Adventure Calendar 2025 5: Dick Whittington

Adventure Calendar 2025

5: Dick Whittington And His Cat

Dick Whittington And His Cat is and odd one because Richard Whittington was a real person, a merchant who became Lord Mayor of London. But it wasn’t a rags to riches story and didn’t involve using his cat to solve a rat problem and make a fortune as a result.

The story starts our far less fantastical than the likes of Jack And The Beanstalk, but it gets mixed with Puss In Boots at some point too.

The Streets Are Paved With Gold

The adventurers hear of a city where they could really strike it rich. A gold rush boom town or the like. (Cue The Simpsons joke.) What will they actually find when they get there? And will they help any other poor souls drawn in by the same stories?

Starfleet Academy

Starfleet Academy, January 15, very teen drama character intros, as is only right and proper.

Ash, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

Ash, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town

Sixteen years late for a The Watch House Christmas special but oh well

Adventure Calendar 2025 4: Jack Tales

Adventure Calendar 2025

4: Jack Tales

Jack is an archetypal tricky everyman found in the UK and also in Appalachian folklore. An underdog getting into and out of trouble with his wits and trickery, having run-ins with authority and the supernatural.

He’s basically a player character.

Jack And The Beanstalk has a young naïve example, so feels like a separate thing.

Fables had Jack being the same guy (as it did with the romantic foil Prince IIRC) getting a spinoff series where he actively spread stories to empower himself, with inevitably mixed results.

There’s also a Samurai Jack episode called Jack Tales as a reference but he isn’t the same storied Jack, it’s just a nickname and his usual method of solving problems is more direct in an equally player character way.

Jack And The Keep On The Borderlands

How do PCs deal with an archetypal PC? A band of adventurers follow rumours to a dungeon and find it’s already been cleaned out. Someone already rescued that dragon from that princess. They start to hear tell of a legendary hero going around doing the kind of stuff they should be doing. When they finally meet this guy, whether he’s a thief blessed with some wits and a lot of luck or a literally archetypal adventurer and the exemplar of the role they play in the world, will they ally with him or try to get him out of their way?

Adventure Calendar 2025 3: Jack And The Beanstalk

Adventure Calendar 2025

3: Jack And The Beanstalk

Chosen because it’s the local big panto this year, Jack And The Beanstalk is the one where a poor boy is talked into selling the family’s cow for some magic beans, but they’re real magic beans so that’s okay, and they grow a giant beanstalk that could provide enough beans to be the basis of a revived farming business but instead he climbs it all the way to a castle above the clouds where he robs the giant owner, escapes back down and cuts the beanstalk down so the giant falls and he can keep the loot, including a talking harp.

It sounds really weird when laid out like that..

It’s adjacent to the various Jack stories about an underdog trickster type, this Jack does win with a bit of trickery but a lot of luck.

Castles in the sky are a classic fantasy motif, and magic items like fast-growing vines and animated musical instruments as well.

What I most wonder is who just sold him a perfectly good magic bean?

The Magic Merchants

Disguised godlike types giving gifts to the kind and punishments to the guilty? Or just getting by on the barter economy?

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come trailer

Talk and stills at People, via Bloody Disgusting

How to follow such a sharp and self-contained ending? Expanding the threat to Samara Weaving’s Grace, bringing in some genre royalty - David Cronenberg, Elijah Wood and Sarah Michelle Gellar as a Big Bad! - and Kathryn Newton as a sidekick with Final Girl cred of her own. Will going big work? Looks fun!

Forks Out

Forks Out, a Beignet Blanc Mystery on Sesame Street

V5: Stolen 1.07

Vampire: The Masquerade

Stolen

1.07

Lessons

Beck

Maebh

Reverend Beck finds Maebh a few nights later, directed by Antha, to inquire about other possible suppliers of antiquarian books and other artefacts. She agrees to ask around in return for a favour owed, and meet him at his church after a service.

That night’s service is private for Kindred and guests, from the Book of Nod itself. He speaks on Lilith’s offer of knowledge and power, the warning that “I do not know what the Awakening will do for you, for you are truly Cursed by your Father. You could die. You could be forever changed.” And that Caine took that step bravely. And next that he entered a city and mortals came to him seeking power in turn, showing themselves more corrupt than he. And that he returned to solitude and sorrow, reason to gather.

