Hooks

EOTB said:
Thanks Beoric, I appreciate your telling me. That discussion is one a lot of people have commented upon as having been helpful to understanding illusions.
Click to expand...
It made a lot of things click. It's hard to reference a podcast, but if it was in writing I would probably reference it the same way I do Courtney's stuff on tricks and traps.
 
Interesting definition in an article at Goblin Punch:
There's a worthy debate to be had about whether the DM should rely more on hooks (which force the player to engage) or lures (which tempt the players to engage). It's a complicated question, but I will say that the best case scenario is when you're able to use lures that your players happily engage with, because they're intrinsically interested in the outcome.
Click to expand...
 
First draft of an intro, and hook, for a campaign I'm putting together for some mostly inexperienced players. I will send it out before the first session, but I'm pretty happy with it and I might just monologue it if not many of them have read it (please talk me out of this, I know it's stupid).
Each of you heard some version of this story in your childhood, from parents, grandparents, teachers, storytellers and bards:

In the beginning, the first age, the Age of Dragons, there were the three progenitor wyrms. Shining Siberys was the source of all magic; Verdant Eberron was the fountain of life, and Shadowy Khyber was the master of secret knowledge, and of the powers that lurk in the darkness.

Together they made the planes of existence, each one to embody a concept; and the final plane, the Material Plane, was to be a place where all ideas become manifest: war and peace, life and death, order and chaos. And so together they made the Sun, and the Moons, and Golden Siberys made the Stars; but Greedy Khyber, who wanted dominion over all things, began to eat the stars as quickly as Siberys could make them.

And so they argued, and Khyber struck Siberys without warning, and tore him asunder, and scattered the broken bits of his body among the stars he loved so much. And you can still see him, up in the sky, in the white gold band that rings our world.

Then Khyber turned on Eberron. But Khyber was spent from their battle with Siberys, and Eberron was fresh. But rather than slay the Betrayer, Gentle Eberron embraced them, and folded them in her coils, and held them until they were quiescent.

And then Eberron called on the powers of life, and gave birth to soil, tree, and ocean, to me and to thee, and so she bound Cruel Khyber for the protection of all creation, in her loving embrace, until the end of time.

Is this truth, or metaphor? Nobody really knows. But is true that the Ring of Siberys is a source of great magic. And it is true that the world of Eberron sustains us.

And it is also true that, beneath the surface of this world, in the underworld that we name Khyber, great evils are spawned. Devils and demons and tiger-faced fiends come to the surface, to terrorize, and seduce, and corrupt. And it is true that the depths are a place of malevolence, where even the stone you walk on and the air you breathe will seek to hinder you, and to aid the fiends that hunt you. There is a reason that when we dig into the earth, we are careful not to dig too deep.

But sometimes we have no choice.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You are all from the same village, in the foothills of the Greywall Mountains, close enough to the monstrous nation of Droaam that you must be prepared to fight off raiders and monsters from time to time.

But the Last War was not kind to your village. Though there has been peace for two years, most of the fighting men and women of your village never returned. So when danger calls, the villagers turn to you to address it. Though some of you, whether young or old, are scarcely trained, and the old warriors among you have had your skills atrophy through age and long years of farming, you are the best your village has to offer.

This afternoon you learned that little Tommy Carter, who never ignored an offer of mischief whenever it presented itself, was playing with some friends up by the ruined Abby – where they knew they were not supposed to be – and the earth opened up under Tommy, and he fell into the depths.

And the village expects you to go find him.
Click to expand...
 
My suggestion is replace the word "dragon" with something more exotic and delete all the identifying names.

Make it cosmic, inscrutable, and terrifying.
 
squeen said:
My suggestion is replace the word "dragon" with something more exotic and delete all the identifying names.

Make it cosmic, inscrutable, and terrifying.
Click to expand...
Well first, I didn't call them dragons, I called them wyrms.

Second, it is specific to the setting, and deeply intertwined with other elements. Fragments of Syberis, the source of all magic, fell upon Eberron, from which all life is born, and gave birth to the dragons. There is a lot of history about dragons in the setting, which I'm not going to get into, but more than in any other published setting that I am aware of, the dragons of Eberron are inscrutable and terrifying. Their magic has shattered continents, and destroyed a moon. When they defeated the titans of Xen'drik, they crushed them so absolutely that their curse still causes fledgling civilizations to fall prey to madness and destroy themselves, nearly 40,000 years later. Their mythology asserts that they can become gods, and that other dragons have done so in the past. Although they have retreated to the continent of Argonessen, from which no mortals have returned, they plot to manipulate Prophesy to do their bidding. Some collect mortals to serve them, or worship them, or as test subjects for experiments, according to their whims.

They are much, much more powerful than AD&D dragons. In purely mechanical terms, it would take 12 ancient spell using AD&D red dragons to match a single great wyrm red dragon on Eberron. An ancient spell using AD&D red dragon is slightly weaker than a young adult red dragon on Eberron. And as a rule, the youngest dragons a party is ever likely to encounter are young adults.
 
Last edited:
I was just throwing that suggestion out there as a thought experiment (for you). What would happen to your descriptions if you changed the god-descriptor. Would it resonate differently? Just a thought.

