided not to ask questions, because the people who disappear are the ones nobody liked. Your table takes the job of finding out what is doing the taking, and the hunt climbs to the roofs, drops through a network of chimneys, and ends in a workshop lair.
That geography is the book’s quiet advantage. Most adventures send a party sideways through rooms. This one sends them up, down, and across, so the battle maps feel different from scene to scene, and the chase has a physical shape the players can describe to each other.
The Coal-or-Candle Tracker
A moral scoreboard the whole table can feel
The mechanic that defines the book is the Coal-or-Candle tracker. It watches how your players treat the people they find along the way. Show mercy and the city reads the party as allies. Cut corners and it marks them as prey. The same night turns colder or warmer around what the table actually does, so the villain’s list is not a plot device. It is a mirror.
A villain with a ledger
At the top of the hunt stands the Sackman, a tall and courtly Krampus in the tatters of a merchant’s coat. He was a guardian the city hired, fed, and then forgot, until his ledger could no longer tell hunger from justice. Players understand him even as they hunt him, which is the whole design. The party leaves with the Sack of the List, a reward item that can swallow a shrunken foe whole, and with the middle link of a warming black-iron chain.
How a Game Master Runs the Hunt
Six ways in, zero homework
The adventure opens with six hooks, so a group that has never heard of Gildenhaven can still arrive with a reason to care. Pick the one that suits your table, read the opening, hand over the ready-made characters, and the night starts moving. There is no prep reading beyond the tracker, and the book is organized so the scene you need is the page you are already on.
A What If guide for the players who go sideways
Chases fall apart when a player does something the author did not expect. The What If contingency guide is there for that moment, so a party that wanders off the intended line has somewhere to land. You adjust, keep the pace up, and the tracker still tells you what the city thinks of them.
Why the city matters
Gildenhaven is not a backdrop. The people the party meets are the ones whose treatment moves the tracker, so every encounter with a stranger carries weight and becomes a chance to be a candle or a coal. Tables that like to roleplay get plenty to chew on, and tables that prefer to fight still feel the city reacting in the margins, which keeps both kinds of player invested in the same scene.
Three Endings and a Fight Built for a Small Party
The finale offers three fully written endings, each rewarded and none declared correct. The boss is tuned for two or three heroes and never one-shots a character, so a duo with no healer can finish the night without the table feeling cheated. Combat appears in every act, and because the chase keeps momentum high, the fights read as part of the pursuit rather than interruptions to it.
Plan on a session of two to three hours. A group that commits to the hunt lands near two. A table that lingers over the Coal-or-Candle choices and the city’s reactions will use the full three.
What to Know Before You Run It
Every adventure has costs, and this one has a few worth naming up front. The tracker is one more thing for the Game Master to watch, so read it before the session rather than during. The tone is darker than the cheerful season suggests, because the premise is that cruel people are being taken, and the book is built to make players question that. A table that wants a heist with a plan will find this closer to a chase with consequences. And a group that prefers a slow, atmospheric mystery will be happier starting with The First Frost.
Why This Holiday One-Shot 5e Plays Differently From the Season’s Usual Fare
Most seasonal adventures lean on a joke: a stolen sleigh, a feud between elves, a heist with a bow on top. The Naughty List takes the season’s own moral machinery, the idea that someone is watching and keeping a list, and turns it into the engine of the game. Your players are not told to be good. They are shown, scene by scene, what the city does with kindness and what it does with cruelty, and they decide for themselves.
The book also treats every path as legitimate. Putting the Sackman down is a valid ending and so is showing him mercy, and neither one is the “right” answer your table must discover. That parity is deliberate across the whole quartet, and it makes the post-game conversation better than most one-shots manage.
What’s Included
The book is built to the fifth-edition System Reference Document, so it drops into any 5e game. Inside you get a complete rooftop hunt that descends through a chimney network to a toy-workshop lair, the Coal-or-Candle tracker, original creatures with full stat blocks, and four ready-made characters at levels 2 and 3. There are six maps, an area reference map plus five battle maps in a hand-inked old-woodcut style, along with original pen-and-ink art throughout. Six opening hooks, a What If contingency guide, three endings, and a Yuletide Quartet appendix finish the package.
Perfect For
- Game Masters who want a fast, pulpy evening without the prep grind.
- Small tables of two or three that like a good chase and a moral gray zone.
- Groups who enjoy a monster with a grudge and a villain they can argue about afterward.
- Players who like vertical maps and scenes that change shape from room to room.
- Anyone running a December game night who wants something darker than a comedy romp.
Part of Krampus: A Yuletide Quartet
The Naughty List is the Present of the four-night series. The First Frost opens the saga with a melancholy mountain mystery, The Silence Yet to Come follows with a winter ghost story, and The Gnashing Court closes at a throne. Play them in any order, or collect all four in the Krampus: A Yuletide Quartet bundle. Every title belongs to the Ready Adventure Series: complete one-shots for small tables and a single evening. For another seasonal option with rooftops and a plan, try the festive heist Yule Be Sorry.
Bring the Holiday One-Shot 5e Hunt to Your Table
Open the book, read the first block aloud, and let your players learn that the city’s gratitude has a price. Whether they put the Sackman down, show him mercy, or walk away with the sack, they will have spent an evening making choices that a tracker quietly kept score of. Grab your copy of The Naughty List, gather two or three friends, and find out which side of the list you land on.
Climb to the rooftops, open the sack, and find out whose name is on the list in the holiday one-shot 5e hunt where the city keeps score.
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