Constructing a 5E D&D One Shot

October 14, 2014

Last Friday night I was home alone and not an RPG game to be played in sight. My regular group wasn’t available yet and I still wanted to drop some funny shaped dice. So what is a gamer to do? I’ll tell you what I did. I reached out to the online RPG game community and some of my fellow Nerdarchists via Facebook. On Facebook there is this group called the Tabletop RPG One Shot Group started by fellow YouTuber GM Juce. He started it to bring gamers together and help people game. A while back I did an article on that FB group and how it’s helping gamers to game.

One shot 5E D&D adventure on the fly

My son was off to a lock-in at church and my wife and daughter would be camping with the Girl Scouts. So I decided to reach out to some members of the One Shot group and see if they’d be interested in playing in a fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons game via Google Hangouts. I was able to scrounge up 5 players for the game and I had about 1-2 hours to prep something.

I’ll be interspersing my GM notes from the game throughout this article.

What I came up with was the Maze of Mandoon. Since it was a one shot game of 5E D&D I gave everyone the parameters for the beginning of the game — their characters were either leaving or traveling to the boomtown of Gryphongaff. They could be together, separate or any combination thereof. While on the road our adventurers got caught in a chaos storm and were forced to seek shelter.

With it being a one shot I wanted to start everyone together all at once and give them a common goal to work towards. Another goal of mine was to use some old school monsters from the 5E D&D Monster Manual.

To this end I pulled out the minotaur as my big bad, sprinkled a water weird in there, and even used some winged kobolds also known as urds from AD&D. I took these beasties and threw them into a classic labyrinth with my players.

We kicked the maze run off with some dialogue between the urds and the players. The winged kobolds alluded to the fact that if the players remained in the maze until sunrise they’d be trapped forever. It turned into a combat encounter fairly quickly. From the get go I wasn’t sure if this was going to be a combat encounter or not, but after my players began killing the little buggers it was decided for me. Wings or not they are still kobolds and once their ranks began to thin they fled.

I’ll let you in on a few of my secrets first off I never even bothered doing a map. I sketched out some of the encounter areas. Anytime the characters back tracked, the terrain changed so I made it clear right from the beginning mapping would be useless. Secondly I ad-libbed a lot of the story as we went. Most of which happened in the cave where they started at.

Next I wanted use an obvious red herring, gargoyles. Plus a fountain full of treasure which was being guarded by a water weird, which was an old school monster from AD&D. I was very excited to see this monster back in the Monster Manual. I also wanted some hunting/ambushing from the minotaur before their final encounter with him in order to escape the maze.

The final encounter takes place at a pair of strange well-wrought creepy doors, where the tiefling rogue in the party easily opened one of the locked doors but set off a pit trap which he easily avoided. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to avoid a flock of poisonous flying snakes. He goes down and is almost killed when the fighter blows up the snakes with a backpack full of oil and alchemist’s fire. It’s soon after that the minotaur shows up to deal with the intruders in his maze. After his defeat the characters escape the maze. You can watch the mayhem below.