OOPS! All Bards: A Battle of the Bands in Dungeons and Dragons

I recently had the chance to run a one-shot for our group which let me explore some campaign ideas I had been thinking about for some time. When I run a full-length campaign I want my players to have the freedom to create a character that they really want to play. The first reason is that when you’re playing a longer campaign you should be playing a character you’re going to have fun playing session after session. The second reason is that when you play a role-playing game you are given the chance to explore new perspectives in a unique way. It’s one of the things that attracts us to this style of gameplay and storytelling. There are always restrictions of some sort that are imposed, like your setting, the scale of the adventure, the vibe that the story will take, among other things that should be discussed during a session zero talk between players and the game master. Beyond those initial conversations, I think it’s bad practice as a game master to impose too harshly on character creation as it pulls the power to tell the story too close to the game master and their intentions. That being said, having the opportunity to run a one-shot that allows the players and their characters to interact with a small slice of my homebrew world gave me a chance to impose some limitations to foster and guide an interesting story and set-up events in a collaborative way. Which produced the added benefit of getting my players to do some of the creative work in writing new NPCs and interesting lore.

Our group recently finished a series of one-shots where each of us took a turn at the game master’s table. A one-shot is a style of role playing different from a long form campaign. It tends to tell a singular story, with limited options for the players to interact with. A one-shot tends to only take up a single session of play, as it can be a replacement for a regular session either between campaigns or when some people may be absent for a session. It lends itself well to exploring characters the players haven’t had the chance to play yet and for the game master to explore areas of their world, modules, systems, or settings that they would like to practice with. The characters won’t level up or progress during the adventure and tend to have a clear goal from the beginning to jump-start the story. We had a slightly different approach because we ran one to two hour sessions, so we strung them together creating one-shots that ran somewhere between eight to twelve hours. A shorter amount of time than a campaign would run, but slightly longer than your traditional one-shot might be.

When crafting the character creation guidelines for my one-shot, “The Traveling Festival”, I decided to impose certain restrictions to guide exploration of my homebrew world in new ways, including places we hadn't visited, and particularly, lore surrounding the nature of bards and their institutions of learning. For starters, my players would start at level 3. They had to take one level of bard, but could multiclass without restriction beyond that. I told them their characters would start the adventure in a band and that they were participating in "The Traveling Festival"; a fantasy style battle of the bands competition that served as the final test for their bardic schools. They needed to come up with their own band: the name, the style, and the NPCs that played with them. I also had them tell me what circumstances would lead them to leaving their band. Our first session began with each of them being kicked out of or leaving their own band. Which led them to join the other players in creating a new band, so they could all enter the festival. This did a few things immediately, it gave each player a goal to complete, an adversary to compete against, motivation to go on the adventure, and a reason to join together with a rag tag bunch of other bards. 

“This did a few things immediately, it gave each player a goal to complete, an adversary to compete against, motivation to go on the adventure, and a reason to join together with a rag tag bunch of other bards.”

This setup for my players allowed me as the game master to tempt them with quests to explore different areas of my world because each stop along the festival was associated with one of the player’s final tests. At each location one the players school’s imposed a quest on the player and their ex-bandmates. They had to uncover some lost piece of history, an interesting local story, or a powerful artifact. In my world this is what bards do as they travel around. Having my player act out these adventures gave them a better familiarity with the bards and storytellers of my world.  This also meant that the players were competing against a team of NPCs for the same goal, providing friendly conflict along the way with the NPC bandmates that the player’s created. At each of the locations I was able to show off how the different people and cultures celebrated, and what stories they found valuable.

By the end of our adventures, the party had formed a new band with strong bonds, they explored new cultures and perspectives, and traversed areas like a mysterious singing cave, a dangerous dragon's puzzle, a dark forest of vampires, and a fae court celebration. The limitations to character creation and in constructing the character’s background helped to serve the larger narrative that we ended up telling. One of the best things to come out of the adventure were the bands my players made — bands just waiting to be dropped into future adventurers in my world. When they see Ashes of Asmodeus, The Golden Chords, Shaft Shakers, or The Insomnia Collective pop in a tavern it will make the world feel that much more lived in.

 After running this adventure I would recommend it to anyone who wants to have a silly time with your players. It was a serious treat to let my players come up with bands and band members for my world. We all had a blast exploring the seldom seen traveling musician side of our fantasy world.

If you have stories or ideas for a creatively themed adventuring party, let us know in the comments!

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Grab your sword and keep on adventuring!

This week’s communication from the Inn at the End comes to us courtesy of DM Alex! You can follow his adventures (and see some of his artwork) on Instagram by clicking HERE.

-The Inn Keeper-

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