Any sites or periodicals dedicated to campaign ideas/concepts?

Question

Like many GMs, I'm perfectly content to sit around and think up new ideas for campaigns or one-shots (with only about 10% of these ideas ever making it to the table). Also like most, I really enjoy just sitting around and listening to/reading other people's creative ideas. These are best when presented as two or three sentencea giving the basic idea of the concept (and allowing the reader to fill in the blanks). Dragon Magazine would periodically run articles on world and campaign building that fit this mold nicely (unfortunately, the new Dragon seems to eschew this older practice).

Are there any sites (regularly updated preferably) or periodicals that are either dedicated to or focused on short campaign hooks/plot ideas?

Answer 1

Here's an answer I got from a friend. It's full of goodness.

My #1 pick: http://strolen.com/ This site is full of awesomeness. Visit, use and contribute.

Some random generators you might find useful:

• http://www.chaoticshiny.com/adventuregen.php
• http://donjon.bin.sh/adventure/
• http://www.squid.org/tools/quest/index.html
• http://www.springhole.net/generators/plotgenerators.htm
• http://www.roleplayingtips.com/city-encounter-generator/

Other resources you might like:

• http://www.roleplayingtips.com/5-room-dungeons/
• http://dmtools.org/gens.php?nav=benign
• http://www.encounteraday.com/
• http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/22094841/1001_Eberron_Encounter_Ideas_%28both_combat_and_non-combat%29
• http://revolution21days.blogspot.com/2007/10/list-found-in-old-notebook.html
• http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=380763

Answer 2

You could try the Campaign Builders' Guild. It's a community centered on campaign and world building with their own forum. While the CBG follows a more general approach (from one-shots to gaming systems and whole campaign settings) you may still find what you're looking for.

Answer 3

The Knights of the Dinner Table magazine has a regular feature entitled, "Bait & Tackle".

This is a one-two page spread with 5+ setups for encounters. If you're stuck for an idea, or just want some help sprinkling some interesting ideas around, I've found them to be a great resource.

A recent example - The party is attending the funeral of a friend. During the proceedings a pallbearer trips, the coffin opens and is filled with rocks. There are ghouls/ghasts living in tunnels below the graveyard. They provide treasure from their victims to the caretaker of the cemetery for access to the freshest corpses.

Answer 4

It's extremely bare bones, but there is a "Random Adventure Element Generator" that will spit out a collection of adventure elements in a random order. If you string them together in a way that's appropriate to your game system then you can come up with some interesting stuff.

Answer 5

My two Points of Light products present four mini settings each to use. As I tried to use concepts that apply to most fantasy campaigns, many people seemed to find them useful.

Each setting has a numbered hex map, a short background outlining it's history and current situation, a section describing various regions and/or organizations focusing on geography, and finally a list of locales keyed to one of the numbered hexes.

I known several people who used one map or sections of one map in their campaigns. Many of the regions and locales can be broken out and used in a different setting.

Answer 6

A significant forum thread on the topic: here.

Some non updated links: Big list of ideas

And in published form: Eureka