Hi all

Hi all

Hi all,

Finally got round to actually joining this space, very happy to be here!

I wanted to consult you all on something – could you recommend any good one-shots for a new-ish roleplaying group, ideally in the PBtA space?

I’m currently running a pretty large-scale Dungeon World campaign for some friends who had never roleplayed before we started back in Feb. One of the players is going away for a bit and I wanted to take the opportunity to broaden our collective RPG horizon, but all the games I own/know of are longer form and I don’t want to start a campaign within a campaign…

To cut to the chase – One Shot me, please!

30 thoughts on “Hi all”

  1. My recommendation is outside PbtA but it’s great and I strongly recommend it: Joshua A.C. Newman’s Shock:Social Science Fiction. The setup is you pick a sci-fi thing that makes the world different from our world (the Shock), then you each pick issues that matter to you personally. You create characters (and their antagonists) at the intersections of this grid. So if the Shock is “humanoid robots” maybe you’re making characters about robots and capitalistic exploitation, robots and democratic degradation, and robots and environmental collapse.

    Each player has a protagonist at one of these connection points, and then the player to her left plays her antagonist, a person or force that’s about the same stuff as she is. Then she creates a story goal, something she wants to have happen by the end of the story. The antagonist tries to block that from coming true, or coming true in the most horrifying way possible.

    You play 2-4 scenes about each character/antagonist pair and see how the world gets burned down.

    It runs quick and creates amazing fiction that you all care about, by design.

  2. My recommendation is outside PbtA but it’s great and I strongly recommend it: Joshua A.C. Newman’s Shock:Social Science Fiction. The setup is you pick a sci-fi thing that makes the world different from our world (the Shock), then you each pick issues that matter to you personally. You create characters (and their antagonists) at the intersections of this grid. So if the Shock is “humanoid robots” maybe you’re making characters about robots and capitalistic exploitation, robots and democratic degradation, and robots and environmental collapse.

    Each player has a protagonist at one of these connection points, and then the player to her left plays her antagonist, a person or force that’s about the same stuff as she is. Then she creates a story goal, something she wants to have happen by the end of the story. The antagonist tries to block that from coming true, or coming true in the most horrifying way possible.

    You play 2-4 scenes about each character/antagonist pair and see how the world gets burned down.

    It runs quick and creates amazing fiction that you all care about, by design.

  3. Monster of the Week works well in a one-shot format, is close enough to Dungeon World for your players to adjust quickly to and relies on movie tropes that probably everyone in your group is aware of.

  4. Monster of the Week works well in a one-shot format, is close enough to Dungeon World for your players to adjust quickly to and relies on movie tropes that probably everyone in your group is aware of.

  13. I recommend using Impulse Drive, it is in Beta on DriveThruRPG ( http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190933/Impulse-Drive-Preview ) or Apocalypse World and reflavoring it to be in space. Then either use Impulse Drive’s contract creation (contract = job) or get 21 Jump Points.

    21 Jump Points is session prompts for space opera. It was written for Uncharted Worlds (which has a pretty unkind to casuals character creation process — the lack of playbooks turns me off), but it works for any thing (all of the space stuff could be reflavored to being in a desert wastelands for Apocalypse World). Don’t worry if the session goes off the rails, that is good, it means the players are creating new things, and their misses and 7-9 results will allow you to throw curve balls in.

    Or if you want to be really bold, you could download Black Starrise and run it under Apocalypse World in space. If you do AW in space, I suggest treating Weird as Smarts (and not having a weird skill). Black Starrise can be hard to find online (it was free when Alternity was released in 1998 and was available for download, but it is hanging on by a thread in the after echoes of echoes of internet archive), so here is a link to one of my many backups of the free mini-adventure: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GOllh8NY31-9es6y8cQRbygCRRm-tPHy/view?usp=sharing

    Black Starrise TL;DR: The heroes are under contract to help finish repairing a Drivesat Relay Station in order to restore contact between the Stellar Ring and the Verge at the Second Galactic War and hi-jinx ensue. It has 3 acts each with 3 scenes, the whole thing is pretty short, it was designed to be run as a demo for the atrocious Alternity system (warning: Alternity1.0 used +X Steps as penalties and -X Steps as a bonus, so don’t be surprised if you see things like “The heroes have a +2 step penalty to force a door” or whatever).

  14. I recommend using Impulse Drive, it is in Beta on DriveThruRPG ( http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/190933/Impulse-Drive-Preview ) or Apocalypse World and reflavoring it to be in space. Then either use Impulse Drive’s contract creation (contract = job) or get 21 Jump Points.

    21 Jump Points is session prompts for space opera. It was written for Uncharted Worlds (which has a pretty unkind to casuals character creation process — the lack of playbooks turns me off), but it works for any thing (all of the space stuff could be reflavored to being in a desert wastelands for Apocalypse World). Don’t worry if the session goes off the rails, that is good, it means the players are creating new things, and their misses and 7-9 results will allow you to throw curve balls in.

    Or if you want to be really bold, you could download Black Starrise and run it under Apocalypse World in space. If you do AW in space, I suggest treating Weird as Smarts (and not having a weird skill). Black Starrise can be hard to find online (it was free when Alternity was released in 1998 and was available for download, but it is hanging on by a thread in the after echoes of echoes of internet archive), so here is a link to one of my many backups of the free mini-adventure: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GOllh8NY31-9es6y8cQRbygCRRm-tPHy/view?usp=sharing

    Black Starrise TL;DR: The heroes are under contract to help finish repairing a Drivesat Relay Station in order to restore contact between the Stellar Ring and the Verge at the Second Galactic War and hi-jinx ensue. It has 3 acts each with 3 scenes, the whole thing is pretty short, it was designed to be run as a demo for the atrocious Alternity system (warning: Alternity1.0 used +X Steps as penalties and -X Steps as a bonus, so don’t be surprised if you see things like “The heroes have a +2 step penalty to force a door” or whatever).

  15. My general suggestion is to go with a genre/theme you are all super interested in. So if you like Tolkienesque (and D&D) fantasy, Dungeon World is great. If you want a group of monster hunters solving a mystery, Monster of the Week. Post-Apocalypse gritty weirdness… Apocalypse World. Sexy queer teens in high school, Monsterhearts. Personal, body, feminine horror, Bluebeards Bride.

    There are a ton of games out there, and I find the enthusiasm and knowledge you bring can outway differences in the specific game or system.

  16. My general suggestion is to go with a genre/theme you are all super interested in. So if you like Tolkienesque (and D&D) fantasy, Dungeon World is great. If you want a group of monster hunters solving a mystery, Monster of the Week. Post-Apocalypse gritty weirdness… Apocalypse World. Sexy queer teens in high school, Monsterhearts. Personal, body, feminine horror, Bluebeards Bride.

    There are a ton of games out there, and I find the enthusiasm and knowledge you bring can outway differences in the specific game or system.

  17. A contra-indication for PbtA one-shots: many of them (including Apocalypse World) are widely regarded as not best played in a one shot. Many of them indicate that in the text.

  18. A contra-indication for PbtA one-shots: many of them (including Apocalypse World) are widely regarded as not best played in a one shot. Many of them indicate that in the text.

  27. I recently played Bluebeard’s Bride with a group of newlings. Went very well. It is PbtA and built for one shots, but since it’s a very intense game of feminine horror you should definitely check with your players first.

  28. I recently played Bluebeard’s Bride with a group of newlings. Went very well. It is PbtA and built for one shots, but since it’s a very intense game of feminine horror you should definitely check with your players first.

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