It’s December 23rd. Your aunt asks if you “still do that dragon game.” Your cousin’s kids are bouncing off the walls on candy canes. And somewhere between the grocery run and the presents you forgot to wrap, you said yes to running a Christmas one-shot. Tomorrow. For people who think a d20 is a weird marble.

You get 30 minutes to prep. That’s it.

Guess what? Thirty minutes is plenty. Not “plenty if you’re a genius.” Plenty if you treat prep like a speedrun: clear splits, no side quests, and zero reading the whole adventure like it’s a lore book in Skyrim.

Look, I know the math feels bad. In the American Psychological Association’s holiday stress study, lack of time was the top holiday stressor at 67%, ahead of money at 62%. And GMs start the season behind. On a normal, tinsel-free week, only about 10% of DMs prep a session in 30 minutes or less, according to a Sly Flourish poll of 3,663 DMs.

So fast prep is a real skill. The good news? You can learn it before the eggnog runs out. This post hands you the whole route, split by split. I call it the Festive Speedrun.

Step One: Pick Your Route

Speedrunners split runs into categories. We get two.

Any: You buy or download a holiday one-shot and get it table-ready. Fastest route. Recommended for most of you.

Homebrew: You build a festive one-shot from parts you already own. Slower, more fun, and a higher chance of clipping through the floor.

Which one wins? Any, by a mile. Mike Shea of Sly Flourish, the Lazy Dungeon Master himself, says he needs 30 to 60 minutes to prep a three-hour game from published material, but one to two hours for a one-shot from scratch. A published adventure is a save state somebody else made for you. Load it.

So is Homebrew a trap? Totally. Well, no, actually, not if you cheat. And we are going to cheat a lot.

(Quick aside: I tried naming these routes “Sleigh” and “Scratch-Made Cookie.” My editor, who is also me, said no. Moving on.)

A Published One-Shot in 30 Minutes

Holiday one-shots are everywhere right now. D&D Beyond sells One-Shot Wonders: Holiday Adventure Pack, five adventures for levels 1 to 12 for $14.99. DMsGuild is packed with options too, and plenty of them are pay-what-you-want.

Pick one before you start the timer, though. Shopping is not prep. Shopping is a side quest with a loot box at the end.

Timer starts now.

1. 0:00 to 0:10, Skim and slash. Read the intro, the ending, and the boss fight. Then cut the adventure down to three scenes: an opener, a middle, and a boss. Most holiday one-shots pack in five or six. A table full of first-timers will get through about three. Cross out the rest with a red pen. It’s on brand.
2. 0:10 to 0:20, Pre-gens. Print the pre-generated characters if the adventure includes them. No pre-gens? Jump to the pre-gen section below. Do not let your uncle roll stats from scratch. That’s a two-hour boss fight with no checkpoints.
3. 0:20 to 0:25, One-page cheat sheet. On a single sheet, write the opening line you’ll read out loud, your three scene names, the boss’s AC, hit points, and two best moves, plus five NPC names. That’s your HUD.
4. 0:25 to 0:30, Table setup. Dice, pencils, snacks, and a sticky note that lists what players can do on a turn: move, do one thing, and talk as much as they want.

Here’s what that looks like at the table. Say you grabbed a pay-what-you-want “save the toy factory” adventure. Scene one: alarm bells ring in the workshop. Scene two: the frozen tunnel where the thieves left tracks. Scene three: the boss, holed up in the wrapping room with a sack of stolen toys. Everything else gets cut, and nobody at the table will ever know it existed. That’s the beauty of it.

Fun fact: Shea’s original Lazy Dungeon Master pitched “five minute game prep.” Years later he wrote, “I oversold this idea.” He landed on about 30 minutes. If the guy who made lazy prep famous says 30, then 30 is your number.

Homebrew: Build It From Parts

Okay, you little freaks who refuse to buy things. This route is for you.

