Back to the Couture¶
"I find myself... incommensurably obliged."
A time-heist one-shot about sacred objects, disproportionate responses, and the small regrets we'd undo if we could.
Keywords: Character-driven, low-stakes premise, high-stakes emotions, heist, time travel, comedy, bottle episode
The Setup¶
The party has befriended a weathered career grifter—someone who taught them (or one of them) the practical curriculum of the crooked life: lockpicks, cold reading, sleeping rough, and slipping away unseen. He's transactional but reliable, operating by "honor among thieves" rules he's never once romanticized. He wears an ostentatiously fine (and large) hat he's transparently proud of. He peppers his speech with elaborate vocabulary he may or may not be using ironically anymore.
Then, one day, he finds the party, and he is a changed man. Grim, intense, bloodthirsty, speaking in clipped sentences. The flowery language replaced with the winds of winter. They notice his hat is missing.
Slowly they realize this man is fully prepared to kill over a hat. Not because he's snapped, but because the hat was the one thing. The one line. And someone crossed it.
Anyone in the party who's known real poverty would likely understand immediately. When you've got nothing, you pick one thing and hold it sacred. The rest of the party might laugh, or try to talk him down, suggest he just buy a new hat. Someone has to decide whether to translate for them or let them fumble through it.
The objective is simple: Find the people who stole the hat.
The complication: The thieves were actually a guild of Fire Elementals on sightseeing through the Material Plane, disguised with strong Illusion spells. As the party approaches, one of them laughs: "This ugly thing?" and incinerates the hat in front of their eyes. Like a child popping a balloon.
Two Paths Forward¶
The Sane Option: The Replica¶
Track down whoever made the original, source the materials, commission something identical. This is the reasonable path—investigation, craftsmanship, perhaps a small fetch quest for rare components (who the hell decided to put an actual Griffin feather in this haberdashery of a hat?).
But the grifter will know. He'll wear it, he'll thank them, and he'll know it's not the same hat. Objectively speaking, the new one is better, but the spell is broken. The transaction will be complete and things will be... fine.
This path works if your table prefers grounded problem-solving. It's still satisfying—there's detective work, maybe some confrontation with the fire elementals, and a bittersweet ending where everyone pretends the replacement is enough.
The Correct Option: The Time Heist¶
Steal a super-experimental one-use-only time-travelling scroll. Go back, save the hat, save the timeline.
This is insane and therefore the correct choice.
The scroll should be stolen from someone who will absolutely come looking for it later—a solitary archmage, a BBEG from a previous campaign, a powerful entity the party has unfinished business with, or their local rival who they always mess with. The party burns a cosmic favor to save a hat. They travel back exactly one week, to the day before the hat was stolen, and must extract the hat, of course without disrupting the timeline or running into their past selves (otherwise immense psychic damage).
The Regret Mechanic¶
Here's where the one-shot becomes something more.
If you want to build toward this adventure in advance, seed "small regrets" into that special day they traveled back to. Nothing campaign-altering—just the kind of thing that nags at you:
- A harsh word to an ally they wish they could take back
- A deal they made that felt wrong the moment they shook hands
- Information they didn't share in time
- A stranger they didn't help when they could have
- A moment of cowardice they've been replaying in their head
The time heist gives them the chance to go back and fix these things. But the scroll imposes constraints—they only have until sundown (or whatever limit suits your table). They cannot fix everything. So they have to triage their regrets in real time, negotiating which personal cringe is worth spending their dwindling hours on.
The drama (and comedy) writes itself: the party splits up trying to accomplish different micro-corrections while also protecting the hat from a bunch of disguised fire elemental tourists. Someone inevitably makes things worse. Someone fixes their small regret but causes a new problem for someone else. Someone realizes they can't actually change the thing they wanted to change because their past self needs to experience it, and it's actually fine.
The hat is the mission objective, but the hat is also the excuse, the thing that lets them admit to each other: "Actually, there's something else I'd want to undo while we're here..."
The Resolution¶
They return the original hat. The grifter puts it on. He doesn't ask how. He doesn't want to know. He just nods, says something like "I find myself... incommensurably obliged," and the mask is back on. But it's real this time.
Running This Adventure¶
Best used: After your party has been together long enough to have accumulated small interpersonal friction and minor regrets. This works as a breather between heavy story arcs, or as a character-focused session when you need a break from the main plot.
Tone: Comedy on the surface, genuine emotion underneath. Think Groundhog Day meets a caper film. The absurdity of the premise makes the real character moments feel somehow more real.
The grifter NPC: Adapt to your campaign. He works best if the party already knows and likes him—someone who's helped them before, who operates by his own code, who they've seen be competent and sardonic. If you're using the Alveta "Velvet" character from this bundle, Alphonse Collier fills this role naturally.
Time travel rules: Keep them simple. One-way trip back, fixed return point, no meeting your past selves (or immediate paradox/ejection from the timeline). The constraint creates the tension; don't let the mechanics become the focus.
The fire elementals: They're not supposed to be villains you actually fight, just obnoxious tourists who genuinely don't understand why anyone would care about such an ugly hat. The one who burned it was simply being a dismissive asshole, not out to pick an actual fight. Don't let the party kill them without consequences; they're just idiots on vacation.