Starting an Adventure is Always the Hardest

Every world has to have a jumping off point. A first line you read in a story, the first image you see in an atlas, a first decription your dungeon master reads you. The question is, as always, what do you want this to be?

This first snippet of information can be the basis of your audience's entire perception of the world, and it had better be good or you might lose them. In today's market, people need to be hooked in seconds or hey might never delve deeper. But I can get into the ADD of marketing another time.

In an adventure in dungeons and dragons, the starting point is where the players meet. Oftentimes, the players will meet in a tavern, and get roped into doing something they had no real initiative to begin. Others are more creative, driving all the players to a common location by means of a threat, or even having the players be captured by some now-common foe that they must escape. But, even the best adventre hook can feel estranged when the characters don't have any motivation to be there.

One thing I try and do when creating a campaign, is give a notice to the players about things they need to involve in their backstory. 'You need to be broke, and willing to work for money' 'You belong to a theives guild' 'You must be searching for a specific holy maguffin' are all examples of requirements I've given players in the past. It's like building in a handle for your adventure hook, and it makes campaign planning much easier, because you don't have to design a hook for any imaginable subset of characters, but for any characters that might fall into a particular category. If every one of the characters seeks the same maguffin, they have a very strong reason to keep working together once they find themselves out of whatever trouble they found themselves in.

Of course, you can't expect this connection to the first hook to continue to be the hook for every adventure, or the players will start to feel dragged along by the nose. Higher level and follow-up advenures still have to be tailored to a general group of just about anyone.

This hook/handle concept is something that other dungeon masters should consider, to make their own lives easier, and the players feel more connected.