The Map
Hello folks, and welcome back once again to another round of Grave Plots. Today I would like to take a look at one of the more traditional adventure hooks: the map. Yes, the map. You’d be surprised at how wide a variety of wonderful adventures begin with maps. What follows are just three of the many great plot hooks and adventure starters that begin with a good map.
The Treasure Map
A great way to start a campaign, this hook will have your PCs on a trek through dangerous and exotic locales on quest for truly wondrous treasure. The setup for this one is pretty simple: give the PCs a treasure map and a good reason to start following it. So, the first step is to decide on a good treasure. Whether you go with the legendary lost city dreamed of by explorers for generations (think Eldorado or Atlantis), or just a good old fashioned chest filled with gold doubloons (well, not doubloons, unless your campaign setting includes 16th century Spanish coins, in which case you should use Pieces of Eight instead, they’re just plain cooler – ask Long John Silver, he’ll tell you) is primarily a matter of taste and you should just pick whatever appeals most to you. The next step is getting a map into the PCs’ hands. Perhaps one of the PCs inherits an old map from a beloved relative, or a wealthy patron offers to finance an expedition for only a very small or very specific piece of the treasure.
Ok, so that’s the set up, now on to the adventure. Your map should lead the PCs to an exotic location, maybe a deserted (or not-as-deserted-as-everyone-thought) island, a tropical rainforest in a far off land, or perhaps the map leads into completely uncharted territory. Getting to this new and exotic location can be an adventure in and of itself: PCs may have to buy their own ship, or secure passage on an existing vessel; they may have to hire reluctant guides, or even find and secure the services of a scholar capable of interpreting their map, all before they can even set out.
Once they arrive at the setting for their treasure hunt, they should be confronted with some new and unexpected danger: angry natives hell-bent on keeping outsiders out of their lands; pirates whose hideout the PCs have stumbled upon; or large and unusually aggressive monsters (this may be one of the few times where it’s okay to use dinosaurs without losing face). Pretty much whatever strikes your fancy will do just fine here. After the PCs deal with (or even while they are dealing with) this new threat, they should reach the first (possibly only) stop on their map, and this is where things start to really heat up. Either the PCs discover some vital clue about the exact location of the treasure they seek, or they find the treasure itself. Just as they’re starting to put things together, the main drama of our tale unfolds – either a rival treasure hunter who has been letting the PCs lead him right to the treasure, or a traitorous “ally” of the PCs finally makes his move, stealing either their treasure or an important clue and leaving the PCs in dire straits. Now the PCs must dig themselves out of whatever hole they have been plunged into and track down the thief in order to claim their treasure, or at the very least get back on the road to claiming their treasure.
Looking to get more out of this hook? Here are few short suggestions to get a little more bang for your buck. Make the adventure into a campaign: perhaps the PCs have their map stolen from them several times by other interested parties, or find themselves in a race to get to the treasure before a host of colorful and memorable rival adventurers. Perhaps employers are less than honest with the PCs about the exact nature of the treasure in question. You could also curse the gold, giving you a whole other adventure while the PCs have to deal with a dangerous curse. Perhaps a rival hunter steals the treasure from the PCs only to unleash a vengeful demon, who had claimed the treasure as his own, and now the PCs and their rival need to set aside their differences in the face of a common foe. Perhaps the whole thing was a set up by one of the PCs’ enemies to draw them into an elaborate trap. Perhaps rivals fall into the trap instead and only the PCs can save them from certain doom and defeat the bad guys before it’s too late.
The Mysterious Map
A great way to inject a map-based adventure into your existing game, this hook adds a little mystery and a lot of fun to your game. The set-up for this hook is simple as well: give a map to the PCs. I think the best way to do this is to have the map turn up in treasure, preferably in “important” loot. For instance, maybe they find the map on the body of a recently defeated villain (ideally someone the PCs have been working towards offing for awhile now), or in the magically locked, trapped, invisible chest located in the tower of a secretive wizard the PCs have spent the last three sessions preparing to rob. The map really only needs to meet two major criteria to work for this hook (while you could probably live without these, the adventure that follows works a little better with them). Number one: the map needs to be a surprise – something that sticks out, or something that the PCs didn’t expect to find. Number two: the map needs to be mysterious and difficult to decipher. Cover it with strange runes and moon writing, a long bit of script in a rare dialect of ancient elven, make the contents change based on whether it’s viewed by daylight or torchlight, etc. If you do these two things, and the PCs don’t have some emergency to be running off to deal with, they should be interested enough in the map to want to find out exactly where it goes and then go there. (If for some reason you want to use this hook while the PCs are in the middle of dealing with a psychotic wizard bent on destroying the world any minute now, then make the map somehow related to dealing with that situation; perhaps it was found on a traitorous lieutenant and reveals the location of his hidden base or some such.)
Deciphering the map should prove to be a fairly difficult task in its own right. After all, the map is complicated, probably ancient, and likely more than meets the eye, so the PCs’ first order of business should be finding out just what the map says. Whether this entails the PCs going on a series of dangerous quests for grumpy wizards before they can be bothered to translate the map, or the PCs spending hours working on figuring out how to get through all your nifty little safe-guards and built in riddles, puzzles, and complicated clues, depends on you, your group and your general play style. Either way, once the PCs do figure out what the map says, they should find that it leads them to something truly incredible and rewarding, or at least plot-important (for most of you DMs I’m sure that you can and probably will do both), such as, wondrous treasure that ordinary characters can only dream of, mid-boss villains’ or bosses’ hideouts, hidden kingdoms, or dungeons where no man was ever meant to go.
The Incomplete Map
Incomplete maps make for excellent adventure hooks because they allow you to reveal the story bit by bit, evolving it in a very controlled fashion without it feeling too constrictive. The set-up for this one is easy too. Yep, you guessed it: give the PCs a map. You could do this a few ways: perhaps after defeating a band of pirates the PCs acquire a single piece of a treasure map, or maybe a shady merchant offers to sell them an apparently complete map they later find out is only a piece of a set. The development here is pretty simple (but a lot of fun). Basically, the adventure is all about finding the next piece of the map. There are two good ways to go about this. The first is having each map lead you to the next clue, the next section and just a little bit more information. The second is to have the PCs actively looking for more pieces to complete the map, and it’s only with all the pieces that they can finally figure out what’s going on.
So now that you’ve got your adventure development, let me quickly address the thing that really makes this idea shine: the plot development. This hook is great for conspiracy games; with just a little bit of the plot being revealed at a time, the PCs will find themselves wondering why the map was broken up in the first place, and it’s up to you why someone would go through all that trouble. Perhaps the secrets obtained through the maps are thought to be too dangerous for mankind, or perhaps it was simple greed. Regardless, there should be a reason that the map was broken up, and a fun way to develop it is to have someone out there trying to make sure that the information remains hidden. There could also be people out there who think the truth must be uncovered, no matter the price. How these groups interact with the PCs and one another is up to you. The plot can be as complex or as simple as you want. However you choose to run this adventure, jumping from place to place in a desperate search for information or treasure is sure to produce some edge-of-your-seat, intense thrills.