Hi, as the title states my players are moving faster then Homer Simpson towards a sign that says free donuts. I need some one-shot ideas for side missions i can send them on for townsfolk around the mainland. There's plenty room on my map for new areas so i just need some idea fuel for that while i work on the main storyline. Im a new DM and i love being descriptive so even base ideas will take off for me once they're in my brain. Thanks for any help you guys can give. 

staying in an inn over night , they're sat eating breakfast before setting off for the day, there's a loud banging on the door. a frantic mother is asking the innkeep if he's seen their child, one of the innkeeps grandkids

your party over hear it and convince them to help shouldn't be hard if they're a good aligned party. short tracking stint, they pick up some childs tracks follow them a bit a find they join up with a larger set, then the childs tracks stop, the adults sized ones go to an old derelict building, find a bit of floor collapsed,  make  a small dungeon inside you find a strange person living in one of the rooms, they have the child laid out on a straw bed, but when the party appears it screams and runs off to hide round a corner.
if they inspect the child they will find it's been bitten by a poisonous snake and the stranger has been attempting to heal it with some herbal remedies.
speak tot he stranger they find out it's terrified of just about everyone and hiding out here, it's a very badly burned tiefling. who has no friends and no where decent to live. 
resolution party cures the child of their poisoning, they convince the tiefling to go back to the tavern with them, 
a bit of negotiation they get cheap lodgings in the inn  when they're in town, the tiefling gets a job in the inns kitchens and somewhere to stay in the inn. que side quest arc about evil cult who were going to sacrifice the tiefling as they consider him defective He's good not evil), the cult is a small small group of tieflings who sacrifice by burning, but he escaped mid sacrifice. hence the burns.

While travelling they find a farm building that has had it's door smashed in, there's blood all over inside the farmhouse but no bodies. after a search they find some tracks they follow them back and find a group of ogres or trolls living in a cave. some fighting to follow and a bit of loot.

someone from your main storyline sends thieves to nick something from your party or assassins to stop them if they know who they are. make a ncie fight that should fill a session with very little work.

while travelling. they camp down for the night and make themselves some stew. there's a bit of leftover because they made too much.  later in the night the ladle lifts from the cooking pot and there's a loud slurping noise while the ladle empties. then there is a rummaging in someones back pack/saddle bags and things start falling out onto the floor. 
the culprits are pyk a pixie paladin and his mount furmer the pseudodragon. 
later on in the night they encounter a harrassed druid who is searching for pyk and furmer as he's supposed to be travelling with them to a nearby druidic grove. a task which he describes as trying to heard invisible cats.

thank you so much for these ideas! they really sound like fun ideas my players will love! 

It's also an opportunity for you to sandbox it for awhile and work on your improv skills ;)

You could try letting the players drive: "OK, what do you want to do next?"

Maybe a character has an issue in their backstory they want to track down; maybe there's something they ran across in the adventure that they want to go check out in more detail - they'll likely think of something they want to do.

If the party shifts from passive - hey, this adventure is happening to us, and we're reacting and trying to deal with unfolding circumstances - to active - hey, we're on a mission to do ________, let's go! - then you just have to figure out how the world reacts to the party for awhile.

that could be fun ill have to ask for their backstories again see if theres anything i could exploit to get them to be more active instead of reactive thanks!

In my campaign I had a lot of scripted events happen to the players, it was a semi-railroad where I would have let them wander off track if they chose to but it would have come back around to what the goal was I had put forth. I used these to give the players the information they needed to learn how the world worked, how politics worked, building a framework for them to create reasonable expectations and get a feel for their characters. 

Then came the point in time where the players hit all of the marks that I had put down on paper, similar to where you are now, and I decided to do something I've always wanted to try. I stopped steering the game and put the wheel in the players' hands. It's a hard transition at first, on both sides of the screen, but it has a profound impact on how much more the players invest themselves into the game. 

I have the majority of the world sketched out, all of the plots and story arcs are in play, I know what the end game is of each of the BBEGs and world events will be if the players don't interact with them. I don't need to do any more work on this stuff, it's already done. Now my only job is to keep track of how those stories and plots progress and change based on what the characters want to do. I also don't have to come up with anything since the players will ask questions and I use those questions to make new quests and adventures based on what the players feel is important to them. 

Plan one side quest, put it into play but don't give them anything more than the plot hook and a goal. Let them start to make decisions on how they want to resolve it. After this side quest is done, you simply have to look at them and ask "What do you do now?" Based on their response, you start to have the world react to them, you are now in the seat of a DM, the guy who adjudicates the actions of the players, rather than the carrot and stick you've been up to this point.

Since its spooky season try looking at possibly stringing together the Halloween themed encounters James Heck has been posting right here on the website, I'm sure your party would appreciate the seasonal themed adventures and it would be easy for you to adapt to most situations.

thanks for the great idea! ill throw one of the side quests i debated on but ditched for expediency in to slow them down. 

@liam i have thought about thatbecause they look so fun! i didnt expect so many people to respond so fast with ideas and tips!

