The Art of the One-Shot

As the foreword to the original “white box” edition of Dungeons & Dragons said of the brand-new medium of fantasy roleplaying games: “While it is possible to play a single game, unrelated to any other game events past or future, it is the campaign for which these rules are designed.” There’s no question that this concept of the campaign as a longform shared-narrative story is still the foundation and best part of the experience of playing a fantasy RPG. But at the same time, every campaign effectively starts out as a single adventure, and there’s something special about that experience that makes one-shot games great fun.

Why One-Shot ?

Even if your process of running games is focused entirely on a long-term campaign, opportunities and reasons to run one-shots are always present. At the top of the list for many groups, playing a one-shot is a great alternative to cancelling game night if most players can make it but enough are absent to make running the regular campaign game a nonstarter. Or in a campaign that features a significant break point between different parts of the story, including an extended downtime between the previous story arc and the next, taking a week or two off to run one-shots can help heighten that break.

Just as common is the opportunity to run a game for new players — friends, classmates, coworkers, and so forth — who have never played an RPG before but are keen to try it out. But whatever inspires your urge to run a one-shot adventure, the following things are worth keeping in mind.

Pregens For All!

A one-shot game by definition should be started and finished in a single session. This means focusing on the adventure first and foremost, and nothing gets in the way of that better than dedicating a big chunk of the session to character creation. Even with really straightforward games, brand-new players wanting their first taste of a fantasy RPG most likely have zero interest in the niceties of the character creation process. So ignore that process with a handy selection of pregenerated player characters. 

Some one-shot adventures might come with their own set of pregens, built specifically with the adventure’s story in mind. But if not — or if you prefer to homebrew your one-shot — the Internet is full of pregens for literally every RPG system out there. (If you’re playing D&D 5e and are looking for 1st-level pregen characters, feel free to check out the free, new-and-young-player-friendly heroes I created for the Hidden Halls of Hazakor starter adventure.)

Going Low

Especially when running a game for brand-new players, one-shots are often best when focused on straightforward starting characters. Even for players with plenty of experience in higher-tier campaigns, taking a break to go back to being a neophyte can be fun, and makes it more likely that players can focus on the fun of the single-session story as opposed to looking up rules for a higher-tier character whose features they’re not familiar with.

One option for a regular group who dip into one-shots to break up a long-term campaign is to treat their one-shot characters as side characters, letting them gain experience, new levels, or new features between one-shot games. Advancing characters by design this way is a good way to create higher-powered characters ready to play future one-shots, even as the lower-powered versions of the characters can be archived to be reused as needed.

Keep It Simple

Especially if you’re a GM who loves having your adventure scenarios challenged by highly focused, optimized characters, take a step back from that when running one-shot adventures. Complex and optimized characters are great fun in a campaign where players are building those characters over time. But it can be a huge challenge to process and master a complex character in the short time that a one-shot allows.

For your one-shots, encourage the use of simple pregens or straightforward character builds that be assembled in just a few minutes at the start of a session. Keep in mind the general rule that spellcasters are often more challenging for new players than combat-focused builds, and don’t be afraid to customize the one-shot to allow an unconventional party built around ease of play. If a group of brand-new players all want to run martial classes or warrior builds, run with that, directing your complexity-loving GM’s brain to reshape the adventure and let an unconventional party shine.

Standalone Adventures

One-shot adventures are in tremendous supply across the hobby, so even if you’re looking for a one-shot on short notice, you should have little trouble seeking out and finding one that feels like a good fit for your group. Among many other options, adventures created for organized play and convention games are often focused on a single three-to-four-hour session’s worth of gaming, and provide enough background information to let you run your game as a standalone even if the adventure is part of a larger series.

If you find yourself running a lot of single-session adventures, you can also keep an eye out for anthologies of one-shots or standalone adventures. (I am obliged to point you in the direction of Fantastic Lairs, a book created by Mike Shea, James Introcaso, and myself that provides a wide range of scenarios that can be run as one-shots or integrated into a larger campaign.) Or if you prefer to homebrew, I wrote up a short guide to designing a single-session site-based adventure in about 10 minutes that’s worth looking at.

Flexible Foes

Especially when running a one-shot for low-powered or beginning player characters, be ready to adjust the math of monsters and other challenges on the fly to keep the adventure fun. When a group of brand-new players ready for their first exposure to RPGs sits down for your one-shot adventure, having their characters fail badly or die outright makes for a bad introduction to the hobby. In a longer campaign, ups and downs are an essential part of the heroic narrative, with each failure the characters face making the victory that follows feel sweeter. But a one-shot should be focused almost entirely on wins for the heroes, making sure that setbacks are minor and easily overcome.

The Dream Tombs: Backstory as Adventure

As a GM, I’ve always been a big fan of when character backstory works its way into the campaign. I enjoy when players see fit to reveal secrets about their characters. I love when backstory is revealed in key moments to underline the drama of a roleplaying scene — or sometimes even a combat encounter.

Character backstory working its way into the campaign spontaneously often comes in response to specific beats of narrative pressure. Something happens in the campaign and a player sees the opportunity to have their character react in a way that reveals something about who they are. Other times, fate or the actions of villains push the heroes into a corner that inspires the revelation of a secret a character had hoped to take with them to the grave — but which their player has been dying for a chance to let slip.

Sometimes, though, the opportunities for characters to reveal backstory don’t come as often as we’d like, or certain players might not have as much emotional investment in backstory as others. So if you’re looking for an excuse to bring a bunch of backstory into your game in a fun way, the following adventure setup can help you make that happen.

What Dreams May Come?

This adventure setup is taken from a dungeon site called the Dream Tombs, which I set up for one of my weekly CORE20 campaigns. What follows is entirely generic, though, and suitable for pretty much any fantasy game.

To set up what I wanted to do, I sent the players the following email before our session:

Unlike many of the adventuring escapades we share together, the one we’ll be starting today comes with a bit of homework. I’d like you all to come up with three bits of backstory for your character that you’re comfortable sharing with the group. This can include story elements in the three secrets you all provided at the start of the campaign, but doesn’t have to.

What I’m looking for are specific meaningful events from your character’s life involving action, other characters, and so forth. So perhaps a pivotal interaction with family or comrades, a dangerous situation that had to be overcome, a moment during an important job that went really well or really badly, et al. Something momentous on a personal level that would make a good scene in a movie.

The “three secrets” mentioned in the email refer to the pre-session-zero character-building conversations I like to have with the players leading into a new campaign. It’s totally not necessary to make the Dream Tombs scenario work, and I find that even without that kind of preliminary framework, many players have a sense of a secret or two their characters are keeping to themselves.

Records of the Past

The Dream Tombs in my campaign were a complex of ancient crypts protected by powerful magic and holding secrets the characters were looking for. But the choice of location for this scenario is totally up to you. In addition to a tomb or crypt, the theme of secrets and backstory being brought forward into the campaign might be apropos for a magical library, a warded laboratory or guildhall, a ruined wizard’s tower, or any other location where suitable magic can come into play. 

As the characters explore the site, alongside whatever other location features you prep, work in one physical detail — small pieces of parchment that are scattered across or hidden within the site. Some of the parchment fragments are old. Others are relatively new. All feature notes in different languages and different handwriting, with each parchment a record of some incident or event, anonymous and unsigned. 

Describe the notes as seemingly written by someone wanting to record a thing they’d done, a conversation they had, or something that happened to them. As the characters have a chance to find more of the notes, describe them further as carrying a sense of yearning for the past — or in a many cases, a sense of regret or fear for that past.

Living the Memory

At any appropriate points during the session, the magic of the site triggers. This could be a thing that happens at regular intervals while the characters explore or linger, or in response to characters touching certain things, fighting certain guardians, and so forth.

