Category: Adventure Hooks

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

D&D: The Final Frontier

It’s unusual for a D&D campaign to take place in on location. Most adventures involve extensive travel and exploration. The heroes go out, adventure, kills some monsters, find some treasure, and then return home to spend their hard earned cash and brag about their accomplishments. As the PCs get more powerful they will usually venture farther out and fight tougher monsters, but inevitably they return home.

In most established campaign setting there are very few areas of the world map that are considered to be untamed or unexplored. The likelihood of the PCs finding someplace that is truly the frontier of society is extremely rare in most campaigns. By the time the heroes started their adventuring career everything had already been discovered. Sure some civilizations might have fallen and their runes are now a place of great mystery, but the idea of going someplace and finding something truly new (at least to the PCs in your campaign) is pretty much revolutionary. And you know what, that really sucks for the players. After all, trailblazing the wild frontier is a thrilling adventure in itself and can add considerable depth to any campaign.

This kind of adventure has nothing but potential. Think about it, in a campaign setting where vast expanses of the world are completely unknown the PCs will face danger and adventure with every single step they take. Getting there will be half the fun for the first time in a very long time. Random encounters will become the norm since they really have no clue what the standards are in a wild and untamed land.

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Adventure Hooks Eberron

Secrets of Eberron Revealed (Part 14)

In this instalment of our ongoing Eberron series we reveal the secrets of the Magebred army that threatens Khorvaire from just within the Mournland, and we meet a Warforged Sentinel Marshal who knows secrets about House Cannith that they will kill to keep secret.

Today Dungeon’s Master welcomes guest poster Alton (a.k.a. Marc Talbot) author of the gaming blog 20ft Radius. Alton shares our passion for D&D as well as the Eberron setting. When he proposed writing an instalment of “The Secrets of Eberron Revealed” we were happy to let him make his contribution to this ongoing look at our favourite campaign setting. If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to visit 20ft Radius and check out more or Alton’s work. – Ameron

Click on the Eberron tab above the Dungeon’s Master banner to find the previous installments in this ongoing series as well as many other great Eberron articles and resources.

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Adventure Hooks Humour

Adventure Hooks Inspired by The Simpsons (Part 1)

As a DM I’m always on the lookout for ideas that I can throw into my campaign. It doesn’t matter how seemingly irrelevant the source may be, once I put my gaming mind to work I can often come up with an idea for an encounter or an adventure in just about any source of popular media be it a movie, novel, video game, comic book or television show. The key is to imagine how the situation could be adapted to suit your needs. You’re not often going to find a situation or idea that’s perfectly suited for D&D when you experience it (sorry, the real world just isn’t a fantasy role-playing game) so you need to be creative.

To demonstrate the abundance of ideas in the most obvious places I focused my attention on The Simpsons. I think it’s safe to say that most gamers are fans of the show and that almost every scene and snippet of dialogue from the first few seasons is emblazoned in the minds of gamers in the 35-45 demographic. Yet even with a table of gamers who all possess near perfect recall of the earliest episodes of The Simpsons, you can still base an adventure or encounter around some of the best episodes and the players are unlikely to recognize that it was inspired by The Simpsons. To prove it, here are five examples.

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Adventure Hooks

8 Adventure Hooks: The Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

Sometimes the easiest way for the DM to get the PCs to bite on an adventure hook is to just have them be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Events unfold whether the PCs choose to get involved or not, but simply being there puts them in the heart of the situation. Through their own actions (or inactions) they become part of the encounter. Clever PCs may decide that getting involved isn’t their problem, but experience teaches most players that if they don’t step in early, things can quickly get out of hand.

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Adventure Hooks Player Resources

Switched at Birth – An Origin Story

A good background should help define who the character is, especially early in the adventurer when he’s relatively inexperienced. Your PC’s backgrounds should do more than just provide him with skill bonus or a free minor power. I encourage players to be creative when coming up with a back-story. I’ve learned that the more detailed their origin story, the more I can use those details to help shape the game to come.

Although I derive inspiration for my campaigns and my characters from a variety of sources, I seem to get the most ideas from reading comic books. As a huge comic-book nerd with a massive collection (5,000+ issues and growing) I have no shortage of source material. What I do find surprising is how I can reread an old favourite and have it inspire me in a way it’s never done before. And that’s exactly what happened this weekend.

