OSR Recommendations for four hour adventure

[Sacrosanct]

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.

 

[Ancalagon]

so it's not about just adventures that flow well for sessions that last four hours - the adventure has to be "completed" in one such session, correct?

 

[not-so-newguy]

I can't recommend it because I haven't played it or even bought it, but I've been looking at an adventure called "blue alley" over at DMs guild. It's supposed to last 3-4 hours

Blue Alley - Dungeon Masters Guild | Dungeon Masters Guild

Blue Alley - CAN YOU SURVIVE WATERDEEP'S MOST INFAMOUS DEATHTRAP? Blue Alley lies hidden in the heart of Waterdeep. Built by a secret

www.dmsguild.com

 

[Sacrosanct]

so it's not about just adventures that flow well for sessions that last four hours - the adventure has to be "completed" in one such session, correct?

Yep. Each session will be between 3-4 hours. It's a block of time at a convention

 

[Ancalagon]

The Mangeblanc hotel adventure at the end of the Troika! main book? (the luminous edition)

 

[Retreater]

There are some good self-contained sites in the Forbidden Lands books and Trilemma Adventures has some one-page dungeons.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

There's the adventure packets for Beyond the Wall and Other Adventure, each one is a short adventure and needs no prep because the motivations of the various NPC and the resolutions of the adventure are rolled when the PC create their characters with their playbook.

 

[jgsugden]

If you're willing to convert, there are a lot of 'Delves' out there from conventions or this 4E book: Dungeon Delve (4e) - Wizards of the Coast | Dungeons & Dragons 4e | Dungeons & Dragons 4e | Dungeon Masters Guild. They're intended to be just the type of thing you want - just enough premise for a 4 hour session.

 

[Burnside]

Attack on Coppercoil - Dungeon Masters Guild | Dungeon Masters Guild

"Duergar raiders have attacked a secret gnome outpost. During a desperate rescue mission, adventurers encounter giant snails, a net full of gnomes, an octopus, a sealed scriptorium, death, a ruined birthday party, a berserk construct, a haunted letter, and much more."

 

[Quickleaf]

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).