After you have your story arc put together, you’ll notice that the PCs will need clues and information to get between the various plot points. The first bit of information they receive is the story hook. This launches the whole adventure. If the story hook doesn’t grab them, then the adventure screeches to a complete stop before it gets up to speed. You don’t want this to happen.

Your opening salvo of information needs to be timely, pertinent to the PCs, actionable, achievable, and not too horribly risky at first glance. Once you have momentum in the story, your future bits of information can be helpful in nature, but if you can make each piece of information along the way as vital to the PCs as the opening story hook, all the better.

Timely

If your opening story hook does not have a sense of immediacy or urgency, it’s going to fall flat, be ignored completely, or the PCs will decide to “deal with it later.” In gaming terms, the “deal with it later” category is a death knell for an adventure hook as now it becomes a casual side quest that will most likely be forgotten. Get the hook in their face and demonstrate to them how urgent the hook is.

Pertinent

Even if the plot hook is urgent, it needs to be pertinent to the PCs. A plot hook of “A scout has discovered that the goblin tribes are going to attack the village on the other side of the range of hills in a week,” will most likely not entice the PCs into action. Sure, it’s timely. They have a week to stop the goblin incursion, but it’s going after “that other village over there” not the village the PCs live and breathe in.

However, if the PCs have NPC connections to that village on the other side of the hills and it’s a four-day travel to get there before they can setup defenses for the village, then you have a pertinent and timely hook.

Actionable

Make sure the story hook has some action in it the PCs can take. If they have an unmarked, barely decipherable treasure map to a section of the world they’ve never seen, heard of, or can get to, that treasure map will go in someone’s pack until such time they feel like figuring out where the treasure map leads.

In my example above about the goblin tribes attacking a nearby village, the PCs can take a variety of actions to save their NPC friends in that village. They can travel to the village and setup defenses. They can venture into the nearby wilderness to directly confront the goblins and disrupt the tribes’ abilities to mount an attack.

Regardless of what actions the PCs can take, make sure the action that is similar to “I go to the capital city and beg the king to send his army to defend the village,” is off the table. Make sure the king or capital city are too far away to be of assistance. Make sure any “powerful wizard” (you know the ones I’m talking about) are conveniently out of town or away on vacation or some such. This will allow the immediate, pertinent actions to land squarely in the PCs’ laps.

Achievable

When presenting the story hook, make sure the PCs have a clear, understandable, and calculable chance of success. If “the goblin tribes” are too much, maybe scale it down to “a goblin tribe,” but definitely don’t use “all twelve hordes of demons from the underdepths below are going to wipe out that village.” Of course, if the party is higher level, then multiple goblin tribes may be what the adventure calls for. Likewise, if the party is very high level or has a great deal of competency and/or prowess, maybe they could face down all twelve hordes of demons.

Regardless of what power level you’re playing with in your game, do not throw the impossible (or something perceived as impossible) in front of the players. This will almost guarantee that they will call upon someone or something more powerful than themselves (like the king’s armies or that vacationing mega-wizard) and this will then make it “someone else’s problem.” You’re trying to create a cool story with obstacles for the party to overcome, not for them to circumvent by recruiting others to blow up the obstacles for them.

Risk

If a venture is not risky, then it’s a travelogue with lots of walking (or riding a horse or transporting in a spacecraft). There will be risk involved. The risks you are going to plant in front of the party do not need to be called out in the story hook. The risk should be implied in the presentation of the hook, but you as the designer and/or GM do not need to lean hard into this area. Here are some segments of sample hooks that imply risks. Can you figure out what risk (or risks!) these segments imply?

• The night of the lawless purge will arrive in the city in four nights, and you’ve been hired by a noble family to secure and protect their home.
• The treasure map you’ve found clearly marks the loot’s location as being in the center of a cemetery in the ruins of a large city five days horse ride to the north through the Gray-Finger Forest.
• The full moon is coming in five days, and your faction’s benefactor was bitten by a werewolf last night. You must find the cure before the full moon or prepare to kill your benefactor.
• A pyramid has risen from the sands outside the city, and demonic forces have poured from openings on all sides. While the demons aren’t approaching the city, they are disrupting trade, travel, and supply trains. Also, the largest oasis in the area happens to reside immediately next to the pyramid, and water supplies are running low. You are the city’s best, and perhaps only, hope of chasing the demons back into the pyramid.

See how easy that was? Of course, a hook can have more elements to them than my above samples, but I was trying to illustrate risk more than any other component of a hook.

Momentum

Once you have your initial story hook in place, you need to continue dropping clues that will get you and your PCs to the next section of the story in the adventure. This is where designing the adventure from back to front makes setting clues and hints easier. If you’ve followed my advice on this topic, you already know what is happening next. You just need to establish a set of clues that will point the party in that direction.

What kind of clues work as continuing story hooks? Well, I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait around a few more months. This is the fourth installment of this series, and I do a deep dive on the clues, rumors, and connective tissues of adventure design in the eleventh installment. I apologies for you having to wait until then, but it’ll be worth it. I promise.

Upcoming Months!

The first set of information you established for your adventure was mood, tone, and theme. In the upcoming months, we’ll be breaking down the thematic elements of adventure design. Namely, I’ll be looking at thematic environments, thematic bosses, and thematic mooks across the next three months.