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Seek Adventure Prompts

by Mike on 8 December 2025

For a year I ran a Shadowdark campaign built off of six pages of material in Cursed Scroll 1 outlining the setting of the Gloaming. The Cursed Scroll zines, by Arcane Library, do a fantastic job of offering tiny bits of useful information that sparks our imaginations to build our own adventures and campaigns. The best campaign world books and sourcebooks offer these actionable adventure prompts as well – little passages of text that inspire us to build entire adventures.

Here are two examples from Kobold Press's Midgard World Book, one of my favorite and most-used campaign sourcebooks:

Ruins of Pharos: Once a seat of learning and a hub of trade, Pharos was razed during the dragon invasion across the Mavressa Straits and has never been rebuilt. Its ruins are swampy, but towers, hillocks, and even half-flooded caverns abound. The place is home to dark dragons and darker ghosts.

Ruins of Siyaz: A great experiment by a kobold alchemist named Mektree the Mad went horribly wrong in Siyaz, releasing vampiric mists and flesh-rotting vapors that turned the town from a thriving metropolis to a tomb almost overnight. Scattered bands of gnolls use its empty buildings, but the dragon urmanli consider it a place best left fallow.

These two small phrases give me enough to build multi-session adventures with hidden ruins, strange monuments, cracked statues of forgotten gods, old vaults filled with traps and terrors, and factions of deadly enemies to face.

We may feel like we need fully fleshed out adventures or campaigns with keyed maps, detailed location descriptions, and intricate plots but often, when we read such adventures, we say something like "that's not how I would have done it." Grabbing onto an adventure prompt from a published campaign setting lets us build adventures the way we want.

When I wrote City of Arches I had this concept of adventure prompts firmly in mind. I wrote hundreds of short location descriptions each with their own adventure hook – not to fill out the whole city but offer enough of a prompt for GMs to grab them and run.

What Else Do We Need?

Prompts help push us in a particular direction but it may be only the first step in turning these prompts into a real adventure, quest, scenario, or session for our game. What else do we need? Here are my ideas:

A quest – Why are the characters going there? What's their goal?
A motivation – Why would the characters take the risk? Greed, altruism, and discovery are often three powerful motivators.
A more detailed location – Think about what the location looks like. I like to start with a good Dyson map.
Inhabitants – Who's there? Maybe there are multiple factions.
A situation – What are the inhabitants doing there?

If you need some motivations for the above items, check out the various tables in the Lazy GM's Resource Document.

That helps fill out details, at which point we can fill out many of our eight steps for the next session we're going to run.

The Advantage of Published Sourcebooks over Published Adventures

Building adventures off of prompts is why I prefer sourcebooks over published adventures these days. Those little prompts let me capitalize off of the tremendous work put into big sourcebooks and still write custom adventures built around ideas that excite me and the backgrounds, motivations, and directions of the characters my players bring to the table.

When you're looking for material to aid you in preparing and running your games, look for material that offers adventure prompts to inspire you and let your imagination run wild.

More Sly Flourish Stuff

Each week I record an episode of the Lazy RPG Talk Show (also available as a podcast) in which I talk about all things in tabletop RPGs.

Last Week's Lazy RPG Talk Show Topics

Here are last week's topics with time stamped links to the YouTube video.

Patreon Questions and Answers

Also on the Talk Show, I answer questions from Sly Flourish Patrons. Here are last week's questions and answers.

Talk Show Links

Here are links to the sites I referenced during the talk show.

Last week I also posted a YouTube video on Smuggling Wyvonir Part 1 – Dragon Empire Prep Session 46.

RPG Tips

Each week I think about what I learned in my last RPG session and write them up as RPG tips. Here are this week's tips:

Print NPC art so players can see who they’re talking to.
It’s easier to convince players to try a new system if you offer it for a handful of sessions. Reduce the initial commitment.
Join characters together with bonds and relationships.
Build characters together and bind them to the core motivation of the campaign during your session zero.
Keep character names in front of you during your game.
Good handouts bring players into your fictional world.
Designate a rules lawyer who helps look up rules during the game.

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