Stay with me here, because this is the whole trick. The golden rule comes from Justin Alexander of The Alexandrian: “Don’t prep plots, prep situations.” A plot says the party saves Christmas in act three. A situation says Krampus’s goblins raided the town’s toy shops at midnight, and now they’re holding the mayor’s kid in a frozen mill. What the players do next is their problem. Your prep just shrank by half.

1. 0:00 to 0:05, Pick a situation. Roll on the tables below.
2. 0:05 to 0:10, Strong start. Open in the middle of the action. When Riley at Awesome Dice ran a two-hour family Christmas game, the very first moment was Santa’s sleigh falling out of the sky. Nobody touched a phone after that.
3. 0:10 to 0:20, Three scenes with reskinned monsters. Use stat blocks you already own. The cheat sheet is coming up.
4. 0:20 to 0:25, Secrets and a reward. Write five secrets players can find, like who’s really behind the raid or where the kid is hidden. Then add one silly magic item, such as a scarf that grants advantage on saves against cold.
5. 0:25 to 0:30, Pre-gens. See below. Yes, you’re noticing a pattern. Good.

The d6 Festive Situation Tables

Roll once on each column. That’s a full adventure seed in under a minute.

d6	Hook	Villain	Complication	Reward
1	Every toy in town vanished overnight	A goat-legged Krampus knockoff	The villain kind of has a point	A ride in a flying sleigh
2	The festival bell won’t ring	A grumpy frost hag	The kidnapped kid planned the whole thing	A cocoa mug that never empties
3	The town feast got stolen	A rival toymaker guild	The storm gets worse every hour	A scarf of cold resistance
4	A reindeer stampede hits Main Street	An army of animated snowmen	The town guard is drunk on mulled cider	A fancy holiday title from the mayor
5	Someone sabotaged the lantern parade	A young dragon who hates loud singing	The reward turns out to be cursed	A pet reindeer with attitude
6	A blizzard trapped everyone in the inn	A lich who wants a seat at dinner	The “helpful” elf is a spy	A snow globe that shows next December

Roll a 3, a 6, a 1 and a 2. Now a lich stole the town feast because nobody saved him a seat at dinner, and honestly? He has a point. The prize is a bottomless cocoa mug. That’s a whole session.

Pre-Gens for First-Timers in 5 Minutes

Holiday tables are full of rookies. Grandma. The in-laws. Your teen cousin who only plays shooters. On the D&D Beyond forums, one DM posted that their never-played in-laws were flying in the following week and wanted a holiday adventure. Another fairly new DM said their parents asked for a Christmas one-shot and they had very few ideas.

Riley at Awesome Dice nails the stakes: “we only get one chance to make a TTRPG ‘first impression.'” Character creation is where first impressions go to die. So skip it.

Build five pre-gens in five minutes:

• Grab level 3 sample characters. Use the adventure’s, or the free sample characters for your system. Level 3 gives everyone a cool trick without a stack of options to read.
• Give each one a single-line hook. “You’re the elf who broke the toy machine. Nobody knows. Yet.”
• Let them pick a silly holiday name. Riley’s family went with names like Tingle, Butterrum and Grumbus. It costs zero prep and buys instant investment.
• Circle two things on every sheet. Their best attack and one cool power. Everything else is fog of war until they need it.

The Reskin Cheat Sheet

Building a Krampus stat block from nothing is a classic December trap. On the forums, DMs who homebrew holiday monsters keep hitting the same wall: balancing them is hard, and the fix other GMs offer is to reskin monsters that already exist. Steal the numbers. Change the description. Players only ever hear the description anyway.

Holiday monster	Stat block to steal
Rogue elves	Goblins or bandits
Evil nutcracker soldier	Animated armor
Snowman bruiser	Ogre
Krampus’s little helpers	Imps or quasits
Gingerbread swarm	Swarm of rats
Frost wraith	Wight
Angry reindeer	Giant elk
Krampus himself (level 5 party)	Barbed devil

Six rows cover a whole one-shot. Okay, eight rows. I can’t count when there’s fudge nearby.

