Sometimes the Players Write the Adventure Hooks For You
My first DnD group just recently finished up Lost Mines of Phandelver (see How My Level 5 Players Killed a Young Green Dragon) and were chomping at the bit to play a new campaign. I haven’t had time to properly flesh out an original one, so I gave them their pick of one of the pre-packaged campaigns I already bought, giving them a basic idea of what was in each one, and they picked Curse of Strahd. I also gave them the option of continuing on with their current characters, but they wanted to try building their own characters from scratch. (One of my original players had to drop out due to work scheduling issues, unfortunately.)
So we spent the next couple weeks going through character concepts and ideas, fleshing out the basics of a Half-Elf Rogue, a Tabaxi Rogue, a Human Bard, and a Kalashtar Druid. (It’s gonna be an interesting campaign!)
Now at the end of the last campaign, the party had picked up a bunch of souvenirs: a tooth and scale each from Venomfang along with a shard of bone from the flaming skull of Wave Echo Cave. These were fashioned into matching pendants.
So as they’re making their characters, the Bard (originally the great axe Fighter from Phandelver) made a comment that she wished they could keep the cool pendants.
“Sure,” I said. “You could say they’ve been handed down since vague time in the past.”
All of them immediately leaped on the idea, hitting me the question of would they have to create descendants, too, or could they obtain them through other means.
By this point, my mind has started formulating an idea to get the party to Barovia. So I tell them: “You don’t necessarily have to inherit the pendant. Maybe you found yours in a market stall or plucked it off a dead body at some point in the past.”
So all of them were pleased as punch to have something from their first campaign carry over to their second. In their minds, they were just fun little reminders of where they, as players, had been.
I, on the other hand, had other ideas.
Given they were all from vastly different backgrounds and likely wouldn’t have run into each other, I modified the Creeping Fog adventure hook from Strahd. Not only does the fog swallow them up and dump them off on the road to the Gates of Barovia, but they see a vision where the bone from the flaming skull on each of their pendants suddenly catches fire but doesn’t burn them, their shadows changed to that of each player’s first character, and they saw the missing player’s shadow as well though the fire on that pendant is like a dampened coal, the shadow itself wearing the pendant rather than there being a fifth person there. The sun rises (as much as it does) over Barovia, and the flames on the pendants go out. They found themselves in a strange forest with people they’d never met before all wearing the same pendants.
Needless to say, the players loved it.
Next time around–if I finally get to be able to write that custom campaign–I’m thinking of taking that silly little suggestion that same player who wanted to keep her pendant made months ago and making it happen:
“I think it’d be funny if at the start of a campaign, you’re not a group of adventurers but a group of tourists who just ended up stumbling into stuff as it goes wrong.”
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