Talking with
Thomas about the
Day of Al’Akbar, a module he’s running for our ongoing AD&D 2nd Edition al-Qadim Church game. He was asking if it felt like there was too much going on in the city for the party to keep track of and that led to us discussing how NPC’s give clues and just what hooks and focused are needed for the PCs in an adventure. I haven’t read the Day of Al’Akbar yet, as we’re still playing through it, but our party headed to the city of Khaibar, thinking it was an abandoned ruin with perhaps a small bandit camp. Our goal was to find the cup and talisman of Al’Akbar, in order to cure a disease in a city we’d like to be able to visit without fear of catching a plague and to charge the rulers a massive amount of gold to do so. Instead of the ruined and empty (or nearly empty) city, we arrived to find a re-established city with at least 500 inhabitants, multiple inns, mercenary soldiers, a bandit king and his followers and a terrorist waging a magical bombing campaign. Needless to say, this threw us for a loop and we spent two sessions exploring the town, speaking to dozens of NPCs, exploring a dozen or so labeled shops and such and trying to figure out if the tensions in the town were going to interfere with our mission of obtaining the two artifacts we had come in search of. The third session was largely us stumbling onto the aftermath of some NPC theater and using it, as well as several overpowered spells, to loot the palace of the town and locate the first part of the artifact, but we still don’t quite know what happened between the bandit king al-Farzikh and his enemy, Mad Dog, and if the mercenary take-over after al-Farzikh’s death was planned or just opportunistic. But, since none of those NPCs seem to be searching for the artifacts, it’s likely that we play next we will continue to ignore them as we move our hunt for the second artifact elsewhere in the city.
This got me thinking of two modules that I’ve run recently where I feel like the PCs were drawn into the plot despite a relative paucity of hooks, the excellent
Dancing in the Ruins module for Godless, and the first published Planescape adventure,
The Eternal Boundary. At 6 pages, Dancing in the Ruins, is wonderfully economical, it offers a few NPCs who can serve as quest givers, but mostly relies on the mystery to be compelling. For The Eternal Boundary, it starts with a quest giver, either faction or non-faction, but both those starts give the PCs basically the same information and send them on a quest that is largely a red-herring and then the PCs discover the real plot of the module in the course of tracking down their MacGuffin. Instead of detailed hooks what both modules rely on are Perplexities, tangles of clues that convince the PCs and their players that there has to be something more (and oh boy, there is plenty more lurking beneath the surface in each module.)
MINOR SPOILERS FOR DANCING IN THE RUINS,THE ETERNAL BOUNDARY AND N1 – AGAINST THE CULT OF THE REPTILE GOD BELOW.
