Month / August 2024

by guyeatsfood

Beware of the Cat! – Review: No Small Crimes in Lankhmar, for Dungeon Crawl Classics

A slightly different review post today, being a review of a short adventure published by Goodman Games for their Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar setting. As with all my reviews, this is play-informed; I ran the adventure last week at Kraken, with a total of six players. Curious patrons can find my pregens attached to this post – I wasn’t able to source a Lankhmar PC generator in the many excellent DCC websites, so you’re welcome to these!

In short, No Small Crimes is excellent, and offers many things that we can steal and adapt for a location-based one-shot.

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

Patrons have also got the eight pregens and one-sheet of rules that I used to run this adventure below – if you’d like to try running it yourself, be sure to check it out!

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by guyeatsfood

The Kowloon Knife-Kut Knoodle Katastrophe – a Feng Shui 2 One-Shot

As I write this, I’m knee deep in prep for Summer Kraken, a baroque gaming retreat in the German wilderness. As usual, I’m bringing a new Feng Shui one-shot, and so I thought I’d release this – from last summer’s convention. As usual, it’s written up in a playable-for-me sense – your mileage may vary!

If you want to get hold of Feng Shui 2, the best place to start is Atlas Games. If you’re curious to see how it plays in action, you can watch me run it for (among other gaming luminaries) Robin Laws, the game’s designer, on Unconventional GMs – a tight hour and a half of a different one-shot, to feature soon! Check out the other Feng Shui 2 one-shots I’ve posted here, too.

If you want this one-shot in .pdf form, you can get it from my Patreon feed – of which:

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

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by guyeatsfood

Supercharge your One-Shot, Part 5: Big Starts

In this series, I’m going to be showcasing some techniques you can drop into almost any one-shot TTRPG session to improve it – even if the adventure you’re running is already published, these will make it better. Each one is minimum-prep, and guaranteed to be well worth it at the table. Check out the previous posts here (adding sidekicks), here (hexcrawl plots), here (deadlining fights), and here (montages)

Start Big

The beginning of your session is the most important part of the session – it’ll be the first thing your players experience, and if you’re going to keep pace ticking along, you need to start with this. Structurally, this also means you should completely avoid one of the classic one-shot openers; the mission briefing. These are invariably dull as ditchwater – and slow the pace right down as the most cautious player asks question after question to try and wrangle more information out of the briefer. 

While you’re reading this, I should tell you about my Patreon. Patrons get access to content 7 days before they hit this site, the chance to request articles or content, and the chance to play in one-shot games, for a very reasonable backer level of £2 per month. If you like what you read, want to support the blog, and have the funds for it, please consider supporting here. Telling people about the blog, and sharing links/retweeting is much appreciated also – thanks!

Continue reading →