Need a Quick Plot Hook? Steal One from This Week's Vault

These five hooks are crafted to spark your creativity and hopefully open some unexpected doors to your campaign world. Each one can stand alone or be reshaped to fit your setting.

Can't wait for you to make these ideas your own.

A grand banquet has lasted for thirteen days without pause. The nobles eat, drink, and toast as if time has no meaning. It is odd. None have left the hall, and no servants have been seen entering or exiting. The players are hired to “politely end” the celebration before the city's stores are depleted. But every plate replenishes itself, every toast refills, and the music never stops. Who or what is feeding them?

Each morning, the town bell rings once for every soul that died the night and day before. Today, it rang backward causing the dead to stir. The townsfolk whisper that the bell tower's keeper made a bargain to bring back his lost child. But there was a catch, for every life restored, another must vanish.

An old mapmaker swears his maps are starting to change themselves. Rivers curve differently, forests shift shape, roads lead to nowhere, and there are even cities that have vanished from the parchment. His apprentice was found staring at one of the new maps, muttering, “I can see them moving.” The guild offers a bounty for anyone who can trace where the maps are leading or who is drawing them.

Miners claim they can hear voices beneath the stone, echoing through the tunnels. When they tried to follow the sound, one worker returned blind, saying just, “They were so kind.” The mine is closed, but a merchant offers a fortune to recover a gemstone that “sings back.

A whole city wakes one morning unable to recall its own name. Maps, signs, even letters and contracts only show smudges where it once appeared. Trade halts, magic falters, and people begin to lose their memories of each other next. A lone archivist begs the party to help recover the city's true name before the world forgets it ever existed.