Suggest a quest hook!

[TDK]

Recommend a DnD quest line, encounter, quest hook, etc. Ranging from a little silly to quite serious, to give everyone ideas.

It can be as simple as "The quest for the erotic pangolin!" or a complete campaign idea.

[Amake]

Erotic quests could be fun. Imagine if in the average quest hub tavern walks a fine-looking specimen of woman that turns the place into a dating sim. Without too many hints, one member of the party must announce "I'd hit that so hard whoever pulled me out would be crowned king of the land!". Then she, or more likely he, must succeed in doing so. Then comes the real challenge as the rest of the party must find a way to wedge the weld-on wench away. And then they become kings and queens of the universe.

[EVILNess]

(This quest works best if the PCs are new to an area and don't really know a whole lot about the residents of a town.)

One I did was have the players spot a Beholder in a town heading down an alley, the beholder looked "worried" and looked like it was searching for something. Make them roll a faux spot check if you want them to really notice it, and credit it to whoever has the highest spot skill in your group to make them feel good.

If they are bloodthirsty and quick to fight types and attack it they get a good rousing engagement. A challenging battle with a powerful foe, who drops no loot.

If they follow the Beholder to see why it is in town they can eventually corner it and find out that it is actually a "good" Beholder and he was searching for "INSERT MACGUFFIN HERE" and he noticed the PCs following him. He decided to stand his ground and make his case. After the introductions are done have the Beholder offer to hire the to find his missing MacGuffin.

For example, my Beholder was a fairly famous local Wizard who was fairly liked. I had him looking all over town for his missing adopted daughter. After a little poking around they found she was kidnapped by a splinter sect from the thieves guild for ransom to fund a coup on the current head of the Thieves guild. They saved the girl and made two powerful allies. The who had access to many powerful spells and items and was a good source of local information tied to the arcane, and the Thieves Guildmaster, who had access to well stocked fences and more subtle information sources.

It's a good solid adventure with good solid rewards, and what's great about it you can spice it up and make it a personal thing for your campaign.

For example, you can make the beholder be a liar, and he actually kidnapped the girl to sacrifice her to some dark god. By adding this one thing you can basically extend the adventure to encompass saving the little girl again and maybe even turn the beholder into a recurring villain instead of a friendly NPC. Maybe the Thieves Guild splinter faction was trying to save the little girl, and the Guildmaster was in on it and spread false information to discredit the kidnappers and get them killed by NPCs to rid the world of would be rivals.

Another good twist is that if they kill the beholder and he is a prominent member of the town is that would make them fugitives. They could be arrested for murder and tried and sent to prison, forcing them to escape or die. They could have bounties that follow them wherever they go making for many interesting encounters down the road with people seeking profit from their heads. This plot thread becomes doubly interesting if you have a paladin in the party, and could be a great way to teach PCs to look before they leap if that is an issue with your group.

I like modular stories like this since you can basically fit them in anyway you want. You just have to have a bit of imagination to change the little girl kidnapped by thieves to magical necklace stolen by evil cultists.

[Specterbane]

My best friend DMs an adventure group I used to be in and did a few adventures for. The two adventures I ran were a Ship graveyard full of lizard people and a haunted house with an encounter made entirely out of traps in a locked hall way. But I took a break for a while and he and I still talk shop about what to do. I usually tell him fun things from anime's or things, and he'll find great ways to use them. Here's a few of them that have gone well.

The party is currently in a town that's under an enchantment by the big bad of the whole campaign. Now the party has entered in and is trying to figure out what's going on, but the plan is that soon they will have to face an actual moral choice as they're assaulted by the innocent townspeople who are under the control of the enchantment and protecting a captain of the big bad. The idea is that while mowing down the townspeople take almost no effort, the characters are still going to be going about whole-sale slaughter on the town if they do. So he's looking to force the party to make a moral decision about their characters. He got the idea when I told him about the end of the Slayer's anime.

The other fun idea we talked about was to have the party infiltrate a large tower that's set to be constantly rotating in sections and have no entrance at ground level. The idea is to make the party scale the tower and enter it from the top. We talked about maybe having them fight some gargoyle type enemies on the way up and at the top before having to find a way to sneak around in the tower and manipulate the rotation to find secret rooms and what not. I think it'd be a lot of fun personally

[Kim]

Curse them with something that if they don't find a cure within a week, or some other such amount of time, they'll die. Gives a sense of urgency to the quest.

[Saz]

Random time travel/teleportation to random times and places in recent history of the world the players is in. Only the party experiences this, and obviously needs to stop that shit.

I'd recommend setting some ground rules on how time travel works in the game universe.

And probaly go see a shrink after each session.

[Arhra]

With a game I ran, I decided on a plot shotgun technique. There was a tiny village with a nasty series of little problems, some of which tied up into a scheme by the bad guys. I fired them all off at the players and saw what stuck.

Everything from 'wolves are eating my sheep!' (some lycanthropy was involved), to a pair of invisible imps running around stealing stuff, spoiling milk and otherwise being jackasses. And a kid is trying to hatch a weird egg he found in secret.

The real trick was this place was acting as the players' base of operations, and I had a rough idea of the time line of how events would go without intervention.

Wish I'd gotten a chance to run it for longer. It's a nice way to flesh out a village.

Oh, I also did "the vizier bribed the dragon to kidnap the princess to make his pet bunch of adventurers look good" once.

Since we had a rogue, fighter, cleric, wizard setup, I made this other party a bard, barbarian, druid and sorcerer.

Also they were a band. They had groupies!

The players twigged to them being their natural rivals very quickly.

So yeah, you can get a lot of mileage out of combining stock plots, and players loooove rivals.

[EVILNess]

With a game I ran, I decided on a plot shotgun technique. There was a tiny village with a nasty series of little problems, some of which tied up into a scheme by the bad guys. I fired them all off at the players and saw what stuck.

:cool:
With a game I ran, I decided on a plot shotgun technique.

:ohdear:
...plot shotgun technique.

:eek:
...plot shotgun...

:aaa:

For some reason that made my day. I pictured a shotgun that you threaten the players with when they don't do what you have planned for them and mess up all the hard work you put into a plot-line.

[tacticslion]

Some of my plots have included:

Lady Fire Dove is not aloud to read this. kthanxbai
Having the players wake up with: no (hazy) memory, no voice (and illiterate), and no history (literally: a warforged who wasn't activated before they woke up) all waking up at the same time finding themselves surrounded by slaughter of people in strange costumes and strange places. The one without a voice or literacy knows what happened, but obviously can't communicate it. The one without any history literally had no soul/mind/senses during the events, and the one without a memory didn't know what had happened. Together the three of them were forced to struggle and wade through a series of plots and intrigues dealing with the dead people for the first four levels or so, until they finally found a) the discarded information core from the warforged, b) the way to restore the mute's voice and learn her language (which was different from the local language), or c) confront the baddies and learn directly (actually the hardest part). This game is, in fact, awesome, although the PCs occasionally so differ on what to do the game goes no where. If you have more PCs, simply tie them in via other means. One guy could be cursed to speak of it and/or is unable to act of his own volition via some super-spell-like effect or psionic tampering - he might even be an unwitting puppet of the enemy. Another could be one of the original city watch officers who arrested the PCs, but comes to believe in their innocence (and could act as their "parole" officer). A third could even be the person who 'found' the site and alerted the city watch to it. You can even combine some of these, and make fantastic story quests and elements. For example, the PC who lost her memory is actually an (a psionic race from Eberron, who were bred to be possessed by psionic outsiders - this isn't eberron, but the idea holds) and doesn't know it - she is periodically 'suppressed' and goes and does terrible things, but is then released none the wiser. The mute girl in our party is a shifter 'savage' bard (can't read/write, loses 'civilized' aspects for 'barbaric' aspects) who was a slave imported from another location, and was a preistess-in-training for her tribe (of shifters) [that's what 'savage' bards are in her culture - priestesses]. She's sung the sacred songs her whole life, and used 'dream catchers' (minor magical wards) against the 'dream spirits' (the creatures who possess Inspired and others) and has always thought of the hosts (and all with psionic powers) as utterly corrupted and evil, but the PCs are the only ones who treat her like a person - the entire rest of the city is highly racist and treats her like a slave (in fact she has papers indicating that she's the property of the PC who lost her memories, just so she can go about without being harrassed). Now, she's mute, and one of her major quests is to recover her voice to 'heal' her unknowingly 'diseased' friend. She actually just recovered her voice recently, through psionics, and has been teaching her friends her language, while making an effort to learn theirs, and is having a hard time knowing what to say or not about her friend who she watched slaugher tons of evil mages before collapseing unconscious underground. Anyway, it's powerful and interesting pathos, and makes for great RPing. Requires starting at low levels, however, otherwise you can bypass all those obstacles instantly.

One idea, if you have a long campaign, that will have known, limited-duration enforced 'breaks' due to player schedule conflicts, is have a central campaign interspersed with the past lives of a player character (or four) who has re-incarnated through multiple lives, playing out a different role each time, until (s)he reaches the 'main' campaign story arc which ties those together. The above story is actually an example of that. A sample is the one without a memory was, many years ago, a righteous paladin, turned into a vampire-blackguard, but forced to save the world from an undead plague... lest she be destroyed herself. She was decieved by an epic lich who wanted to save the world, and she was killed, but under an epic spell to 'cleanse' her enough to eventually be reborn once the 'taint' was gone, so she could recieve her true (non-undead) reward. Later she reincarnates as a desert elf, runs into that same lich (who kind of killed the world by saving it), and voluntarily re-helped the lich restore the world to life. The lich granted her effective infinate reincarnation (as the spell). Years (and several lives) later, this was hacked by a hag covey to get her immortality. She survived, killed much of the covey and completed the 'save the world' quest from her vampire days by plugging a hole that would eventually destroy the world with herself. Instead of destroying her spirit, however, it shunted her spirit to an alien world (the world of the current campaign) where it was reincarnated one last time in order to fight the undead-causing disaster that nearly turned her original entire world undead before was going to strike again - thus the campaign now. Each PC gets a story like that they can play (effectively: "here's your PC, let's go on a mini-adventure") during the enforced 'break' from the other players schedules. The main problem is that your schedule has to be loose enough for that, and you need PCs that absolutely eat up immersive story telling (fortunately mine do).

I got other stuff I'll post later (Tuesday maybe?), but it's late and I'mma go to bed to get to church tommorrow, then out of town.

[stefan]

the entire party has been polymorphed into bears.

they must find a way to return to normal, when they are in the middle of a large city without the vocal chords or dexterity to communicate their situation, or the ability to use their spells or equipment.

a possible plot hook with the sapient animal underground and their king, a rat lich, as they strike deals with them in return for finding out how to get their old bodies back.

[TDK]

the entire party has been polymorphed into bears.

they must find a way to return to normal, when they are in the middle of a large city without the vocal chords or dexterity to communicate their situation, or the ability to use their spells or equipment.

a possible plot hook with the sapient animal underground and their king, a rat lich, as they strike deals with them in return for finding out how to get their old bodies back.

<3 <3 <3

[Arhra]

the entire party has been polymorphed into bears.
That is glorious.