Creating Hooks Within a Sandbox

I'm currently working on a new mini-sandbox/point-crawl called Night Land, which I'll write more about in the coming weeks. It will run at around 60 pages, contain ten locations, half of those being adventure sites with maps and keyed areas. It's essentially a weird world to be explored, with no overriding objective or goal for PCs at the outset. 

This has presented challenges in determining engaging hooks I can plant in the setting, which encourages players to interact with adventure sites. The questions are what kinds of hooks to have and where/when to find them. In similar settings I've studied, it's often achieved with rumor tables, which I wanted to move away from.

Here is a list of additional ways to create hooks. These are broad conceptual ideas, which you could expand upon with specific narrative threads or plot-lines relevant to the setting:

• Active: an event that happens directly to PCs.
• Passive: events that happen and draw the PCs in.
• A social hub the party meets. 
• Developing major NPCs, stakeholders with motivations.
• A default action that offers hooks.
• Items (such as books, scrolls) about a place someone has been.
• Items the PCs already have.
• Items the PCs have encountered.
• NPCs informing players of what is going on.
• A current need of the PCs, such as a depleted resource.
• An encounter that needs to be resolved.
• Putting PCs in the path of an obstacle.
• Consequences of walking away from opportunities.
• Living world, events unfolding even if PCs weren't there.
• Situations that act as triggers. 
• Synergy between the different elements of the setting, one outcome triggering another.
• Timeline of events that occur unless the PCs preempt and stop them.

Aquilus Character Class Name Generator

Here is a character class generator I've developed for my setting Aquilus. 

I'm especially interested in how language can drive inspiration for RPG content. Firstly, come up with the name of something you might find in your world or campaign, then determine what its characteristics and properties are. Chris McDowall – the writer of Electric Bastionland – has a blog post about this technique which he calls Spark Tables, "taking two results and smashing them together for inspiration." The results can be counter-intuitive or even absurd, but they're often flavorful and stimulate the imagination.

In the generator below, I firstly fed in around 1200 character classes collated from sources including RPG wikis, indexes, rule-sets, etc. I then fed in hundred of adjectives. The first result generates an adjective (and occasional noun) followed by a class. The second generates two different character classes put together, both results offering thousands of possible combinations. 

I'm currently working on several other generators for elements such as spells, magic items, landmarks, encounters, and monsters, which I'll share in due course.

 

What do you hear about the nearby cults?

An expanded version of this table is published in Aquilus issue #1.

Roll (d20):

1. They are controlled by a sentient artifact that manipulates them to it's own end. Their leader knows the answer to almost every question posed to them.
2. Their temple is near a dark and fog-shrouded swamp of glowing vegetation and breeding grounds of beasts. They have their tongues cut out and do not speak. Their leader has opened a portal to another plane. 
3. They worship an immaculately carved statue near their temple, located deep within overgrown woods. They hybridize with non-humans. New members must drink poison and save vs death as an initiation ritual. 
4. They suffer from persistent sickness and their children have birth defects. Their leader is a ruthless killer, who members would die for.
5. They are reformists with new ideas for control. They have groups of street children throughout the land in their employ as spies. Their temple is known for its stunning architecture and music. 
6. They are a charity that helps desperate travelers, feeding the hungry and bringing food and water convoys to the needy. They deliberately expose themselves to mutagens.
7. They are starving, miserable beggars who are facing certain death. They take care to avoid sharp objects. They bleed an unknown substance. 
8. They worship an overlord who awakens from cryonic sleep every decade to give new orders. Once per week, they must go to a specific shrine or sacred place. 
9. They are working on plans for the reincarnation of a long-dead entity. One member has fled with important pieces of information and is being hunted. The leader is a great artist.
10. They are wealthy, thrill-seekers from powerful families. They practice intense anonymity and wear masks in public. Their leader is a mind reader.
11. They worship a monolith that causes past-life flashbacks. They travel on winged beasts. Some of the members are shape-changers. 
12. They bury magical items and artifacts with the honored dead. Some of the cultists are members of an extraterrestrial race. A trader in the village has deceived the cult without realizing their true nature.
13. They are grave robbers who deal with local holy people to scare the town folk to pay for protection. They speak to each other in a language they have invented. The leader has mastered the art of time travel. 
14. They are former assassins. They possess an artifact that alters life and accelerates evolution. Their temple is heavily guarded.
15. An evil wind has brought a plague to their temple. They avoid moonlight and can discern a voice that doesn’t belong to one of their members.
16. They are an apocalypse cult that worship star gods. They have been murdering local farmers after they exposed their leader's past. Members meet once a month at the store-house of a local merchant and drink each other's blood.
17. They are the last remnants of a once-widespread faith. Their practices involve ­self-mutilation and sacrifices of newborn. 
18. They have been seen digging up ancient graves and crypts, where they found mysterious tablets. Their leader is a great healer.
19. They carry news and letters across the land. There are tunnels under their temple that lead to secret places.
20. They use mysticism, astrology, and narcotics to make outrageous claims about the future, that many believe. Deep within their temple is the greatest library in Aquilus, filled with forbidden tomes.

Painting by Neo Rauch.