Christmas is a time for goodwill, being merry, and gorging yourself on all your favorite foods. No Dungeons and Dragons game is more festive, then, than the one run by Washington D&D fan Jenna - who baked an entire battlemap out of gingerbread.
Jenna's level-seven one shot was a pre-written D&D adventure from DM's Guild, titled How the Lich Stole Christmas. The layout of the dungeon already resembled a Christmas tree, but Jenna decided to take it one step further with her baked buildings. "We had joked about doing it for years at various D&D Christmas parties", they tell Wargamer.
Jenna, a 55-year-old homemaker, had admittedly never baked a gingerbread house before. However, she wasn't about to let that small detail spoil the vision. "It was a learning experience", they tell Wargamer.
Jenna had to template the structure from scratch to match the dungeon she planned to run. "I used paper to template, but the DM's Guild module's Christmas-tree-shaped dungeon had many repeating shapes, and the soft template was too easy to mix up", they explain. "I had to fill in with a few graham crackers."
"I don't really enjoy rolling out dough or cutting out templated shapes by hand", she explains. "You need to leave some scraps on the edge after cutting to prevent spread, then recut the lines when warm. The gingerbread was pretty rigid, so that was difficult and you need to work quickly while it is still hot."
"I baked the flat base, in three parts", Jenna says, "then afterwards learned that most gingerbread house builders use a foil wrapped foam board, which would have made things easier, less time consuming and more mobile."
"Royal icing has a steep learning curve", she adds. "Mine was structurally sound but more like working with caulk than icing, so it busted my piping bag and got pretty messy." Jenna recruited their husband and one of the players to decorate the set before play began, and they "tried their best to hide my mess".
The finishing touches included gingerbread trees from an Ikea gingerbread kit, Necco wafers on the bottom of regular, plastic miniatures, and gummy bears that represented captured children (and, Jenna tells Reddit, were eaten by the players after being rescued).
Despite the trials they faced, Jenna would absolutely take a second stab at gingerbread dungeons. The response alone seems to have been worth it. "My players loved it! It added a lot of joy to our annual D&D Christmas party", she says. "And the nine-year-old son of two of our players had just started playing D&D in summer camp, and they brought him along. He was over the moon and very excited that he got to eat it after the game." "It was just very playful and whimsical - and smelled amazing."
"Next year, I plan to grab some pre-baked gingerbread kits and Ikea gingerbread trees and kitbash a battle board on a foil wrapped foam base", Jenna tells Wargamer. This means they "can focus on decorating and eliminate templating, rolling and hand cutting the gingerbread". "I might try to bake just a few turreted curved custom pieces for towers", she adds. "We will see how ambitious I feel."
The dungeons of Christmas yet to come might feature pop rock mines, candy Lego caltrops, and chocolate treasure chests, Jenna says. "I am thinking a full table battle board, with two forts, a gingerbread tree forest and maybe an isomalt frozen lake." "One fort will be decorated with peppermints and the other with colorful candies like gumdrops so they are visually distinct." Jenna also has dreams of creating more Christmas-themed one shots, from 'capture the candy cane' competitions to encounters with a candy eyeball Beholder.
Whatever the future holds, we sure hope it's tasty.
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