D&D 5E [Let's Read] One Shot Wonders: a collection of 100+ single-session scenarios for 5th Edition D&D

[Libertad]

Official store page.

While the most popular 5e adventures are longer campaigns, a significant amount of gaming groups cannot commit to such lengthy endeavors. Be it testing the waters with new players, giving people the opportunity to try out alternate PC builds, or just a short change of pace, one-shot adventures are popular due to requiring little investment. However, even shorter products rarely advertise themselves as being one-shots, much less offering over a hundred such modules ranging across all levels of play.

One Shot Wonders is the first major sourcebook of Roll and Play Press, a company that specializes in physical aids for tabletop games. Beyond just a collection of quick adventures, the product is optimized for ease of use in actual play. First off, every NPC and monster detailed in this book uses stats that are freely available in the 5th Edition Basic Rules. Second off, each one-shot comfortably fits within 1-2 pages, and applies clever use of formatting to convey relevant information in the minimal amount of space. Here’s one such adventure, Hostage Hoax, as an example:

Here’s a two-page adventure that’s a bit more detailed, Fight At the Museum:

(the black bar is censoring my email address, it’s not a graphics error).

Both one-shots include the general overview, boxed text to start the adventure, brief write-ups and parenthetical stat blocks for NPCs, a suggested progression of events, locations and clues to forward the plot, and the sample level range along with modifications for different levels of play. Additionally, the text boxes for different information, such as Quick Stats, Suggested Stories, and level range all use different formats and colors to make them easily pop out in the reader’s eyes. There are no widowed or orphaned lines of text, either, and the book comes with two PDFs, one in a single-page format and another in a two page side-by-side spread format. Which makes it all the more surprising that neither PDF has bookmarks, which makes navigation a bit more difficult. Otherwise, that’s my only criticism formatting-wise for One-Shot Wonders.

The book begins with an Introduction from one of the authors as to their primary rationale for creating the book: to serve as a third option besides lengthy pre-written adventures and the additional time and effort from homebrewing everything. The followup pages go over the standard formatting and key info points that the book uses, along with a one-page What To Play selection of particular adventures united by strong themes, such as roleplay-heavy scenarios or ones set entirely within a dungeon.

Each chapter of One-Shot Wonders has 17 adventures sharing a common type of terrain or region, ordered by increasing levels of experience to a maximum of 8 to 9th level. Six of the adventures are more vague hooks than complete encounters and scenarios, with 3 of those ones fitting on a page, and one of the “full” one-shots includes a map with keyed rooms. The exceptions are the last two chapters, with Legendary Adventures focusing on high-level play, and Running Your Game connects all the adventures in this book as part of a single setting along with miscellaneous DMing tips. Chapters 5 and 6, Down Underground and Around Town, have two map-based adventures each. I will not be covering every adventure here for reasons of brevity, instead highlighting the more novel and interesting ones.

Chapter 1: Out in the Cold​

This first chapter quite predictably covers adventures set in wintry and arctic locations. Our opening adventure, The Cat’s Mother, involves the PCs escorting a halfling conservationist to watch over some endangered sabre-toothed tigers who are at risk of being poached. The mapped adventure, Trial and Error, takes place in a remote research station inhabited by scientists, who due to experimental serums ended up changing into monsters. There are notes in the compound that can reveal the monsters’ weaknesses and possibly return them to normal.

One of the cozier one-shots is Snow Angels, a Christmas-themed adventure where a pair of angels hires the PCs to deliver gifts to villagers in their stead, as their current duties keep them occupied in healing a sick mayor. Needless to say, delivering the gifts involves breaking into peoples’ houses, which contain personal defense traps and guard animals/constructs. In Too Deep is an investigation-based Lovecraftian scenario taking place in an isolated seaside village. Many of the townsfolk are brainwashed by an aboleth, and the various sidebars provide clues and encounters so that the PCs can piece things together. The final encounter is with the aboleth under a frozen lake, who is guarded by cultists and gibbering mouthers. The final one-shot of this chapter, Ice Trials, is a light-hearted, combat-lite festival where the PCs can take part in three contests against Erikk in a village. He is the only other contestant, whose years-long winning streak caused others to stop competing. The contests involve herding mammoths, a luge track race, and felling a tree and chopping it into as many smaller logs as possible. During the final contest, a wandering frost giant attacks the PCs and Erikk.

