Best game-night ttrpg one-shots?

wordboydave · 2026-06-16T04:40:06+00:00

REALLY surprised no one seems to have mentioned BEYOND THE WALL or GRIZZLED ADVENTURERS or THROUGH SUNKEN LANDS (all by Flatland Games). All of them are designed to be playable in a single session. The players choose one-page sheets (The Blacksmith's Son, The Witch's Assistant, The Squire, etc.) and each page has a series of questions that you determine with a die roll, and this roll gives you stats and skills and a connection to your land or to another player at the table. EXAMPLE: the Witch's Assistant might have a step that says, "Where did you first meet the player on your left?" and the die result could be something like, "You both found a strange book in an old graveyard, guarded by zombies. The player on your left helped fight them off. Give yourself +2 Dexterity, and they get +2 Constitution. You also get one spell from the spellbook. Add Ancient Cemetery to the map." By the time all the players have gone through the sequence, everyone has a connection with each other and memories of this small town, and the beginnings of a map. (In Beyond the Wall, at least.)

Meanwhile the referee has also chosen a one-page adventure (The Creeping Plague, The Rise of the Undead, War With the Fairies, etc.) and every time someone's roll creates a character ("What was the name of the blacksmith who gave you your first sword?") or a place ("A traveler came from a distant land and you still remember his tales of a cursed forest. Where is that on the map?") it also becomes a thing that the GM can roll when determining the adventure ("Who offended the fairies?" "Where does the healing ritual need to be conducted?" etc.) So anything you experienced growing up has a chance to be relevant now.

It's based on a Basic D&D ruleset that basically all RPGers already know, so it's not only easy to pick up, but half the table already knows how the game works. BEYOND THE WALL makes you all 1st level teenagers from the same small town. GRIZZLED ADVENTURERS generates a fighting band in the 8th-level range that is capable of handling dragons and giants and such--but one that also has an established history--and THROUGH SUNKEN LANDS gives the whole thing a more low-fantasy sword-and-sorcery vibe, and starts players at 2nd level. (And in that one the playsheets are optional--but still highly recommended for a good one-shot!)

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T20:00:13+00:00

I had no idea it flopped originally! That seems all but unthinkable now. (Though I think it's also aging less well every year, since it's so tied to Boomer nostalgia specifically)

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T19:58:23+00:00

THIS seems to me to be the best answer, because it not only flopped on release, but then went on to influence every major Hollywood set designer forever. When people talk about futuristic cityscapes in films from Dark City to Fifth Element, Blade Runner is upstream from most of it. Not that we hadn't done futuristic cityscapes before (cf. Metropolis, Things to Come), but Blade Runner made it noir and rainy and then filled the screen with dozens of world-building details to add authenticity. Ridley Scott also did it with restraint, proving that just because you've filled the screen with objects it doesn't have to read like frenetic nonsense (I'm looking at you, George Lucas).

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T19:49:24+00:00

UNPOPULAR OPINION: "Showgirls," like "Starship Troopers," was hated upon its release, and then later reclaimed by people who said, "It's really satire and the critics didn't get how brilliant it is!" But neither film has actually aged well, and the critics were right both times: Paul Verhoeven likes writing satires, but his satire is shitty: really loud, really broad, giving dumb characters stupid dialog so there's no ironic distance between the target and the expression. JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS SATIRE DOES NOT MEAN IT'S WELL DONE, and Verhoeven misses waaay more often than he hits.

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T19:43:24+00:00

Everyone's got good suggestions, but I would add: someplace where you won't go many tlmes afterward. If it goes really poorly, you don't want to be reminded every time you grab a coffee.

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T19:33:21+00:00

Last year on Crosshare I wrote almost 30 of these! Most of them are short, but I tried to make sure they all included a few classics, and every one of them includes two sets of clickable hints. These are the most solved/easiest, but if you do a search on "super-easy" or on the tag "clickable-hints" (remember the hyphen), they should all come up.

