The Pot at the End: A St Patrick’s Day D&D 5e One-Shot That Runs Itself

The Pot at the End is a complete St Patrick’s Day D&D 5e one-shot adventure that delivers a full evening of chaos, comedy, and genuine stakes in a single 2.5-3 hour session — with zero prep required. If you’ve ever wanted to run a holiday-themed D&D session for your small group but couldn’t find anything designed for fewer than four players, this is the adventure you’ve been looking for. Built specifically for 2-3 players with pre-generated characters, scaling notes, seven battle maps, and a boss encounter that offers three completely different victory paths, The Pot at the End is ready to run the moment you open it. Whether you’re a busy DM looking for a festive one-shot, a couple who plays D&D together, or a small group that’s tired of rebalancing content designed for bigger tables, this adventure was built for you.

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A Rainbow Crashes Into a Village Festival — And Your Players Have to Clean It Up

The setup is simple and immediately compelling. The village of Cloverfield is celebrating its annual Spring Blossom Festival when a well-meaning leprechaun bridge-keeper named Finnegan O’Dew accidentally fires a solid rainbow beam directly into the town square. A massive iron cauldron of gold crashes into the cobblestones. Clurichauns — foul-tempered, two-foot-tall fey brawlers — come sliding down the rainbow like a ramp, shillelaghs swinging. The festival descends into pandemonium.

Your players don’t get recruited. They don’t receive a quest from a mysterious stranger. They’re just there when it happens, and somebody has to deal with it. That immediacy is what makes the adventure work. There’s no twenty-minute hook to get the party invested — the hook is a rainbow exploding into the town square while drunk fey creatures start a bar fight with an entire village.

Four Acts of Escalating Chaos

The adventure moves through four distinct acts, each with a different flavour and pace. Act 1 throws your players into the festival disaster — combat with clurichauns, civilians to protect, and a path through the wreckage to reach the rainbow bridge. Act 2 takes them across the bridge itself, fighting encounters at vertigo-inducing height with no railings and forced movement mechanics. Act 3 is a dungeon-lite climb through a hijacked control tower in the Feywild, culminating in a confrontation with Chieftain Raucous Redthorn. And Act 4 is a collapsing bridge escape that will have your table holding their breath.

The pacing is deliberate. Each act runs 30-50 minutes, the tone shifts from disaster movie to road movie to dungeon crawl to action climax, and the adventure never asks the DM to improvise transitions. Everything connects naturally, and the momentum never drops.

Three Ways to Beat the Boss in This St Patrick’s Day D&D Adventure

The boss encounter with Chieftain Raucous Redthorn is where this adventure separates itself from standard one-shots. Raucous is a nearly three-foot-tall clurichaun chieftain with a magical shillelagh, a battered top hat, and a fey compulsion that means he literally cannot refuse a direct challenge. Your players can defeat him three different ways.

They can fight him — a legitimate combat encounter with elite guards, environmental hazards, and a rage mechanic that triggers when he drops below half health. They can challenge him to a drinking contest — a Constitution save progression from DC 10 to DC 18 with cheating mechanics and advantage for the first three rounds. Or they can challenge him to any contest of their choosing — arm wrestling, riddles, a dance-off, an insult battle. Whatever your players dream up, the adventure has a resolution framework for it.

This design philosophy means that every group gets the boss encounter they want. Combat-focused tables get a proper fight. Social players get a memorable scene. Creative groups get to invent something nobody wrote down. The adventure supports all three paths equally, with complete mechanics for each.

Designed for Small Groups — 7 Battle Maps and Full Scaling Notes

Every encounter in The Pot at the End includes specific scaling for 2 players and 3 players. This isn’t a suggestion to “remove a few enemies” — each encounter lists exact creature counts, adjusted hit points where relevant, and tactical notes for how the fight plays differently with fewer characters. The adventure was designed for small tables from the ground up, not scaled down from a larger format.

The book includes seven detailed battle maps covering every major location: the Cloverfield Town Square with its festival wreckage and gold-scatter crater, the Rainbow Bridge as a linear combat strip with encounter zones and a terrifying bottleneck, the Feywild Clearing hub connecting the tower and side quest, all three floors of Finnegan’s Control Tower (ground floor workshop, second floor gambling den, and the top floor boss room with rainbow machinery), and the Clover Field for the optional side quest encounter.

