d100

Quest Hooks

One-line adventure seeds ready to drop into any session.

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Quest Hooks — 100 entries
d100	Result
1	The miller's daughter sleepwalks to the standing stones every new moon; last night she did not come back.
2	A bounty board names a wolf 'Old Sorrow' with a reward that has tripled overnight.
3	Every clock in town stopped at the same minute; the clockmaker has locked her shop.
4	A noble hires food tasters at triple pay, weekly. The position keeps opening.
5	The village well now echoes with two splashes for every stone dropped.
6	A merchant will pay handsomely for an escort - not for his goods, but for an empty, locked wagon.
7	Children have started drawing the same tower, and no such tower exists. Yet.
8	The old lighthouse keeper signals in code to a sea that has no ships on it.
9	A wedding invitation arrives for the party by name, from a couple they have never met, in a town they have never visited.
10	The temple's eternal flame has begun burning green when certain people walk past.
11	A prisoner due to hang insists he will be gone by morning. He has said this six mornings in a row. He is always right.
12	Farmers report their scarecrows are one field over from where they left them.
13	A cartographer pays for escorts to map a forest that is, according to her older maps, growing.
14	The graveyard's newest headstone bears tomorrow's date.
15	A guild of chimney sweeps suddenly has more gold than the bank, and impeccable manners.
16	Someone is buying every mirror in the district, paying double for cracked ones.
17	A retired adventurer begs the party to return an idol he stole forty years ago - quietly, before 'it notices it is almost home'.
18	Livestock born this spring all have the same white marking: a crescent with a notch.
19	The ferryman's toll has changed: he now asks each passenger for a secret.
20	An abandoned mine has started producing smoke, on schedule, twice a day, like shift changes.
21	A letter arrives for a party member from themselves, dated next month, containing only: 'Do not sell the horse.'
22	The baroness's portrait ages; the baroness does not. She wants the painter found. So does the portrait.
23	Bandits robbed a caravan of nothing but salt, leaving gold and silks untouched. Third time this month.
24	A hermit predicts the weather with perfect accuracy but has begun refusing to predict next Thursday.
25	Sailors swear the new sandbar in the bay was not there at dusk and is shaped like a hand.
26	The librarian will pay for the retrieval of an overdue book. The borrower died sixty years ago. The fine is itemized.
27	Every rat in the city crossed the river last night, heading east, in silence.
28	A dying knight asks the party to deliver his sword to his squire - and to lie to her about how he fell.
29	The village festival needs a fourth judge for the pie contest after the last three vanished. The pies are widely praised.
30	A stranger pays the party to attend an auction and bid on lot 17, whatever it is, at any price. He cannot enter the building himself. He will not say why.
31	Wanted posters appear overnight with a face matching no one - until the innkeeper's son wakes up wearing it.
32	The town's wishing well has started granting wishes, with the precision of a tax auditor and the mercy of one too.
33	All the crows in the region now roost on one dead tree, in shifts, guarding something beneath.
34	A woman hires the party to break INTO prison: her brother is inside, and something else is in there wearing the warden.
35	Milk sours in one specific house within an hour, no matter its source. The family is asking. The house is not telling.
36	The duke's hounds refuse the north woods - all but the oldest, blind one, who pulls at his chain to go.
37	A mapmaker's new map shows a village that no one, including the mapmaker, remembers drawing. The ink is his.
38	A troupe of actors seeks guards; their last three performances ended in weeping and one small riot. They refuse to cut the second act.
39	Each dawn, one more statue stands in the market square. The sculptors' guild denies everything, enviously.
40	A halfling matron wants her stolen recipe book back before the harvest fair; the thief has already opened a bakery. The bread is better. This makes it worse.
41	The monastery bells rang last night. The monastery has been a ruin for a century. The bells were sold decades ago.
42	Fishermen keep catching bottles containing pages of the same diary, in order.
43	The gravedigger wants to show someone something in the oldest grave, but only someone 'who did not grow up here'.
44	A tax collector vanished on the moor road; the crown wants his ledger back. The ledger, per rumors, wants to stay lost.
45	A child's imaginary friend has started leaving real footprints.
46	The alchemist offers a fortune for one honest bottle of tears of joy. Fakes, she says, taste of onions and ambition.
47	Two villages celebrate the same hero's death day - with different bodies in different tombs. Both were just robbed.
48	A courier stumbles into the inn with an arrow in his pack and an urgent letter - addressed to whoever pulls the arrow out.
49	The stars over the valley are correct, say the astronomers, except one, which is new, and getting closer.
50	A ghost politely haunts the bathhouse, but only on days the mayor bathes. The ghost holds a grudge and excellent evidence.
51	The blacksmith's apprentice forged a horseshoe that will not cool. The horse it fits has not been born yet, says the witch, buying drinks, waiting.
52	A caravan seeks guards for the mountain pass; the last convoy arrived safe, on time, and two people larger than when it left.
53	Someone has been paying the town's debts anonymously, in old coins, from a mint that drowned with its city long ago.
54	Hunters found a clearing where autumn never arrived; green leaves, spring birdsong, and a tent, breakfast still warm.
55	The oracle's answers have started rhyming, which she says only happens 'near the end of a verse'. She wants to know whose.
56	A widow will pay someone to lose at cards, convincingly, to her grandson, who has bet the farm against a stranger nobody else can see.