Inscrutable, at least to me, means sometimes non-nonsensical to the human mind. The thought there was to break up logic in that narrative because (again for me) the presence of human-logic makes the gods more mundane. They act, and feel, with human emotions which familiariezes something that should be ephemeral.

I didn't really expect my comments to stick for you, but hoped it might yank you into a different, more original/unexpected, head-space.
 
Last edited:
The vast Galactic wyrm, who the <name> call Siberys but the <other name> call Slartibartfast-the-deceiver, is believed to be the source of all magic because when it self-devoured, blood rained from the heavens as golden light, penetrating the Earth causing it to rend and heave. From those primordial fires, man gained the power to mold and shape his world and (most importantly) reach through the cracks between realities to draw forth arcane knowledge and energies.

Or somesuch nonesense.
 
squeen said:
The vast Galactic wyrm, who the <name> call Siberys but the <other name> call Slartibartfast-the-deceiver, is believed to be the source of all magic because when it self-devoured, blood rained from the heavens as golden light, penetrating the Earth causing it to rend and heave. From those primordial fires, man gained the power to mold and shape his world and (most importantly) reach through the cracks between realities to draw forth arcane knowledge and energies.
Click to expand...
Ok, you suggest that I not use human logic because it makes the gods more mundane, and then your suggestion for fixing that is to include a scholarly description of how god-magic works?

Also, the myth as written does not have a god descriptor, any more than I called the progenitor wyrms dragons. My discussion of dragons in the second post is not player facing. In-game, nobody actually knows if the gods are real, they never directly speak to anyone, let alone wandering around and interacting with mortals.

That myth is intentionally derivative. I made a conscious effort to choose language that recalls existing RL myths. My players have no experience with the setting or the system, I want to ground them in a safe place before I send them off into the scary places. If I make the myths sound like a twisted horror, how do I ground them? I intentionally invoke Gaia imagery to give their home, which the players know nothing about, a feeling of safety; then I tell them about the places that are not safe; and then I send them there. If home is as terrifying as the underworld, then the underworld isn't really terrifying. There needs to be a contrast.

EDIT: I'm also giving them clues as to how things work. This is a setting where the boundaries between the material world and the planes are often thin; this is a phenomenon they are likely to have to deal with at some point, and understanding that the planes are incarnations of concepts will help them navigate that.
 
Last edited:
Beoric said:
This is a setting where the boundaries between the material world and the planes are often thin; this is a phenomenon they are likely to have to deal with at some point, and understanding that the planes are incarnations of concepts will help them navigate that.
Click to expand...

I'm very curious as to how you plan to implement that feature. Like, what tangible game parts will the players get to experiment with in order to take advantage of that stuff?

I ask because I see a lot of DM-facing information in people's adventure plans (my own included) that sound ideal on paper, but when thrown to the players it largely gets ignored. Having players experiment with world meta stuff doubly-so, since most of it is intangible, non-interactive lore that gets shoveled onto them in exposition and forgotten after a session or two. So I'm curious if you have any plans to get the players to pick up that this stuff is interactive, and not just world flavor or generic background.
 
DangerousPuhson said:
I'm very curious as to how you plan to implement that feature. Like, what tangible game parts will the players get to experiment with in order to take advantage of that stuff?

I ask because I see a lot of DM-facing information in people's adventure plans (my own included) that sound ideal on paper, but when thrown to the players it largely gets ignored. Having players experiment with world meta stuff doubly-so, since most of it is intangible, non-interactive lore that gets shoveled onto them in exposition and forgotten after a session or two. So I'm curious if you have any plans to get the players to pick up that this stuff is interactive, and not just world flavor or generic background.
Click to expand...
Well, for instance, the planes represent concepts, as do their inhabitants, who fulfill a role and do not truly have free will. Knowing that the inhabitants do not behave like fully formed individuals, but will inevitably behave like the things they represent, should change your strategy for interacting with them. You will never pursuade an angel of Syrania to act against its nature, but you may be able to trick it by exploiting its nature.

Here's another example. The areas on Eberron where other planes bleed through are called manifest zones. There are two types of manifest zones that give rise to undead: Dolurrh, the Realm of the Dead, and Mabar, the Endless Night. Zombies and skeletons that spontaneously arise in a Dolurrh manifest zone are pretty harmless, they are just going to mechanically do the things they did in life, or try to complete a task they left unfinished in their life. Mabar zombies and skeletons are actively malevolent, and will seek to destroy the living. Dolurrh manifest zones spawn ghosts and other undead that are the actual spirits of people who died, whereas Mabar tends to spawn ghouls, shadows, and other types of undead that seek to feed on the living, and are not necessarily tied to the spirit of someone who once lived. Dolurrh manifest zones can cause ennui, as PCs gradually lose their memories and their motivation, and are difficult to cast spells in. Mabar manifest zones are often filled with carnivorous plants; also, necrotic spells are ehnanced, and radiant spells are suppressed, and PCs can take necrotic damage just from being there. Certain types of necromancy are easier if you are in one zone or the other. So figuring out that you are in a manifest zone, and just what type of manifest zone, can be helpful in navigating it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top