In full swing of the annual R&S Winter Solstice Festival, designated duty officer Curly Three escorts an outsider into the party and over to Rooster. Rooster listens to the stranger for a moment before summoning his four most capacitated agents, Tricksy, Slick, Beard, and Bizzle, away from the barrel of solstice uther.
The gnome stranger hails from Iceville, a town known to R&S because of its beloved annual visitor, R&S brethren Kringle, who swapped his greycoat for a red coat to bring presents to Iceville’s boys and girls. The stranger reports that Kringle did not make his usual Kringlefest visit this year, and Rooster wants the team to find out why. White coats of cold resistance are issued in place of the usual warm weather greycoats. The white coat looks perfect over Slick’s Winter Solstice dress.
The party will begin by locating a keep, a light industrial toy manufactory operated by Kringle, in the forest outside Iceville. The location is secret, and the keep is magically shrouded to ensure it remains so. Today’s whimsical transport is a flying sleigh drawn by eight flying reindeer who will deliver the team to the nearby forest without complication.
. . .
The first thing Slick notices stepping out of the sleigh onto the frozen forest lake is a foul odor from the north. Beard dashes for the source of the stench and runs into a yeti. The yeti claws at Beard and paralyzes him with a chilling gaze. Beard’s beard badger, Booboo, emerges upon Beard’s head to survey the situation and booboos at the sight of the yeti. Slick charges into the fray with his axe and Tricksy runs up a tree firing her shortbow. Bizzle, last out of the sleigh, evacuates the reindeer by engaging the autopilot, a plywood gnome tied to the reins. Bizzle dashes around the back of the yeti giving Slick a sneak attack that kills it.
Slick dashes to a gnawed-on commoner dying in the forest and feeds him a healing potion. He is Lars, and he has come from Iceville also to search for missing Kringle. Lars explains that 300 years ago Kringle defeated a demon who kept Iceville in perpetual darkness to feed off the citizens’ fears. Lars infers from the team’s size and attire that they are Kringle’s helpers. Beard so emphatically praises Kringle, his 32nd most favorite boss, that Lars loses consciousness.
Bizzle investigates an abandoned sleigh of the same make as the one by which they arrived, but this one is tricked out for Kringlefest. The steel reindeer harness has been snapped. Reindeer guts are splattered up in the surrounding trees. Beard transforms into a reindeer to get a sense of what the reindeer were doing or where they came from. Ranger Tricksy can easily discern hoof tracks left by the arriving reindeer as well as promising boot tracks left by a rotund gnome abandoning the sleigh.
Tricksy leads the party in pursuit of the survivor along snowy trails. Bizzle carries Lars. Reindeer Beard launches into a full gallop across a snowy clearing until he’s pummelled with snowballs by snowmen who meld invisibly back into the snow. Tricksy discerns the snowmen from her treetop firing position and points their locations out to the party by lobbing pots of boiling water, melting one snowman. A snowman pops out next to Slick and ice claws him. Slick lights a torch and jams it into the snowman. Tricksy’s suturefly, Knit IV, helps Bizzle rearrange Slick’s attacker into a pile of snow. Snowmen surround Beard and knock him out of reindeer form with snowballs and ice claws. Beard tries to flank around to line up burning hands, but he’s knocked out.
The party scatters, hitting whatever snowmen they manage to glimpse. A snowball critically hits Bizzle in his ACL. Beard regains consciousness and casts a wall of fire which melts a snowman. Tricksy hucks alchemist fire, melting a snowman, but her next throw ignites a tree instead. Bizzle helps Slick chop down his snowman attacker. Tricksy steams another snowman with a boiling water pot. Slick finishes off the last snowman with a jab from his flaming torch.
Beard douses the flaming tree with a well-placed tidal wave. Slick spots an object in a snow drift. It looks like a snow globe, but the inside swirls with wispy evil instead of fluffy snow. Bizzle picks up unconscious Lars. Tricksy continues tracking the boot prints.
Tricksy leads the party to a bloody trail. Slick gets a sense that something isn’t quite right in the sound of the forest. Beard, still grievously wounded, dashes ahead toward the sound of a clock and enters an illusory field masking a small keep. A phalanx of toy soldiers shoots Beard unconscious with rifles. Tricksy sees none of that and continues tracking the blood trail to dead reindeer.
Slick, curious about the popping noises, follows Beard. The soldiers shoot at Slick when he comes through the field. Bizzle pokes through the field, gets a measure of the situation [SALUTE: five soldiers, shooting Beard dead, next to a keep on the other side of an illusory wall, wearing identical uniforms possibly in service of Kringle, time now, armed with rifles and bayonets] and returns to dump Lars in the snow. Tricksy sends Knit through to recon while Slick receives a follow up attack of bayonets and projectiles.
Bizzle charges in with his scimitars taking out the leftmost soldier. He shifts right giving Slick the sneakiness he needs to take out the next one in line. Tricksy gets the next one with her shortbow while Slick takes a refreshing potion break. Bizzle takes out the next one and Tricksy the next. Slick gets a sneak on the last toy soldier and the first squad is defunct. Bizzle stands on Beard and feeds him a healing potion in time for a second wave of toy soldiers to advance. Beard lights a bonfire under one of them and Tricksy finishes the job with an arrow. She and Slick take out the last toy soldier.
An inky darkness envelops Slick, and he is gored by an unseen assailant’s horns. Slick lashes back blindly with his axe and makes hard contact, breaking his attacker’s concentration. The blackness dissipates revealing an unpleasant demon introducing himself as Krampus. Bizzle charges in with flashing scimitars and boisterous taunting. Beard, from his repose, calls down a moonbeam of radiance on Krampus and then rolls out of the illusory field. Tricksy plugs Krampus with shortbow shots. Krampus breaks a nail clawing Slick into unconsciousness. Krampus is quickly overwhelmed by concentrated revenge attacks and falls dead.
Bizzle checks out a bulky bag Krampus carried; it’s full of dark toys like the dark snowglobe. Beard drags the mischievous bag into a clearing and, with the refreshment of his salvage bar, destroys the evil toys with a lightning storm. Bizzle stands on Slick and feeds him a salvage bar.
The team enters the keep, which is larger on the inside, and finds Kringle chained to his workbench, forced to construct toys for Krampus who then enchants them with evil. Liberated Kringle whistles for his eight reindeer but only five respond. They retrieve the sleigh and help Kringle deliver non-evil toys to the good children of Iceville, merely one day late.