Last Minute Cancellations of One Player – What Do you Do?

The other night was supposed to be the next chapter in our War of the Dead campaign, but sickness prevented one of our players from making it. He let me know that morning and I spent a while debating whether to go ahead without him or run something different. The next chapter starts out with a bang and I didn’t want him to miss out or have his character behave in ways that he might not agree with since there are some very tough choices that will have to be made.

So then, having made that decision, I needed to figure out what I would run. I realized I would have about 30 minutes to prep a new game for that night. Which strangely enough is the topic of the week for this Johnn Four’s Role-playing Tips list serve: “I only have 30 minutes to prepare for a game.”

Johnn provides good advice, but it’s largely geared toward a fantasy setting and involves building from scratch. It’s similar advice to the Lazy Dungeon Master, which is a great read and resource. I recommend both if you’re running a fantasy campaign and starting from scratch. I wasn’t keen on either, knowing I had lots of existing adventures and resources.

In thinking about what I wanted to do, I also considered that this comes up fairly frequently that one out of our four regular players can’t make a session.

I had originally increased our group to four members so that we could still play effectively with three if one missed a game, but the other problem is that I often run on-going and very intense campaigns where someone missing a game is a problem. Their character doesn’t really participate and may be temporarily sidelined in some way as a result.

As a result of these frequent occurrences, I decided I need something not only for tonight, but I could use whenever this happens in the future. It would also need to be provide 3 hour self-contained adventures with an ever-changing mix of the player’s characters, but have the same pool of PCs so that they can enjoy overall story development and not just have one-shots that don’t have any connection to one another.

I reviewed a few of options that first came to mind (focusing on games that I had a good amount of material already for):

• D&D 5e or DungeonWorld: Both excellent options, but fantasy games typically involve dungeons. Having heroes delve into small dungeon after small dungeon seems ridiculous and having them in one big dungeon where they keep changing out who is there doesn’t make any sense either. The genre just isn’t conducive to one-night episodes with constantly changing protagonists. I could always run it in a town as per Johnn Four’s suggestion, but aside from Village of Hommlet, I don’t have any other town adventures pre-made.
• Star Wars: This could work as some sort of series involving Jedi during the Old Republic, but right now I don’t have the full FFG Star Wars rules, so couldn’t get this up and running quickly. Also, I don’t have adventures pre-made for that style of play.
• Chill/Cryptworld/Monster of the Week: A game where you work for an organization that sends you to hunt different monsters each session works very well. My main problem here is that I’m planning to run Masks of Nyarlathotep this year as our main campaign and don’t want to have just horror, horror, horror all year long. Plus, the mixing of campy horror and dark horror might undermine the campaign.
• Paranoia: Good option for this type of play, it is generally focused on short missions for troubleshooters. It’s an excellent option in fact, but I’ve home-brewed my own game system for it and I haven’t quite finished character creation yet (I used pre-gens for my last game). Something to consider though and good reason for finishing character creation rules. In any case, I wouldn’t be able to get this up and running in 30 minutes for the game that night.
• Deadlands Reloaded: I have a ton of old Deadlands material, Pinnacle publishes dozens of One Sheets, short adventures that can be run on the drop of a hat and my players know the Savage Worlds game system well. The setting works well for a group of heroes who travel from town to town helping people against various foes. It’s horror, but Wild West is sufficiently different and pulpy enough to differentiate it. The heavy gun use also makes for a far different feel to the game. I also have a good library of maps, minis and reference material for the Wild West. This will work!

In the 30 minutes that I had, I printed off the adventure and made notes about who the key characters/creatures are (to identify which miniatures I will need) and key locations (to identify what maps I will need).

Then, I printed some character sheets and found a map of a Wild West town to be the main town for the adventure, taking it from my copy of the Deadlands Classic, Boomtowns, as well as previously printed building maps from that book that I had on file.

I then pulled out my Deadlands book, GM’s Screen and Savage Worlds kit (deck of cards, bennies, pencils, dice and markers for wounded/shaken/etc.), packed it, pulled out my Wild West miniatures and a few other miniatures that I could use for the various key players in the adventure.

Finally, I pulled up my pdfs of the main books and cut and pasted stats for the key encounters on to a sheet for quick reference.

And, I was done. Ready for a night of gaming in about 30 minutes.

We started with character creation. If they would be playing these characters for a while, they should be invested in them, so no pre-gens for this purpose. They decided they would be detectives for the railroad (I later picked the Iron Dragon railway since they’re in the North), solving problems for the rail baron and his customers. We had a preacher, a gun slinger and a deserter (from the Union Army).

With their new backgrounds, I decided to start the mission with them called in to see their boss, one of the rail baron’s lieutenants. They named him Mordecai and decreed him to be a real bastard. So, he reamed them out as they arrived late and berated them for all their failings as he gave them their next assignment. One of their customers who ships stuff on the trains had his goods stolen from one of the trains. They need to recover it. This altered the game set-up a little, but worked well to incorporate their posse’s identity and was a simple improvisation.

The posse tracked down the train robbers to an abandoned mine, where they found all the criminals already and torn apart. Not a good scene, but they took down the strange coyote that was in the mine only to find it was filled with stuffing. A scary exploration of the mine ensued (also added on to give them a bit more exploration).

A visit to the taxidermist’s shop turned violent as his creations came to life and began attacking them. They were quickly dispatched and the taxidermist didn’t fare too well either.

Following this, there was a quick encounter where I added a Union Army lieutenant searching for deserters in the town, handing out posters. This tipped the rest of the posse off to their comrade’s secret past, but they decided to protect him and distracted the soldiers.

Unfortunately, in the saloon, where he went to hide out, a couple of the locals drinking noticed he looked like one of the guys in the poster and tried to grab him. He fled out the back and the rest of them barely escaped the town. The Major Hindrance of Enemy was definitely causing him headaches. This was again another improvisation that brought the story out.

Finally, at the “creators” house, they found the rest of his “creations” and almost had a TPK battling them.

It was a great game and didn’t look or feel too different from games that I spend many hours preparing for. It worked and I’m happy with the results.

As for the adventure itself, it worked out perfectly and was easy to adapt to an unknown mix of Deadlands PCs, so I can recommend it highly for a one-shot if you’re looking for something on the fly.

All this isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy pulling a game together on the fly, I have done so many times in the past, but this approach led to a more organized approach that not only dealt with the temporary crisis, but will help me in the future when this inevitably happens again. I hope it helps you too.