Create a Homebrew Campaign | #12: One-Shots
It happens to the best of us. Sometimes, you need to fill in space in your campaign to account for the unexpected. You may have a sudden player absence, a schedule change, or you may just need more time to prepare a key aspect of your next arc. Whatever the cause is, these situations often lead to the necessity of a “side quest” or “one-shot”. However, just because something is a one-shot doesn’t mean it can’t be important to the story or fun for the players! In this part of the homebrew campaign creation series, I’ll be talking about how you can make meaningful one-shots for long-term campaigns.
If you’d like, there’s a video version of this post! You can check that out below.
What is a One-Shot?
Before we talk about why you'd even bother with one-shots, I want to clarify what I mean when I say one-shot. One-shots are single sessions that contain an entire arc. In a one-shot, the goal is presented and reached, all in a single session. You may start the session with the party being approached by someone in distress, pleading with them for help. By the end of the session, the party has helped the person who spoke to them at the beginning of the session (or at least tried to) and is back on track for the main campaign arc, whatever that may be. It’s essentially a fork in the road for the main campaign, a way to fill in a game session without having too much revealed of the main story.
Why Would You Run One?
One-Shots are designed to not contribute much to the main story, and that’s actually one of their advantages. This makes them great for player absences. If you’re going to be missing a player for a particular session, then you can run a one-shot so that they don’t miss anything too important (theoretically). This is especially useful when the player absences are unexpected, as they can often be.
Additionally, one-shots can be easier to prepare than entire campaign arcs or critical story sessions. So, if you’re finding that you need more time to prepare the next arc in the story, you can grab a one-shot and put it into your world. In fact, there are many modules out there that include one-shots, and the tabletop community is often writing one-shots for this very purpose. All you have to do is find one and mold it to your party’s current situation, then you’ve got a session ready to go in just a couple of hours (at most). This gives you more time to work on the main campaign.
Of course, skipping the session is an option, and sometimes it’s the only one. For me, I prefer not to skip sessions because playing a tabletop campaign is a big part of my social circle. It’s not just a game, it’s a time when I get to sit at a table with several dear friends, eat some food, joke around, and just generally socialize. Additionally, if I skip a session, it means that there’ll be almost a month without playing together, which is a pretty long time.
However, skipping the session may be better for you and your players, especially if the session where you would be inserting a one-shot just don’t make sense. If your last session ended on a steep cliffhanger right before a boss fight, it wouldn’t make sense to suddenly slide in a one-shot because a player is absent, so you may just skip that session and wait for a better time to run the main campaign and return to the core story you’re trying to tell.
Making it Important (without Depriving Absent Players)
Just because a session is technically a filler session doesn’t mean that it can’t be important, meaningful, and memorable. This is even the case for sessions that are written last minute or are borrowed from other modules. However, if you have a player who is going to be absent, you want to be careful with how much story-critical information you’re providing to your party. You don’t want to have a big reveal take place while a player is missing from the table, depriving them of an impactful moment in the tale you’re trying to tell. What you can do instead to ensure that the session doesn’t feel like a “waste of time” is put small bits of important information in there.
A good example is world-building. Use the session to take some time to build out your world and give some important details to your players. Perhaps they come across a symbol that has meaning in your main campaign—something they’ll see again, later. Or, maybe you include an NPC they’ve spent time with in the past, but whose character has been, before. You could even introduce a new, important character, but just hint that he’s going to be vital later down the road.
Whatever you decide, adding a couple of small details to your session can help it to feel less like a meaningless filler session and more like an important beat in the story. We’ve all seen filler arcs in television shows and it’s likely that we’re all in agreement on the fact that they’re dull and potentially the worst episodes in the show. We can tell they were made just to increase the number of episodes in a season and it isn’t fun. The exception is when the writers seize the opportunity of creating a filler arc to drop some important information or character development.
I want to clarify here that when I say filler arc, I really just mean any arc that doesn’t progress the main story, or that was made as a result of extenuating circumstances. The latter is pretty common in television between budget constraints, producer demands, and strikes. As a writer of your own campaign, you are the director and writer who has to work with what you’ve got. When players are absent or your creative well is running dry, you need to decide if it’s time to set up a one-shot for the next session to buy some time.
One-Shot Ideas
Don't worry, I’m not going to leave you without some concepts for one-shots! I actually have a few that I want to pitch to you. These aren’t necessarily fleshed-out concepts for a one-shot, but rather an idea of how to approach setting up a one-shot. I’ve done a few different sorts of one-shots and I really enjoy running a couple of them. That’s another important aspect of a one-shot: it should be fun, rather than feeling like filler, so these ideas should help you to feel better about running one-shots (perhaps even get you excited to add some to your campaign)!
Player-Run Session
If you know that a filler arc is going to be needed in the future (five or six weeks of notice should be fine), consider asking your players if any of them would like to run a one-shot. You may have some experienced DMs in your group or you may have some players who have always wanted to run a session or two, but weren’t sure how to ask! I’ve had players run sessions a couple of times and, in fact, am about to have an entire arc of my campaign in which each of my players will be running their own sessions! This is an excellent way not only to give your players some experience behind the screen but to give yourself time to prepare future story arcs. I like to use it as a method of buying myself some time.
Kidnappings
A great one-shot idea is to set up a kidnapping for one of the player characters. If you’re going to have an absence, make that absence the cause of the one-shot. It’s a great explanation for the absence and it even comes with a hook that will naturally draw your players in. Where did their companion go? They need to find their friend, regardless of what else was going on!
I’ve had a few kidnappings in the past. It helps if you know about the absence well in advance, so you can be prepared as a storyteller. You can set up the absence in the session before so that everyone is on the same page about what’s happening in the next session (and you don’t have to roleplay for the absent player). I’ve had Big Bads imprison player characters, I’ve had yetis snatch them up for supper, and I’ve had them put under mind control. There’s no shortage of ways to make the absence the core plot hook of the session!
Side-Quests
In my opinion, this is the most common form that a one-shot takes. We should all know what side-quests are. They’re quests that have little (if anything) to do with the main quest of a game (in this case, a tabletop game). They range from meaningful (much of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) to meaningless (Breath of the Wild). I don’t suggest taking a page out of Breath of the Wild’s book and having your players collect thirty-five lizards for the entire day. I do suggest making the side-quest simple and easy. Rather than having potential player deaths, make it something they can easily complete within your given time frame and give them a solid reward at the end. A cool item, some gold, a valuable contact… whatever the case may be, just make sure that the side-quest was worth their time. Entice them from the beginning and reward them at the end.
And please, don’t make it a collect-a-thon. Please.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed this side quest! In today’s detour, we discussed one-shots: what they are and how to use them. I’ve found them to be a valuable tool in my tool belt, helping me to prevent players from missing important parts of the story due to absences. Unfortunately, you can’t always plan for player absences, especially if there isn’t a reasonable place to take a break in your story arc. However, with enough planning (and players who are kind enough to tell you about their absences in advance), you can prepare one-shots that are fun and memorable!
Thank you so much for checking out this post. Next week, we’re talking about the campaign arc or the core arc that runs through your campaign, from beginning to end. This is the building block off which all other arcs will be built, so it’s crucial! We’re fast approaching the end of this series, and I’m so happy to be getting to the real storytelling parts of this homebrew campaign creation series. I can’t wait to share the next session with you!
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