Chapter 2: On the Coast​

The next chapter has us depart for sunnier, saltier pastures out by the sea. Our first adventure, Down at the Docks, involves helping a terminally unlucky gnome sailor finish a variety of tasks before her ship’s next voyage in order to avoid being kicked out of the navy. Such tasks will involve things going catastrophically wrong and require PC intervention, such as the gnome accidentally knocking over a barrel full of grey oozes while swabbing the decks. The next adventure, Wave of Destruction, involves preparing a town for defense against a plesiosaurus that has been attacking settlements up and down the coast. Minor preliminary encounters and tasks the PCs participate in can give them an easier or harder time against the final battle, such as catching enough quippers to use as bait to distract the beast. Fishy Business, whose goblin chef is Kaz Kardwall and the character on the cover of this book, has his restaurant sabotaged by a sea hag seeking to ruin his business. The adventure begins when she uses magic to polymorph anglers into octopi and giant crabs and orders them to attack patrons and break things. The follow-up encounters involve the PCs tracing the hag’s lair to a boat known as the Sandpiper, and while there discover that she was hired by a disgruntled employee seeking revenge against Kaz for putting her family’s cafe out of business.

The Sunken Crown is a classic underwater treasure hunt, where a research team hires the PCs to retrieve a cursed crown last reported in the contents of a shipwreck. But the crown has already been found by a merfolk gang leader who is planning to use the treasures found within to mount a raid on a nearby underwater city. Wedding Crashers has the PCs acting in the role of peacekeepers at a wedding between two pirate captains whose ensuing political alliance has brought its share of would-be assassins and rowdy saboteurs. The final adventure, Blackout Bay, takes place in a multi-level lighthouse complete with a keyed map, where the PCs are hired to investigate the lighthouse’s projection of magical darkness which is devastating for maritime travel. The culprit is an elven vampire who feeds on sailors whose ships crash into the shoreline.

Thoughts So Far: The first two chapters have a good diversity of content. You have more whimsical and silly adventures like Down at the Docks and Snow Angels, you have your monster hunts like Wave of Destruction and In Too Deep, and you have mini-dungeon crawls like Blackout Bay and Trial and Error. The only shortcomings are a relative lack of adventures involving deeper investigation and political intrigue. The ones we do get are rather simple and straightforward, but given that these kinds of adventures are much harder to fit in a 1-2 page format, much less a pick up and play oneshot, this isn’t as big a mark as it otherwise would be if other adventure types were found lacking instead.

Join us next time as we explore more regional one-shots Under the Sun, Into the Woods, and Up in the Hills!

 

[Libertad]

Chapter 3: Under the Sun​

Sandy deserts, rocky badlands, and various other kinds of desolate wastelands, these one-shots take place in areas where the environment itself is a deadly threat all its own. Some of the more notable adventures include Flower Power, where a druid hires the PCs to retrieve a single flower petal from a legendary plant (any more and the plant will die) in order to brew a year’s worth of healing potions, overcoming wild animals and rival scavengers who would take the entire plant itself; No-Horse Race, where the PCs compete in a racing tournament where the vehicles are magical crystal-powered wagons, complete with three separate rolls so that multiple PCs can do interesting things other than drive, such as repairing the power crystals and shooting competition as the gunner; The Tomb’s Tome is our mapped dungeon crawl, where the PCs need to return a stolen book to the mummy within so that the undead reverses a dire curse placed upon a local village; Law and Disorder, an escort mission where the PCs need to safely transport whistleblowers aware of poor safety and labor standards at a mine as its corporate owners arrange them to be assassinated by an oni that stalks the party overland; and Chasing Dreams, where a missing girl believed kidnapped by a monster actually went of her own accord to find a couatl in order to receive its tutelage to obtain divine powers. This consists of a linear dungeon crawl with puzzle rooms that test virtues such as a Trial of Respect where knocking on a locked door opens it but attempting to force one’s way in unleashes a damage-dealing trap.

