It’s possible to turn a one-shot Dungeons & Dragons game into a full campaign. The scope of a fantasy setting means that there are a lot of reasons why an adventuring party would need to keep working together, even if they succeeded in one quest.
D&D has seen explosive growth in popularity over the past few years, thanks to streaming shows and social media making it easier than ever to get groups together. There are people who sign-up for one-off adventures at their local game store, as they want to give D&D a trial run before fully committing time and money to the hobby. If the game goes well, then that group of players could meet up for years to come, in order to go on adventures across the D&D multiverse.
It’s possible that the DM of this game only created an adventure with the idea of the story existing in isolation. They never planned to expand the adventure further, as the goal was to simply throw the players into a dungeon with some goblins and skeletons so that they could get a feel for the game. Suddenly, the group wants to meet again and is expecting a second Dungeons & Dragons adventure that follows on from the first. Fortunately, there are several ways that a DM can transform a one-off game into a full campaign.
D&D: Transform The Player’s Theories Into A Campaign
D&D players love crafting theories about what is going on in the current Dungeons & Dragons campaign. All it takes is a lowly goblin clan hassling a trade route to start theories flying about the big bad who is secretly influencing events. As the DM, it can help to use these theories to craft the rest of the campaign. That way, the players will feel smart when they think they sussed everything out beforehand. The DM can steal the storytelling style of JJ Abrams and plant a few subtle seeds in their one-shot without thinking about their long-term ramifications.
All it takes is a mysterious coin from a foreign land, a scroll written in a code that needs deciphering, a statuette of an eldritch horror, a mysterious portrait whose eyes seem to follow the player wherever they look, or a map to a treasure on an unnamed island to send the player’s minds and mouths racing. The DM just needs to keep their ears open or even ask directly what the players think is going on, and plan the rest of their D&D campaign accordingly.
D&D: Time Skip > Getting The Band Back Together
If the DM wants to pivot into running an established campaign (like Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden) or simply has a new idea for a D&D campaign that puts the party in a different environment, then a time skip could be in order. The DM can establish that the party went their separate ways after their initial adventure and drifted apart. A year later, they have been called back together by some powerful authority figure or organization, as their skills are needed once more.
This can give the players a chance to iron out elements of their character that they didn’t like from the initial D&D one-shot game. This can be anything from changing skills to altering their personality quirks. The player now has an in-game reason to tweak their character, now that they have had a taste for the game. The time skip could involve anything from being falsely imprisoned, to returning to their studies, or even starting a family. All it takes is for a fresh calamity to come along to prompt the D&D characters to action and rejoin their allies from years before, in order to go on another dangerous adventure.
D&D: The Enemy Strikes Back
Revenge is a powerful motivator, and it makes for great sequel fodder. One way to transform a one-shot D&D session into a full Dungeons & Dragons campaign is to have the players face the repercussions of their actions. Let’s say the players had to deal with a band of murderous outlaws who were terrorizing trade routes as their first adventure. It’s possible that the group was secretly working on behalf of an invading force, which had paid the outlaws to test the response time of local armed forces to any disturbance in the region, so that they could plan their own assault accordingly.
Maybe the leader of the group had a relative who was a member of a powerful cult, and they have convinced their allies to turn their divine powers against the party. It’s possible a member of the outlaw band escaped with a lot of loot and has become paranoid that the party is coming after them, so they use their gold to hire assassins and mercenaries to quietly take them down. The revenge plot is an easy way to expand the setting and kickstart a second adventure while introducing foes that can act as the main antagonist of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
D&D: The Mists Of Ravenloft Claim The Party
If the original adventure ended on a finite note and the DM is unsure of how to proceed, then the D&D multiverse has them covered. There is a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting called Ravenloft, which is composed of several Domains of Dread, each of which is ruled by a powerful Darklord. The Domains of Dread are based on different horror genres and tropes.
The most famous of these is Barovia from Curse of Strahd, which is heavily inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Hammer Horror movies. Most people don’t willingly seek out the Domains of Dread. Instead, it’s possible for adventurers to find themselves enshrouded by mist one day, and then appearing in one of the Domains. The all-powerful rulers of the Ravenloft setting have the ability to pluck people from different realities and shove them into one of the Domains, where the only method of escape is by taking out one of the Darklords.
As of the time of writing, the only Ravenloft campaign book is Curse of Strahd, but a new book called Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft will be released on May 18 and this will flesh out the other Domains, allowing DMs to send a party into some of the scariest Dungeons & Dragons adventures of all time.
