From Winter’s Crest in Exandria to Liar’s Night in the Forgotten Realms, there are plenty of adaptations of real-world holidays to include in your Dungeons & Dragons game. Whether you’re running downtime for your campaign or planning a unique one-shot adventure, holidays can help flesh out a setting and make it feel more lived in. Pulling and adapting the tropes of holiday celebrations can make for exciting and original encounters, too.
Here are a few suggestions for adapting Valentine's Day for your D&D game:
- Establish the basics of your holiday
- Plan your festive encounters
- Bring in thematically appropriate monsters
Establish the basics of your holiday
Holidays can go a long way toward creating a fantasy world that feels three-dimensional. If the people of a region have holidays, then they have a culture and traditions. Your D&D version of Valentine's Day could be celebrated with a feast, themed games, or special arts and crafts. Perhaps you have imagery of Cupid or hearts waving from banners along a town’s roads.
Think about how the holiday could tie into your adventure's setting. Is it widely celebrated or is it unique to a small village the characters stumble upon? As you think of and answer questions like these, you’ll learn a lot about your setting.
The origins of Valentine's Day in your D&D game
The Gods of the Multiverse appendix of the Player’s Handbook can be a source of inspiration for deities that might benefit from a celebration of love. But you could decide that the holiday has no ties to the gods. Here are just a few examples of setting-agnostic origins for a romance-oriented holiday:
- A kingdom celebrates the anniversary of the wedding of a historically beloved monarch with feasts and songs of love.
- A farming village marks the waning of the winter months with a celebration of the last opportunities for romantic trysts before the planting season takes up most of their time and focus.
- The wine harvest is in, and it is good.
These holidays are pretty different from each other in tone, but all of them could be a catalyst for encounters or quests. Maybe the kingdom has a traditional flower that is used to decorate for the occasion, but bandits have been attacking travelers en route to the grotto where they grow. Perhaps a young romantic hires the party to help them find their beloved in order to wed before their opportunity closes at dusk. Or maybe the wine is just really, really good and—hey, where did your coin purse go?
Plan your festive encounters
Once you’ve set up the occasion, it’s easy to take the tropes of a holiday celebration and marry them with some of the more popular gameplay styles of D&D. Here are just a few:
Themed items and games of chance
A festival is one of the easiest ways to run a holiday session in a D&D campaign. All you need to do is line a map with booths and games of chance to draw characters in. The revelry of the occasion could attract vendors with strange magic items that could be fun for gameplay, or are simply thematic like the philter of love or the heart weaver’s primer. Game booths give you the opportunity to create wild skill challenges for the characters to undertake. Bards could try their hand at a lovesong competition with a Charisma (Performance) check. Fighters could try literally breaking decorative hearts in a Strength challenge.
If you’re looking for more inspiration for carnival games, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight adventure gives examples of carnival games (like the one below) for each ability score that are a great starting place.
Gnome Poetry Contest
A participant must outperform a gnome in a best-of-five poetry contest. Doing so requires three successful DC 15 Charisma (Performance) checks in five or fewer attempts.
Source: The Wild Beyond the Witchlight
Tunnel of love
The classic tunnel of love carnival attraction provides a great opportunity to create a mini-dungeon for the characters to explore. Perhaps the enchantress who normally sets the tunnel up was busy and her apprentice botched the setup, causing a more perilous experience than the townsfolk were expecting. As a result, the party must enter an elaborate dungeon to rescue some missing customers.
Taking the familiarity of a dungeon crawl and remixing it with the cheesy romantic vibes of swan boats or cherubic archers can easily lead up to a memorable session for the table.
Are you a lover or a fighter?
This is D&D, so there’s always at least some reason to roll for initiative, right? Maybe that young lover’s family is not too keen on letting their kid marry and has hired mercenaries to keep them from getting to the altar. Maybe the conquered citizens of the kingdom’s former enemy aren’t loving having to replace their own holiday with the celebration of their occupier and are thus looking to cause trouble.
Bring in thematically appropriate monsters
If you’re wanting to spice things up with some monstrous mayhem, here are some D&D creatures that would work well for a Valentine’s Day-themed game:
- Any Small or Tiny beast: Stuffed animals normally given as gifts come to life and attack at the market! Use the stats for the animals that the stuffed toys represent.
- Mimic: Here's a classic monster that'd be a fun choice for a Valentine’s Day adventure. A mimic can hide as a box of chocolates the characters will never suspect.
- Satyr: Accurately described as hedonistic revelers, a group of satyrs crash a party and are too rambunctious for locals.
- Sprite: These tiny fey creatures provide a great D&D alternative to Cupid that won't be shy over firing off a volley of arrows!
- Unicorn: It just seems like something that would fit, doesn’t it?
We’ve only just scratched the surface of the creative opportunities you can find by mining real-life holidays to inspire your games. Hopefully, this quick guide has helped you feel ready to light some candles, dim the lights, and play some D&D with those you love.
Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
This is very good advice for world building
I can really see a promising yet very unskilled wizard apprentice try to impress his date by animating stuffed animals at a carnival just when the party arrives.
.... I'm gonna steal that.
Would it be wrong to have a succubus in the valentines day campaign? or very right lmao?
Has there been anything about a discount for Valentine Day like was posted last year?
Guards !!! to the Thief !!!
Ah yes! Let us bring more useless consumerism into our Fantasy worlds...
I am very intrigued by the unicorn bunny myself
*cough, cough* SINGLE'S AWARENESS DAY. lmao
Yes, I agree - the implicit discrimination and second-class citizenship sounds like an excellent source for a supervillain origin story.
good advice
nice deets
yeah from tomb of annihilation
I love this! Already have ideas.
This is very good and nice to play
The only nice thing in Chult.
Just a warning to DM's before they get deep in planning to bring Valentines day into their games, that for some (a lot of?) people, Valentines day is exceedingly uncomfortable and not something they want to be reminded of. Just be sensitive of the feelings of your players and all should be well.
As someone running Descent to Avernus at the moment, that is the only way I can think to do it lmao
These are all super cute and fun ideas! Definitely borrowing some of these!