Rumors and treasure maps as adventure hooks

[Yora]

I really like the idea of running a campaign where the players are offered a number of hooks to explore places or investigate villains, things develop depending on what the players do, and each adventure is done when the players feel they are done. One way to do that is to have various local events and developments that affect the places where the party is currently staying, or to put hooks for a next adventure in the one they are currently playing.

But I also want to try out for once to have a campaign in which the players have adventures in different lands, where they would be dealing with different environments and different native creatures, Very Conan style. I think the best way to give the players such opportunities might be to use rumors and treasure maps. You could always have an NPC hire them to go on an expedition to retrieve something, but to me this always feels like the GM is telling the players to go there because that's what you have prepared for the next adventure. Once the players are visiting an NPC to hear a job discription, could you ever imagine them saying no and looking for other work? Rumors and treasure maps can be more or less "lying around" and the players coming across them while they are currently busy with something else, while you wouldn't have an NPC making a job offer in the middle of an adventure.

Thing is, I never used rumors or treasure maps in my games. I guess a treasure map is simple enough. You can even write a note with a general description on the back to give the players hints what they could expect of it. But how do you do rumors? I'd like it to be done in an elegant way and not too obvious that I want the players to follow up on them. I've never seen players having random chats with innkeepers.

[Pelle]

In my experience, players easily forget rumours they hear about in the middle of other adventures, being hyperfocused to resolve what they are in the middle of. So it might be worth it to ooc maintain a list of rumours, and being explicit about it. Maybe if it is clearly stated that some rumours will turn out being false, so players know they may or may not lead to new adventures, that can help making it not too obvious what 'should' be done.

[MoiMagnus]

There is two way of handling it:

1) Being very clear at meta level that those rumors are hook and not lore details.
There is a reason why video games give you a quest log: players will either forget about them, or just not understand that there is something to do from them.
So that would be keeping a list of "quests" probably including a rating of difficulty and length.
If you chose to do so, I would advise be open to inputs from players, so if a player ask "and there was also this story about a werewolf, what's the difficulty rating of that?" and you didn't planed about it, just add an item to the list by improvising a length and difficulty.

2) Give them a motivation to look for quests, and a reason to think there will be something interesting to find in rumors (nobody care about the affair between the butcher and the barman's wife). Players are much more likely to remember and care about rumors if they were looking for them than if you gave it to them.

[doctor doughnut]

The classic answer here is to role play more, that is the immersive acting part. Avoid the silly thinhs where the characters know things by rolls, and do more in character talking.

A lot of players (and many DMs) don't grasp the concept: but short focused conversations can be great. Really a great example here is TV shows. The show only has like 40 minutes to tell the story, so they do an easy trick: exposition. This is where a character just tells the audience (or the players) something they need to know. The tavern keeper comes over and in one breath says "welcome, drinks are one silver, don't travel down the high road after midnight or the ghost of Kark will get you." Woah, see how he just dropped a rumor?

In a general sense, adding an odd detail is the perfect way to set up a rumor. Each captured goblin has a shovel...and oddly new one too. It's a bit odd...ask a goblin and they drop the rumor of 'we are looking for Left's Lost Gold'. Paintings, statues, any other art, and so on can work too.

Really, in a general sense, every NPC should ''spread a rumor". Really....that is not so different then real life.

[Imbalance]

Dunno how it well it translates to tabletop, but back when I played Sid Meier's Pirates! I was always a sucker for the drunk with a piece of random map he'd sell for drinking money. There was usually a decent payoff, sure, but the allure was in trying to correctly plot where in the Caribbean isles or shores of the Gulf the loot was buried based on minimal info. Same with some long lost relative. These incidental quests got me to sail to the corners of the map, risking mutiny or capture for the sake of exploration. Skyrim does something similar but with set locations, making the map sketches themselves more thrilling to find than the treasure they promise.

[Quertus]

So, others have brought up keeping a "log", which I agree with.

However, before you get too far in, I would suggest very clearly explaining your pitch, and very clearly reiterating the idea in session 0.

See, personally, I avoid travel. A month travel time, with random encounters? It'll take up months or years of sessions to cover there and back again. No/fewer random encounters? Well, then one of these campaigns was "unrealistic".

So, I hear rumors of far away things? I'm going to put them on the back burner until I get the ability to Scry & Teleport my way there, or to just handwave "we murder & eat some wildlife/orcs/whatever on the way there".