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Adventure Hooks

Adventure Hooks – Moral Choices

Adventure hooks are indented as a way to get the PCs into the action quickly. Dangle something interesting in front of them and hope that they take the bait. It might be a greed trap where you offer them a pretty bauble or magical item, or it might be an interaction with a strange or unusual character. In most cases the adventure hook is simple and straight forward (which is not to say boring).

However, in some cases the adventure hook can be more than just a simple way to get the PCs interested in the next leg of the adventure. Every once in a while adventure hooks should be a little bit more complicated than the usual fare. DMs should provide the PCs with a dilemma in which they have to make a choice. Although there isn’t a clear-cut right or wrong answer, either outcome will have serious consequences.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

10 Adventure Hooks Found in the Library

If your character is only good at killing monsters you likely dread when the adventure leads the PCs to a library so they can perform research. That’s something best left for the smart PCs. After all, what can you possibly contribute to this situation except mayhem and grief? A creative DM can find plenty of ways to get the whole party excited the next time they find themselves dealing with books instead of monsters, and today we’ve got 10 adventure hooks to make the job even easier.

I’m actually surprised how often my own adventuring party has found themselves wading through books looking for some lost kernel of wisdom. Many DMs prefer to rely on an interesting social interaction with a wise sage or local expect to convey the information the PCs need, but leaving the heroes alone with a whole lot of books can be more fun than you might think.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

Time Travel in D&D

If you’re looking for a way to pump some new life into a long-running or stagnant campaign why not make a radical change like thrusting the PCs into the past. I can already hear some of you scoffing at the idea, but in a world with magic is time travel really that unlikely?

Players get bored when they’re not challenged. Sure you can throw more powerful monsters at them but even that gets repetitive. What I’ve found is that anything that takes them out of their comfort zone is good for the game. Players don’t realize how much the success of their characters relies on the familiar. High level PCs usually have a reputation and their deeds are well-known by the community. Taking all of that away from them can have a greater effect that you might think.

Although I’ve played multiple characters in multiple campaigns over the years every camping took place in more or less the same time period. In established worlds like Forgotten Realms or Eberron, keeping the action in line with cannon allowed us to interact with well-known NPCs and work elements from new releases into our games. Even though I played in numerous campaigns set in the Realms during my high school years they all happened simultaneously.

Now fast forward your campaign setting 50 years. Assuming there wasn’t a cataclysmic disaster (like the Spell Plague) and things progressed without any significant interference, what changes do you think happened to the world and the people in it during that time. Just think of how much things have change in the last 50 years in real life and imagine the kinds of change that will come in the next 50.

So in a world with magic what do you think their future will look like? How technologically or magically advanced to you think your campaign world will become in the next 50 years? A more important question is how much has your campaign world advanced over the last 50 years? While contemplating that brain teaser think about how your PCs would react if they found themselves thrust back into that time.

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Adventure Hooks DM Resources

8 Adventure Hooks for Campaigns on the High Seas

Adventures that take place on the high seas (or at least on a ship) and feature pirates seem to be very popular these days. When we posted the preview of Lair Assault: Talon of Umberlee last week it generated a lot of excitement – in large part because of its pirate theme. There’s just something about an adventure that takes place on a pirate ship that appeals to so many D&D players. I know that when I first saw the Pirates of the Caribbean movies I immediately started thinking about how to shift my existing D&D camping onto the high seas. The question was how to make that transition?

If you find yourself in a similar situation and you’re looking for a way to get your heroes involved in an adventure at sea than we’ve got just what you need. Below are 8 adventure hooks for campaigns on the high seas. These adventure hooks are easy to work into any game whether you’re already immersed in a campaign on the high seas or you’re looking for a jumping off point. Use them as presented or tweak them as necessary to better suit your needs.

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Adventure Hook: The Magical Bazaar

I’ve always found the idea of purchasing magical items boring. As a player I’d rather my character risk life and limb to battle monsters and delve into dangerous catacombs in hope of finding a special magical item. However, the reality is that I usually only find one or maybe two items this way. In order to fill out the rest of my PC’s inventory I usually end up purchasing the majority of his gear. This is the way D&D works.

As PCs advance and level up they’re eventually going to accumulate vast wealth. It’s an unavoidable reality. With this abundance of gold pieces comes the inevitable request to purchase magical items. PCs many not be able to purchase magic items in the middle of a dungeon crawl, but as soon as they hit a larger metropolis there’s few excuses for why they can’t convert their hard gotten gains into something more functional and portable.

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