One Shot Adventures

This past Monday, our regular session was canceled as two players were going to miss the session.  There was some desire to run a on-shot adventure, which is a bit of a challenge in our relatively short play window (4 hours at max).  This got me to thinking about how to make it possible to pull off.

We really need two things to be ready to roll quickly, a set of characters and a scenario to run.  That got me to looking around the web and I ran across some useful pages for both issues.

Pre-Created Characters

Creating a character can be fun, but it takes a while and isn't a great use of a precious session time.  To that end having a range of pre-generated characters available is helpful.  I ran across exactly that on the Digital Dungeon Master web site.

They have pre-built characters for all 12 standard classes at all levels from 1-20.  They have some of the major choices available, so if you want to play a 13th level, College of Lore Bard you are all set. Assuming you are ok playing a Half-Elf, as they only have one character per Level/Specialization/Class combo offered and most  (all?) of the more exotic choices are unavailable. If you are hankering after a swords bard, or any bard other than lore or valor, you are out of luck at this site.

They also only have multi-classing choices as a coming soon™feature.  Though, for the purpose I'm envisioning, that's a non-issue.

Module/Dungeon/Scenario

The other issue is having something to run.  The DM can totally wing it (not my usual choice), have something pre-baked (nice idea, but my kitchen is rather busy), or grab something perhaps from the Internet.

Fortunately, there are quite a few choices on the Internet.  One handy place to look is the Dungeon Masters Guild.  They have tons of things at the site and linked from it.  

You can search around with the menus or use thuer search function.  Looking for "one shot" in the search window may just do the trick.

If you are playing in one of my groups,  please stay away from the Modorn Maze.