Adventure Calendar 2025 2: Cinderella

Adventure Calendar 2025

2: Cinderella

The lead Disney Princess, the story of Cinderella is also popular for pantomimes as it has a beautiful and somewhat feisty heroine, a villainous stepmother and ugly stepsisters, a fancy dress transformation suitable for a costume design showoff moment. No fight at the end but you can’t have everything.

The motif of finding the heroine through a lost shoe goes back as far as a Greek story told around the BCE/CE turnover, but Cinderella mostly codified in France with Charles Perrault in 1697, after an Italian version in 1634.

She generally only has so much agency and ends up needing a lot of help, though some versions give her a more active part. See Sapsorrow, the version dramatised in The Storyteller, where she escapes a terrible fate and makes a new one for herself with a magical disguise and some dress theft.

And a happily ever after

The lack of a fight at the end makes this less immediately adaptable to standard RPG shape, but the mix of magic, fancy royal events and attempts to subvert it lends itself to toying with it as the PCs are the ones trying to help or hinder something like this. See Witches Abroad for an example.

I’ve actually addressed Cinderella for Relics, with the Fairy Godmother’s Needle as a quietly powerful item that can remake clothing and allow someone creative to spin up beautiful fashions and flawless disguises. I also found that there’s no standard origin or name for the Fairy Godmother so I made her Aglaea of the Three Graces.

You Shall Go To The Ball

The PCs get a chance to attend the fanciest formal event of the season - whether they want to or not - and perhaps get mixed up in romances and schemes, and maybe see someone there who needs some PC shenanigans style help.

Adventure Calendar 2025 1: The Snow Queen

Adventure Calendar 2025

1: The Snow Queen

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen

As the example I cited in the intro post this seems as good a place to start as any. Scottish Ballet is doing it this year and The Ice Tower is currently in cinemas about an actress playing the queen and a fan getting caught up in the world.

It was also the starting point for Frozen though the result is pretty different - see early designs here that are more like a blue Cruella before making Elsa a beloved superhero.

The Snow Queen isn’t a traditional story, it was published in 1844 in a book literally called New Fairy Tales, but it’s familiar enough now.

It starts with the Devil creating a mirror that shows only the worst in everything and breaking it in an attempt to invade Heaven and that’s just the prologue. One of the splinters goes into a boy named Kai’s eye and this makes him a target for the Snow Queen, so his friend Gerda sets off to rescue him. On the way she has various side adventures and is helped and hindered by royalty, talking animals and the like.

It’s very much the kind of story you might get from playing Once Upon A Time. So for RPGs it would be an easy adaptation to kitchen-sinky fantasy, while the motley assortment of heroes trying to rescue someone from a sinister powerful type’s fortress is one of the most basic story outlines we could take.

The Devil’s mirror could be a plot hook all on its own - I could drop it into Relics or some World Of Darkness games with ease.

Cold-tinted glasses

A pair of antique spectacles made with glass from the Devil’s mirror, allowing a user to see the flaws in everything. Useful for engineering and proofreading and the like, but likely to leave you with a negative view of the world.

Adventure Calendar 2025: Fairytales

Adventure Calendar 2025

0: Fairytales

For my seventh year doing festive adventure ideas daily (click December 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024 in my blog archive) and this year a number of stories sorta kinda related to Christmas - fairytales.

The Princess Bride poster

Has it got any sports in it?

Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...

Doesn’t sound too bad. I’ll try to stay awake.

Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming.

The Princess Bride

Here in the UK theatres put on pantomimes for families around this time, a uniquely British mix of classic fairytales, vaudeville humour, audience participation and crossdressing. A lot of the stories will also be familiar from the Disney canon. Ballet companies bring out the likes of The Snow Queen as well for the Christmas season, so those are fair game too. Now to find a list with enough of them...

If I run out I will borrow from The Storyteller, not least as it included a story about running out of stories.

December

Low the tide, low the light

Comes the sun again

Thea Gilmore, Sol Invictus