Chapter 4: Into the Woods​

Stories centering on forests are an ever-popular element of Western fiction, from foreboding lands home to wicked fey and vicious beasts to scenic realms of primeval beauty. The one-shots within run a diverse gamut of adventure types and themes. Curtain Call is a murder mystery where a member of a theater troupe of traveling satyrs find one of their number dead, and the PCs need to piece together various clues to find out the killer and their motivation. Unhappy Birthday is a more comedic adventure where a friendly ogre pleads for the PCs to find replacement birthday presents for his pouty son, and is an open-ended time-based mission where the party can visit different locations in the woods to retrieve gifts, such as a jar of glowing beetles that are dangerous in a swarm and honey mushrooms that grow nearby poisonous fungi that act as a proximity-based trap. Welcome Home is a map-based dungeon crawl where a farmer hires the PCs to clear out a neglected mansion they inherited, and is filled with the legacy of a married couple, whose wife turned to dark magic in order to revive her deceased husband. Trouble Brewing is a magical distillery that is suffering a series of dangerous disasters as the PCs arrive, and they need to act quick to safe bystanders and the facility from a variety of hazards such as haywire constructs, scalding steam vents, and overflowing cider making the floors slippery. And two adventures see the PCs fighting alongside good-aligned monsters against threats to nature. The first is Foes In the Foliage, where the PCs are aided by a treant to stop the plot of wicked dryads who seek to gain mastery of the rainforest by assassinating a sapling treant next in line as the jungle’s caretaker. The second is Nightmare Glade, where a group of nightmares are corrupting a holy glade, and the PCs have to overcome magical traps and insane wildlife to get to the glade and fight the nightmares, where the guardian unicorn arrives to help the PCs fight once they kill all but the last nightmare.

Chapter 5: Up in the Hills​

From gently sloping ridges to vertical snow-capped peaks, this chapter covers adventures where the earth meets the sky. The first adventure, Hilltop Herd, is your tpical low-level stakes “fetch quest,” where the PCs rustle up escaped mountain goats to bring back to a village farm. The goats must be rescued from hairy situations such as a hungry bear to a villager mistaking the PCs for being cattle rustlers. But the Wizard and Oz stands out, where the PCs are hired by a mage to rescue her kidnapped pseudodragon from a rival mage as part of an escalating (yet non-violent) feud, and in addition to the rescue can raid the other wizard’s tower for treasure. Come Home to Roost is our mapped dungeon crawl, where a group of exhausted and frustrated travelers accompanying the PCs are displeased to find out that the only inn for miles has been overrun by a family of cockatrices, and must be cleared out if the PCs hope to and a nice reward from the inn’s owners…to say nothing of getting shuteye outside the elements! Up In Smoke involves a group of reactionary azers and salamanders known as the Firebrands seeking to destroy a gnomish village by triggering a volcano, and the PCs are given an iron golem mecha to pilot as they attack a legion of Firebrands. Aerial Outlaws involves the party taking to giant eagle mounts in order to dispose of some wyvern-riding bandits menacing a mountain pass.

Thoughts So Far: One Shot Wonders continues to provide us with creative and offbeat adventures. I particularly like how several of them incorporate good-aligned monsters into encounters, particularly Aerial Outlaws in the use of aerial combat. I do feel that having the unicorn cavalry show up only when there’s one enemy left in Nightmare Glade can feel a bit disappointing if one’s player groups are the types to feel as though their glory is being hogged or stolen. My favorite adventures in these chapters are No-Horse Race and Up in Smoke; the former in that you don’t see many racing mini-games in 5th Edition and one that has more involved tasks than seeing whoever maintains the highest movement speed. And I like Up in Smoke due to the novelty of the PCs piloting a golem mecha.

Join us next time as we depart for classic dungeon-delving setpieces Down Underground and head into civilization in Around Town!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I will be running Wave of Destruction on Sunday if not enough people show for our Radiant Citadel campaign (we'll use the same characters -- this will just be a filler episode for those characters who participate).

The mix of tones in the book might be a problem for some people -- I could see the "D&D is srs business" folks not liking some of them -- but as I run for a lot of people with different tastes, I like having a grab bag of stuff available to use at practically a moment's notice.

I own two of Roll & Play's ring-bound Gamemaster's Guides, which are very nice, so I should have expected this book to be of excellent physical quality, but I was surprised at its quality and the gilt corners, etc. The company always does a good job with layout and really show how poor of a job many other publishers do with comparable space.

 

[Libertad]

Over on RPGnet, a reader of this Let’s Read asked how the iron golem mecha works, and I figured others might be interested as well. It uses the stats as per the monster, but multiple PCs can climb inside. It still absorbs fire damage, but those inside take half the amount of said damage due to the golem internally heating. Should the mecha be destroyed, it explodes as per the Shatter spell. Finally, there’s a gap inside the golem that PCs can fire through in order to do their own ranged attacks. The Suggested Story sidebar says that a roll must be made each turn in order to properly operate the golem and use one of its actions. There’s no sample skill/tool check or DC given, which is the sole oversight of this one-shot.

