The Cozy Dragon's Hoard of Dice

Cozy is frequently a point of contrast; in discussing what makes a campaign cozy, I’ve previously mentioned that it is one where the world has a warmth to it. Cozy is the prelude and return home, in The Lord of the Rings; it is the taverns and houses, cottages and daily life of settings such as Skyrim. These are worlds worth saving, we are told, not despite the loss of comfort that comes from striking out onto the open road or braving the fierce terrain and snowstorms, but because of these places of respite.

So what does it look like to run your campaign in a world that is more quaint than majestic?

You can have strictly cozy adventures. The mystery novels of Agatha Christie have no end of death and dismay, but nevertheless retain their ‘cozy’ descriptor as a mystery subgenre. You can find any number of articles online discussing the question of what makes a mystery cozy, but as investigating any three of these will find three different answers, and we’ll create a fourth here, shortly.

Of note, the Cozy Call to Adventure can take a number of different forms:

The point of contrast. This is the Hobbit approach – Bag End is a place of warmth and comfort until the protagonist leaves it. It’s a place from which to draw strength when travelling through points of adversity.

The world is cozy; the adventure is not. This is the Skyrim approach; despite the protagonist being a dungeon delver (and a surprising number of thieves and robbers dotting the countryside), the cities and thorpes of Skyrim are safe, warm, and protected.

The adventure is cozy. While not necessarily easy to accomplish, the trick here is to take much the same approach as one would with a cozy murder: the adventure takes place within a town or homestead, and the villain is not vile; this is a good fit for the approachable and understandable villain that doesn’t go too far.

The term is, somewhat by design, a flexible one; you can have a ‘cozy’ mystery adventure, or even an adventure that takes place entirely within a tavern or inn. While traditional ‘murder mystery’ style adventures are hard to run in settings which have the ability to commune with the dead, that which magic grants, magic can take away. There can be monsters as well; the vibe is simply that the monsters should not be breathlessly perilous, or made manifest via gore.

Building your adventure to be cozy does not require that all of its elements be cozy; having a hobbit hole to come home to, or a quaint village to protect from the dragon can be enough. It’s for this reason that it’s good to have a conversation with your players before running a game that’s built to have these kinds of stakes; it can be easier to be cold. But building a world worth defending can make all the difference.