101 Adventure Hooks

[atemu1234]

Ok, so I want to start this thread with a simple concept in mind - random adventure hooks that could (someday) be compiled into table format so we can use them as random generators for an adventure.

I'll start with a generic one, so people get the idea

1. A dragon has kidnapped the princess of a neighboring kingdom, and the king is offering a reward for her rescue.

No more than a couple sentences, maybe a paragraph. Nothing too descriptive, just things that can be the baseline for an adventure.

[DrMotives]

- An earthquake lifts an ancient shrine from where it submerged in a lake, attracting scholars eager to identify it, and other unknown things.

- A small village is overrun by militant humanoids (orcs, gnolls, hobgoblins), and refugees ask for help.

- The last ruler of a dynasty has died of natural causes. The liege lord of the PCs city puts a reward on lost genealogical records to support his claim to the throne.

[Dromuthra]

5. Odd lights have been seen in the nearby swamp at night, and the residents of the town are reporting strange nightmares and sightings of shapes in the fog. The mayor/leader of the community has hired the PCs to investigate.

6. A cabal of Liches has carefully manipulated the ruling houses of the nearby countries into civil war to create a mass of dead to form an army.

7. An aspiring archaeologist found a strange centuries-old map that leads to an undiscovered tomb.

8. While burying the dead king in ceremony, the builders unearth a necropolis below the capital city.

9. The only heir of a noble/king is ill and the PCs have been hired to find a cure.

[daremetoidareyo]

10. The mayor is missing! His wife has a bounty out for information. The mayor is actually in the basement of the local whorehouse that has been taken over by shapechanging she-spiders. He is paralyzed and his abdomen is full of their eggs. All of his close business associates don't want to admit to the mayors whoring and thus act really shady.

11. A new spell has become an abyssal favorite: Summon person I. This spell randomly grabs a mortal from the world and puts him into a scary combat encounter in a hellscape before they suddenly and almost invariably die, and then snap back into whatever it was that they were doing before they were summoned. What worse is Summon person II, where 1d3 people are randomly plunked into hell to fight for a minute before dying. This usually wouldn't be a problem...except that these spells are reallly really popular all of a sudden, and all of the people in the spell are sourced from this one particular world. And their mental scars are showing.

[Droopy McCool]

12. You're entire party has been framed for the murder of the country's beloved prince. After escaping with a helpful NPC's assistance, you must find the real murderer while dodging the authorities.

13. A wizard (or the like) has hired you to find some super rare spell components for a new spell he is researching. Once obtained, it turns out this spell causes the recipient to become sick, spewing a black tar like substance. Oh yeah, it's contagious and spreading fast.

McCool

[Barbarian Horde]

14. The macguffin has been stolen! Young adventurers must reclaim it, or the kingdom shall fall into ruin from Mesterio the all powerful.
15. You find yourself in a tavern....... that's on fire. You must find the devious bastard who destroyed the macguffin inn and bring him to justice.

[Dravda]

16. The PCs are having an ordinary day in town when the city is suddenly annihilated by an explosion, killing everyone. They wake up that same day, the only ones who remember the world ending later that evening. Each time they die, they simply reset back to the morning of the apocalypse, with only ten hours to avert it. They must relive the same day, again and again, trying to learn what the calamity is and why they seem doomed to be spared it over and over, with the eventual goal of averting the disaster.

[Vizzerdrix]

The PCs are fishing up some lunch when they reel in a catfish that has a ring and a finger inside its belly. Both look oddly like they came off one of the party members, but noo e is missing a finger.

[SwordChucks]

An evil princess has kidnapped a beautiful dragon and is keeping it at her tower.

[Efrate]

An earthquake has opened up a massive cavern under a very difficult mountain range with but one known and very dangerous pass. PCs are hired to investigate the cavern, map it, and see if it provided another way through/under the mountain. The neighboring kingdom is doing the same, and its a race to see who can reconnoiter it first, set up tariff waypoints, and scout an optimal route. Of course, whatever lives there is now also free to get out and cause mischief.

[Duke of Urrel]

20 (?). Choose any two different plot hooks, A and B. Mislead your players into believing that they are going to have an adventure that follows the pattern of A, but then let them discover, bit by bit, that it actually follows the pattern of B.

[enderlord99]

Long ago, when he was just a prince, King Blaque (of the Gold dynasty, whose surname matches their breed) surprised the world when he married a commoner: Mari, who was a copper dragon and the daughter of the hemp farmers Mr. and Mrs. Juana. The Queen happens to obsess a quite bit over certain types of sunflower, and the king is quite intrigued by news of a strange, viscous liquid that has been found in a nearby desert; neither of these facts, however, are particularly important. What is important is that now, King Blaque Gold and Queen Mari Gold have a daughter named Rose, who turned down several offers to be a supermodel (being a princess, she attracts an annoying number of paparazzi as is; she wouldn't want to make it worse!) and also seems to, for unknown reasons, have turned to the worship of Tiamat.

The PCs are Clerics of Bahamut. They must save the beautiful, fire-breathing dragon/princess (Rose Gold, who is part gold and part copper) from herself.

[Dravda]

20 (?). Choose any two different plot hooks, A and B. Mislead your players into believing that they are going to have an adventure that follows the pattern of A, but then let them discover, bit by bit, that it actually follows the pattern of B.

I like this. I actually once structured an entire campaign around a similar concept, with the PC (it was a solo campaign) being fed a fairly standard fantasy intro. There was an evil empire, they were toppled in a civil war and an uneasy peace has come across the land as the evil empire threatens to return...

By this point, the PC is fairly confident (from a metagame and storytelling standpoint) that she's going to spend the game fighting the scions of the evil empire returned. Pretty standard storyline. Imagine her surprise when, while investigating rumors into her own past, she discovers that she IS the last remaining descendant of the evil empire. Her duty isn't to vanquish the old world order, but to reforge it. What she'll do with it when she has it, now, that's the real question.

[Bakkan]

The young king's brother has been killed, and the heirless king is likely next. With various nobles and officers likely to claim the throne once the nefarious deed is done, and the murderer of the king's brother still unknown, the only people the king can trust to investigate are the PCs, who arrived just this morning, after the killing.

Having escaped from a band of slavers, the PCs find themselves in a city in the middle of a blazing desert. Water is expensive and rationed, food is hardly more abundant, and the PCs have only the rags on their backs. No time for heroics; survival is the first priority.

The PCs are hired as couriers to a nearby primitive village of orcs, ostensibly to establish trade relations. The letter they deliver is trapped, and the leader of the orc tribe is killed in the explosion. The PCs have now been framed for murder, and the conspiracy must go a long way up.

[Vizzerdrix]

Oh no! Someone stole the cookies from the cookie jar! Who could it be?!


Well the players better find out because local rumor has it that a Dalmosh cult has set up shop in the city and the kings cookies are more than valuable enough for the summoning ritual. They have only a few days to figure it out or the city wil be devoured.

[redzimmer]

27. The ghost of a slain bronze dragon beseeches you to find the brigands who slew her and stole her eggs.
Each of the dragonslayers took a portion of her horde and now are powerful persons of influence (money can't buy happiness, but it buys a better class of misery), each with a captured bronze wyrmling.