Hopefully I'll be DMing some four hour sessions at a convention. Any good recommendations for adventures that would fit that window? Don't have to be first level.
The Twilight Game in
Galder's Gazetteer is a great 5th level one-shot. Haven't run it yet, but been doing more one-shots recently, and I'm active on their Discord, and between my read and what I'm hearing, it runs great in about four hours.
My go-to one-shot used to be my conversion of an old DUNGEON adventure, which I reworked/renamed
Hunt for the Archdruid as a 3rd level one-shot. I've run it twice (well two and a half times), and as long as you keep the pacing snappy it fits within 4 hours just fine.
I recently ran my conversion of an old Chris Perkins' adventure, "A Wizard's Fate" (DUNGEON 37), and we ran out our 3-hour clock in the dungeon, but my guesstimate was that if we had another hour, and I'd exercised a bit of a stronger hand with framing the scene, that it would have fit in 4 hours just fine. Also, I ran it online, and games tend to be a bit slower when played online, at least IME.
I've also been wanting to try out
Cat and Mouse from Kobold Press. It is a 1st level adventure with a nice little story with a funnel structure – narrow at the beginning, but opening up to more choice towards the end – and there are three parts (which always translates well to running a one-shot. However, as much as I like it, I think it would take some work to streamline it for a 4 hour one-shot session.
Planning one running another old Chris Perkins adventure,
Redcap's Rampage, online as a one-shot in September. Like most of the DUNGEON adventures, it's requiring a pretty strong editing hand to conform to a one-shot format (and I run just 3 hour games when running online). Generally, I'm noticing that dungeons as "room-by-room exploration" elements will run out the clock like nobody's business, so I'm mostly reinterpreting the ruins at the end as simply the terrain of a final fight (if it comes to that).