Choose a character randomly and have their player choose one of the memories they came up with. Then have that player narrate that backstory memory. Describe the scenario as the character slipping into a kind of fugue state and going through the motions of the memory event, even as illusion magic unfolds around them to share that memory with the other characters. Work with the player to build up the description of the memory vision and make it real, asking questions to expand certain moments, suggesting additional details, and so forth.

Then, when the vision is done, tell the players that even as the illusion magic fades away and the character comes back to their senses, that character sees a piece of parchment manifest in front of them to fall to the ground. On that parchment, they see a written record of the vision just shared, magically scribed in their own handwriting.

Cost or Reward

Depending on the nature of the site where these dreams manifest, the revelation of backstory and secrets might be enough of a narrative reward to carry your memory scenes. But you might also attach benefits or drawbacks to each memory, so that the characters are rewarded or punished by the magic tapping into their psyches. For example, if the characters are making an incursion into an enemy site set to end in a boss battle, the magic might provide them with one-off benefits as their memories let them recall moments of past inspiration or draw new resolve from memories of failure. 

Alternatively, if the characters are exploring a site that calls out for putting pressure on them as they explore, each memory might impose penalties or conditions on the character experiencing it — or even on all the characters as they share that memory. (When I used this scenario, the Dream Tombs were that kind of site. The characters were searching for a specific tomb and the treasure it contained, and the longer they took, the more debilitating memory-visions they would have to face.)

Inspiration for Story

In addition to the fun of bringing specific backstory elements and secrets into your campaign within a solid narrative framework, this adventure setup can have the added bonus of inspiring players to think more about their backstories — especially players who are more about playing in the moment, and who might have given little thought to their character’s life before the campaign began. One of the best bits of feedback I got from a player after we finished our Dream Tombs scenario was their lament that they hadn’t gotten a chance to share all three of the memories they’d written up. Especially if the players in your campaign aren’t naturally big into backstory — and this can often be true of new players — bringing memories to life this way in the course of an adventure can be a great start.

Art by Dean Spencer

Heroic Gifts 3

For this third installment of an apparently ongoing seasonal series (see 2023 and 2024), here are a few more examples of unusual gifts, awards, and compensation for the heroes that come with their own built-in story and adventure hooks. When gold, gems, and magic start to lose their luster for experienced adventurers (and even more-experienced players), take advantage of any of these unique bequeathments suitably given as thanks for an adventure well-done.

Felt Cult, Might Delete Later

As a reward for putting an end to a depraved cult, the characters are gifted with a powerful relic the cult were planning to use to fuel a dread ritual. The item functions perfectly to produce whatever other magic you want to bestow upon the party. But over time, the characters discover that the item’s connection to the cult has suffused it with magic that attracts would-be cultists — who all end up treating the unwitting characters as their cult overlords. Initially, NPCs drawn to the relic might appear to simply be followers and sidekicks brought into the party under the game’s usual rules. But over time, those followers begin to engage in stranger and stranger behavior, treating the heroes less as employers and benefactors and more as quasireligious figures. If things go unchecked, one or more ambitious followers might ramp up their erratic activities — with the characters perhaps discovering that the newly active cult they’ve been investigating is secretly led by them!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The characters are gifted with a magical talisman that promises to let them overcome the fickle notions of fate. A certain number of times (whether limited overall, once per month, or what have you), a character wielding the talisman can undo one recent event, dictating the manner in which the event should have unfolded (subject to any limitations imposed by the GM). But what the characters don’t realize at the outset is that fate is complicated, and the single change asked for inevitably comes with a number of other unexpected changes to complicate the campaign. The characters might discover that they have close ties to NPCs they’ve never heard of, have lost or gained magic items, owe money for services they don’t recall requesting, have inexplicably changed their appearances or names, and so forth. Figuring out the scope and scale of the changes can introduce a steady stream of side quests each time the talisman is used — or perhaps the talisman begins to unravel fate whether it is used or not. 

Haute Cuisine

As a reward from a powerful noble or royal, the characters are entitled to eat free for life at the finest restaurant in the land. But the head chef of this legendary establishment is secretly an archfey whose meals bestow magical benefits in exchange for service. Depending on how the players like their obligations set up, the heroes might partake of fine dining and learn of the meal’s magical benefits, then find themselves compelled to undertake a dangerous mission to make use of those benefits. Or the archfey chef might reveal a mission the characters can undertake, offering the magical meal beforehand as a down payment on rewards to come. Either way, eating at the restaurant or magically teleporting in a take-out order might become a regular source of plot hooks and valuable magical benefits as the campaign unfolds.

Investment Opportunity

As an offered reward or a side-effect benefit of a successful adventure, the characters receive an ownership stake in a successful business or mercantile venture — a profitable inn or tavern, a merchant company, a chain of businesses, and so forth. But even as the venture turns over steady profits to fund the party’s adventuring, the characters don’t realize that the business has secret connections to a criminal guild, a powerful supernatural figure, a secret school of magic, a clandestine organization of freedom fighters, or some combination thereof. Wherever the characters’ connection to the business is known, mistaken identity and expectations abound.

Clothes Make the Hero

Characters in an urban or socially-focused campaign might receive the gift of fine custom clothing, crafted by the most reputable tailor in the land. But what no one realizes at the outset is that this tailor’s crafting carries an eldritch essence, causing the clothing to act as sapient magic items focused on increasing the characters’ renown. As long as the clothing is worn, the characters find themselves invited to exclusive parties and engagements, accidentally bumping into powerful people, and just generally getting ahead socially. But at the same time, powerful nobles, wealthy criminals, and corrupt political figures grow suspicious of the characters’ inexplicable social rise — and attempt to stop it.

Sing-Along

Whether gifted as a commission by a grateful noble or organization, or created as a spontaneous offering by a skald whose folk were done a service by the party, the characters are immortalized in song as the subjects of a heroic ballad. However, the song proves even catchier than expected, quickly spreading from town to town, loved by young and old, and sung in every tavern — to the point where the characters are suddenly well known in every region they visit and every settlement they pass through. Endless pleas for aid accompany their musical notoriety, alongside challenges by villains and would-be heroes looking to make names for themselves. Undoing the effects of the song might require some skillful social engineering — or the discovery that the original creation of the song was some kind of magical setup meant to hamstring the characters’ adventuring potential.

Out of Time!

It has been an age and a bit since I last posted anything to this blog aside from the monthly collection of daily fantasy roleplaying gaming tips I drop on BlueSky and Mastodon dice.camp. The primary reason for that is that I’ve been working like a maniac as the lead editor for Draw Steel, the MCDM RPG. In fact, I’ve been working like a maniac on Draw Steel since late 2024 (and loving every minute of it), but the last four months or so have been especially filled with time crunch.

Despite that time crunch, though — and despite the downside of being so flat-out busy working with other wonderful folks that I run out of time to work on my own stuff — I still manage to run two CORE20 games every week on top of a D&D 5e game I’m playing in. And when you’re running low on time to sleep, finding time to prep the games you’re running can be a challenge.

For one of my CORE20 campaigns a couple of months back, I ran five sessions of built-from-scratch homebrew adventure, set up with about two hours of prep. Not two hours per session, but two hours for all five sessions — fifteen or so solid hours of gaming. And now that I have a bit of downtime again, I thought it would be fun to break down my process, which covers a number of specific approaches I’ve found useful for prepping games when the amount of time you have to prep games approaches zero.

The Framework

A while back, I talked about a framework for fast game prep that can help you create a solid two-hour one-shot session in less than 10 minutes. The process I’m going to talk about here reflects that approach to some degree, but expands to the idea of prepping multiple sessions for an ongoing campaign, not just creating single-session adventures.