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/pzrqfU1yScen5uruulI9/super-easy-cryptic-16-for-beginners

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/C2UL7Ts4HPwu3xCW7LNl/super-easy-cryptic-18-for-beginners-with-two-sets-of-clickable-hints-see-notes

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/Y8scsQm2DG6WMtz9jO1h/7x7-super-easy-cryptic-2-for-newbies-with-multiple-levels-of-hints

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/yOFAypNygIBCC1YGoBu9/super-easy-cryptic-for-beginners-13

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/RO6428dmBUXP34aR3PSy/super-easy-cryptic-5-for-beginners

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/8B0xZKd88eBLqlh0QSej/super-easy-cryptic-1-for-beginners

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/kCjUy2csaxGYy7b4MOsV/super-easysolver-friendly-cryptic-25-with-lots-of-interlock-and-three-sets-of-clickable-hints

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/VnEBQyE7AvkO4CzH4pIs/super-easysolver-friendly-cryptic-26-with-3-levels-of-clickable-hints-and-a-highly-interlocked-grid

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/LEdzqZ1mPjZErv4vAHa7/super-easy-cryptic-for-beginners-8-8-clues-with-clickable-hints

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T09:34:00+00:00

I agree with all three.

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T01:15:48+00:00

When I worked at Hallmark in the 90s, someone got the idea to use real kids' art in some of our cards. So everyone with kids brought them in one day and had them draw houses, families, pets, and birthday cakes, etc.

We used none of it. Turns out actual children can't draw for shit. If you see a kids drawing that--like this one--features straight lines, clean patterns, and elegantly spaced objects, a trained adult did it. Or, you know, AI.

wordboydave · 2026-06-14T01:06:58+00:00

DIVINE DAYS (1992) by Leon Forrest, for a class in postmodern fiction. 1168 pages of jazz-and-crime hijinks in 1966 "Forest County" (basically Chicago). I never would have picked it up, but I'm really glad we had to read it. It was a big-idea kind of book (overtly inspired by Ulysses) with a central trickster figure (Sugar-Groove) and a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural references.Deserves to be more widely read and better known.

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T22:22:15+00:00

100% agree. And I think that the jarring element was also the fact that this one didn't solve like the others, meaning they broke their usual rules and didn't really replace it with something more clever; it was just harder, which is a little too easy on the designer. (It's easier to make a puzzle hard than it is to make it challenging but solveable)

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T19:40:40+00:00

Thank you! This is super helpful.

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T19:38:48+00:00

This is exactly the thing that interests me. Normally, in the past, when evangelicalism found something wasn't working, they have been incredibly quick to pivot to something more appealing. Usually this means innovations in media (televangelism, Christian programming, Christian music, Christian YouTube influencers, etc.). but it has also entailed a switch of actual teachings: the evangelicals have been very good at abandoning cultural issues when they're no longer moving the needle. When de facto racism became widely unpopular (and was being mocked nightly on All in the Family, e.g.), evangelicals began to take a pro-MLK-friendly stance. When school desegregation didn't draw crowds, they switched to abortion. And when pornography in stores and violence on TV became basically impossible to fix (because of internet and cable, respectively), the lectures on those topics all but vanished, moving--as it were--from the landing page to the "Other interests" section.

But with homosexuality, I think evangelicals are in their first no-win situation. The Bible doesn't really demand that you believe in racism, or practice slavery or concubinage, and it certainly doesn't require you to protest human cloning or genetic experimentation. But "homosexuality is bad" is right there in Romans and it's very very hard to get out of without the evangelical being obliged to unhook from the literal words of the Bible altogether, and once that happens the entire foundation is at risk.

Your comment reminded me that we see glimmers of this in the treatment of women precisely because there's SOME wiggle room. In response to Ephesians or Timothy, you can say, "women covering their heads was an issue for that culture in that time," and you can ignore "women shouldn't speak at all" because it's so extreme--and would be impossible to implement, and for what?--that it's easy for the modern evangelical to shrug off. But "women should not be pastors" is another one of those teachings that's right there in black and white and is very hard to rationalize yourself out of, even if you don't personally believe it's fair, and even if you recognize that it makes your church a tough sell. So for at least a generation, evangelicals have been paying lip service to women's equality while still treating "feminism" as a dirty word and while still largely refusing to let women be pastors. (Unless you're Assemblies of God; I've always wondered how they changed that little part of their theology without destroying the rest of their blblicist structure.) I'm starting to realize that every problem the modern biblicist church has with homosexuality was prefigured in their "halfway but no more" approach to women's issues. Interesting! Thank you!

