D&D: Three Adventure Hooks For Far Off Locales
Need to get your party from one part of the world to another? Here are three adventure hooks where the journey is the destination.
Travel is one of those places where D&D can get a little scattered. While there are plenty of guidelines to help you get from one place to another, it’s a slightly more abstract concept than fighting off goblin ambushes. Take too long, and you fall into a Tolkien trap, where you end up describing trees and pathways and rivers and natural features for hours. And while that might be exactly what your table loves, you can lose a whole session to traveling, which is great for players who needed to get some work done surreptitiously on their laptops, but less so for those who were hoping for some adventure.
This is my surreptitious laptop.
But skew too far the other way, and you end up just immediately jumping from point A to point B and then it feels like you’re teleporting, and the world loses a bit of verisimilitude. And it’s weird, because you’re skipping along to the adventure, which your players want–but they don’t want it to be too obvious. There’s a balance. And here to help are five sidequests that can take you to distant destinations in whatever campaign world you need. All you have to do is have the right random encounter tables, a few terrain types, and you’re good.
Lost Fragments
Need to send your players off in a distant direction to get caught up to the rest of your plot as it unfolds? Want a reason to motivate players to move on from the town where their favorite NPC lives? The Amulet of Alauris is a magical amulet (probably) from an ancient civilization of powerful mages–but the amulet has been splintered into many different fragments over the years. The players (or one of their contacts) have one, which functions as a minor magical item. Trentin Vos, a half-orc scholar (who holds a side job as whatever the party happens to need), recognizes the amulet for what it is, and lets them know that his own research has identified a second fragment that happens to be located somewhere near where they’re headed.
Now you have a magical amulet with pieces scattered throughout the world. All you have to do at first is figure out a few common features for each piece to have, then later on figure out what it does when it’s assembled. Whatever you decide on, just make sure it feels suitably rewarding for whatever effort the party has gone through. 3-6 fragments feels like a decent enough amount to track down.
Campfire Tales
This is an sidequest for while your party is travelling. When looking for a spot to make camp, they come across Sol Grith, a Goliath ranger who is out wandering. Sol is a solitary wanderer, but, the party has caught them in a rare mood where the loneliness of the wild has left them grateful for the chance meeting. They offer to share their meal and some stories, and will ask the party about their adventures. If they seem cagey, Sol understands that “some people got business they can’t share. Reckon you might have a story you could, though.”
This is basically an opportunity for the party to tell their story. Afterward, Sol shows them a shortcut that shaves a few hours or days off their travel time, whichever is appropriate. If you enjoyed the players’ stories, perhaps Sol even gives them a jewel worth 250gp that they’ve picked up on their travels. If attacked, Sol uses their considerable skill at stealth to try and slip away from the party.
Can You Help Me Get To The Dungeon
This is a sidequest for more experienced adventurers. Past level 5, or so. When they’re getting ready to travel, they’re approached by a party of new, yet-to-be-seasoned adventurers who are getting ready to set off on their very first quest. They’re headed out in search of a dungeon that happens to be near wherever the PCs are about to travel to–they offer whatever gold they can scrape together (and the prospect of being free hirelings if that’s not enough) if the PCs can help them get to the dungeon.
Along the way, they ask the PCs questions about adventuring, and for their best dungeon delving tips. Things like, “how do you know when to run away from an enemy?” “When’s the best time to cast fireball?” “Is it better to all rush in to the middle of the fight?” “How do you know if a place is trapped?”
Ask your players questions that you think they’d love to answer. Give them a chance to feel like cool adventuring heroes, and then, depending on how they answer they can set this new party up for success or failure. Decide how good their answers are, and if it helps the newbies get through the dungeon the next time they run into each other, they’re more experienced and overjoyed to see the people that gave them a leg up. If their advice was less helpful, maybe the next time they run into each other, the newer parties are older, wiser, and a little less trusting/more willing to offer the players the same kind of “help” they got.
How do you keep travel interesting? Let us know in the comments!
