#113: The Naughty List | A Krampus Midwinter Hunt: A 5e One-Shot for Small Groups

In this city the worst people vanish every midwinter, and everyone has learned to be grateful. Something is keeping a list, and tonight your table is on it.

The Naughty List is a Krampus one-shot for fifth edition, a pulpy urban hunt built to run in a single evening with zero prep. The harbor city of Gildenhaven is prosperous, proud, and quietly missing its cruelest citizens, one a night, taken off the rooftops by a thing nobody will name out loud. Your table takes the job of finding out what is doing the taking, and the chase runs up the chimneys, across the snow-slick roofs, and down into a workshop where the missing are being sorted, judged, and kept.

The thing at the top of the roofs is the Sackman, a tall, courtly Krampus in the tatters of a merchant's coat, and he is not hunting at random. A Coal-or-Candle tracker watches how your players treat the taken: show mercy and the city reads you as allies, cut corners and it marks you as prey, and the same night turns colder or warmer around what your table actually does. The party leaves with the Sack of the List, a bag that can swallow a shrunken foe whole, and with the middle link of a warming black-iron chain and a line they will not shake: the first bell has already cracked, and the last has not yet rung.

What makes it land is the bargain under the tinsel. The Sackman was a guardian this city hired, fed, and forgot, until his ledger could no longer tell hunger from justice, and the players will understand him even as they hunt him.

Part of Krampus: A Yuletide Quartet. The Naughty List is Book Two of four standalone midwinter one-shots that tell one larger story across four winters: Book One, The First Frost; Book Two, The Naughty List; Book Three, The Silence Yet to Come; and Book Four, The Gnashing Court. Each stands completely on its own and plays in any order, so you never need the others to run this night. A warm chain-link passes from book to book, and a table that plays all four watches a single old debt come due.

What's Inside:

• A complete one-shot, a rooftop hunt into a chimney-network descent and a toy-workshop lair, ready to run tonight with zero prep.
• The Coal-or-Candle tracker, a moral engine that marks the party as targets or allies by what they actually do.
• Original creatures with full stat blocks, including a boss fight built so it never one-shots a hero.
• Four ready-made characters at levels 2-3, so anyone at the table can sit down and play.
• Six maps, an area reference map plus five battle maps, drawn in a hand-inked, old-woodcut style.
• Original pen-and-ink interior art throughout, from chapter openers to every creature and character.
• Six opening hooks, a What If contingency guide, three endings, and a Yuletide Quartet appendix.

Perfect For:



• Game Masters who want a fast, pulpy evening without the prep grind

• Small groups of 2-3 players at levels 2-3, in one 2-3 hour session

• A Christmas game night, a Krampus one-shot, or a chase between campaigns

• Any table that loves a good hunt, a moral gray zone, and a monster with a grudge

Everything you need to run a complete midwinter night is in these pages. Climb to the rooftops, open the sack, and find out whose list you are really on.