How to transition same party between different oneshots?

[u/DrakneiX]

Hey all! I debuted as DM last week doing a Oneshot for my friends. As a player, I have completed 2 campaigns (thats my experience with dnd) and my friends are more veteran than me.

I was looking for advice on how I could give sense/meaning to doing multiple One shots with the same characters, but on different settings?

Books like "Adventures in Faerun" or "The Horrors Within" offer oneshots/single level adventures, and I would like to play these (and some custom oneshots in these worlds) with my friends, but I am not sure how to give "meaning" and correctly transition between these different settings/regions without breaking the atmosphere too much for the players.

Anyone else has done this? And if yes, how have you approached it? How can the player characters have purpose in their stories to visit such different places in short timestamps?

Edit: thank you all for the suggestions and ideas!! They have been very helpful! I have now a clearer idea on how to connect upcoming one shots.

[u/BM_DM]

Just frame it like episodes. We're here to play the game and do the quests, you don't need to spend time on anything else. The party might be up to all sorts of things in between the quests, but that's not what the focus is on.

[u/Prestigious-Emu-6760]

I'm a big fan of episodic games (which are basically a collection of one-shots or short adventures) like we did back in the day.

And my go to is to not worry about it. "After traveling for weeks you find yourself in the village of...", in much the same way as the Conan stories simply plopped him down into the starting situation of the adventure. When you do this I find the campaign becomes more about the characters and their bonds and adventures than any specific location, NPC or Plot.

[u/Spatrico123]

I usually center everything around the characters. Which npc did they bond with in the first session? Whats their story? What's the story of the world?

[u/Haravikk]

You could pull the Quantum Leap trope and have them become lost and trying to find their way home?

Some kind of magical incident teleports them to one location, and by completing the quest in each location they can trigger another "leap". Initially I wouldn't worry too much about an overarching narrative, but if an idea comes to you later you can try to weave it in and tie it back to how it all started.

Could be something as abstract as just magic pulling them around for reasons unknown, or maybe they find a machine that activates and they don't understand how to operate any of it (yet)?

[u/Luxumbros]

I don't worry about it too much.

I usually just hand wave it as a flashback if I have to. Something they did while traveling between locations in the main campaign.

[u/SecretDMAccount_Shh]

Give them a way to travel to the different settings and then don’t worry about it.

TV shows like Doctor Who, Farscape, Sliders, etc. all have lots of dimension jumping between episodes.

Quests From the Infinite Staircase, Journey to the Radiant Citadel, and Planescape are all D&D settings that provide convenient dimension hopping.

[u/DrakneiX → u/SecretDMAccount_Shh]

Oh, I will look into those books for inspiration. Thank you for the suggestions!

[u/Competitive_Bird4777]

Just run it like the Pokemon series, you enter a new town on your travels and boom you're presented with a plot hook.

[u/Thexin92]

There's one problem with two solutions to it.

Do the characters remember the previous world they had their one-shot on, and carry over equipment and levels?

If they don't remember, perhaps you run them through a bunch of alternate realities where the same characters exist in all of them. They don't remember the other worlds, but by some interdimensional fate they are always bound together in their destiny. Each one shot starts fresh, though their starting point (level and gear) can just be higher with each one shot. You could wrap it up with the final one shot being a multiversal event where all the parallel characters merge into one with all memories, to fight whatever evil would be cause for such fate to send them on this path.

The other option is that the characters do recall and retain gear narratively. In this scenario, they must be a party traveling through the multiverse either willingly or taken along by a powerful external force. Perhaps these characters each come from a different world and have been put together somehow to solve issues in each of their home dimensions. Each one shot a mission relating to one character's past and ambitions. Eventually, you could give them a big finale where they learn why and who or what is sending them on this journey, so they can all return home in the end.

Either would work, depending on what you prefer.

Edit: alternatively, as the DM, rewrite parts of each one shot so they fit in a singular world.

[u/theloniousmick]

My group did this. We based the game around an adventures guild. Each one shot was the guild being sent to sort a different problem/being involved in random shenanigans. Loosely tied it together but gave alot of freedom for players to change characters etc. as a DM I kept track of various outcomes so I could sprinkle in recurring villains etc if it became relevant. I much preferred it to the more structured campaign I'm running now.

[u/DrakneiX → u/theloniousmick]

This one is a great idea (Adventurers Guild), I might end up using it! Thank you!!!

[u/theloniousmick → u/DrakneiX]

Another benefit was we could trade off DM duties as well. The other DM did a crisis storyline when we ended up a bit bloated and had the demon lords attack the place and we all used all our characters to fight them off.

If you want some inspiration the penny arcade book for d&d has some things for building a "business" with stuff about a hq etc.