One-Shot Classics

As a middle aged family man, finding time to play D&D is more and more challenging.  The days of playing weekly are gone and if I can manage to get a game in once a month, I'm doing well.  Plus, I have two groups I can run games for and this limits the time I can spend with either.  One group I'm running a home brew campaign for. (See my Broken World blog for details). The other group is made up of younger players who haven't had exposure to many of the classic D&D adventures.

Since the release of  the 5th Edition of D&D, I've been toying around with an idea for making a campaign out of classic modules.  But those adventures were mostly designed for the frequent player whose group can spend weeks on the same module.  I don't have the luxury of time anymore, so I've come up with a plan to take classic D&D modules, extract the core concepts from them and rewrite the adventure so that it can be played to completion in one session.  In most cases, this means cutting out a lot of material, but that's okay as long as the adventure retains the qualities that made it special.

Ultimately, my goal is to make a whole campaign from these classics, from level 1 to 20.  Each adventure would be self contained so that players that miss a session won't have to be integrated into an adventure when they return to the table.  Despite the self contained aspect of each adventure, I'll have an overarching plot developed that ties all of them together.  Of course, some adventures can't be played in one session because of the size and complexity, so I'll break those up into self contained parts.

The classics that I plan to use are as follows:

L1 Village of Hommlet

L2 Temple of Elemental Evil: Pt 1 - the temples

L3 Temple of Elemental Evil Pt 2 - the elder elemental eye

L4 Ghost Tower of Inverness

L5 The Isle of Dread

L6 Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun

L7 White Plume Mountain

L8 Ravenloft

L9 Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure

L10 Tomb of Horrors

L11 Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

L12 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks

L12 Against the Giants: Heading of the Hill Giant Chief

L13 Against the Giants: Warrens of the Stone Giant Thane (convert from 4e adventure)

L14 Against the Giants:  Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl

L15 Against the Giants: Hall of the Fire Giant King

L16 Queen of the Demonweb Pits

L17 Vecna Lives

L18 Rampage of the Tarasque (original creation)

L19 Rise of Tiamat

L20 Prince of Undeath

This campaign will be run in the World of Greyhawk.

I plan to write about each adventure, how I condensed it into a one-shot and how I determined  what I considered to be the core concepts of each.  Stay tuned...