The campaign for one-shots
I mentioned in my last post that there is nothing I enjoy more than the development and advancement of a character. In D&D terms, I’m talking about levelling up, of course, but most games have some mechanic that allows characters to improve in a tangible way. You might get to pick a new advance, or a new ability or you might just get a few percentage points added to a skill. Normally, taken on their own, these are incremental and not earth-shaking in their effect on the character or the game. But when taken as a whole from the point of a character’s creation to the end of their adventures, they are often massive. More-so in some games than others, but always very noticeable (unless you’re playing something really lethal like a DCC funnel.) I do like to see my characters improve like this but in recent months I have been struck by how advancement is not necessarily the object of the exercise for me, it’s actually just change. You might need a longer campaign to give characters an opportunity to level up, but you don’t necessarily need one to change them. A one-shot can do that quite admirably, thank you!
If you remove the necessity for advancement and replace it with the necessity for change in PCs you can make it far more immediate. Horror games make great one-shots for this reason. So many of them involve some sort of sanity mechanic, meaning you have to change the way you play your character or else the character’s interaction with the world and the fiction is altered when they start to lose their grip. Other games introduce physical mutations from exposure to powerful forces. Still others have temporary effects that afflict or bless characters from the use of their own abilities. What I have discovered over the last while is that a successful one-shot will often involve leaning into one or all of these options, or other types of changes that I haven’t listed above.
Is this why players sign up for a one-shot game? Maybe not. Probably not, in fact. For me? I usually sign up to try out a game I have never played before, or a scenario I have never played before. Honestly, I rarely know enough about a game before I go into it to know whether or not it will involve any real character change in such a short format. But those that do it? Those ones live long in the memory.
Alien Dark
I’m immediately cheating by referencing a two-shot, but let’s not split hairs, eh?
Alien Dark was the first game I ever took part in as a member of the Open Hearth gaming community. Alun, the writer of this nasty and wonderful little game was our GM. Now, there’s a mechanic in this game that allows the GM to accrue Danger. They can then use that to just completely fuck your character over with Aliens, both physically and psychologically. This is something that has a tendency to leave you in Bill Paxton levels of panic real fast. And if you’re panicking, just imagine how your poor character feels.
Well, actually, there’s no need to tax your imagination, dear reader, I can tell you. You see, my character, Benny Doyle, a ne’er-do-well with a substance abuse problem, was really piling on the stress points. Within the fiction of the game, you are required to write a short line describing the effect of the increasing mental distress on your character. Benny got nuts. He went from meek and afraid and hiding behind the other PCs to roaring about needing GUNS and going, quite literally, toe-to-toe with an Alien. Man that was fun. Like, I just enjoyed this poor lad’s descent into drug-fuelled madness so much. And it didn’t happen all at once either, I got to draw it out, as Alun ramped up the tension and the Danger, over the course of one and a half sessions or so.
This is the sort of change I’m talking about.
Death in Space
Here’s another example, which, in the moment of typing this, oh, gentle blog-goggler, I just realised was also a two shot in the end. It had been designed as a one shot but sometimes, just sometimes, your players have too much fun creating their damn characters and your one shot divides, much like an amoeba, into two separate but equally awesome wholes.
Death in Space is a game by the Stockholm Kartel. It’s an OSR game of space horror, which, even at the best of times, I would imagine has a pretty high mortality rate. As a disclaimer, I have only ever run this game this one time so I can’t confirm that.
Anyway, I wrote this short scenario with inspiration from a couple of locations and NPCs from the core book. The idea was that the PCs visited this space station which orbited the ruins of a destroyed planet. They explore the claustrophobic, jungle like environment on this station and interact with the denizens, a void cult led by a grotesquely mutated woman.
Then I get them to roll some checks. With every roll they fail on the station they build up void points, which they can spend to do cool stuff. But when they do that, they open themselves up to the possibility of void corruptions. The Death in Space core book has a Void Corruption table. Here are some samples of the shit my players’ characters were inflicted with:
“Another you starts growing on you. The twin clone is fully grown and detaches after 1d20 days. It has its own will and purpose, decided by the referee.”
“A part of your body becomes shrouded in a cloud of darkness.”
“Flies and other insects crawl out of your body when you sleep. A small cloud of them surrounds you. Their buzzing is a constant static.” (Actually, since this was a one-shot, I made it so the flies just popped out all the time. Much more effective.)
I adjusted the rules slightly to make corruption more likely and, you know what? My players loved being corrupted! Their characters were going through intense and horrific changes while also learning more about themselves as they were tested psychologically.
Now, go play a one shot and corrupt some PCs!
Also, go and buy Alien Dark on itch.io; it’s PWYW! And Death in Space from here. It costs a specific amount of money but it’s a good game and a gorgeous product.
The Dice Pool 