Is it possible to treat a homebrew campaign or adventure as an excuse to never stop writing notes, ideas, NPCs, monsters, history, and more? Yes it is. And it’s fun to do so if time permits! But what I’m talking about here is a minimalist approach where what you’re looking for is the maximum return on your time, in the sense of being able to say, “This five minutes of prep will let me fill an hour of game time.”

Home(brew) is Where the Heart Is

As a general setup, fast prep is almost always about homebrew adventure design. Because over many years of running games, one of the odd truths I’ve discovered is that running your own homebrew adventures takes less time commitment than running published adventures. On the face of it, that might seem odd, given that published adventures do all that writing and story design stuff for you. But the reality is that doing the kind of close study and notetaking you need to really get a feel for a published adventure and a sense of how you want to run it takes a lot of time. Certainly, for a great adventure, that can be time well spent. But when your time budget is flat broke, something’s got to give.

Being only half-prepared to run a published adventure can be a tense experience. But being only half-prepared to run a completely homebrew session can be exhilarating, because you get a much better return on your creative investment from making things up on the fly than you do from looking things up on the fly as you try to remember where your published adventure is meant to go next. 

Lay of the Land

To build out an adventure quickly, start with a cool map. Or, as I did for the multiple sessions I needed to plan with no time, start with several maps you can easily link together. Two types of maps are ideal for fast prep — those with straightforward features that don’t require a lot of notes (wilderness, caverns, simple dungeons), and those that are so detailed you can just pull information off the map (detailed city locations, manor houses, fortresses, and so forth). Avoid locations such as a wizard’s tower where you’re going to need to think up a bunch of wild details to support that location. You want to be able to wing that sort of information on the fly, whether you’re coming up with generic details for an underground grotto, or saying “There’s an oak chest in the corner of the sitting room” because that’s what the map shows.

For my campaign, I scored five maps from Dice Grimorium — one of a number of cartographers I back on Patreon — all part of a “Cave Tunnels” series. Then I let the maps springboard the other fast-prep components of the extended adventure.

Thematic Inspiration

When you’re putting together a full adventure in a hurry, focus on a singular theme that you can use to suggest monsters, traps, and other mechanical components, and which you can easily fall back on as inspiration when you’re talking up description and mood. For my adventure, the cool colored crystals on the map immediately suggested “elemental caverns,” so that’s what I went with, setting up different colors of crystals on the different maps. One level each of earth caverns, water caverns, air caverns, and fire caverns. Then inspired by the theme, I grabbed a final level taken from a similar map series showing four eldritch cauldrons around a vast pit (seen above), which I decided would make a most excellent power source for the elemental caverns above.

Fight the Good Fight

If you’re playing any sort of campaign in which monster hunting is the characters’ jam, planning combat-focused sessions is one of the best ways to maximize your prep time, because setting up combat is way faster than the time filled out by running it.

While the characters figured out how to cross a chasm in the earth cavern, I decided that they’d come under attack from transfixers — the CORE20 upgrade to the piercer, which first magically dazes you, then launches from the ceiling to arc through the air toward their targets like a stalactite air-to-surface missile. It was a monster the characters had never encountered before, making the fight feel fresh, and a good fit for the location and the earth/rock theme.

For the water level, I worked up a tougher-than-usual wight guardian — breaking from the elemental theme in order to introduce a mystery (talked about below). For the air level, an air spawn (the CORE20 air elemental) was on guard and perpetually pissed at anyone trying to steal valuable elemental crystals (talked about at “Treasure” below). 

For the fire cavern, the elemental crystals embedded into the walls were the threat, erupting with energy randomly whenever the characters got too close. These weren’t set up as traps, though, but effectively static combat threats that the characters were fully aware of, then needed to “fight” their way through.

The combat encounters through the elemental caverns were fairly straightforward in terms of threat level. So then for the cauldron cavern, I got to break out the big guns for a climactic challenging encounter — a fiendish vrock drawn to lair within the flow of magic boiling up from the well and through the cauldrons. Oh, and each round, the cauldrons would lash out toward a random character with elemental energy — though not in the way they expected (see “Treasure!” below).

It’s a Mystery

Setting up a simple mystery the players can ruminate on and solve is a great way to heighten engagement — and comes with the benefit that players thinking through a mystery are doing most of the work while you play. For this adventure, the combat with the advanced wight led to the discovery of another group of wights, all previously destroyed (and thus inert), but with no signs of battle around them. Each showed wounds consistent with having been executed while alive, allowing them to be transformed into wights by corrupting magic in the cavern. But each had also then been executed again as a wight, with no signs of struggle or having been bound.

The strange nature of this seeming sacrifice was something the players latched onto immediately, and generated an awesome amount of discussion around what circumstances might have caused it. The truth behind the mystery — which the players figured out in good time — was that this was a group who had discovered the caverns, become corrupted by the energy of the cauldrons when they used one to destroy an enemy army above the site, and were transformed into servants of the cauldrons’ magic. The group collectively decided to end their lives rather than follow the cauldrons’ directive to leave the caverns and become walking conduits for destructive elemental power, with the advanced wight the last survivor. But if the players had come up with another explanation that felt even more dramatic, I would have absolutely made use of that instead. That kind of course correction in response to figuring out a mystery is a special gift to the GM who doesn’t have time to prep, wherein without even knowing they’re doing so, the players write up the backstory you didn’t have time to figure out. 

Raise the Stakes

The final piece of the no-time-to-prep prep process was setting up a clear conundrum for the players to deal with. This came in the form of the cauldrons, with the dead-wights mystery and the scouring elemental power witnessed during the vrock fight confirming that the magic of the site was far too dangerous to just walk away from. Dumping the cauldrons into the pit was an obvious solution to that problem, but doing so incorporated the challenge of each cauldron being too heavy for any one character to move, and programmed to lash out with corrupting power if anyone got too close. 

Destroying the cauldrons using a careful approach of moving in behind them, lassoing each of them in turn, throwing the rope across the pit, then pulling from the other side played out over most of one session — literally two minutes of prep time to set up a couple of hours’ worth of planning and roleplaying. Part of the reason that worked is that the characters had no access to any magic that could have destroyed the cauldrons outright. But if they had, I would have simply adjusted the cauldrons’ potency to make sure that a certain amount of discussion and problem-solving would remain.

Treasure!

The final piece of the campaign-building puzzle is the rewards to be bestowed upon the characters for facing off against the challenges you’ve laid out for them. Looking to your theme and your map locations for inspiration is a good starting point for rewards, and I did so to come up with two ideas. 

First, a certain small number of the elemental crystals found throughout the caverns had become saturated with elemental power that would remain in them if they were removed. With a sense that these special crystals would be valuable assets to crafters creating elemental-themed magic items, the characters were meticulous in locating and claiming them.

Second, the theme of elemental power and the idea of the wights having been corrupted by that power to become servants of it set up the idea that during the final fight, the cauldrons lashing out against the characters wasn’t actually an attack. Rather, it was an attempt to infuse the characters with magic that would eventually tie to them to the cauldrons as corrupted servants. For the first couple of cauldron “attacks,” the characters made their saves and so knew nothing about this. But when the first character failed their save and found themselves gaining the ability to cast a variant-damage fireball, the fight got more interesting. When one of the characters then realized that the power they were absorbing was tying them to the cauldrons, the fight got more interesting again.

Game On

It’s literally taken me longer to write up this post than it did to prep the fifteen-or-so hours of gaming whose setup I’ve described here. Doing campaign prep is fun for me, and I don’t begrudge myself time spent making notes, sketching out ideas, and assembling the building blocks of a cool adventure. But even if you’re like me and think of campaign prep as time well spent, focusing on a simplified framework for adventure design can be a good experience — especially when you find yourself in a time crunch and need a different approach.

