At Gen Con 2024 I picked up The Wassailing of Claus Manor, an intriguing tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) that had just walked off with an ENNIE Judges’ Spotlight Award. I brought it home, where it sat in a bag for a few months, but my indie game group managed to play it during the Christmas holiday season last year. We had so much fun, I’ve gathered the courage to offer to host The Wassailing for my local game convention, DieCon in June. (June 6-8, 2025) The game incorporates a number of creative setting ideas and cool game mechanics in an excellent one-shot format. (And the game book has woodcuts!)
Although Christmas themed, Wassailing is not designed for young children. An excellent actual play with the game designers can be found, here.
The Wassailing Setting
While Claus Manor is, indeed, Santa Claus’s home at the North Pole, there is little resemblance to those animated Christmas specials you might recall. The estate grounds are dark, cold, and hostile, and the rambling mansion mysterious.
The game takes place in a Downton Abbey type setting, with players taking on the roles of servants to an increasingly eccentric family of rich nobility. Lord Santa Claus is there, as well as Lady Gertrude, their teenage children, and several other relatives.
The turn-of-the-last century, Edwardian vibes lend themselves to free-floating anxiety from industrialization, impending war, and the breakdown of social classes. Eldritch horror is always just a nightmare away.
Wassailing Characters
The Player Characters
The players are the servants of the house, tasked with assisting the Claus family members with their problems. These nobles are prone to Trouble (yes, with a capital T) and expect the household staff to clean up after them.
Character creation takes only a few minutes. Players choose their character’s occupation, background, seniority, and a spirit trouble from module lists.
Spirit Trouble is a quirk, like “Ear Worm” (you love a good Christmas carol) or “Sweet Tooth” (You’re a connoisseur of confections). This trait is evidence of the Claus family’s magical thinking rubbing off on the characters. The consequences can escalate, and mere idiosyncrasy develop into real pathology. The Claus family loves to sugarcoat reality, and they need the staff to remain sane enough to keep things on a mostly even keel.
Spirit Trouble is tracked as Holiday Spirit points, and six points means the character has gone completely off track and will be dismissed. However, characters can slow their descent into insanity by recalling more mundane problems and narrating how they overcame them. The module provides prompts to elicit these backstory tales.
The Nonplayer Characters
The module provides a household of magical, aristocrat types to make increasingly bizarre demands on the player-servants: Lord Santa and Lady Gertrude Claus, their children Kringla and Jolnir, Santa’s half-brother General Ded Moroz, and Ded’s granddaughter Snegurochka. A modified deck of playing cards determines which family member has set a task or quest for each player. A sequence of troubles, increasingly dire, is provided, as the Claus family’s schemes progress. The players can only hope to manage the mess and mitigate the risk.
Do not lose this job.
Wassailing Game Design
All information needed for a Wassailing session can be found in the charmingly illustrated gamebook. A compilation of turn-of-the last century holiday advertising art decorates the pages. And the game rules themselves are well organized and clear. Brian Sago created amazing woodcut art portraits of the Claus family for this book.
The story itself grows out of the players’ response to the prompts posed by the module and the improv acting that develops out of their interactions.
The game requires creation of a draw pile from playing cards (six of the face cards), and players build dice pool from two sets of colored six-sided dice.
The book includes maps of the Claus Manor grounds and a diagram of the manor.
Wassailing Game Play
The player characters each, in turn, received a request for help from a family member. All their requests are Trouble, the only question being how much and how weird.
For example, Lord Santa has explored the dark arts to facilitate more efficient Christmas gift delivery. However (as we all know), a price is always extracted for such powers.
The specific task the family member requests comes off a prompts list of increasingly alarming schemes. A short scene can be role played as the player character receives the request, then the player ponders a plan, ideally one utilizing their character’s skills.
For example, one of Santa’s early requests is help with a problem: he’s made a duplicate of himself and lost track of the clone. Can the servant round up faux Santa? Unfortunately, “this is the third Santa to approach you with this request today… each believing themselves the true lord of the manor.”
After each player receives their task, play returns to the first player, who makes a dice roll and roleplays their plan to satisfy the bosses while mitigation the risks involved.
Mechanisms exist for players to assist or undermine each other as well as pass a task on to another player.
Now Bring Us a Figgy Pudding
We made a holiday party of our game, with cookies, creepy Christmas music, Christmas cards for character sheets, and Christmas pencils and stickers.
The game is entertaining for both seasoned TTRPG players and supports new players with plenty of prompts and suggestions. For the keeper, the game scenario will arise from your players, so all you need do is refer to the tables in the game book for plot prompts. Relax and let your players help you weave it all together into a holiday amusement.
The Big Cinch from Montag Press, is an award-winning supernatural noir adventure by Kathy L. Brown. Sean Joye, a fae-touched young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean, new life in America. Until he asks the wrong questions…
Have you played an indie tabletop roleplaying game lately you’d like to recommend? Your comments are welcome. Navigate to my website, click the blog title and a dialogue box will open at the end of the post.
If you enjoyed reading this game review, you might like to read about the roleplaying game Butter Princess.
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St. Louis Writers Guild just published Weird STL, an anthology celebrate all strange, spooky, and just plain wonderful stories of our hometown. This volume of short stories, poems, and essays includes a Sean Joye universe short story, “Big Magick.” Joseph Arwald, one of the baddies from The Big Cinch, tells us what really happened to the Ferris Wheel from the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair.