What do you do when only two people show up for game night? A lot of DMs will cancel, but this is the wrong thing to do. People planned their evening expecting to do something fun, and they went home disappointed. Too much disappointment, and they'll stop coming.
My solution, which has been quite effective, is to run a "Monster of the Week" game. It's pretty simple...if I've got 2 players, I pull a CR-appropriate monster out of the book, come up with a hook, and send them off to fight it. Generally speaking, if you've got 2 players, a monster whose CR is about 2 less than their level should be okay.
A good Monster of the Week adventure should go like this:
1. Learn there is a problem. (Something is killing the villagers' sheep.)
2. Discover the true nature of the problem. (There's an owlbear that's moved into a nearby cave.)
3. Develop a plan. (Use a sheep as bait, rogue throws a net down from the tree.)
4. Take care of the monster (kill or drive off).
5. Get reward.
Don't run it as a railroad. Maybe in tracking the owlbear, somebody fails a Survival check, so they end up getting lost in the forest and waylaid by goblins. Maybe they find the owlbear too fast, so in the owlbear cave, you stash a corpse with a map to a small, zombie-infested ruin deeper in the forest.
The key to the loot is it needs to be disproportionately large. Reward players who have the commitment to play even when they don't have a full Fighter/Cleric/Roge/Wizard group. Not only does this make people want to come back, it makes the players who skipped out feel like they're missing out.
Don't worry about not having a full adventure worked out right away. You'll figure out the details as you go...and you may want to remind your players that you're making it up tonight, not running from your prepared notes or module!
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