Missing Persons File

The Banality of Overused Hooks

I’ve been a player in an online 5e game. It wasn’t my first choice by any means, but it’s with some old friends, some of whom were excited about the new edition, so I’m up for playing anything they want to play. Not only is it a 5e game, but the GM is running a Sword Coast campaign, possibly inspired by his play through of Baldur’s Gate 3. It’s structured as a sandbox, in that the hooks lead to various 5e modules, and we can choose between them, though in practice this has meant that we started in a Saltmarsh-ish town and then proceeded to follow the Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure path (though we may be venturing toward the Waterdeep: Dragonheist adventure path now).

It’s interesting, I suppose, as a bookend to the 5e era. Though, Gus L did hit the nail on the head in his review of Lost Mines:

Forgotten Realms was the worst thing to happen to D&D, a terrible setting that reeks of bathos and takes itself far too seriously. It plunders everything cliched and overused from Tolkien but abandons all the strange sadness and the mythological references. It fills the land with huge civilized bastions of good/order like Waterdeep and exhaustively defines their systems of governance, but allows these nations to be plagued by trifling enemies like goblin tribes. Forgotten Realms embraces a pedantic faux-medievalism, but then uses a contemporary positivist understanding to explain magic that allows for cutesy magical technology to gloss over the inconvenient aspects of the pre-modern. Most offensively, most objectionably, Forgotten Realms is a dense, full, world - so steeped in cliched lore and laid out so extensively in dull gazetteers that there is no room for a GM's creativity without excising some of the existing setting and map…This is really the first example of the core problem with Lost Mine: every situation, encounter or description that could be drained of weirdness, mystery and wonder has been and most have instead been remade with the dullest versions of standard fantasy tropes the designers could find.

Anyway, I have not read the module, so this is more an account of what it has been like to play through it. Specifically, I’ve noticed something about the quest structure.

Our quest chain began by us PCs guarding a caravan. We were then asked to recover missing person A. That NPC, one rescued, then asked us to find and save his friend, missing person B. That NPC then asked us to find his brothers, missing people C and D. In between these adventures, our downtime in Phandalin had various individuals ask us to save others: missing person E who ended up being trapped in a windmill, and missing family F who had been captured by the “Redbrand” gang terrorizing/ruling the town. My fellow players took all of these hooks.

Very few and quite paltry rewards were offered for completing these various tasks; in fact, upon saving the friend, missing person A gave us half the reward in the form of an IOU! Instead, all of these adventure hooks basically appealed to what Gus, again, calls the “strange assumption of character goodness” in the adventure. Whereas a game like b/x assumes the characters are risking life and limb out of desperation to make some money (via finding treasure), 5e is a game that pins its heroism on the good-hearted nature of the characters, to the point where a scenario like Lost Mines would start to fall apart without it.

Saving a missing person is, in that way, an easy quest hook for a designer who just needs the PCs to get to the next bit of content. 5e PCs are, after all, almost superheroic even at level one, and in the background is the metagame assumption that every combat will be ‘balanced,’ i.e. easy (we have only faced moderate danger in one combat). This assumption not only means that the PCs are not risking anything much by volunteering to save a random missing person, but that it would almost seem unbecoming to refuse these calls to adventure, or even to ask for a tangible reward.

What this devolves into is a version of what Justin Alexander called a “cargo cult” adventure structure: “An NPC tells you where to go, you go there, and you find another NPC who tells you where to go.” In our case the NPCs we encountered had basically one message for us: go save missing person X, be a hero, level up, and when you need to get to the next level’s content, don’t worry, there will be another person that needs saving. In other words, the linearity of the adventure is not just in the sequence of events, but in the assumptions it makes about how the PCs will negotiate those events and situations.

This sits rather awkwardly, by the way, with the means that 5e gives PCs to be heroic, namely a series of tactical combat encounters that, when viewed at a slight distance, sure seem to be borderline war crimes on a 5x5 grid. But something about the heroic mission of saving this or that person seems to do the magic trick of obscuring that fact, so that wiping out a cave of goblins is justifiable as long we rescue the one human.

Granted, it would be unfair to label this simply a 5e problem. In fact, I’ve been preparing a Dolmenwood campaign, and noticed that the ‘missing child’ is also an easy hook for that campaign setting, in part because of it being a trope in fairytale-type stories. I don’t think it can never be used, but perhaps, like all hook types, should be used sparingly.

What’s needed for the missing person quest hook, then, are for the stakes to be raised so that there are tangible drawbacks to simply doing the ‘right thing.’ And, there could also be complications after the fact that change the context of the situation. In sum, taking on the quest needs to be a player choice with both benefits and drawbacks.

Here are some ideas to complicate the “random missing person” hook for one’s game:

1. The missing person is happy where they are and does not want to be saved

2. Deception: someone is trying to lure the PCs into a trap. How can this be telegraphed?

3. The missing person is someone important to the PCs plans, but their absence comes when the PCs don’t have time to spare

4. The quest giver, perhaps an anxious parent worried about their child, is actually an NPC antagonist in disguise. They are trying to get the PCs to do their dirty work for them in some way

5. There are two abducted NPCs, and they are in separate locations. The PCs can only save one of them.

6. The missing person cannot be rescued without at the least the potential for harm to come to others. For example, perhaps a prince has been captured, and his rescue will necessitate the sacrifice of ordinary soldiers.

Well, those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. Please put any additional ideas you may have in the comments!