Adventure Hooks

[alcyone]

Was thinking about different ways we do adventure hooks. What else have you got?

1. None. You get the players together and say, "Look, do we have to go through this wearisome charade? You know I have an adventure, it's at this castle. Can you just show up at the front door and give me a break?" Often this works great because no one wanted to hear an insulting "hook" and just want to get started. Besides, it's how we Basic D&D players did everything before we got the Expert Set.

2. Use the published hooks. Most published adventures give a few really lame hooks that won't work with your party anyway. They are usually easy to say "hell no" to. They are usually something about some wealthy guy who gets off on paying people to go to dungeons, or some missing kid or their pet cat, or some bandit who has been raiding someone you never have met or care about. Usually you have to tweak these. Sometimes you will need all of them to get the players enticed and get their reward maximized, and once they learn that trick you are doomed and owned by them.

3. Make up a hook. This is usually a good strategy, at least you know what your players usually are willing to do. This has a good chance of working if you are smarter than a tennis ball and pay attention to your players when they, you know, play.

4. Rumors. These are really silly if you can't get your players to role-play the information gathering at least. It's a good way to get them to spend money and use their bard tricks and whatnot to get at the better rumors. Once they have them, they'll have trouble making an elephant from the parts you gave them, especially if many of them are false. But it works pretty well if you are running something sandboxy. It gets them out of their seat and trying things. If they are the type that needs a yellow brick road to square one of the adventure, though, it's not so great.

5. Tailored rumors, given to each player in private. These are especially nice with a newly rolled party. You tell each player how they got to where they are or base it off their background, come up with your own tie in. Don't tie it all the way, just enough to get them on the right road. Usually you can do this for a whole group, giving each one a seemingly totally separate way of starting off. The beauty of this is you can just drop your group in an inn and hear them TELL EACH OTHER the "hook", often getting parts wrong and coming up with something wacky and sometimes off the mark, but they often do it in character, and sometimes what they come up with is better than what you intended.

6. Bait and switch. Well, yes, that castle the Baron wanted you to clean out, you declined to go there, but this other castle you just passed on the road, that is a TOTALLY DIFFERENT castle. Good side, the baron doesn't have to pay anyone. Bad side, you won't be able to live with yourself, you railroading swine. (It's not really a different castle. You just made all roads lead to Rome.)

7. The Inn. Once you get people in an inn and they are done pickpocketing and ordering ale and stew and trying to pick up dates, they generally know they are there to find an adventure. Sure, it's cheap. Usually works. This is especially useful when the party is missing a member and they need to hire someone; they can tell the group all about it on the way. This is somewhat like "rumors" above, but maybe more NPC driven.

8. The Persistent Sob Story NPC. This pathetic individual will beg, offer money, and generally just pester the players until they do what is asked of them or they kill the NPC. If you make the NPC astonishingly capable under duress, this can be your adventure, as the players try to kill a beggar who is also a 10th level wizard. Without even leaving the alley they started in!

9. The Villain. Ah, memories. When the villain is the one giving the hook, they can be lavish with their promises. They are trying to get the PCs killed anyway, or getting them to kill or steal from someone who is really the good guy, or just pin the blame on someone else. This is particularly effective if they are a Persistent Sob Story NPC of modest and humble appearance, like a good-natured optimistic gnome with a head full of evil.

Sometimes the characters won't take the bait. I at least like to then have some wilderness/road/travel stuff set up with some planned or random encounters and NPCs to talk to, doesn't have to lead to anything but you can store away the interactions and use anything good that comes from them later and at least people can still play something. In a full sandbox players very often won't take the bait, but in that case you are probably prepared for that anyway.

[serleran]

10) You wake up. There are others around you also waking up. You've got a knife... so do they.

11) Your mentor has summoned you. They are dying. They ask that you do the one thing they were not able to complete...

12) It is the end of the world and you must save it.

And so forth.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Get your hands on a copy of Insidiae. Hooks galore.

[Litzen Tallister]

My brother has gotten in the habit when running adventures to, at the end of on adventure, to offer a number of rumors in the region and ask the party which one they explore. I tend to use a funnel system, so if I have spent a bunch of time preparing a dungeon or something similar, there are a number of roads (mostly metaphorical) to choose from that all have a likelihood of arriving at the dungeon. Though sometimes, just allowing for open-ended play and seeing what develops works really well, particularly with C&C being relatively easy to pull material together without a lot of furious note-taking behind the screens.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

My brother has gotten in the habit when running adventures to, at the end of on adventure, to offer a number of rumors in the region and ask the party which one they explore. I tend to use a funnel system, so if I have spent a bunch of time preparing a dungeon or something similar, there are a number of roads (mostly metaphorical) to choose from that all have a likelihood of arriving at the dungeon. Though sometimes, just allowing for open-ended play and seeing what develops works really well, particularly with C&C being relatively easy to pull material together without a lot of furious note-taking behind the screens.

I have no clue if it's still out there, but before I made the jump to C&C, I found a bunch of great PDFs on ENWorld that had that sort of thing. Tavern rumors and the like. Outrageous laws, stuff like that.