This is a new topic for one-parters. Given the nature of the group, I don’t expect it to get used very often, but here’s one, from the Chaosium “We Are All Us” free adventures commemorating the death of Greg Stafford:
Session 1 - Call of Cthulhu: The Lightless Beacon: And not, as some of us might have hoped, Spring Break on Booty Island.
Session 2: Mythic D6 - Bastion: Guest GM Jerry D. Grayson takes the Wharties through a nice straightforward job, buying the thing and bring it back. How hard can it be?
Session 3: Definitely Wizards: We are taking the final wizardry exam! Only one little problem…
Session 4: Overdue: Library assistants go to collect an overdue book. How hard can it be?
Session 5: The Vampire Next Door: What, that nice Mr Alucard? There’s no such thing as vampires.
Session 6: Call of Cthulhu: The Necropolis: It’s just a buried tomb in the Valley of the Kings. What could go wrong?
Session 7: Call of Cthulhu: What’s In the Cellar?: Look in the cellar, they said. Find exculpatory evidence, they said.
Session 8: Call of Cthulhu: The Dead Boarder: Just what was that nice Mr Gardiner up to?
Session 9: Call of Cthulhu: The Haunting: Roger had never played this classic scenario…
Session 11: Cthulhu Eternal: The White War: On the Dolomites in 1916. There are worse places.
I’ve run one one-shot in recent years, and it was based on making things up, not on a published scenario. I had picked up Hellcats and Hockeysticks (an RPG based on St. Trinians) and decided to try it out. So I made up a set of pre-gens, with space for a couple of points of customization, and invited four of my regular women players and a woman who’s a fellow player in a Call of Cthulhu campaign to try it out (they played a daughter of the Russian mafiya, a descendant of samurai, a horse-mad girl from Virginia, an artistic girl, and a working class sports hooligan—the player decided her name was “Tanqueray” for what her mother was drunk on when she was conceived, shortened to “Tank”). I had some NPCs with agendas available, but most of what happened was the PCs stirring up trouble in the classic St. Trinians fashion and me running frantically ahead of them laying down track in front of where they had decided to go. . . .
Whartson Hall (of which I am a recent member) has generally been playing short games, 4-8 sessions of typically 90ish minutes each. (Some of us have late work, others very early.) But given how leisurely we are it’s quite rare to finish an adventure in a single session. This one is nominally an hour if the GM rides the players hard enough.
Good thing she hadn’t been sloshed on sake, or Cointreau… Then again, she could’ve had a friend whose mother got drunk on absinthe, so they’d be Tank & Abs.
Session 2: Mythic D6 - Bastion: Guest GM Jerry D. Grayson takes the Wharties through a nice straightforward job, buying the thing and bring it back. How hard can it be?
