One Shot Classics: Village of Hommlet

My first attempt at a one-session game failed.  But, I do have an excuse: we spent a considerable amount of time rolling up characters, so I will accept that excuse and not count this attempt.  We did get a considerable amount of role-playing in and did get two or three combat encounters in so I think we have a good start to the adventure.

For the Village of Hommlet, I decided that the adventure's core concepts were the following:

• The village itself is, of course, central to the adventure.
• The major NPCs: Burne, Elmo, Rufus, Jaroo Ashtaff, and others had to be encountered.
• The Inn of the Welcome Wench had to be involved.
• The tensions between the followers of Cuthbert and the followers of the Old Faith had to be introduced.
• And, of course the Moathouse had to be in the adventure.

I did not get all of the NPCs that I wanted to in the initial session, but I got more in than I thought I would.  The adventure quickly led to the inn and that's where much of the night was spent role-playing.  There was excellent exploration done by the PCs, one of whom was a druid who used his shape changing powers to discover the bandit's hideout in the moathouse by sneaking into Zert's room and going through his pack.  

The PCs made a scouting trip to the moathouse, but when they saw all of the bandits and a bugbear, they decided to make a plan before tackling it.  That's where the session ended.  Not bad for a couple of hours of character creation and a couple of hours of play.

My hope is that the next session will complete the adventure.  They will tackle the moathouse again, take on Lareth and find the connection to the Temple of Elemental Evil, which will be the next adventure.  I need to pare down the moathouse dungeons a bit, I think, in order to get all of that into a  4 hour session.

My next trick will be to figure out how to squeeze the Temple of Elemental Evil down to its core components.  I read the novelization and have some ideas, but I'll devote more neurons to that after I've finished Hommlet.