What are some of your favorite plot hooks?

[Ion]

For my birthday, my mother bought me a book called "Robin's Laws of good Game Mastering" It is a good, but fairly short read on the theorys of game mastering.

At one point, it states that "satisfying adventure stories have clear endings." That seems fairly acurate to me. The best games I can remember have been the ones that had endings, as opposed to continually spirling bigger and bigger as more NPCs, Organizations, Monsters and what not get involved. While this is usually fun while it is going, there gets to be a point where I need to start thinking about some closure to these adventures, so you can start new ones.

So, to sum it up, what are your favorite hooks that imply their ending?

Here are a couple examples from that book I mentioned earlier by Robin D. Laws

- track down the assassins who killed the sultan
- recover stolen plans to the XK-100
- find the Holy Swork of K'athaar
- slay the Lich King
- investigate alien sightings at White Rock Ridge
- stop Shark Man from robbing any more banks

Thanks in advance!
Ion

 

[Turanil]

- the adventure I ran to introduce my players to 3rd edition (two or three years ago):

PCs begin in a crystal cavern where they eventually discover many images or even doubles of themselves imprisoned into the crystals. Impossible to break them. There is two or three exits to the cavern, and finally they take the most obvious. Then, they "discover" they are back home after many years of absence they cannot remember. They investigate to discover the land is under domination by an evil cult planning for unleashing a major demon on the world. They try to prevent it but fail, and die.

Then they awake at home, with a powerful wizard in front of them. He had cast a high level spell similar to Astral Projection and sent them into the "shadows of time" to see what will happen in the future if some current course of action continue.

The funny thing is that in the begining of the adventure (i.e.: while they were unknowingly in the future), they were around 12th level. But once they are back to present, they are but 1st level, as their career is only beginning. So now, the PCs now what they must to do to prevent an evil future for their land. Plus because of the "cavern of the shadows of time", they saw many probable future outcomes for their PCs, which would translate into clues for later adventures.

Unfortunately, this was the only adventure with these characters, and the campaign wasn't run.

 

[LizardWizard]

So, to sum it up, what are your favorite hooks that imply their ending?

The Pandora's Box.
Due to a violation of some ages-old prohibition or moral principle, hell is set loose. Fiends walk the land, crops wither, all the elves fall victim to a strange malady, and the king is nowhere to be found.
This plot hook is extremely versatile, especially if the trouble is large enough to foil the PC's plans.

 

[Ion]

Those both sound pretty cool.

Does anybody have any thoughts on less epic hooks?

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I guess my favorite is an adventure I've been working on on and off for about two years (and never seem to get much further on - I need to stop going back and editing what I've done and just push on). The party is hired by a very wealthy noble to find his missing wife. A second party has also been hired and the race is on to find her first. The plot gets interesting when the second party attempts a double-cross of the noble, and when the party discovers that the circumstances behind the wife's disappearance are not quite what everyone expected.

OK, I've just reinspired myself to get back to work on this one...maybe I'll evne try to finish it this time.

 

[exile]

The adventure that I am designing/writing at present is stolen from a guy that DM'd for me and some friends when I still lived in KY. It involves the theft of a number of "dangerous" books and the PCs' attempts to recover them.

If anyone is interested, I can post more details about the main plot as well as some of the subplots that I have in mind.

Chad

 

[nameless]

I thought this hook was rather mediocre, but my players ended up loving it and talking about it for years to come.

The more proper members of the group were members of a merchant house, and they were contracted to transport some kind of valuable merchandise, but weren't allowed to know what it was. Only the house's leader had any clue what the object might be, and his instructions to his PC underlings were to "not open the [unlocked] box, and in no circumstance touch the contents." I knew full well that this meant somebody would see what's inside, and I had a small railroading guarantee that someone would open the box even if the PCs didn't.

The rest of the group were bandits hired to sack the caravan. In the chaos, the enterprising caravan leader PC opened the box to take out the contents and hide them from the bandits. Had he not opened the box, one of the bandits surely would have.

The box contained a single egg, which was quite large. As soon as it was touched, a 30 foot radius sphere surrounding it was teleported far, far away. This encompassed the PCs on both sides of the conflict, but they didn't have much time to fight, because a loud roar pierced the air, followed shortly by a Tyrannosaurus breaking through the jungle and chasing all the little meat bags away. The first night, they realized from the stars that they were really far from home, and in some kind of "Lost World" full of dinosaurs and other reptilian dangers.

The two groups had to cooperate to survive, and when the NPCs in their group started to get thinned out by natural selection, the former enemies quickly learned camraderie. After leveling up a couple of times, they finally made their way to the pass that lead out of the valley.

The reason for their presence was shortly revealed as an Ancient Green Dragon who created the valley as his home. The egg was his, which he was sending to another dragon in order to propagate the thinning numbers of the species, but the egg was warded with powerful magic to teleport it back home if it was touched (read: endangered) by anybody other than a dragon. Rather than kill the PCs, the dragon let them go on the condition that they deliver the egg to its intended recipient.

So off they went with a mundane task that would take months of travel to accomplish, in foreign lands. And on the grand scale, they were recruited to save the dying dragon species.

Now that I recount it, I guess I am a little proud of the hook. =]

 

[LostSoul]

Betrayal. That's a great plot hook.

 

[Inconsequenti-AL]

The Prisoner.

One from Morrus game - we cleared an old keep building of orcs. In the dungeons there's a prisoner. A small girl chained to the floor, in an anti magic field. Very friendly, but with no name or memories. She detects of evil strongly enough to KO our paladin. She's also immune to most magic - which can be a real problem when you've sold the horses in favour of teleportation.

We took her with us - after a 'short debate' (i.e. can of worms) about the nature of evil... People kept trying to recapture her - successfully in the end. Apparantly she's some sort of 'bearer'.

Really want to get to the bottom of this one. It's certainly got my attention!

 

[Hand of Evil]

Tag you are it...

Basic plot object is found that says if it ever falls into the hands of X, Y will happen. Players are given the object and have to get it somewhere, along the way it is stolen, players have to get it back, there are chases, sub-plots, the object changing hands.

Players were tagged with the object three times, after the original game.