The Backup Campaign

As written about on this very blog (and in plenty of other places), there are lots of strategies a GM can adopt for carrying on the campaign with a less-than-full roster of players. But because I’m a GM who really doesn’t like running games with a less-than-full crew, I’ve been known to dabble in the one-shot backup campaign.

A backup campaign is a campaign that runs alongside the main campaign, custom built to pick up the slack when too many players in the main group have to bow out of a regularly scheduled session. But because running or playing in two campaigns is [quickly checks math] twice as hard as running or playing in a single campaign — and because running one campaign is hard enough as it is — the backup campaign has some very specific parameters.

For the GM

A GM running a one-shot backup campaign needs to economize on prep and story development as much as possible. The following guidelines can help make that easier.

One Session at a Time

Because you’re never hoping that players will be missing two sessions in a row — and because if they are, you have no guarantee that it’ll be the same players each time — the focus of the backup campaign is the one-shot. A single short adventure whose beginning, middle, and end fits nicely into the space of your regular session.

A Rotating Cast of Characters

Because you generally won’t have the same players unable to attend a game every time, the makeup of the party needs to fit the idea of different characters jumping in and out of the backup campaign session to session. So look for a foundational story setup that works well with characters coming and going. An exploring-the-ruin-of-the-week dungeon delving campaign works great for this setup. So too does a high-seas pirate campaign, a mercenary company taking on adventures for hire, or the party as a group of investigators working cases in a major city. With all these options, it’s easy to explain that certain characters are off doing other stuff while the remaining party members descend dark staircases, plot a heist from the harbormaster’s house, or hunt for a murderer on a noble’s estate.

Straightforward Adventures

Not all one-shot adventures are created equal, whether you’re writing your backup campaign yourself, playing published one-shots, or pulling a single-session scenario out from the narrative of a longer published adventure. Because you want to make sure you wrap up your adventure in whatever time your session allows, focus on keeping things simple so that you can keep things moving. Set a clear goal for the characters. Narrate any necessary setup and backstory if it feels like roleplaying through it will run long. Keep an eye on the clock and cut intermediate sections from the story to leave yourself ample time to play out your big finish. And if you run out of adventure a bit before the end, don’t worry about it. Completing an adventure comes with a built-in sense of accomplishment for the players, and finishing up a one-shot session early won’t take away from that.

Focused Combat

Depending on the length of your game sessions, you’ll likely want to shoot for one or two full-scale combat encounters in your backup campaign games — typically one easy and one hard fight, or two medium fights with some additional excitement (traps, environmental effects, a mini-boss, and so forth) in the second encounter. To avoid combat running long, make sure each fight features alternative end points beyond the “everyone fights to the death” baseline.

Embrace the Random

If you create your own adventures rather than running published adventures, a one-shot backup campaign is a great opportunity to flex your improv muscles. Creating an exciting dungeon crawl, wilderness adventure, or urban excitement one-shot requires little more effort than finding a map you like, a solid plot hook, coming up with two sets of foes for the characters to face off against, and interesting environmental effects or NPCs to bring your locations to life. Lots of books (including my friend Mike Shea’s Lazy DM’s Companion) feature random adventure generators that you can use to sketch out a one-shot scenario in just a few minutes.

For the Players

Playing in a one-shot backup campaign can be just as much fun as playing in a long-term campaign. But players should keep a few things in mind to maximize the fun — and to help make the GM’s job as easy as possible.

Focus the Action

Because you know that a one-shot game needs to move from beginning to middle to end within a fixed duration, do everything you can to keep things moving. Focus on the setup and backstory presented by the GM, and feel free to ask whether specific plot threads are more or less relevant to the adventure throughline as you play. When the game’s in combat, think about what your character is doing ahead of time, and have any references you need to spells, special attacks, and magic at the ready. Pay attention to what’s happening around your character so that you’re able to quickly build on that, rather than having to ask what’s going on. And if any of these objectives are things you sometimes struggle with in your main game, treat the backup campaign as a lower-stakes place to hone your keeping-the-game-moving skills.

Know Your Character

It can be really easy to lose the narrative thread on a character you play only a couple of times every few months. As such, put an extra level of focus on your character for the backup campaign. Make the time to review their build and backstory each time you play, and look for any and all roleplaying opportunities as a means of heightening the connection between the character and you.

Keep Things Simple

Because the backup campaign is all about one-shot adventures bookended within a single game session, don’t expect a ton of complex continuity between adventures. And hand in hand with that, think about leaning away from complex characters with deep backstory, convoluted goals, and several layers of secrets. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of any of that, of course. But the backup campaign isn’t necessarily the place for a complex character to shine.

Try Different Concepts

Single-session one-shot campaigns lend themselves to unique and interesting characters, and are a great excuse to try a character type or build you’ve never played before. Mix-and-matching character archetypes and concepts can be a lot of fun, but lots of players worry about a character who tries to do much becoming less effective than a more focused character in a long campaign. But in a one-shot campaign, you don’t need to worry as much about that. You might play the same character for a half-dozen one-off sessions or just a single game — long enough to have fun with the concept before moving on to something else.

 

Roll for Narrative!

Everyone hates random encounters! Or at least that’s the common wisdom. Random encounters derail the throughline of an adventure. They break the momentum. They force characters to use up valuable resources that’ll be needed later in the set-piece encounters still to come. In the worst-case scenario of characters being so tapped out of spells and limited-use features after a random encounter, everything grinds to a halt while the GM figures out how to work a long rest into what was supposed to be a time-sensitive adventure.

And all of that is absolutely true — if you treat every random encounter as an automatic combat encounter. Particularly a random encounter in which the wandering foes are automatically set to fight to the death. But combat is only one part of the story a fantasy RPG can tell — and as the facilitator and outliner of that story, you can do way more with random encounters than roll for initiative every time.

What’s the Story?

I go on about story in D&D (and by extension, all of its many offshoot games) from time to time, because I believe quite strongly that story is the foundation and end goal of all RPG play. So it should come as no surprise that I treat random encounters as just another part of the GM’s story-generation machine, by focusing not so much on the mechanics of what kind of encounter is called for and how tough that encounter should be, but on what kind of narrative the encounter can help build.

In keeping with the general bent of the game to define itself as being supported on three pillars of social interaction, exploration, and combat, those three facets of the game make a good starting point for thinking about how every random encounter might play out. But we can then add an additional layer to our random-encounter triad, thinking about random encounters as a means of delivering lore and exposition in a nicely dramatic package. 

Social Interaction

As pretty much every version of D&D is quick to point out, not every monster is a monster. Which is to say, the world is filled with creatures who adventurers can meet, and those creatures can have motivations other than fighting, killing, or eating said adventurers. More interestingly, even some of the creatures who do want to fight, kill, and eat the heroes often have motivations that can tame those urges.

So how do characters find out what type of monster they’re dealing with? By talking, of course. A well-armed adventuring band is generally a daunting presence, giving a lot of monsters reasons to listen if the characters make an immediate offer of no hostilities. A group of wandering creatures with no real interest in what the characters are doing might simply agree that both parties should go their own way. The initial sense that combat feels imminent makes for a nice moment of tension, and a successful parlay to prevent that combat creates a sense of success that all the players can share in.

Lots of different kinds of social encounters can play out with a wandering band of intelligent creatures, from those creatures being lost and looking for directions, to creatures looking to trade equipment, magic, or information, to a protection racket where creatures more powerful than the characters ask for payment to let the party go. You can dial up the social aspect of that last encounter even more with some roleplaying or an increased payment, letting the characters convince the creatures to go ahead of them and clear out any other random encounters that might lie ahead.