Busy Week? Split the Run Into Three Chunks

Real talk: 30 uninterrupted minutes in December is a fantasy setting all on its own. A sponsored Slumber Cloud survey reported by Fox News found the average American spends about 38 hours getting ready for the holidays. And YouGov’s December 2024 poll found that 28% of adults feel stress over a lack of time to relax during the season.

So don’t fight the calendar. Split the run like an MMO daily quest.

• Chunk 1, Monday lunch (phone notes): route, situation and three scene names.
• Chunk 2, Wednesday after the kids are asleep: monsters, secrets and the reward.
• Chunk 3, the morning of the game: pre-gens, cheat sheet and table setup.

Ten minutes, log off, come back later. Your prep still levels up.

Not Celebrating Christmas? Swap the Skin

According to a Monmouth University poll, 90% of Americans celebrate Christmas in December, while 6% celebrate Hanukkah and 4% celebrate Kwanzaa. Then there are solstice folks, Lunar New Year tables in January or February, and plenty of groups with mixed traditions. The speedrun doesn’t care what’s on the box. Swap the skin and keep the splits:

• Midwinter. The Forgotten Realms already celebrates Midwinter, so it slots into D&D with zero work.
• The Longest Night. Heroes keep the town’s lanterns burning until dawn.
• A Festival of Lanterns. Saboteurs try to wreck the parade.
• Your own invented holiday. Give it a name, a food and one silly custom. Done.

One tip: borrow the big ideas, like light beating darkness or neighbors sharing food in the cold, and invent the fantasy details yourself. Nobody wants a goblin wrecking a real religious ritual at Grandma’s table.

The Save File: Reuse It Next Year

When the game ends, spend five minutes on post-game notes. Write down what worked, what flopped, the best player moment and the NPC everyone loved. Put your cheat sheet, pre-gens and notes in one folder named “Holiday 2026.”

Next December, load that save. Same town, one year later. The snowman army is back, and this time it’s unionized. Prep time drops to maybe 15 minutes, and you just started a family tradition by accident.

The first year I tried this, my notes ended up buried in a drawer under a mountain of wrapping paper. Did that wreck the sequel? Nope. Well, actually, it helped. My players remembered every detail, down to the name of the cocoa vendor, and they corrected me all night long. Turns out the save file was in their heads the whole time.

Holiday One-Shot Prep FAQ

How long does it take to prep a holiday one-shot?
With the Festive Speedrun, about 30 minutes for a published adventure. From scratch, take the Homebrew route and lean hard on the d6 tables and the reskin sheet.

Should I buy a holiday adventure or write my own?
If time is tight, buy. Going by Shea’s numbers, published material cuts your prep roughly in half.

Do I need pre-generated characters?
For first-timers, yes. Making characters from scratch can easily eat the first hour of a short game.

How do I fit a one-shot into two hours?
Three scenes, max. Aim to start the boss fight by the 90-minute mark.

Can I drop a holiday one-shot into my ongoing campaign?
Sure. Run it as a side quest, and give absent players a quick reason their characters were away so nobody feels shorted on loot or XP.

How do I balance a homebrew Krampus?
Don’t build him. Reskin a monster with the right challenge rating and describe him with extra horns.

Your Turn: Start the Timer

That’s the whole run. Pick a route. Cut to three scenes. Hand out pre-gens with silly names. Steal stat blocks. Save the file for next year. Thirty minutes later, you walk into the holiday chaos as the relative everyone wants to sit next to, not the one still reading rules at the dinner table.

The holidays are short and loud. Your prep doesn’t need to be long. It needs to be smart.

So here’s your call to action. Follow the steps above, set a 30-minute timer, and run your holiday one-shot this year. Then come back and tell me in the comments what you rolled on the d6 tables. And if you know a forever-GM who’s drowning in December, send them this. They need it more than another set of dice.

GG. See you at the table.