For the last few weeks my gaming group has been between campaigns. The previous week some of the players suggested that I run a one-shot of either Star Wars D6 or Gamma World. Both of them sounded pretty fun to me. I decided to run Star Wars D6 though because the characters would only take a few minutes to create and I am much more familiar with those rules than Gamma World.

I came into that day not knowing for sure if we were going to be roleplaying or not. When everyone showed up they pretty much said, “Let’s do it!” So they started making characters and I started making an adventure. I knew I didn’t have much time because it doesn’t take long to make Star Wars D6 characters. I wanted to create an adventure that would last about 3-4 hours, would be over-the-top, fun and memorable, and would include a lot of miniature combat.

While my four players decided on their classes, I started gathering some information. I printed out a map for Mos Eisley and found a cool picture of a loan shark character type that I decided would be the primary character for the adventure. As I was building the adventure in my head, something cool started to happen.

Two of the players decided to make Bounty Hunter characters. That made an instant, easy hook where they both did bounty hunting together. The third player decided to make a Cybernetic Pirate, while the last player decided to make an Ex-Cop. Then the player of the Cybernetic Pirate decided that the reason why the other player was an Ex-Cop was because he recently framed him for murder and other nefarious activities! Two plotlines are written for the one-shot adventure before I have even created the first adventure.

Since I had just received six different four-packs of Yakuza miniatures from Dixon Miniatures (more on this in another article), I decided that the antagonist characters would be of the evil, Yakuza-like persuasion. I used some random name generators over at Seventh Sanctum; I quickly had my evil organization, The Eternity League, and a host of bad guy names.

I added all of these factors up in about fifteen minutes of brainstorming. The ensuing adventure saw the two Bounty Hunters hired to find the missing son of a local corrupt politician. They brought along their friends, the Cybernetic Pirate and Ex-Cop for some extra back-up, as they knew the enemies of this politician were powerful. They got in a fight with the Eternity League while looking for the loan shark who took the politician’s son. Once they defeated them, they eventually tracked down the loan shark and learned that he had, in fact, sold the son to the Eternity League. They tracked down a location where the Eternity League hung out at, went in guns blazing, one-shot adventure complete. Or is it…?

We all had a pretty good time reminiscing about Star Wars D6 and old adventures we’d been through. The players were able to play with a little reckless abandon because they figured this would be a one-and-done adventure. But after it was done, we all realized that we had a pretty good time and that maybe there was a little potential with expanding this adventure further out into a small campaign.

Do you find that players play one-shot adventures differently than campaign adventures?

Have you ever had an intended one-shot adventure turn into a campaign?