My regular weekly D&D game was on hiatus for a month because of random adult things. A familiar story, I’m sure. Our group is small, so even one player not able to make it generally means that we can’t play. Usually that’s fine, but occasionally the absences stack up and we miss a whole bunch of sessions together, which can really slow down the momentum of the game.
This past week, only one person was missing and I decided to get the remaining players together anyway and see what we could do. As the Dungeon Master, I figured I had some options.
The events unfolding in the story really required all the characters to be present. It was a tense moment! The party had just infiltrated the castle of a powerful Fairy queen, and were on the verge of being discovered. I knew that I could employ a few classic tricks to continue the game, like running the character of the missing player myself, or having them fade into the background for a session or two. But in this case it wasn’t a really satisfying idea to leave somebody out.
What to do, then?
Another option was to play a one-shot adventure unrelated to the campaign. I liked that idea but I thought: maybe there’s a way I can tie this into the main story.
I’ve recently been inspired by listening to the podcast Worlds Beyond Number (Patreon, YouTube, Apple, PocketCasts — If you haven’t heard of it, and you’re a fan of tabletop RPG‘s, definitely go give it a listen). They frequently do these “interludes“ between their main story arcs which are stories told in a shorter form with a cast of characters totally different from the main characters of the campaign. However, the events that unfold in the interludes are always somehow related to the history of the world or its main cast. They add to the game rather than just being a distraction.
I decided to try to try something similar in my game.
I came up with a simple story idea borrowed from the book One Shot Wonders (another great resource that you should check out). The main characters of my game are teenage friends in a fantasy world. I decided to set the story in a time when the characters were much younger and didn’t have a lot of experience in the world. I asked each player to make a copy of their character leveled down to level one with no items or gear. Their characters were attending a class set in the restricted book section of the library when suddenly, a ghost appeared!
The ghost they had to deal with was a former librarian at the school who was also an underappreciated author. In her rage, she began by flinging books at the students, following it up with attempts at possession and life stealing attacks.
It ended up being a very satisfying story! While keeping the ghost distracted, the characters were able to use the magical card catalog to find one of her books, collect it from the stacks, and then read it to her, assuring the ghost that she hadn’t been forgotten.
There were two big benefits to this mini adventure: first, the book that the players retrieved actually contained information relevant to their current storyline. Since the characters were very young at the time, it made sense that they had mostly forgotten about the events in the library until now.
Secondly, it allowed the players to have their characters bond in a more natural way than they had been able to at the beginning of the adventure. I think this was the best part.
When starting any campaign, players have some idea of their characters’ backstories, but we all know as roleplayers that our characters evolve over time. Once we’ve been playing for months or years, we often find a better voice or persona for who our characters really are. By jumping back in time like this, we were able to utilize those more solid personas to live a moment in the characters history that really mattered. It felt a lot more real and meaningful to see these people learning about themselves and making friends than it would have if we had played this scenario before the story started.
I think that flashback episodes like this are underrated for their roleplaying potential and I plan to use them more!
Payton.Codes 
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