Exploration

As has been said, the best offense is often a good defense, which makes avoiding a fight the ideal way to win it. Outside of a scenario where two groups confront each other coming around the corner of a dungeon corridor, you usually get to decide the distance at which a group of wandering monsters is seen. So by giving the characters enough lead time and a bit of initial cover, you can easily build any random encounter into an exploration mission dedicated to getting around or away from the imminent threat.

Exploration-based random encounters can be simple. Literally two minutes in game as you describe what the characters see coming toward them or following behind, and the players telling you what approach they take to staying unobserved while they go around the threat. But even the quickest and most seemingly uneventful avoid-the-monsters encounter helps flesh out the story, reminding the players and characters (and you) that the world is an active, dynamic place where things happen and the characters are going to stumble into those things from time to time.

Combat

All this talk about not making every random encounter into a combat encounter shouldn’t be taken to mean that random encounters should never be combat encounters. For most groups, combat is great fun. But you want to make sure that combat random encounters don’t start draining the characters’ resources in a way that’ll mess up the progress of the campaign.

First, focus on easy encounters that shouldn’t drain too many of the characters’ resources, whether that means combat with lower-threat foes or fights with more daunting foes who run as soon as they realize the characters aren’t going to fall as easily as first thought. And in the event that the characters do spend resources in a fight that you’d rather they didn’t, you can make sure a combat random encounter gives them a chance to replace some of those resources. If taking on debased cultists leaves one or more players with long-term conditions, give the cult leader a couple of spell scrolls of lesser restoration or greater restoration. If driving off a pack of dire wolves leaves the characters in a hit point deficit, maybe there’s a magical pool nearby that acts as a potion of healing once per week for any creature — and is what the wolves were protecting when they attacked the characters.

Lore and Exposition

Random encounters are often set up in a way that wants to detach them from the main narrative of an adventure. But beyond whatever fun you can have with them as you play, every random encounter can also serve to push specific bits of lore and exposition into the story — even lore and exposition you hadn’t thought about before. 

Lore and exposition are often most closely associated with the social encounter pillar, but both can be worked into combat and exploration as well. Whenever the characters encounter other creatures, those creatures might have information they can reveal. A behir has heard a rumor and is willing to trade it for a favor. Avoiding a gnoll ranger patrol lets the characters see the gnolls use a secret trail leading to their hideout. A bandit chieftain who flees a fight drops a satchel full of maps that will give the party an edge as they seek a lost temple. Any time you have information ready to drop into an adventure, a random encounter can make a great time to do so. 

But there’s another level of lore that random encounters let you play with, as you think about the encounter’s place in the adventure — letting the encounter becomes its own lore as you patch the appearance of monsters and other foes into the story. Roll up an orc war band during an adventure where the characters are going after evil stone giants? Guess what! You just determined that the giants are using orc mercenaries to patrol the territory around their lair, even if that wasn’t part of the adventure setup. Roll up a chuul in an environment where a chuul doesn’t make a lot of sense? There’s suddenly a portal to the Far Realm nearby that the players will never know you just made up on the spot.

Heroic Gifts 2

I had great fun with this concept last year. So I thought it would be fun to revisit the seasonally appropriate idea of gifts, awards, and recompenses for the heroes as potential story and adventure hooks. Any GM can leave a vorpal sword or a headband of intellect wrapped up under the tree for the characters this year. But a thoughtful GM can create the personalized gift of unusual offerings and honors that grateful benefactors, patrons, or persons saved from peril might bestow upon the characters, rewarding them for an adventure well done.

Unhappy Guardian

A grateful long-retired knight bequeaths the characters with a magical token given to them by the late king they once served. Though the knight never had cause to use the token, it is said that breaking it performs a one-time summoning of a powerful celestial who will defend the wielder and follow their orders. However, what the knight doesn’t know is that the celestial bound to the token was ordered to serve them and only them, and won’t react kindly to being summoned by others. When called upon, the celestial might grudgingly defend and assist the characters, then demand a favor or quest in return — or else. They might agree to aid the party in exchange for first taking over its leadership, then leading the characters into peril far outside their pay grade. Or the celestial might assume that the characters are ignoble sorts who’ve robbed and murdered their dear knight, and set about seeking retribution.

Borrowed Power

A powerful priest or the magic of a mysterious shrine might grant the characters a permanent magical boon in lieu of magic item rewards — a once-per-day combat assist, the ability to cast a cantrip or spell, a boost to AC or a saving throw, or some other benefit appropriate for the characters’ level. But what the characters don’t realize at first is that those benefits are fueled by life force stolen from villains cursed by the priest or shrine, who take an equivalent penalty or lose access to magic bestowed upon the heroes. Now those cursed villains are looking for a way to get back what’s been taken from them — and the characters are in their sights.

Noblesse Oblige

To show their gratitude at the party’s heroics, the monarch of a small, not-particularly-wealthy realm bestows upon each of the characters a noble title vacated because its previous holder and their heirs were slain in whatever war/disaster/monster incursion the heroes were instrumental in overcoming. However, what the monarch didn’t mention is that each of those titles comes with extensive debts and obligations — perhaps including obligatory and potentially deadly quests — that the characters are now on the hook for.

Shared Accommodation

The characters are gifted with a talisman that allows them to access a wondrous extradimensional space — a magnificent mansion, demiplane, or similar sanctum. But what they learn only after using the sanctum for a time is that the space appears to also be used by other heroes, with evidence of their presence appearing each time the characters enter the space. The characters might end up taking the other group’s treasures stored in the sanctum, assuming them to be some sort of magically appearing gift — or have their own stored treasures disappear for the same reason. They might find lore or notes left by the other group, which point to mysterious adventure narratives the characters can get caught up in while they try to track that group down. They might discover that the other adventurers using the sanctum are actually a group of villains related to their own quests, allowing them to use the space to seek those villains out — or to turn the sanctum into a deadly ambush site.

Giving What We Can

Rescuing or saving an impoverished community sees the grateful members of that community gift the characters things their meager incomes allow them — homespun goods, folk art, trinkets, and so forth. But over time, increasingly powerful monsters and villains start to be drawn to the party, and to one of those gifts in particular. Eventually, the characters realize that the innocuous gift is an artifact that was hidden away in that form by a deity or powerful spellcaster. Now the artifact is pushing them toward an adventure in which the characters are meant to restore the powerful relic to its true form — or die trying.

The Gift of Friendship

As a reward from a powerful high priest or deific agent, the characters receive a soul boon — a powerful magical ward that protects them against death in some way (advantage on death saving throws, boosts to healing, automatic temporary hit points, or whatever). But what they don’t realize is that the cosmic power who grants the boon does so by lumping all the characters’ souls together — along with the souls of other heroes the boon has been granted to. This soul mixing might manifest first as the characters learning each other’s secrets or having strange dreams of being other people. It might escalate to compulsions to engage in quests that other soulbound heroes failed at. And it might culminate in the characters seeking out the deity who granted the boon in the hope of figuring out a way to see its power reworked or undone before they lose all sense of their own identities.

The Lone and Level Sands

I’ve had desert exploration on my mind recently, both as a result of my current campaign and a recent editing project, which has inspired a collection of random desert encounters. These encounter setups are organized around multiple possible throughlines (a topic I talked about not long ago), and are a follow-up to a selection of nautical encounter setups.

These encounter ideas work for characters traveling through desert, badlands, scrubland, or other remote locales. They can be used as random encounters, as the setup for a series of encounters you build out from these initial ideas, or as an initial-encounter hook for an even larger adventure.

(As an aside, the title of this piece is taken from the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem “Ozymandias,” which ties to the recent editing project mentioned above — the new book from Mike “Sly Flourish” Shea. You can find a teaser here.)

