Any gamer who grew up playing some sort of Palladium product probably knows what a hook, line, and sinker adventure is. But to those who don’t, I thought I would introduce the concept since it is a great down and dirty way to build an adventure. It’s quick, it’s easy, and it includes a little twist at the end to add some spice into your gaming session.
Hook, line, and sinker adventures were a concept that was heavily promoted in Palladium years ago but has also been introduced in other games as well. The process goes like this. To design the framework of an adventure, you only need the three elements.
Hook: This is what draws the party into the adventure.
Line: This is what the party has to do in the adventure.
Sinker: This is the twist, or possible complication, to the adventure.
And that’s it. That is the whole adventure. It sounds really simple and that is the beauty of it because it is. With this general outline, a gamemaster can brainstorm dozens, if not hundreds, of different adventure ideas for their campaign.
When I was a teenager running the Palladium Fantasy Roleplaying Game, I would brainstorm dozens of adventure ideas using this method. My only roleplaying “claim to fame” actually came while using this process.
Many moons ago I was brainstorming different adventure ideas for my Palladium FRPG campaign. I happened to post a few of them on my Palladium FRPG fan website that I ran back in the day, before creating websites was as easy as it is now. I posted a simple hook, line, and sinker adventure titled “Gorum’s Bridge” that caught the attention of Palladium writer, Bill Coffin. Bill loved the basic premise of the adventure and asked if he could use it in his upcoming sourcebook, PFRPG Book 9: The Baalgor Wastelands. Like any young fanboy, I agreed immediately.
What Bill did with my simple concept for the adventure is a perfect example of what any gamemaster can do with a hook, line, and sinker adventure. He took a simple idea and made it better. Here is how the process worked from start to finish.
I created a simple hook, line, and sinker adventure that goes something like this:
Gorum’s Bridge – Adventure
Hook: The party is traveling along the road and comes upon a large bridge that they must use to cross a large ravine.
Line: As they approach the bridge, a large troll appears out of seemingly nowhere on the bridge and demands they answer his riddle in order to cross the bridge.
Sinker: The troll doesn’t actually care if the party answers his riddle at all. He’s a bandit and he’s just stalling the group while his cadre flank and surprise attack the player characters.
That is it. That is the whole adventure. I think my original draft added a little bit of additional flavor, like the troll pretended to be a wizard but in reality he just had a very weak cloak of invisibility item he was wearing. I think I also scoured the internet and found a simple riddle I could ask the players.
But that was it. That was the entire adventure. And that’s all any good hook, line, and sinker adventure needs is that little nugget idea that you can use to develop the rest of your adventure around.
When Bill Coffin asked to use my idea in his sourcebook, he asked for permission to modify it slightly to seamlessly fit it into the sourcebook. When he did, he took that very simple idea and fleshed it out to make the simple concept even bigger. I believe the final adventure was approximately two pages or so in the sourcebook. It included area specific information that fit it into the Baalgor Wastelands sourcebook and statistics for various creatures and items but not a whole lot else.
The core of the adventure, though, remained the same. And that is the hallmark of any good hook, line, and sinker adventure.
If you haven’t tried this method for brainstorming adventure ideas, go ahead and give it a try. It can take a little while in the beginning to get used to. In no time at all though, you can develop a very large list of adventure ideas that can become your seeds to a great campaign.