Adventure | Design

Medieval Horror – Lands of the Dark Wicche

One of my favorite old-school videogame RPGs was 1992’s Darklands. Set in medieval Germany, the game was brutally difficult, seeped in superstition and folklore, and — way ahead of its time — a massive sandbox you could explore. It was also incredibly buggy, had UX issues, and required some some serious autoexec voodoo to get […]

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Design

Most Popular Adventures – 2020

It’s been a busy 2020 on the 1shotadventures blog! This year, 9 new free adventures were published for systems ranging from D&D and Call of Cthulhu to GURPS and Savage Worlds. Special thanks to everyone who gave me feedback or dropped a note to here or on Twitter. I originally started this blog because I […]

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Adventure

Is Slasher Horror Impossible? The Mound in the Yard

The slasher film is a popular take on horror. In RPGs, slasher adventures are utterly underrepresented. For Halloween this year, I went on a search for a great ’70s or ’80s style slasher killer adventure. I almost came up empty. I found RPG-adjacent storytelling games like The Final Girl and Slasher, and I also found […]

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Adventure

Use Your Outtakes – The Curse of Sekhmet

One of my favorite pieces of movie trivia is that the famous mine car chase from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was originally planned for Raiders of the Lost Ark. If you read the original Raiders screenplay, you’ll find the scene at the very end. After Indy and Marion recover the ark from […]

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Adventure

Old West Horror – The Black Mine of Teihiihan

I was drawn back into Call of Cthulhu when one of my friends started running one-shot adventures for his teenage son. Suddenly, even old, barely-remembered adventures like The Haunting were magical again, and we were all having a blast tromping around abandoned cabins, fleeing cultists and Deep One-infested lighthouses, and laughing as we inevitably went crazy and died horribly […]

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