Adventure Hooks

I now have a rudimentary setting for the characters to explore. I don't foresee it growing large enough to support full sandbox style play, but it is working for me.  I need to find ways for a GM to nudge the players towards the dungeon that is a little more fleshed out than a rumor table.

This is where my hooks will come in. Hooks can work just like railroading, in that instead of ram-rodding your players on a liner path, you drag them through it. I haven't encountered anyone advocating "on rails" roleplaying, so my hooks will have to be somewhat subtle.  I suppose I can provide  a few ranging from dragging the players towards the dungeon to "what, the mountain? Nah, its the woods to the east you have to worry about."

The Death of a Minor Noble

A prisoner managed to escape the church's pit mine prison through the dungeon, and came out the
other side with a weapon found in the tech level of the dungeon. The weapon had a disposable charge, which means that it was leaking dangerous alien radiation and fumes. Keeping it in his possession, the prisoner was willfully killing himself in the name of revenge. The target of his fury was a minor noble who supplied the church with a steady stream of laborers, convicting commoners for any perceived slight.

The prisoner unleashed the weapon on the noble, and was quickly dispatched. His identity confirmed, the family of the noble wish to uncover the mysteries of the strange artifact, and discover how he managed to escape the prison.

I've got stripes...

A more extreme (railroady) variant of the above hook is to have the characters fall victim to the noble, and find themselves thrown into the pit prison. This hook could also be used as the logical conclusion to sandbox behavior if the characters run amok and try to set themselves up as lords of the mining town. In either event, the players would discover a secret entrance into the dungeon through the pit mine.

Secret Cultist

One of the player characters is secretly a member of the cult, complete with hidden gestures and signals to communicate with the GM. They long to bring about the end of the world, and have been sent to investigate the progress of the cultists now active in the region.  I like this option a lot, and it borrows heavily from a Star Wars one shot that +Random Wizard ran where one of the players was a secretly a Sith.

She was able to use force powers to secretly impair the success of the party, signaling Mundi that she was so inclined by tossing her scarf over a different shoulder. In this particular instance, the secret cultist character will try to trick the other characters into helping detonate the "world buster" bomb hidden deep in the wreckage.