Art from the 4e Dark Sun Campaign Setting

The Empty Village

While crossing uninhabited badlands in pursuit of a villain they’ve promised to capture alive, the characters come across a ruined village abandoned decades before. The site might now mark the territory of a clan of basilisks who petrified the villain, and who the characters must defeat so they can claim the villain’s statue form, then restore it. Alternatively, the site might be subject to a terrible curse that destroyed its original inhabitants and the villain alike — and which has trapped the spirits of some of the lost into scattered gemstones from which they might be returned to life.

Shelter from the Storm

An advancing sandstorm sees the characters forced to quickly seek shelter in a series of caverns accessed through a crumbling stone bluff. But as they explore the cave complex, they realize that they aren’t the only ones seeking shelter there. The other group might be a party of desert raiders who use the caves as a secret hiding place to lie low after attacks on trade caravans, and who are willing to kill to keep its location a secret. Or they might be spectral undead spawned from long-dead travelers who tried to wait out a storm centuries past and were killed when rising dunes sealed them inside — and who the characters can convince to stand down in exchange for finding, then properly interring their remains.

Unusual Oasis

Characters traveling through the desert spot an oasis appearing on no known maps, with humanoid figures seen on the outskirts, beckoning frantically. The inhabitants of the oasis might be a noble’s hunting party who became lost during a storm, and who promise a rich reward if the characters return them to their home city. The oasis might be the headquarters of a gang of brigands, who manage to keep the site a secret by drawing in, robbing, then killing every traveller who passes by. Or the site might be unknown because it marks the lair of an elder water elemental recently spawned from an ancient underground aquifer — and who has taken a local nomadic tribe hostage, forcing them to worship the elemental as a god.

Mirage Arcana

A dry lakebed is well known as a site for mirages, but characters exploring the area discover that some of those mirages are magical illusions concealing a crumbling fortress. The site might be home to a friendly master illusionist who loves their solitude, and who is happy to hire adventurers to run errands for them. Or the fortress might be intentionally concealed by teams of spellcasters working for a powerful warlord, who plans to use the hidden site as a staging ground for attacks against nearby settlements.

Lost Merchant

While traveling a well-established trade route through the desert, the characters catch up to a lone merchant pulling a handcart, who claims to have become separated from a larger caravan that came under bandit attack. The merchant might secretly be a merchant lord, desperate for an escort to the nearest settlement and willing to reward the characters with treasure and adventure hooks. They might be a good rakshasa in disguise, looking for selfless heroes to undertake a dangerous mission. Or the merchant might be possessed by the spirit of an ancient sorcerer entombed nearby as a penance for their evil deeds, and who hopes to convince the characters to break the seal on the sorcerer’s tomb and restore them to power.

Carnival of Shadows

While enjoying a seasonal carnival in a scrubland town, the characters are caught in the middle of a skirmish between members of two rival bandit gangs violating the carnival truce. It might be the case that one of the gangs is attempting to assimilate the other, threatening to plunge the whole settlement into violence unless the characters intervene. It could be that a wandering assassin is set to fulfil a contract on a powerful figure in the town, and set off the gang violence as a distraction. Or the violence might be the result of a fell magical relic recently brought into town by an unknowing treasure hunter, its spreading magic turning folk violent and threatening to turn the carnival into a bloodbath.

Down by the Seaside

Inspired by some seafaring adventuring in the earlier sessions of my current campaign, and by some writing on a project that cannot yet be named, I was thinking recently about random encounters with a nautical theme. And because I talked not long ago about always setting up encounters with multiple possible directions, sharing some nautical encounter setups seemed like a fine idea.

These encounter setups work for characters on a ship at sea or traveling along the coastline close to the water. They can be used as random encounters, as the setup for a series of encounters you build out from these initial ideas, or as an initial-encounter hook for an even larger adventure.

Art from the Dungeon Master’s Guide

Yo Ho Ho

As the characters approach a small fishing village, they spot a pirate vessel anchored offshore and bloodthirsty buccaneers shouting in the streets. If the characters storm in looking for a fight, the pirates might simply be enjoying some shore leave and paying the locals well for food, drink, and entertainment. Alternatively, the settlement might be the hiding place of a first mate who fled the pirates’ service with a collection of treasure maps, and the buccaneers will tear the town apart unless the first mate and the maps are found — or the characters stop them.

Saved from the Sea

Shattered wreckage spotted on the water turns out to have a near-unconscious humanoid clinging to it — a survivor of a shipwreck. The survivor might be a sailor whose gratitude for being rescued sees them offer to lead the characters to a site of buried treasure. Or the survivor might secretly be a member of a cult, pretending to be adrift and waiting to be rescued, and leading the characters not to treasure but to the cult’s island enclave to be sacrificed.

Merfolk Meeting

The characters spot a strange vessel rising from the water — an open-deck magic submersible crewed by merfolk. The merfolk might be making initial forays toward trading with the folk of coastal towns, giving the characters the opportunity to set up initial contacts or even act as brokers for trade between the settlements of the coast and the undersea. Alternatively, the merfolk might be on a mission of vengeance, looking for a pirate vessel or local warship whose crew slaughtered a pod of dolphins under the merfolk’s protection — and willing to take their revenge against any surface folk.

Strange Waters

One or more rare sea creatures — whales, dragon turtles, and so forth — are seen swimming through shipping lanes, local fishing grounds, or other waters they would never normally travel through. The characters first need to deal with the creatures damaging watercraft or docks, then determine what’s caused this strange migration. It might turn out that the creatures have been driven from their usual waters by some sort of magical disaster that needs investigation. It could be the case that corrupted merfolk druids or sahuagin enchanters have directed the creatures to attack folk of the surface. Or the creatures might be under the magical control of a cult seeking to claim territory along the coast, acting as the vanguard of a much larger aquatic assault.

Sudden Shipwreck

Along a coastline the characters have traveled multiple times, a shipwreck is suddenly visible at low tide where no wreck was seen before, in waters with no dangerous obstructions and with no storms in recent weeks. The wreck might be a vessel that foundered when a cursed but valuable magical relic on board forced the crew to abandon ship. It might have been disgorged by a natural portal recently opened in the seabed, and through which aquatic monsters from another part of the world will be drawn if the portal isn’t closed. Or it might be a rare mega-mimic with a penchant for feeding on underwater treasure hunters.

Mysterious Lighthouse

When traveling in a storm or attacked by seafaring monsters, the characters take refuge in a remote lighthouse that reveals itself to be empty, despite its magical light shining from dusk to dawn. As the characters explore, they might discover the lighthouse staffed by the benevolent ghosts of all its former keepers, who have a quest they need fulfilled. Or they might discover that the magically automated site is now used as a meeting place by a nefarious seafaring cult, whose members arrive to deal with the intruders who tripped their magical alarms.

Unusual Campaign Starts

Figuring out how to get a campaign going can be one of the most challenging parts of being a GM. It’s relatively easy to build cool encounters and social setups, and the big climactic events at the act breaks and endgame of a campaign often write themselves. But when trying to figure out how to get brand-new characters together for the first time and drag them quickly into the action, it’s easy to feel like all the obvious starting points to the story the campaign will tell feel overly tame, trite, or obvious.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and every gaming group has different needs. Every single in-game campaign start that might seem basic or antiquated to a person who’s been playing D&D for decades (like me) is going to absolutely be the essential best campaign start for some first-time GM somewhere. And even grognards like me might be totally fine with the timeworn meetup in a local tavern that’s launched tens of thousands of campaigns. The game can be just about anything, and so can incorporate just about anything.

