I start a lot of campaigns the same way, because I love the village of Nightstone.

It’s been smoothed and eroded when compared to the default version, but it’s still there. And, integral to the story of Nightstone, is the story of THE Night Stone, a massive rock that shows on magical radar, but doesn’t do much as far as anyone knows.

This is perfect DM bait. I have so many options. I could use it as a lead in to SKT, although I  doubt I’ll use the whole thing. My favorite part of the whole adventure is the excuse to have Fire giant romping around looking for Adamantine. But I don’t have to do it. If the party never pursues the cloud giant thieves, then whatever. Thread over with nothing lost. Or the giants could be studying it, neutral like, or they could be using it to take over the world, good but not thinking about humans, or they could be using it to take over the world, evil. The ONLY thing established in the root thread is that no human scholar knows what the rock is. Which gives the DM plenty to use with it.

I tend to go from Nightstone to the Sunless Citadel, again remixed to a great extent. (I added two new ideas for threads this week!) The party follows threads from Nightstone, where they are neatly served and new threads.

Plot hooks are related to fishing, actually. I dangle things, and we’ll see which players bite. It’s always better to have more threads than you need, and if threads aren’t going anywhere, then pull them out, thin the story, until just the active threads remain (okay, keep one or two extra for color)

My current long running game has something like 5 high level, end game threads that are around and when I’m creating the small adventures, I see if I can advance one of those. (These are not Dungeon World fronts, because those never made sense to me.)

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *