10/21/2021

The holidays are a great time to get together with friends and family. They are also a great time for a holiday themed one shot adventure. This may be a chance to try out a different game than the usual system played. Maybe a chance for a forever DM to be a player.

This year, for Halloween, we are going to take a break from our weekly Dungeons and Dragons 5E campaign to play Vampire the Masquerade 5E. My wife has played the Vampire PC games and wanted to give it a try. The group agreed, and I am going to run a simple adventure that should take a couple of hours. A few players had played older versions of the game, and some hadn’t played it at all.

Some of the keys to a successful one-shot adventure are:

1. The DM has to have a good grasp of the rules and should be able to explain them simply to the players. Take a few minutes to go over the rules and maybe even have some examples of mechanics.
2. The characters for the adventure should be pre-generated before the game. This allows more time for playing the game and the characters are suited for the adventure. Make sure to have more characters than players so everyone has a choice.
3. The DM should supply some simple cheat sheets along with the character sheets. This will give the PCs something to reference when playing.
4. If possible, create a mood for the game. Add music and lighting to enhance the game session and make it a memorable experience.
5. If the game takes special dice, have enough available for the players to use as well.
6. The adventure should be short enough to complete in a single night but contain all of the different elements of the game. (For example, a D&D game should have the 3 pillars: Combat, Exploration, and Social encounters)

For my Vampire game, I have already supplied the players with the reference material for them to look over. I will also have printout copies of all of the reference material as well at the table. I will also spend 10-20 minutes at the beginning of the session going over the mechanics as well as some examples of the rules in play.

Since there are going to be 4 players, I have created 7 vampires (one from each clan). This way, everyone will have some choice of character. I have the character sheets created (and will hand them out at the start of the game session) along with some background information about the characters.

For the mood, I will have candles (Vampire Blood from Bath and Body Works) lit around the room. I will also have music playing in the background. Tabletop Audio is a free website that offers plenty of music choices. I also have the Queen of the Damned Music soundtrack as well as the Soundtrack from Vampire Bloodlines.

Since Vampire uses only d10s, I have bought extras for my players to use. Everyone has some d10s with their D&D dice, but you might need to have up to 10 of one color and 5 of another (Hunger Dice). I bought 50 red d10 dice and 50 different color d10 dice (5 sets of 10). I will let the players choose colors, but the red dice are hunger dice.

I have done this before with other games. We once played a Mutants and Masterminds 3E game when we had some players miss a session. I had all of the characters pre-generated (pretty much the Avengers and X-Men all made up and ready to go. I might share all of those files here at some point). I had miniatures for all of the characters and a bank set piece (it was a bank robbery gone bad). The group still got to play and everyone had fun.

Keep on gaming!