Campaign starts are a necessary evil for fantasy RPGs. Arguably, they’re a necessary lawful evil, insofar as they follow well-defined rules but often do so in the worst way possible. Many too-familiar campaign starts can come to feel like a handshake agreement the GM sets up to give away a plot point they know they won’t be able to otherwise sell. They make the players feel obliged to say things like, “Why yes, we’ll talk to this mysterious old man who’s heard a rumor about trouble at the abandoned abattoir out of town,” ignoring obvious contrivance for the sake of getting the story going. (One of the most common campaign starts builds on the hook of the NPC in need, which I expressed my thoughts on previously.)

Getting Things Going

If you’re at the point where too many of your own campaign starts — or the starting points of specific published adventures you’d like to run — are feeling flat, the following campaign starts can be used as setup for lots of different types of campaigns, or can serve as inspiration for unusual campaign starts of your own. 

All Fired Up

Sometimes it’s fun to subvert expectations by turning a tired trope on its ear. Rather than having the characters meet up in a tavern for the first time and hear a rumor meant to draw them into the campaign, have them getting ready to meet up in a tavern — except the tavern across the street explodes before they can get introduced. The process of rescuing victims and helping to put out the ensuing fire brings the characters together, even as the cause of the explosion can tie into their first adventures.

Not-So-Secret Map

Another classic campaign start that’s easy to turn into something more interesting is the wandering NPC selling a map to an old ruin. Certainly, there must be treasure there! But then the characters quickly discover that this NPC is one of many NPCs selling copies of the same exact map in multiple settlements across the land. The question of who’s running these NPCs and why they’re trying to bring multiple adventurers to the same location becomes an initial mystery in the campaign — or perhaps even the central mystery — that the characters need to solve.

Who’s on First?

One of the most abrupt ways to kick off a campaign is to have the characters start off in a combat encounter in a cool location of your choice. Except they have no idea where they are, who they are, or how they got there, except for a vague sense that they know and trust each other — and a stronger sense that everyone else at the site is trying to kill them. When the fight’s done, the characters’ memories start to slowly return, and the magic relic or other McGuffin that caused their amnesia becomes a secret that feeds into the rest of the campaign.

Unseen Connections

A group of characters who don’t know each other learn of some secret connection between them — the same seemingly mundane trinket that each picked up at some point, a tattoo they barely remembering getting after a night of drunken revelry, an NPC they all interacted with as youths, and so forth. An unseen connection can provide a core throughline to the campaign if the reason behind it connects to an NPC or other force intentionally wanting the characters to come together. Or it could be just be a happenstance moment that the characters can look back on with a sense of “Isn’t it wild how we first met?”

Piece by Piece

If time and your gaming schedule permits, it can be a lot of fun to start a campaign as a series of short adventures for small numbers of characters, who then come together to create the party as a whole. Two characters accidentally meeting in a tavern or caught up in a monstrous attack and bonding while they fight back to back often feels more dramatically palatable than some sort of “the gang’s all here” full-party meetup. You can run this sort of small-start scenario quickly — for example, three sessions in which two different characters meet up, followed by a full session where all six characters come together. 

Alternatively, you can have different characters interact with each other during many mini-sessions, slowly building up the relationships that will define the party. As an even more interesting setup for those who are comfortable with this sort of roleplaying, bringing the party together slowly can let the players decide that their characters really don’t like each other after their first interaction, letting subsequent interactions fully build out the characters’ eventual adventuring bond. 

Hunters and Hunted

In a party where some of the characters are notable do-gooders while others are a touch shifty, having the campaign kick off with the good characters hired or inspired to track down the scoundrels can be a nicely novel approach. The trick with such a scenario is making sure that common ground can be quickly found to bring the characters together — for example, the scoundrels convincing the do-gooders that they (truthfully) have been set up or are wanted for crimes they didn’t commit. Likewise, the good characters could realize that the reason or patron behind their hunt only gave them half the story for their mission, and that delivering up the other characters is no longer in their interest.

For players who don’t know each other well or who don’t like surprises in their story setup, talk about this potential campaign start in session zero or even earlier to make sure it doesn’t present any problems. But if you’re playing with a group of friends you know well who have enjoyed similar unexpected twist scenarios in your games, try telling some of the players that the campaign is going to start out with the party wanted by the law, then tell the other players that the campaign will initially be about them working to track down some notorious criminals. Then reveal the more complex setup in the first session.

The Fast-Prep Adventure

Last week, the marvelous M.T. Black posted on the social mediaz to ask whether anyone had “a proven formula for creating an enjoyable 2-hour session of #dnd with less than 10 minutes prep?” I responded with the following:

1. Map of old ruins, five rooms or so. 
2. Two cool traps or hazards, one placed conspicuously at the entrance. 
3. Place two easy encounters. 
4. Have one incorporeal or teleporting hard encounter stalk the characters, then attack just after the second easy fight finishes.

This was an easy response for me because it’s a formula I’ve used a lot — mostly because I really like the kind of focused adventure it creates, not because I’m consistently short of prep time. But in ruminating on why I like this setup and how it works for me, I thought it would be fun to break the formula down a bit and explore what it’s actually doing. Because through that process, we can think about the underlying foundations of each step of the process, and how those steps can create actionable hooks for adventures of all kinds.

1) An Adventure Flowchart

“The entrance to the old dungeons can be easily located as a flight of broad stone steps leading down into darkness,” were the words I read in the Holmes blue box version of Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager. “But the few adventurous souls who have descended into crypts below the ruin have either reported only empty stone corridors or have failed to return at all.”

And with that, I was hooked. I saw the blue-box rulebook’s Tower of Zenopus in my mind as clearly as any place I’d actually visited in real life, because there’s something so primally attractive about the idea of being brave enough to walk through a site where secrets, history, and danger surround you on all sides.

Dungeons are fun. But they’re more importantly one of the best frameworks for adventure design, as the name of the game has pointed out for nearly fifty years now. A map of a ruined keep, a subterranean temple, a warren of rough-walled caverns, or any other isolated site cut up into a number of distinct locations makes an easy-to-follow flowchart for exploration, intrigue, and adventure. If you don’t have a lot of time to figure out the shape of the adventure you want to run, a dungeon map gives you that shape, creating a literal path that the characters are compelled to follow.

2) Seeing the Unseen

Traps and hazards are one of the most effective ways to remind the players and characters that what they can’t see is potentially as big a threat as what they can see. Traps and hazards help to focus the players on their characters’ surroundings, giving you the opportunity to bring those surroundings fully to life. But one chronic problem of traps and hazards is that when the characters don’t spot them in time, those threats can end up feeling like a sucker punch — a beat of punishment narrative built on failure.

So give the characters an automatic success against unseen environmental threats early on in an adventure to give them a feeling of accomplishment. A trap or hazard that reveals itself easily feels like a victory, and can focus the players right from the start into problem-solving mode as they figure out how to get past the trap or hazard. By establishing early on that the players’ thinking is at least as important to getting past challenges as the characters’ capabilities, you set up a framework to have the players and characters fully engage with their adventuring environment, and that engagement helps bring an adventure to life better than anything else.

3) An Early Win

Easy encounters are the fastest way to turn new or uncertain players into adventure-obsessed veterans. Success in combat spikes a special kind of RPG dopamine straight into the gamer brain. And just as with regular dopamine, once we get that first hit, we want more. As every GM understands, a campaign composed of nothing but easy combat encounters can get stale quickly, but easy encounters are a great tool for a one-shot or a campaign start. Give the characters and players a chance to feel heroic right from the get-go, and they’ll keep coming back for that heroism fix — along with the gradually increasing levels of challenge that make the fix that much sweeter.

4) The Threat That’s Coming

A lot of adventures (especially site-based adventures) set up a kind of rhythm around first seeing monsters, then fighting monsters. It’s a reasonable and logical approach most of the time. But when the characters have very little time between the revelation of a threat and the process of dealing with the threat, the players sometimes don’t have a real opportunity to feel the weight of that threat. That’s where it can be handy to have a formidable foe who can teleport, move through walls, or otherwise reveal themself to the characters, then quickly slip away in a manner that prevents them being followed. 