57	Roadside shrines along the king's highway are turning to face away from the capital, one per night.
58	A dragon has requested, in writing, on excellent paper, a meeting to discuss 'a matter of inheritance'.
59	The harvest doubled in every field but one, which grew a spiral of black wheat the birds will not touch and the miller will not grind.
60	A knight stands vigil at a bridge, awaiting a challenger who died before the knight was born. His order pays well for a resolution. Any resolution.
61	All the town's dogs are digging at the same spot in the churchyard, taking turns, working in shifts, quiet and organized.
62	Someone sold the tavern a barrel that pours a different vintage each night, improving steadily. The innkeeper wants ten more; the seller's trail ends at a cliff.
63	A message in a dead language appears on the schoolhouse slate each morning. The teacher has begun to understand it, which should not be possible, and also it is a countdown.
64	The ratcatchers' guild posts a contract for a single rat: white, one eye, answers to 'Chancellor', last seen reading.
65	A pilgrim caravan needs protection to a shrine that moves - reliably, a mile per year, and this year, for the first time, backward.
66	Every portrait in the manor now looks slightly to the left. The lady of the house has stopped entering the west wing, where 'left' points.
67	The city fountain's water tastes of iron on days someone will die by violence. Today it tastes of iron. It is barely dawn.
68	An entire village writes with the same handwriting now. New arrivals take about a week to match.
69	The old fort's garrison of six reports for supplies every month. The muster rolls say the fort was decommissioned, and the six died defending it.
70	A moneylender forgives all debts, closes shop, and books passage to the coast within one frantic hour of receiving a small parcel. The parcel is still on his counter.
71	Beekeepers report red honey and unanimous swarm decisions. The bees have begun escorting certain travelers and turning back others.
72	The bell in the mine rings from below now, at shift end, though the lower levels flooded years ago and the crews, they say, all got out.
73	A famous sword hangs in the guildhall; its plaque changed overnight from 'slayer of the beast' to 'borrowed'.
74	The orphanage cellar door has grown a second lock, on the inside, installed by no one; the matron wants an armed adult present when she asks the children about it.
75	A comet returns generations early; the astronomers' guild offers a fortune for the notes of the one dead scholar who predicted it.
76	Someone is un-robbing graves: refilling tunnels, returning bones, restoring goods. Last night they left a note asking for help with 'the big one'.
77	The spymaster wants a package delivered without the courier being told what it is or who takes it - they will simply know, she says, when they see the recipient.
78	Snow fell on one house in midsummer and melted everywhere except the outline of something large on the roof, sitting.
79	The village speaks in careful, practiced praise of the new lord. All of it in the same words. All of it, on reflection, in meter.
80	A fisherman's net brought up a locked door. Just a door. Through the keyhole: candlelight, and someone humming.
81	The theater's understudy knows lines from the sequel the playwright has not written yet, and the playwright is losing a race against her own dreams.
82	Border guards report the neighboring kingdom's watchtower mirrors their flag signals perfectly, half a second early.
83	A saint's relic finger has started pointing. The church would like to know at what before the congregation does.
84	This season's ale shows brief images in its foam; the brewers want it studied, the tavern wants it advertised, and the images want, apparently, to show a location.
85	Someone taught the market's mynah birds a name, and a thousand birds now say it when a certain hooded woman passes. She pays the party to find out who, before the birds learn her other name.
86	A plague doctor arrived in a town with no plague, rented a room for a month, and asks each morning if anyone has 'started dreaming of the yellow field yet'.
87	The stone bridge's seventh arch drips upward on holy days.
88	A gnome sells insurance against a disaster she will not name; her previous three towns collected in full.
89	The royal mint reports one die striking coins a year older than they should be - and the extra coins keep surfacing with someone's teeth marks in them.
90	All the candles in the sealed chandlery burned down overnight, and the wax pooled into a single word.
91	The huntmaster's lodge displays a trophy nobody remembers mounting; its glass eyes track the youngest member of any group.
92	A village's ancestor festival went long: the ancestors have stayed a second week, doing chores, and the food is running out and nobody is brave enough to be rude first.
93	Two identical strangers arrived at opposite gates at the same hour, each carrying half a map and a fresh grudge for the other.
94	The old windmill turns against the wind when the miller's widow sings, and she has been paid in gold to sing every night this week by a man she is fairly sure was made of moths.
95	A treasure map is being sold openly, cheaply and legally by the city: to the winner of tonight's riddle contest at the courthouse. The magistrate looks exhausted.
96	Someone replaced the inn's cellar wall with an identical wall, one brick of which is warm, sounds hollow, and has been mortared with, on inspection, cake.
97	The town's oldest resident turned 111 and began speaking a language older than the founding - fluently, mid-sentence, and only to her cat, who has started answering.
98	The night watch found the same man asleep in three locked towers in one night; he remembers only 'the sorting'. He is terrified of being sorted again.
99	A god's statue wept last spring and the temple sold the tears; now every buyer is having the same dream, and one of them offers a fortune to make it stop before the seventh night.
100	Roll twice more on this table; the two hooks are secretly the same story.