An ancient book sits at the center of the party’s quest, and the problem is immediately apparent: pages have been removed, stolen, or lost over the centuries, and without them the book is useless. Someone or something doesn’t want its contents known, which explains why the missing pages are scattered and why finding them won’t be a simple matter of checking the obvious places. The book’s subject matter is for the DM to decide, but whatever it contains should feel worth protecting, worth hiding, and worth sending a party across the world to recover.
Each missing page is its own small adventure. Some will be held by collectors who don’t know what they have. Others will be guarded by someone who knows exactly what they have and has no intention of giving it up. A page might be hidden inside another document, or locked in a vault, or in the possession of a creature that has been sitting on it for three hundred years without understanding its significance. The DM controls how many pages are missing and how hard each one is to recover, which makes this hook as short or as expansive as the campaign needs it to be.
When the last page is finally slotted into place and the book is complete, it doesn’t simply answer the question the party started with. It opens a new one. Whatever the book reveals points toward the next chapter of the campaign, something larger and more dangerous than the retrieval quest that preceded it. The party walked in looking for answers and walked out with a map to something they weren’t expecting.
Party Level: Any. The scope and difficulty of each page recovery scales to wherever the party is in the campaign.
World: Any, but this campaign hook likely entails a great deal of travel to exotic and dangerous places.
Rules-set: Any
Note: Obviously this is a high-level premise for a long-running campaign, with a great deal of flexibility built in. – SW
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