#64 : Salvage Rights | A 5e One-Shot Adventure for Small Groups | Ghost-Ship Horror for 2-3 Players, Game Master Ready

Ready to run tonight: a haunted shipwreck, a rival crew racing you for the prize, and a treasure no one was ever meant to claim.

A ghost ship that vanished three hundred years ago has washed onto an uncharted reef, and you have until dark to strip it before a rival salvage crew beats you to it. But the wreck is bigger inside than its hull could ever allow. Its drowned crew still walk the decks. And the gold in the hold is guarded by something that used to be the captain, and is now far worse.

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Salvage Rights is a complete, zero-prep one-shot for fifth edition. Everything you need to run a full session is right here: open the book, read the boxed text, and play. No homework, no scattered notes, no scrambling at the table. Just a tense, atmospheric descent through five impossible decks into a wreck that does not want to let anyone leave.

The deeper your players go, the stranger it gets. Corridors stretch too long. The water rises when no one is looking. And somewhere below, a rival crew is already aboard, fighting for their lives. What your players decide to do about them, help them, race them, or turn on them, changes who stands beside you in the final fight, and how dangerous that fight becomes.

What's Inside:

• A complete four-act adventure, roughly 76 pages, fully written and ready to run
• 5 atmospheric battle maps of the wreck, explored deck by deck
• 10 ready-to-use stat blocks, from drowned scavengers to the boss and its horrifying second phase
• Four pre-generated level 3 characters so players can jump straight in
• A branching rival-crew encounter that reshapes the climax
• A rollable salvage loot table, multiple story hooks, and scaling notes for 2, 3, or 4 players
• Original black-and-white interior artwork throughout, in a classic hand-inked etching style

The Essentials:

• System: 5e-compatible (fifth edition)
• Players: 2 to 3 (scales to 4)
• Level: 2 to 3
• Runtime: 2 to 3 hours, a single session
• Prep required: none, fully plug-and-play into any campaign and any coastline

Perfect For:

• Busy Game Masters who want a quality session without the prep grind
• Small groups and two-player tables that rarely find content built for their size
• A spooky one-night detour, a convention slot, or a between-campaign palate cleanser
• Anyone who loves drowned sailors, cursed gold, and a boss fight with a genuinely nasty surprise

Whether your party is a pair of seasoned wreckers or a trio of curious adventurers, Salvage Rights drops cleanly into your world. Hand out the characters, set the scene, and let the reef do the rest.

Built to Run Smoothly:

Every act delivers a meaningful choice and a fight, so the session never stalls and never drags. Boxed read-aloud text means you are never improvising the wrongness of the ship on the spot. Skill checks shape how hard each encounter lands rather than gatekeeping the story, so a thin roll never derails the night. And the whole adventure is balanced from the ground up for the smallest tables, where a single bad turn can end a party, with capture-not-kill safeguards and clear scaling so no one goes home early.

The tide is going out. The rival crew has a head start. And the captain has been waiting three hundred years for someone to open that box. Set sail tonight.