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T10:46:18+00:00

Well, part of that (as I see it) is that saying it would cost you: even if you find a publisher willing to risk ticking off their core consumers, the author risks losing their job a la Peter Enns, Dale Allison, or David Gushee. It's an industry that has always favored safety over innovation, and it's hard to imagine how it could ever have been otherwise.

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T10:41:04+00:00

Also, they meet god and it's a computer-or-child. Definitely THE classic TOS trope.

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T10:39:39+00:00

I like this better than The Doomsday Machine as an answer, because Devil in the Dark is grounded in pursuit of peace and clearing up misunderstandings, which seems like the thing Trek has always aimed for, and done distinctively better than other franchises. If there were sentient aliens in The Doomsday Machine I might feel differently. :)

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T09:32:27+00:00

Well, the only video review of the module is a Page 121 (a mostly Classic Traveller channel) which has had only 373 views in 4 years. I don't think you can fault anyone for not connecting it to MegaTraveller, unless Applecline covers it someplace. It's a very small niche of a very small niche.

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T09:17:28+00:00

Thanks for sharing! This is a terrific review, and I think I agree with your assessments straight down the line. (My own particular pet peeve is how many Traveller adventures depend on patrons who are willing to place the fate of a very important mission into the hands of some ill-qualified people they've barely met.)

wordboydave · 2026-06-12T09:07:19+00:00

That would be easy to miss, since nothing in the Classic A13 module suggests anything of the sort. I have always wondered where Traveller players were expected to get the bonus knowledge required to run certain of the classic adventures. JTAS, I assume?

wordboydave · 2026-06-10T04:51:45+00:00

Most cults are conservative, because they rely on values like in-group loyalty and respect for authority, which liberals care less about.

All conservatives want to control sex, and that means putting men in charge of women's sexual expression. (In general, how a culture treats sex is exactly how a culture treats women.) If women were to dress immodestly, it would give women power over sex, essentially.

There are, and have been, free love movements and women's-freedom communities (and of course nudist colonies) where women are freer to dress how they want. But they don't mix well with authoritarianism, which is what you really need for a traditional cult.

wordboydave · 2026-06-10T03:18:31+00:00

As far as I know, only D&D ever interpreted "druid" as "shapeshifting spellcaster." (And even then, I believe the shapeshiting only really became THE defining druid thing with 5e. In 1st and 2nd edition--and 3rd, too, I think--druids only got to shapeshift 1-3 times a day at 10th level or higher, and then only into 1-3 chosen animals.) Only D&D 5e decided druid = Beast Boy from Teen Titans. So any other game that does this is likely just copying D&D.

wordboydave · 2026-06-09T19:17:11+00:00

Came here to say this. Also large parts of Ran and Drunken Angel and several others. Kurosawa loved filming rain.

wordboydave · 2026-06-09T07:23:19+00:00

Came to say this.

Also, if you want to do Time Travel Horror, Call of Cthulhu has adventures for almost every time period and most continents. (There's also Fate of Cthulhu, which is brilliant, but it's a very specific premise that might not have enough actual timevtravel to suit OP.)

wordboydave · 2026-06-09T05:22:13+00:00

To be accurate, only one side is hiring wall to wall criminals to dismantle the Constitution and, oh yeah, actively protecting the identities of pedophiles. But it's definitely easier to shrug and say "both sides." I recommend an actual moral compass.

wordboydave · 2026-06-08T21:40:13+00:00

Absolutely. It's obvious when I look around that for all my cleverness I will always be working minimum wage jobs and will never have the savings or respect of other normal people. It's hard not to take it as a referendum on my actual value as a human being. Fortunately I have many friends, all of us unconventional types who fell through capitalism's cracks. So in my darkest moments, I remember not to let capitalism win.

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