Beasts and Blizzards will see the return of our popular dual-theme system, with the themes being beasts and winters respectively. In other words, we want to see you publish the best quest you can using either beast enemies, winter as a seasonal background, or both if you’re up for a challenge. This contest will run until January 15th at 11:59 (EST). The winner of Beasts and Blizzards will be rewarded with 500 loot points total. All other entries will be rewarded with 100 points for using either theme, or 200 for using both.

Feral beasts are often common foes in RPGs, but it takes a special writer or GM to make these foes real characters in a campaign. Maybe your story will feature an owl-bear hybrid monster? Perhaps a giant spider endangering an intrepid duo of halflings? Or even just that giant rat in your favorite innkeeper’s storage closet? There’s tons of examples in common stories, tropes, and adventures to give you inspiration!

Making your quest involve Winter as a seasonal background could mean a lot of things. Its easy enough to just write it in the background and have some talk of snowfall, but settings deserve just as much character as the leading hero! Seasons care not for the adventurers’ needs (unless you have a handy Druid that can change that) and can be cruel and unforgiving as a result. Whether its forcing heroes to take longer during their travels, endangering their food rations, or bombarding them with snow, hail, or avalanches, there’s a lot that can be done!

If you combine these stories, you can even create some festive quests and re-skin some enemies, such as the Troll, to a certain Germanic folk villain or even another creature, like the Ice Yeti. Maybe a Riftwalker could be utilized as Snow Elementals that sing tunes and narrates the adventure? We can’t wait to see what you come up with!

You can also check out these Vault entries for inspiration and help!

To enter, all you have to do is publish a quest by 11:59 PM (EST) on January 15th. Your quest must be in English to qualify, but we do encourage quests of all languages to be made for, it just takes us too long to translate in a reasonable time to make a ruling on a winner. Finally, make sure your quests are marked for your audience accordingly, anything offensive will be taken down and the entrant disqualified. While we do reference some pop culture in our inspirations, make sure to not use anyone’s intellectual property other than your own!

To Participate: