D&D: Five Easy Adventure Hooks That Just Need Fleshing Out
Sometimes all an adventure needs is a hook – the barest seed of a plot – and then your own creativity takes over. Try one of these.
Building your own adventure is a time-honored tradition for anyone who takes up the screen of a Dungeon Master in D&D. It might seem daunting at first, but sometimes, all you really need is a good hook or a seed to get the juices flowing. Everything else slots in place afterwards. So today, we’re going to talk about some adventure hooks that a DM might flesh out a million different ways.
There Are Bandits In Them Thar Hills
A classic adventure hook in D&D, and yet it’s one that doesn’t get old. This plotline is pretty simple: there are bandits in the nearby hills/caves/forboding forest/other dangerous locale, and they have been preying on the innocent folk of the area. It’s up to a group of enterprising (or at least financially motivated) adventurers to try and put a stop to it.
All you really need to figure out is what kind of bandits there are and what their lair is like. Though if you want to go deeper, you could start asking yourself questions like, “What’s making these bandits shack up in a place so forbidding?” Or, “who do they really work for?” Start with that and let your ideas flow.
An Unholy Alliance Is Brewing
One of the other big D&D tropes is the idea that normally opposing groups have started working together, and that spells trouble. You can pick any two groups that might cause problems to the local area. A classic example of this is groups of evil giants deciding to work together (as in Against the Giants), but you could just as easily have devils and demons (or their agents) working together, or the minions of different colored dragons, or anything that would normally be in opposition.
The threat of an alliance is worth investigating, and then you have all sorts of questions to answer to flesh out your adventure. Why are they working together? What is their ultimate goal? How can they be stopped?
Cults In Your Local Area
I hope these fairly broad archetypal seeds are showing you that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can take one of these ideas and run a million different ways with it. Same with the idea of cultists. There are many different cult NPC villains in the 2024 Monster Manual – all that you need to get an adventure going is to pick one, decide what dark force they work for, and figure out what they might be trying to do.
One of my favorite techniques for coming up with an adventure in a hurry is by writing out something like, “one of the patrons at the inn has heard rumors that the cult has been __________.” And then I fill in the blank. Maybe they’re stealing something. Maybe they’re kidnapping victims. Whatever the first thing that springs to mind is. Then it’s just asking why and fleshing out from there.
Someone You Like Has Gone Missing
Even easier than that is to have a favorite NPC of the party go missing. This is a great way to come up with a shorter adventure in a hurry, or can be the start of a sprawling, winding tapestry of interwoven threads that you pick apart. And there’s usually no in-between.
But all you, the DM, have to do is decide who’s gone missing (hopefully someone the party cares about) and then maybe who took them, so you can leave the appropriate clues. The rest you can try and figure out once the party starts investigating, though again, often a start like that is a great way to shake loose inspiration.
Someone Found A Spooky Ruin
Finally, the time-honored tradition – someone discovered a spooky ruin that’s full of danger and treasure. This is as D&D a setup as it gets. Your standard tavern rumor of “we saw strange lights coming from the ruined castle” or “I found a map to the lost crypt of [ominous name], could be treasure in it”. And then you’re off to the races. Now all you have to do is build a dungeon, but luckily, there’s plenty of advice for doing that.
Happy adventuring!