So you need to get everyone calibrated on just how much travel time to expect. And to want to go explore new areas.

Lastly, pitching it as "like Conan" may give you some issues with assumptions of e6.

EDIT: handouts for maps can be both cool, and good reminders.

[Kadzar]

Do people really have a problem with players not remembering rumors, rather than the opposite problem where they note down every random rumor you just got off a random table, to the point where eventually you have to mostly improvise a mini-adventure when they actually go to visit that farmer with a chicken that lays golden eggs, and you follow their off-hand suggestions to decide that, yes, actually, the farmer's wife was transformed into a gold-laying chicken by that witch you met in that fey-haunted mansion created because of some other off-handed remark by another NPC that they remembered for some reason? Just me?

[andthatisthe]

I really like the idea of running a campaign where the players are offered a number of hooks to explore places or investigate villains, things develop depending on what the players do, and each adventure is done when the players feel they are done. One way to do that is to have various local events and developments that affect the places where the party is currently staying, or to put hooks for a next adventure in the one they are currently playing.

But I also want to try out for once to have a campaign in which the players have adventures in different lands, where they would be dealing with different environments and different native creatures, Very Conan style. I think the best way to give the players such opportunities might be to use rumors and treasure maps. You could always have an NPC hire them to go on an expedition to retrieve something, but to me this always feels like the GM is telling the players to go there because that's what you have prepared for the next adventure. Once the players are visiting an NPC to hear a job discription, could you ever imagine them saying no and looking for other work? Rumors and treasure maps can be more or less "lying around" and the players coming across them while they are currently busy with something else, while you wouldn't have an NPC making a job offer in the middle of an adventure.

Thing is, I never used rumors or treasure maps in my games. I guess a treasure map is simple enough. You can even write a note with a general description on the back to give the players hints what they could expect of it. But how do you do rumors? I'd like it to be done in an elegant way and not too obvious that I want the players to follow up on them. I've never seen players having random chats with innkeepers.

I feel like D&D handles this with planar adventures. Instead of foreign lands, you have foreign planes. Instead of treasure maps, you have planar breaches. Then the party can have really unique lands to explore.

[D+1]

Remember that there is really no reason that you have to LURE the players/PC's into biting a particular plot hook. Just tell them what the adventure is. It is entirely possible to engineer a world-spanning game by simply starting the next new adventure with a bit of "in media res" description:

"After resting from the last adventure in the mountains you decide to take a sea voyage to the land of Sakes and seek additional adventures there. On the way you hear many tales from the sailors about the distant land that is an unknown to you. Nothing you heard sounded enticing, but a few days after making port in the capitol of Sakesalive you decide to investigate rumors in the taverns of a mysterious tower that will require some additional overland travel..."

I'm confident that 19 times out of 20 the players will simply play along. They are at the game table to have their PC's experience adventure. As long as you're providing that, it won't generally irk them that it doesn't ALL take place in the same city, town, nation, or even continent or plane of existence, or that you have to simply make some assumptions to get it jump-started. If you can actually tie very distant and dissimilar adventures together in some way to make a consistent story arc, they'll be only too happy to just buy into whatever "railroading" is needed to put them ON the adventure. It is most certainly better to do that than waste hour upon hour hinting, suggesting, baiting, cajoling etc. trying to get players to STUMBLE into the adventure you have prepared so that the real game can move along. :)

[Yora]

My idea is to have the players announce what they want to do and then preparing for that. Preparing adventures and then hoping that the players will eventually want to go there would be impractical.

[Jay R]

I have occasionally sent the party an email with two or three rumors that they hear between adventures. I have one planned in which they will each hear a rumor about the same place, but the rumors don't agree.

Each one will hear a rumor about the Palace Under the Hill, once owned by the greatest wizard of an earlier age. One PC will hear that it once belonged to Merlin. Others will hear that it belonged to Archimago, Mordenkainen, Circe, Olorin, Baba Yagi, etc.

When they find and explore the place, they will eventually discover that its owner was missing a hand and an eye.

[Cliff Sedge]

I often like to have the PCs find pieces of maps, notes, book pages, etc. I make up physical props for most of them that the players can keep in their character folders.

This makes it nearly impossible to forget plot hooks.

As for spoken rumors or bits of lore heard from NPCs, my style of world building and adventure design is that everything is connected and everything is important. This way, no matter which rumors are remembered or not, they all end up pointing to the same major hook eventually.