Chapter 6: Down Underground​

The iconic environment for dungeon delves, the vast majority of campaigns will see the PCs going six feet under, and not necessarily once they drop to 0 hit points. Our first adventure, Ashes to Ashes, is a clever subversion of a haunted graveyard where the PCs investigate the family crypt of ghostly activity. In reality a magical fire ring interred with one of the deceased is malfunctioning, summoning creatures of elemental fire into the tomb such as magmins and steam mephits. The first of our two map-based adventures is Forging a Future, where the PCs are hired by a duergar artisan to relit a long-abandoned forge now inhabited by subterranean monsters. The other is Spectator Sport, which is a demented carnival secretly run by a spectator (beholderkin) whose dungeon rooms are a series of dangerous games, such as a Wheel of Fortune which can trigger poison dart traps on bad results and a maze with Mirrors of Life Trapping inhabited by Doppelgangers. Web Search has the PCs venture into the city sewers to rescue kidnapped people from a dangerous colony of ettercaps, with additional quest rewards from various NPCs: the sewer company pays the party for killing the ettercaps, the clerk who hired them gives additional gold if they rescue her brother, and the rare peaceful drider who was being harassed by the ettercaps will gift Slippers of Spider Climbing. State of the Art has a noble hire the PCs to retrieve priceless works of art from a gang of bandits, but the bandits were in turn waylaid by a stone giant. The giant is known to be an art critic with nigh-impossible standards who lives in a nearby cave, and will destroy the art by feeding it to his ooze pets if not retrieved in time. The PCs can nonviolently resolve the encounter with the giant by trading for objects of sufficient value, or finding ways to appeal to his aesthetic sensibilities.

Chapter 7: Around Town​

These adventures take place entirely in urban population centers. Our introductory low-level adventures are light on violence: Hidden Gems is a mystery where the PCs must track down a group of invisible thieves stealing sewing equipment and gems from a local business. The thieves are actually a group of sprites living in the building, and can be peacefully resolved where the fey are allowed to live on the premises if they return the gems. Making a Scene has no combat encounters by default, where the PCs take part in a last-minute talent show at a theater when the original performers all come down with food poisoning. There’s also a baboon that gets loose in the auditorium as an encounter, and is at risk of breaking things. It’s one of the two adventures with a map, with the other one being The Baker’s Dozen. That one-shot involves the PCs rescuing a noblewoman’s son from an underground fighting pit which uses a bakery as its front. School Spirit employs the PCs as unconventional exorcists at a magical academy, when a student’s prank goes out of control and summons the ghosts of dead teachers. The spirits can be put to rest via a variety of tasks in addition to combat, such as polishing the trophy of a dueling instructor or reading aloud from a ghost librarian’s novel. The Last Resort is a spa run by succubi and incubi, who will steal the party’s equipment while they relax, and PCs can pick up clues by looking around the spa. The fiends will attack the PCs once they locate the room holding their equipment, and should the battle turn against the monsters they will beg the party to spare their lives and offer a percentage cut of profits from the spa to sweeten the deal. Not Your Vault is a heist adventure where the PCs need to break into a bank vault to find some vital evidence to expose political corruption. It’s a rather straightforward series of traps and encounters, such as an arcane laser grid (no stats are given), an Arcane Lock on the Vault Door, and a final fight against a stone golem in the lobby as toxic gas that functions as Cloudkill floods the area. There’s no map for this final adventure, which I feel is a bit of a downer for a heist-based mission.

Chapter 8: Legendary Adventures​

The one-shots in the prior chapters take place solidly within the first two Tiers of play, from 1st to 9th level. Not tied to any particular environment, this chapter specializes in challenges beyond these tiers. Given the relative dearth of high-level monsters in the 5th Edition SRD, there’s only 9 one-shots detailed here, with 3 of those being vague hooks.

About half of the full adventures are similar in being overtly war-themed, where the PCs are helping conventional humanoid armies against monstrous forces. Contract Terminated has the PCs racing against time to defend a city from an ongoing devil invasion, where they must retrieve a Scroll of Earthquake from the palace vaults to cast during tonight’s meteor shower. As part of an infernal deal, the devils would invade the city “until the earth rises, and the stars fall” if the inhabitants didn’t give up one of their own to Hell every 40 years, with the current would-be offering being a child. Cosmic Crossfire sees the party in a war zone, helping soldiers fight against an extraplanar invasion of aberrations, such as nothics manning eldritch cannons that shoot Fireball spells. The monsters are led by an androsphinx on the other side of the portal, who offers to stop the invasion in exchange for the PC’s souls. If they fight the sphinx, the portal will begin closing upon his death, and the PCs must escape or be trapped forever. Lastly, Creatures of the Deep involves an arcane sea wall battered by aquatic creatures such as giant sharks and storms, with a kraken as the climactic fight. The sea wall has AC and hit points to track, so its destruction is also a loss condition.

As for the non-war one-shots, The Dragon’s Cage is our only mapped module in this chapter. It’s a prison break taking place in a trapped maze, and the overlord is an adult blue dragon with a variety of draconic-themed minions such as wyverns and a half-red dragon veteran serving as warden. Teacher’s Pet has a necromancer archmage as the main villain, who turned the villagers of her former hometown into undead. Games of the Gods is a multiversal tournament where the PCs take part in a variety of games, such as searching for a star ruby that triggers a Divine Word trap hidden in thick jungle underbrush, a rapidly-shrinking battlefield where Walls of Force push fighters closer and closer, and ascending a wall of ice to plant a flag up top as a pair of rocs harass climbers.

Chapter 9: Running Your Game​

The final chapter of One-Shot Wonders contains a variety of tips and resources for running and customizing the adventures within the book. The Realm of Mirabilis introduces a hexcrawl map and sample mini-setting connecting all of the one-shots together. Plotting a Campaign and Connecting Stories shows how one might turn the one-shots into a larger full campaign, with suggestions of linked adventures grouped by environment, theme, and related villains/enemies. Making a Character, Playing a Session, and Running Combat are more generic advice which are actually beginner-level tips for 5th Edition, like what steps to take during character creation or when a GM should conceal rolls vs rolling out in the open. The remainder of articles are for more situational things, like tables of treasure for Rewarding the Party and sample Riddles and Puzzles (really just Riddles) talking about the most common types of puzzles. Our book ends with a pair of Indexes that group all of the adventures by Theme and Objective.

Thoughts So Far: I’d have to say that the adventures in Down Underground are my favorite of the latter chapters here, although several of them don’t feel specific to subterranean travel so much as being vaguely “indoor dungeons.” Spectator Sport stands out in particular, as technically speaking the concept of a dangerous carnival isn’t really locked into any specific region or climate. Around Town was more of a mixed bag: having a full-page theater map might be appreciated by some, but as the default adventure is the kind where initiative isn’t going to be rolled and most likely will be pure improv, I would’ve preferred if another adventure in that chapter had a map. Like Not Your Vault.

I have no problem with the Legendary Adventures chapter being lighter on content given the rarity of high-level challenges in the system, but having half of the one-shots involve active wars/invasions felt too monotonous. Additionally, these adventures rely a bit too much on hordes of low-level monsters that will be effortlessly taken care of by adventurers at this tier. This can be an acquired taste, as for some groups it can let the PCs revel in being powerful champions while still keeping the high-level threats as genuine challenges. But on the other hand, some groups may find the idea of their Tier 3-4 PCs taking on a bunch of zombies, kobolds, and giant sharks to be unexciting roadblocks.

As for Chapter 9, my favorite part was the Realm of Mirabilis in that it helps tie together the one-shots into a more cohesive whole. Having a distinctly artistic yet still usable hex map helps as well. The other articles are a bit too simplistic for my tastes.

Final Thoughts: One-Shot Wonders is an invaluable product for DMs on the go, and its scenarios can be incorporated easily enough into longer-running campaigns. It’s also a great example for writers in how to design a visually appealing and easily readable sourcebook, and the fact that there aren’t many products in its league is a shame. There are a few cases where the one-shots cannot be run right out of the box due to lacking certain things, but overall they require minimal prep and are very easy to understand and digest from a quick read.

For these reasons, I cannot recommend One-Shot Wonders enough!

 

[Marc Radle]

If you don’t mind my asking, who did the art and maps?

 

[Libertad]

If you don’t mind my asking, who did the art and maps?

The credits at the back of the book list Venatus Maps for Cartography. Christina Hassan is listed for Illustrations.