Playing up a slow-build threat goes hand in hand with the players’ engagement with the environment (which you’ve set up initially by letting them see the unseen). As the characters focus on interacting with what’s around them to stay ahead of unknown dangers, they inevitably end up face to face with the danger that’s watching them, slipping away from them, waiting for them, watching them again. Then when that danger finally strikes, it does so at a point when the feeling of impending threat has been escalated to its highest possible level. The result is an encounter that engages the players fully — because they’ve been engaging with it from way before the encounter even begins.

Alternatives to the NPC in Need

D&D adventures have been around for fifty years now, and over that much time, it’s inevitable that elements of newer adventures will start to retread old ground. Sometimes that’s for good reasons, as when a designer wants to create an homage to a classic adventure, or to invert tired adventure tropes to do something now. Sometimes it’s because original ideas are hard to come by, and every writer inevitably writes something that someone else has written before.

But a third factor that often leads to tired adventure design is the fundamental paradigm of RPG adventures needing to be a bounded framework for an absolutely unbounded story. Because that paradigm sets hard limits to what kinds of story we can tell in certain parts of an adventure. And there’s no part of an adventure in which that’s truer than the adventure hook.

In a novel, a short story, a film, an episode of a TV series, or any other form of locked-down story, an author can start that story any way they like. Most often, the start of a story is directly set up by the characters, either through their direct choices or their indirect reactions to unexpected events around them. But in an adventure, that initial hook (what’s often referred to as the inciting incident in fiction discourse) can’t be customized to the characters — because an adventure has no idea who the characters are. The hook has to be generic enough that it can work for literally any group of players, any party, any GM.

And so, long, long ago in Lake Geneva, the extraordinarily tired hook of “An NPC hires the characters to solve some problem” was born.

As you can probably tell from my tone, I’m not a huge fan of the NPC-in-need-hiring-the-heroes adventure hook. And there are two specific variations on that hook that I dislike most of all: the “characters hired by farmers and ranchers to take on some great peril” hook, and the “1st-level party recruited to fight some great evil” hook.

For the former, I grew up in cattle ranching country, and I can tell you with great authority that when farmers and ranchers face peril, they deal with that crap themselves. If any of the ranchers who were neighbors of mine when I was a kid had ever seen an owlbear stray onto their property, that handsome monstrosity would have been a stuffed head over the mantelpiece by the end of the day. The 1st-level troubleshooters hook is equally frustrating by virtue of how badly it breaks the verisimilitude of the adventuring world, because in a world with adventurers, no one has any real reason to hire 1st-level characters to fight evil when higher-level characters must be out there somewhere. Especially when the evil in question has huge stakes, all of which are known in advance. (I’m looking at you, Tomb of Annihilation.)

Mixing Things Up

Whether you’re looking at running a published adventure with the “An NPC tasks the characters with X” hook, or are running your own adventures and looking for ways to break past the oldest of D&D tropes, here are a few suggested alternatives. With just a bit of fine-tuning for your own game and its players and characters, you should be able to work in any of these hooks as an easy replacement for the NPC in need.

Part of the Solution

Instead of helpless NPCs beseeching the adventurers for aid, have the characters come across NPCs who are fully capable of looking after themselves — but who will happily take any additional assistance offered to them. Rather then being the only ones who can accomplish the adventure’s central task, the characters become part of a larger group capable of doing so — searchers, hunters, researchers, survivors of a natural disaster, and so forth, depending on the task. Then the characters just happen to be the one part of the larger group in the right place at the right time to jump into the larger adventure.

Close to Home

Rather than being hired by an NPC stranger, the characters discover that someone they know personally is in peril, create immediate stakes and a sense of urgency. Be cautious with this hook, though. Using it once or twice in one campaign with an NPC who has a habit of getting into trouble can be great fun. Using it multiple times — and especially with vulnerable NPCs placed into real peril — will quickly put the players into a mindset of seeing every NPC you introduce in the campaign as a potential plot-trigger victim.

Mistaken Identity

Having a plot hook handed to the characters takes on a different feel when the hook was intended for someone else. Being mistaken for another group of adventurers or specialist troubleshooters offers an ironic or comedic take on this alternative hook if your campaign runs in that direction. Or you can take a hard left from humor by having one of the characters targeted for attack or assassination after being mistaken for someone else.

Does This Sound Familiar?

A bit of prophetic prognostication given by a soothsayer, found in a previous adventure, or tied to a character’s backstory seems trite on the face of it — until events unfolding around the characters start to echo the prophecy a little too closely. By virtue of its potential to seem contrived, this hook can be problematic in its own right. But granting the players and characters a sense of being caught up in events they might be able to control is a powerful draw, even if that control turns out to be illusory. 

Mysterious Lore

A trope far older than D&D, stumbling across secret information is a great way to inspire the curiosity of players and lead the characters into an adventure. The discovery of an old map is a great way to draw the party into a site-based adventure. Likewise, finding part of a note or a letter can introduce the characters to a problem needing solving, while a troubadour’s song can tease a legend that needs investigating. The trick to making this hook shine is to introduce the revelation before it becomes relevant. Have the characters find the lore in the course of a previous adventure and not think anything of it, then discover a second bit of context (recognizing a location on the map, hearing a name from a mysterious note, and so forth) that fully hooks them in. 

Mysterious Relic

A party member comes into possession of some odd trinket or bit of minor magic that reacts strangely when the characters wander into a specific location or engage with particular creatures or NPCs. The relic can most easily have some connection to an adventure location you want the characters to go to, rumors you want them to investigate, an NPC you want them to meet, and so forth. As with mysterious lore, this hook works better if the relic is something picked up earlier, and which seems innocuous until its purpose is revealed.

Old Obligations

Tying to the characters’ backstories or backgrounds, some piece of the past suddenly reveals itself, drawing one or more characters back into unfinished business that conveniently ties to the adventure at hand. This hook can incorporate all kinds of fun scenarios, from an old enemy seeking the characters out to settle a vendetta, to a rival or ex-lover showing up unexpectedly, to a revealed secret putting the character and their companions into peril.

Dreams and Visions

One or more characters experiences a strange dream that lingers in memory, granting an urge to engage in some quest, seek out a specific location, seek an NPC they’ve never heard of before, and so forth. This one can feel pretty hokey as a concept, but it works surprising well in action, as dreams and visions create a strong connection between character and campaign story in the players’ minds. Properly wrapping up this sort of hook usually requires the characters discovering the actual source of the vision, whether it connects to a character’s deity, a supernatural agent involved in the eventual adventure, and so forth.

Movers and Shakers

Rather than the characters cultivating a positive but predictable relationship with NPCs in need, think about a relationship with someone in power who hates them. Operatives moving against the characters can easily push them in the direction of many different types of adventures, especially if the operatives are more powerful than they are, or if the characters are prevented from openly fighting back.

In the Thick of It

A monster terrorizing the countryside is always good fun for a GM. But rather than having the locals warn the characters about an existing terror in the area and plead with them for help against the threat, have the characters attacked first by happenstance, then put into the position of having to warn the locals. To make the hook even more engaging, have the locals not believe them.

Cash on Delivery

A scenario in which the characters are hired to take care of business as bounty hunters is obviously just a specific instance of the characters-as-hired-troubleshooters hook. But it can put enough of a spin on that hook to make it feel fresh, especially if the characters stumble across the bounty offer as a mysterious lore setup (above) rather than having someone seek them out with the offer. For added oomph, make sure the characters are aware of other adventurers or mercenaries on the trail of the same prize, so that the goal of attaining the prize is complicated by the need to prevent others from doing so first.