This is more of a independent one shot tat i did but my players seemed to enjoy the story and the different elements i put into it. The story was that the players had their choice of a list of circus performers and workers who are employed/enslaved at the traveling circus. After they would chose their characters they would need to make checks in order to correctly perform their act or job during a performance and would be punished depending on how many times they fail or how bad they fail by the ring leader. The goal of the one shot is for the players to team up and with the help of an elderly goblin worker escape the circus and fight their way out and earn their freedom. I hope this helps and i wish you luck.

that could be a fun spin on a session to just a refreshing hey guys main campaigns on break heres a delightful one-shot. thank you!

Quote from DMThac0 >>

 

I have the majority of the world sketched out, all of the plots and story arcs are in play, I know what the end game is of each of the BBEGs and world events will be if the players don't interact with them. I don't need to do any more work on this stuff, it's already done.

I'm jealous :) I aspire to this. Never seem to have the time to get it all written out :)

Quote from Vedexent >>

Quote from DMThac0 >>

 

I have the majority of the world sketched out, all of the plots and story arcs are in play, I know what the end game is of each of the BBEGs and world events will be if the players don't interact with them. I don't need to do any more work on this stuff, it's already done.

 

I'm jealous :) I aspire to this. Never seem to have the time to get it all written out :)

 it's not that difficult to do if you're systematic about it and it's only a sketch other than the map. it's the refine, modify and re write section that can potentially become a lifes quest.. i'm currently running a campaign which is constrained by having the party members be part of a religious order based in a temple. who receive orders from the head priest, that's their mission, go to a place find information./ speak to someone with regard to info they have already found out, 
i have previously run entire campaigns where the only prep a did was rolling up loads of npc's monsters and loot.  drew a region map, then made notes once they'd played it, to keep things consistent if they returned to a place. everything else was wing it. even many of the dungeon maps were drawn by one of the players as they walked through it, 
though pyk and fermer from my previous post were a random encounter roll for the current group a few weeks back, they're now written into the campaign proper as they know some info which the players need to further their investigation. the tiefling/ small child encounter i described earlier were also the result of a random encounter roll. 
you don't need that much written down

This is the current state of my campaign.

I have sketch notes for all factions, and NPCs, basic node-edge graph type maps for most areas that I have mapped ( most areas the players haven't been into are just lore and rumor they've heard about: "it is known"), one or two colored-in-hex style maps for a couple of regions the party is running around in.

Campaign and World Events are done "as needed": take list of all power agencies, figure out what they'll do next, figure out where they conflict and interact, judge who will win, update world.

Most of it lives in my head. 

I agree that works well enough, and the results are acceptable. It also helps if you have the assumptions and tropes of the so-called default setting to fall back on; I don't, as I have a completely homebrew world. I don't even have standard non-human races.

But what DMThac0 is describing a) is a lot of work up front, b) really reduces the ongoing workload on the DM, and c) can lead to a much richer, complex, and nuanced world and set of unfolding events. 

I agree you don't need that to have a satisfying, functional, and enjoyable campaign - but it can be so much easier and better if you have that level of development put into it already. It's why the Forgettern Realms source material is so damn detailed and comprehensive.

@captaincarrot: I usually take that route with my games. It's much less stressful to simply respond to what my players do. 

@Vedexent: I do have some experience in writing fully fleshed out campaign settings. I i helped write some of Greyhawk and I did video game design for a couple AAA games. Its It's not as time consuming now after having learned some of the tricks of the trade. However, you're not wrong in that the endeavor can become all consuming.

just as an aside, did anyone get the very bad pun and easteregg with fermer, the soup and bread stealing pseudo dragon, you might have to possibly be british and a certain age for the easter egg.?

my players enjoyed the side event i had, only 2 were available for play this weekend so after a short jaunt in the mines id made for 3-4 man group (not that good at dulling down to lower group numbers yet)  they bolted out of the mine and headed towards town, one stayed behind at a clearing where some "friendly" NPCs had made camp and the other headed back to town and along the way found a special "shiny rock"(sapphire the size of a grown adult males fist) gets it appraised at the mages guild. the receptionist takes to back room to have guild appraiser have it, time passes and the guild leader comes running into the guild then into the back, shortly thereafter my players start hearing wet smacking sounds, they get to the back then the stairs up right as TENTACLES start breaking through the wall. (turns out the gem held a KRAKEN) so now i had to explain the scene of destruction as a kraken basically breaks out of a building in the middle of a town on what was otherwise a normal day. Next weekend i'm thinking of running the Sea hag one-shot and maybe some of the ideas you guys have given me. (sea hag would work well since its on an island) you guys are so awesomely helpful thanks so much!!!!!

I pull from this collection of one-page dungeons when I need a quick backup plan, and my players have had a blast in some of them! All you'd need to do is come up with a hook that gets them to said dungeon!

Shotgun wedding. One of my plots went off on this weird tangent where they found themselves having to offer up a member of their party to marry this feywild fairy gal, and I thought they were going to fight, and instead they got REALLY EXCITED ABOUT PLANNING THE WEDDING! It was unexpected and hilarious to watch. They got so excited about planning the wedding that all I had to do was sit back and giggle.

Just remember that every interaction they’ve had is a potential hook. Every enemy who survived. Every enemy they killed who had someone left to avenge them. Every shopkeep or damsel they cheated or helped or ignored. The characters have families and histories and obligations and emotional attachments. Leveraging this material is the stuff that will make your world real.