Each map follows the Anvil & Ink cartography standard — black and white pen-and-ink with 5-foot grid overlay, room labels, furniture details, and tactical notation showing cover positions, hazard zones, and enemy starting positions. They’re designed for use as DM reference and as inspiration for sketching your own battle maps at the table.

The Optional Side Quest That Players Will Remember

Between the bridge crossing and the tower assault, players can explore a vast field of four-leaf clovers in the Feywild. At its center sits the Luck Eater — an original creature that feeds on probability itself. It doesn’t fight. It makes deals. Trade a moment of harmless misfortune for a Luck of the Fey token that lets you reroll any d20 once. The misfortune table is pure comedy — magical hiccups that produce green smoke, a fey bird that lands on your head and refuses to leave, or suddenly and vividly remembering the most embarrassing moment of your life mid-conversation.

The tokens become genuinely valuable during the Act 4 bridge collapse, turning a tense escape into a nail-biting sequence where players agonize over the perfect moment to spend their luck. It’s a fifteen-minute detour that pays off beautifully, and tables that skip it will wish they hadn’t.

What’s Inside The Pot at the End

The complete adventure includes a four-act storyline with an optional Feywild side quest, running 2.5-3 hours total. Seven battle maps cover every encounter location from the festival square to the boss room. Full stat blocks are provided for every creature — clurichauns, clurichaun elite guards, Chieftain Raucous Redthorn, redcap, sprites, pixies, and the original Luck Eater. Four pre-generated characters come with complete backstories, personality guides, voice notes, party dynamic suggestions, and tactical combat advice — a dwarf fighter, a satyr bard, a human cleric, and a goblin ranger with Favoured Enemy: Fey. Player handouts include a printable Luck of the Fey token card and a campaign continuation letter. Scaling notes throughout the adventure adjust every encounter for 2 or 3 players without requiring any DM improvisation.

Perfect For Your Table

Small groups and couples who can never get a full party together will find an adventure that doesn’t feel like a compromise. Every encounter was built for 2-3 players first.

Busy DMs with no prep time can grab this book and run it the same evening. Pre-generated characters, complete stat blocks, detailed maps, and comprehensive “what if” sections mean you open the book and go.

Holiday session planners looking for St Patrick’s Day themed D&D content will find something that goes far beyond a reskinned dungeon crawl. The Irish folklore inspiration runs through every element — clurichauns, leprechauns, four-leaf clovers, pots of gold, rainbow bridges, and a drinking contest with a fey chieftain.

New players and first-time groups get pre-generated characters with built-in personality hooks and tactical advice that teaches them how to play their role without reading a handbook.

Experienced tables wanting something fresh will find genuine moral complexity, a boss with three victory paths, and an “unsung heroes” ending where nobody throws you a parade for saving the town.

Part of the Ready Adventure Series

The Pot at the End joins the Ready Adventure Series from Anvil & Ink Publishing — a growing collection of complete one-shot adventures designed specifically for small groups. Every adventure in the series runs in a single session, requires zero prep, includes pre-generated characters, and features the moral complexity and multiple solution paths that define the Anvil & Ink approach. Other titles include The Stolen Festival Bell, The Sinking Tower of Hours, The Colossus Autopsy, The Winter Ball Heist, The Merchant’s Vault, The Crimson Ceremony, and The Bandit’s Keep.

St Patrick’s Day D&D 5e one-shot — Zero Prep, Maximum Adventure

The Pot at the End delivers everything a DM needs for a memorable St Patrick’s Day session in a single book. A rainbow crashes into a festival. Drunk fey creatures wreak havoc. Your players cross a bridge into another world, storm a hijacked tower, and race across a collapsing rainbow while the Feywild falls apart behind them. They land in a pot of gold with exactly one coin left. Nobody says thank you. And they’ll be talking about the drinking contest for years. Grab the book, light the candles, roll for initiative.

The Pot at the End — a complete St Patrick’s Day D&D 5e one-shot for 2-3 players that proves the best adventures come in small packages and end with an empty pot.