One of my original 90s gaming group graciously hosted a get together for that old table over a weekend and one of the things we did was a round-robin D&D mini-campaign.
The concept for all of this was caravan guards taking a wagon from one point to another. It proved pretty robust as a vehicle for random encounters - we had something we were supposed to be looking after. There were NPCs when we needed them for rescues. They did not interfere when we did not need them because they were just wagon drivers. It gave a rationale for why the scenery was changing and how come we were dealing with completely different things from one encounter to the next. It was a nice model for getting straight to the gaming with minimum preamble.
On Fast Party Coherency
The characters we cooked up in a hurry ended up gelling really, really well conceptually. There was an orc monk who was basically a WWE wrestler. I was an orc fighter, dump stat intelligence, just like hit things with my sword. We had a Goliath archer who was effectively the brains of the outfit, to his chagrin and horror, and a halfling sorcerer who was a very kinetic, act-on-sight fellow. For him the plan is do the next step and then see where we are and then do the next thing after that and see where we are, repeat until problem solved or enemy defeated. As a group, they meshed together ridiculously well. Group cohesion was almost instant because everyone was team "scream and charge" - even the halfling (especially the halfling). It worked unexpectedly well.
For short haul campaigns or con games, I think the phrase that sometimes kicked around is "drive it like you stole it" and this was a good example of that. For short haul stuff just stick in someone who is going to burn the candle at both ends and the middle for the duration of this game and then if they survive, bonus, if they do not they have entirely served their purpose.
The Encounters
The set of four encounters started with the first 5e that one of my pals had ever run (typically a WHFRP GM of late). He blended Tuckers Kobolds with a splash from MCDM's Flee Mortals. Very amusingly there was a setup bit where the kobolds were supposed to threaten us as we entered their territory which was supposed to be five minutes of dialogue that turned into a two-hour tower raid because we guessed they had some kind of signal flags on the roof. We attempted to get the drop on them and there was a whole bunch of gaming completely unanticipated and ahead of the actual planned encounter.
The intended encounter was a pop-in pop-out ambush in eight foot Pampas grass where velociraptor riding kobold lancers came at us out of the grass and then we lost sight of them again. There was also Kobold Trapsman from Flee Mortals - together they gave us a fairly serious run for our money. Very good value concept and time-wise - we got something like six hours gaming out of what was supposed to be a one or two hour thing.
The second encounter was a mystery where we found someone beat up on the road, then came to a cottage where it looked like grandma had been attacked by someone - allegedly a hunter. We found a bunch of grisly remains, the worlds most confusing murder scene. We followed tracks into the forest and came upon grandma, in very bad shape - when then turned into a werebear and pummelled us. Turned out that all the confusing remnants were reverted dead lycanthrope bits and the werebear had been assaulted in their home by werewolves. We did not figure this out until the werebear had roundly kicked our butts for a bit before we finally KO them and were able to get the story from them afterwards. Collectively, our PCs were thick as mince, the wrong team for any kind of investigations but that did not stop it being fun.
The next encounter was an ambush in a trapped canyon with an ogre mage and harpies. Our wagons were levitated, everything was topsy turvy and the harpies were literally in their airy element. We had a lot of trouble trying to get footing to fight properly and intercept harpies as they snatched away wagoneers and generally fend off the tootling ogre mage who was causing all this chaos. We lost two wagons, three wagoneers and most of our cargo in that first ambush so we resolved to track them down to their lair. There we had part two, a raid on the camp of the harpies and rescue of our fellows. This time we had tactical initiative and could make use of terrain and surprise on our side - things like cutting tent ropes, setting things on fire and generally steamrolling the foe in a satisfyingly vengeful way.
I ran the closeout which was recycled from a hex from Hexcrawl25 which was bog mummies and crawling claws where the bog mummy flings his hands at you and then closes. I used a peat mummy which just had a slightly different variation of Mummy Rot and difficult terrain (the bog) around the wagons. The minor threat of the crawling claws were great because they distracted and also served to put flanking on PCs for the Bog Mummies to then hit like trucks.
The caravan set up worked really well for just a knock-about game which was just a string of unconnected encounters. It was a good little lesson for why caravan guarding campaigns are great because you can just nail in absolutely anything and there you go, a campaign. It also worked pretty well for the roster switching as we rotated GMs because we can say whoever was not there at the moment was scouting, foraging, down with food poisoning or whatever and it is still perfectly reasonable they turn back up for the next encounter.
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