[D&D-5e] Zar - Reluctant heirs - (WIP / Need feedback pls)

[braintitan]

You could combine some of these ideas to set the hook. Take the idea of a illness and combine it with an invitation from an old friend and you have a old friend has found a cure for the Illness your town is experiencing - so you are sent to the capital to obtain it and when you arrive you find them missing.... other options like that one too. Just my 2 cents.

[MoonZar]

Originally Posted by Amarga

I don't have any suggestions but I'm definitely keeping an eye on this one Zar!
(As for 5e I can't deny that I've broken my vows to 3.5 when it comes to PbP)

Thanks buddy!

[leftyyy88]

I've got a few thoughts, some of which were mentioned in earlier posts but I'd like to expand on them. Other ideas are fresh, I'm not a zombie yet. Also, I'm really liking this world. Excited to see where this goes even if I don't get to play.

Where are the farms? You mention miners and treasure hunters and other workers. But none of these people produce food. OK, so the food comes from the countryside... but people are fleeing the countryside. How are there any small towns left to produce the migrants or food if everyone is either fleeing to the city or dying from the monsters/winter? This is more world-building than hook-building, and may honestly have no effect on players crawling through dungeons. But I figured I'd bring it up.

Class systems/mechanics: You probably have some idea about what is going to be allowed/disallowed from the meta side of things in your homebrew world. But it's worth keeping in the front of your mind. Divine classes will need a deity (which it seems like you have covered). Wizards will need resources to have studied. Warlocks will need patrons. Etc. And someone mentioned this earlier about undead being new in this world, but spell lists must be managed. What's available? What events would have had to happen to lead to someone developing a spell to do ___? (ie. turn undead spells that someone earlier mentioned would have only come about because they encountered undead, right?)

Class background for classes with training: wizard, monk, and other classes (arguably even fighters going to a fighting school) spend a lot of time learning/studying before becoming an adventurer. Everyone in this world seems to be either a worker or a migrant. Art and academia seem to be only for the elite few nobles. Would these classes be disallowed? Would they have alternate methods of learning (ie. a monk hermit that learned to fend off robbers with their bare hands, a wizard that learned via trial and error or experimental method).

Hooks for people already in the city? Workers who are tired of immigrants, refugees who are tired of being disdained, anyone who is tired of the nobles. You have it planned that the players will be migrants coming to the city, but it's entirely plausible that people already living in the city might want to rise up and do something about the problems in the city. Every story needs an impetus to change. If Luke's uncle and aunt weren't killed by stormtroopers, he would have stayed on Tatooine. So some of the people in the city might want to change, this hook leads them to finding the same contacts as the migrant players, and the party is born.

[MoonZar]

Where are the farms? You mention miners and treasure hunters and other workers. But none of these people produce food. OK, so the food comes from the countryside... but people are fleeing the countryside. How are there any small towns left to produce the migrants or food if everyone is either fleeing to the city or dying from the monsters/winter?

That's one of the biggest mysteries in the city, where the food provided by the Archivist is produced? It's part of the plot.

[EMIW]

I'm imagining a situation like Red Dwarf (obviously less sitcom) where the town is built in the only safe part of the ruins of the old city, and they are slowly spreading out, encountering new issues as they expand. But if the town is overcrowded, what is preventing them from spreading out into the rest of the old city? Is it tainted/full of monsters? What stops these dangers entering the town/why is the town safe?