I have a player who is part of a Cartographer Guild in a homebrew campaign. She keeps getting requested to map very specific areas that always end up being dangerous. The map requests all come from the same person in another city. She continues to take the jobs for the steady income but hasn’t made any move to investigate where all these dangerous requests are coming from. What she doesn’t know: The requests are from a secret high society gambling parlor where the elite use scrying pools to watch locations and place bets on whether or not adventerures will survive.
I know she would love the story arc of finding all of this information out, but she hasn’t made any inclination of trying to figure it out. I feel like I’m making it an obvious hook, please help.
Is it a solo campaign? Another PC or NPC could be prompted to ask why she keeps getting sent only to dangerous areas. Even if you end up having her at a tavern, and someone recognizes her. "Hey, I've just got to ask for your autograph. Watching you kill that monster was great!" -drunk rich NPC "Wait...what?" - PC
Awesome suggestion! Maybe one of the guild mates could ask, the other pc (only 2 player characters) plays a classically dumb barbarian and has few thoughts of his own. (A separate headache, but I have a plan for that)
Perhaps she gets a reputation for leading expeditions only to excessively dangerous areas and the pool of adventurers willing to hire on with her dries up.
If the player is happy taking missions from the same remote source and doesn't want to know more than that there may not be much you can do to get her to bite the hook. Bait a different hook and weave in some information about the secret society in a different way later down the line.
You could also have the representative start asking about what kinds of things the cartographer is afraid of. The intent would be so that the gambling ring could do research to find dangerous areas that feed into her fears. If she doesn't pick up on that, watch the Hunger Games and see how some of the spectators respond. Or have someone ask her about something that they wouldn't know without being there.
Perhaps someone tries to win the pool by cheating and send someone, or several people, to make things difficult for the PCs. Allow one or more to survive, who can point you Lord this or that to have hired them to interfere. They need not know more, just something to get the players wondering why someone rich would try to stop them from succeeding.
Another option - or a second step - could be that they arrive to their next place of danger, only to find fresh corpses that look exactly like them. This time around, the cheater has made sure that those scrying definitely see the PCs fail. The doppelgängers have a letter promising rewards if they wear magical disguises while attempting to reach the same goal as the PCs (which was much more dangerously than they were led to believe). The letter is signed by the same lord.
If the players still don’t care, give up and perhaps just let them be invited to a feast by the big winner of the betting, once a final quest is done. They can then tell the PCs about it all and simply reward them a bit more for making them rich.
I have a player who is part of a Cartographer Guild in a homebrew campaign. She keeps getting requested to map very specific areas that always end up being dangerous. The map requests all come from the same person in another city. She continues to take the jobs for the steady income but hasn’t made any move to investigate where all these dangerous requests are coming from. What she doesn’t know: The requests are from a secret high society gambling parlor where the elite use scrying pools to watch locations and place bets on whether or not adventerures will survive.
I know she would love the story arc of finding all of this information out, but she hasn’t made any inclination of trying to figure it out. I feel like I’m making it an obvious hook, please help.
Edit:spelling
Is it a solo campaign? Another PC or NPC could be prompted to ask why she keeps getting sent only to dangerous areas. Even if you end up having her at a tavern, and someone recognizes her. "Hey, I've just got to ask for your autograph. Watching you kill that monster was great!" -drunk rich NPC "Wait...what?" - PC
Awesome suggestion! Maybe one of the guild mates could ask, the other pc (only 2 player characters) plays a classically dumb barbarian and has few thoughts of his own. (A separate headache, but I have a plan for that)
Perhaps she gets a reputation for leading expeditions only to excessively dangerous areas and the pool of adventurers willing to hire on with her dries up.
If the player is happy taking missions from the same remote source and doesn't want to know more than that there may not be much you can do to get her to bite the hook. Bait a different hook and weave in some information about the secret society in a different way later down the line.
A second great idea. Keep them coming!
You could also have the representative start asking about what kinds of things the cartographer is afraid of. The intent would be so that the gambling ring could do research to find dangerous areas that feed into her fears. If she doesn't pick up on that, watch the Hunger Games and see how some of the spectators respond. Or have someone ask her about something that they wouldn't know without being there.
Perhaps someone tries to win the pool by cheating and send someone, or several people, to make things difficult for the PCs. Allow one or more to survive, who can point you Lord this or that to have hired them to interfere. They need not know more, just something to get the players wondering why someone rich would try to stop them from succeeding.
Another option - or a second step - could be that they arrive to their next place of danger, only to find fresh corpses that look exactly like them. This time around, the cheater has made sure that those scrying definitely see the PCs fail. The doppelgängers have a letter promising rewards if they wear magical disguises while attempting to reach the same goal as the PCs (which was much more dangerously than they were led to believe). The letter is signed by the same lord.
If the players still don’t care, give up and perhaps just let them be invited to a feast by the big winner of the betting, once a final quest is done. They can then tell the PCs about it all and simply reward them a bit more for making them rich.
I really like the feast idea if she doesn’t bite the hook soon. Thank you everyone for the amazing ideas!