Tag / one-shot

by guyeatsfood

How to Run Daggerheart One-Shots

Daggerheart has been out for a while now, and I’ve had a chance to run a few one-shots of it, both online and face-to-face; it’s a great system for them, with its narrative focus bringing the epic experience you want from a high fantasy game. So, if you’re wanting to try it as a change for your group, or showcase it at a convention, here are my top tips for running Daggerheart!

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

One Shot Purity

I’m not generally a purist about TTRPG terms. It’s still a convention if it’s just you and 4 friends playing a few games at an AirBnB.  You can play Glorantha using any number of systems (Runequest doesn’t even make my top 5, if I’m honest). You can have a campaign of any number of sessions, really, even if for me it’s between 4 and 12. You don’t need to have served Napoleon at Waterloo to be a Grognard.

But I draw the line somewhere. And it’s with one-shots.

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!

One-Shots are Completed in One Session

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by guyeatsfood

Daggerheart : Into The Witherwild

I wanted to run Daggerheart as a one-shot, so I tried to adapt (most of) the entire Witherwild campaign frame into a 4-hour slot. It ran to 3 hours. My loose prep notes, along with some advice, are below. In terms of structure, I went with Robin Laws’ excellent Three Fights structure from Adventure Crucible – I’ve blogged about this before, and it works really well for any sort of pulpy, actiony game where combat is interesting and flavourful.

This is for Tier 1 starting characters, by the way – by all means use the ones in the Quickstart.

Curious about what Daggerheart looks like in play? Check it out on Unconventional GMs – where we’ve run the Quickstart and a Wild West-style Colossus of the Drylands 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!

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by guyeatsfood

Mayhem in Miquera – a One-Shot for Daggerheart

An Introductory One-Shot for Daggerheart in the Colossus of the Drylands campaign frame

Credit for the structure of this has to go to the wonderful Teos Abadia, who on his Alphastream blog (and linked youtube channel) talks about adapting the 5-Room Dungeon as a learn-to-play one-shot – using it to highlight different parts of gameplay. This is a great way to structure your one-shots to give a showcase of the system (check out my co-host Gaz doing it expertly for The One Ring on Unconventional GMs), and with a Daggerheart session to prep, it got me thinking until I came up with this, for Daggerheart’s Colossus of the Drylands campaign frame:

The Training 5-Room Dungeon for Daggerheart

  1. Arrive at isolated settlement. Assist in evacuation / repair / healing (SKILLS)
  2. Fight heralds (EASY FUN FIGHT)
  3. Resolve to fight the colossus (RP or NEGOTIATION)
  4. Showcase additional gameplay (PREPARATIONS and RESEARCH)
  5. Fight the colossus (THRILLING FINAL BATTLE)

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

Tatooine Manhunt – for Outgunned!

I’ve been doing a fair bit of adapting old “classic” adventures for modern systems recently – this was one that I did from the old WEG d6 Star Wars system into Outgunned! Here’s the notes for it – presented, as usual, in pretty raw form – if you’re a Patron, you can get the pregens I used for it too! (They’re the same as the Strike Force Shantipole ones, if you’ve already downloaded them).

I’ve included the CATS that I did with the session – just to encourage more people to do this explicitly in one-shots; it really helps to put everyone on the same page with the game. You’ll need, as with Strike Force Shantipole, both a copy of Outgunned! and the original adventure to use this – you should be able to get away without Action Flicks for this one, as there’s no starship combat in it.

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

Strike Force Shantipole – for Outgunned!

I’ve been doing a fair bit of adapting old “classic” adventures for modern systems recently – this was one that I did from the old WEG d6 Star Wars system into Outgunned!

Outgunned!?

Outgunned is a game of cinematic action films – it uses a funky d6 dice pool where you’re just looking for matches, regardless of the numbers on the dice – get a matched pair, and you’ve a Basic success, a triple and it’s a Critical, and so on. It uses enemy tracks for both chases and fights, and has some neat – if a bit fiddly in an online game – reroll mechanics where you can risk successes you’ve got for better successes.

It’s available here, or in print here. It’s also got some genre packs in its Action Flicks books – including Star Raiders, which is definitely Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off. So, armed with a download of the original adventure – Strike Force Shantipole – I’ve got my conversion notes below. 

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! For this post, patrons also receive the full set of 6 pregens that I used to run this adventure and other Outgunned! Star Wars games – as .pdf downloads.

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by guyeatsfood

The Downtime Sandwich – a one-shot structure for Forged in the Dark games

There’s a number of games, we’re often told, that really don’t do one-shots well. Often this is because of complexity, or a detailed (and unnecessary) background setting, all things that a skilled one-shot GM can work around. But with Blades in the Dark and other Forged in the Dark (FITD) games, where there’s a structure of play that involves player-led downtime that’s essential to the system – well, you might have a point.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. I’ve run plenty of FITD one-shots, usually just ignoring the downtime rules – and they’ve worked perfectly fine. I’ve even hacked downtime to try and do two full-length scores in a single session. It’s tight – and it comes from a time when convention sessions were a little longer. I’ve been left with the nagging feeling that I’m not offering a proper showcase of what the game is about. 

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

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!

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