Kickstarter-Watch: One-Shot Wonders

I feel like I talk about one-shot RPG sessions a fair bit. Most recently, I’ve been discussing them with other members of our local gaming club in relation to an upcoming open day. My biggest issue around one-shots is that many off-the-shelf adventures are overly prescriptive and cumbersome, and it can be a disproportionately large amount of work for the less experienced GM to put together their own one.

That’s where I quite like the approach taken by the book featured in this Kickstarter, One-Shot Wonders by Roll & Play Press:

Promising over 100 session ideas for your table, the book is brimming with content. The approach is breadth over depth. There are many adventure hooks, but they’re not long or overly detailed. Each one typically consists of just a couple of pages.

Within these pages, you will find a premise, along with a story structure, important characters, key locations, and other useful tidbits. The book is aimed at the ubiquitous Dungeons & Dragons 5E, but the bulk of the content is actually about storytelling and structure, so can be easily used for any system.

Here’s an example of how one such adventure hook is set out:

I like this approach. You have a basic story structure, characters, and hooks, but you don’t need to feel constrained by a long, complex, pre-written adventure. It’s a good balance.

As with many Kickstarters, there are a bunch of stretch goals, extras, and optional purchases. My favourite optional extra in this campaign is one of the less flashy ones. These pre-generated character booklets are really interesting to me:

The class playbooks are one of my favourite aspects of Apocalypse World and the many, many Powered by the Apocalypse games that are based upon it. I think the playbooks give a nice, tangible guide to playing a class that goes just a wee bit beyond a basic character sheet. I hope that these fulfill a similar role, as I’d love to see the playbook approach adopted by other games and publishers.

There are other items on offer, of course. There’s a rather pretty dice set, a nice leatherette scroll dice case, maps, virtual tabletop materials, and the obligatory collector’s edition. Naturally, there’s a big pack where you can everything together at a discounted price:

In this case, that price is £120. With two copies of the hardback book, PDF copies, and all of the various accessories and stretch goals, that doesn’t seem ridiculous. I likely wouldn’t go this high myself, but there’s nothing here that doesn’t look great.

If you want just the book, it’ll cost you £32 for the hardback, or £22 for the PDF. This is probably the tier I’d jump in at (I mean the hardback, rather than the PDF) as the price is pretty reasonable for what it is. Being a UK-based campaign, I’d hope for some pretty reasonable shipping charges for those who, like me, reside upon this sceptered isle.

I do like one-shot games. I’ve written before about running a Paranoia one-shot (Part 1 and Part 2) and playing in several one-shots at Tabletop Scotland in 2019. I’ve also run one-shots to prepare for reviews of games.

If this makes it easier for newer GMs, and even more experienced ones looking for new ideas, to run satisfying one-shots, then I’m all for it. The quality seems decent, and the wider project is ambitious without being unwieldy. That’s a fine balance. If you’re interested in taking a look for yourself, you can click here to visit the campaign on Kickstarter.