Hooking the Players onto AD&D1 Published Adventure Plot Hooks

[grodog]

Yes, we played it out - but not usually in the fashion that the module suggested. I blended the module with the campaign, so patrons changed, or the group got some other form of hook (e.g. an old treasure map, a mysterious clue in an old book, rumors, etc).

Which, I believe, was the intent behind the hooks in the first place.

Absolutely!

For me, it's less a question of edition or campaign continuity than maturity as a gamer: when I was a kid, we ran modules straight-up, with the original background, and often using the tournament characters too; as we grew older (I started gaming at 7 years old), we started to foodle with the modules more in terms of both background/setting, and content, in order to a) change them up a bit so that we could play them again, but still be surprised, or b) make them fit into our ongoing "campaign"---and I use the latter term loosely, since until I got to high school, our campaigns mostly consisted of going from one set of modules to another, under a variety of DMs, with little to no connection between DMs and strings of modules.

I distinctly remember some of the players being pissed off at the background for the I3-5 modules, which featured something about PCs short-sheeting the wizard's bed or something like that, and I think that was one of the turning points for us to move away from modules in general, and when we used them to modify them to be less stupid

 

[S'mon]

The hooks for the convention-competition modules are often really bad, so I tend to ignore them. I especially ignore the Gygaxian trope of "evil king says do this high level adventure to save the kingdom, or die!" because it seems incredibly silly to me.

 

[Lwaxy]

As kids, we used the original settings for the most part, but still tried to make the adventures fit in with what we did before (I started gaming at 8 years). When we played in the mostly adult group, it was usually a mercenary group hired all the time so hooks didn't matter either.

Nowadays there are hardly one shot sessions anymore, and no mercenaries, so we tie everything in with what has happened before, thus the hooks are not generally used and adventures tend to turn out quite differently than the modules planned, anyway