One Hit Wonders

[The Green Adam]

One-shots, pick up games, pilots...one time and one time only adventures that rocked your players socks and then went the way of the Dodo. No campaign came of it but you all still speak of that one time when you ran a kicking game of...something.

So tell us about your One Hit Wonder! Could if have turned into a campaign? Should it have or was it supposed to? Why didn't it?

I'll start, though truely I've have dozens if not hundreds of them. I'm becoming know as the king of the One Hit Wonders...-sigh-

Galaxy Quest, The Role Playing Game
Homebew vaguely based on Teenagers from Outer Space

Based on the movie of the same name, I threw this one together on the spot when for some reason one or more of the players we were expecting cancelled last minute for the first adventure of a new campaign my group was planning. It went over extremely well and is perhaps one of the best games I've ever run.

Having recently watched the movie on DVD, the players took to it immediately. I gave each character a special ability that increased the humor factor and immersed the group in the feel of the film right away. The commandder got bigger bonuses the more melodramatic she was. The alien science officer could come up with an alien power but had to roll to re-use next episode to see if the 'writers' remembered he had that power. Only one player could talk to the computer. Best of all the security officer had trumped up skills and stats but very low hit points and no name. Crewman is all he got. If he service the adventure/episode he would get more hp and a last name. Then double the hp and a first name, etc.

With an original ship design, a hilarious misunderstanding with dirty and primitive alien natives, a freeloading ambassador and more injokes and parodies then you can shake a Targathian baby at, this turned out to be eight kinds of awesome.

So why only once? Well, we had originally planned on running something else and this was more of a fill in. I went on to run the original concept, though in retrospect I think continuing the GQ game would have been more successful. I have since been working on an original homebrew that even better emulates the kind of game I want to run. A return to the Galaxy Quest RPG is only a matter of time...

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[jdrakeh]

Back in the day, I ran a very well received 'one shot' based loosely on John Carpenter's The Thing, Games Workshop's Warhammer 40k, and a mishmash of every 'power armor in space' anime that you've ever seen. It ended up going over so well that the players wanted to continue playing it. . . but they had previously wanted to play a fantasy campaign (which my other friend had put a lot of time into) and were reminded of this. So, we played the fantasy campaign instead. . . and our group petered out as a result. Man. Players are a fickle bunch.

 

[the Jester]

At ConQuest Sac a couple months ago, I ran an awesomely fun 16th level planar one-shot, with a group of pcs that were staging a raid on the bottom of the multiverse, trying to stop the Void Master from doing something terrible with the Wand of Orcus (who is still dead imc). They succeeded, but it was too late to prevent some of the effects, which are rippling throughout my campaign cosmology now and setting up the merger of the Negative Energy Plane with the Plane of Shadow, and the beginning of the 4e cosmology.

It was an awesome game, with the pcs being total high-level asskickers and the bad guys being vicious and powerful malign entities. The Void Masters were trying to resurrect Orcus, and the vestige of Acererak was trying to return to existence through the fact that a major component of the VM's ritual were shards of the Phylactery of the Apotheosis (from Return to the Tomb of Horrors; my pcs destroyed it).