GM: One of the villagers approaches you. “Thank you, brave hero, for slaying the dragon! You have saved all of our lives!”
Hero: You are most welcome.
GM: “I have a task that I believe only you could possibly accomplish!”
Hero: If it is within my power, I will do it.
GM: “You are most kind, mighty hero!”
Hero: And what is the task?
GM: “Please deliver this letter to my niece in Watertown.”
Scenario hooks like this — where the PCs are tasked to perform as mundane messengers — are surprisingly common. I think of these as mail carrier hooks. They don’t always involve a literal letter or message; sometimes it’s an object that needs to be delivered, or maybe the PCs need to go and retrieve something instead of delivering it.
The root of the problem, I believe, is that mail carrier hooks are extremely common in (a) published adventures and (b) video games.
They’re common in published scenarios because the hooks in a published scenario are, by necessity, generic: The writer doesn’t know who the characters are or what’s been happening in your campaign, so they can’t tie the hook to any of those elements. It’s unfortunately really easy for “generic” to trip over into bland.
Such scenarios are also often set in specific locations that the writer feels obligated to bring the PCs to. Having an NPC literally say, “You need to go to there,” is the easiest possible way to make that happen. And the most generic possible reason for an NPC to say that is a sealed envelope that needs to be delivered.
They’re even MORE common in video games, where “I have turned on a switch state and put an item in your inventory, go to Point B to turn off the switch state and remove the item from your inventory” is nearly the most simplistic programming possible. Want to implement a lot of content quickly and/or signal the players that it’s time to move onto the next zone? Mail carrier hooks are super-easy to implement.
And because published scenarios and video games are probably the most significant exemplars for new GMs, these boring, generic scenario hooks infect their scenarios, too. Eventually many people — players and GMs alike — come to accept them as a rote expectation of the game.
GM DON’T #12.1: MAIL CAR ON THE RAILROAD
The problem with mail carrier hooks is that they tend to reduce the PCs to mere errand boys. A particularly insidious implementation of these hooks, therefore, is to string them out in a linear sequence and then railroad the players through them.
An NPC tells the PCs where to go. The PCs go there and meet another NPC. That NPC tells them where to go. Repeat forever.
There’s a certain dark elegance to the scheme’s simplicity. If you’re just going to force the players to do exactly what you want them to do anyway, you might as well just tell them where they’re supposed to go. And, as we’ve discussed, the delivery of a sealed envelope (or it’s equivalent) is the absolute most generic way to do it: Anyone can hand you a letter and they can tell you to take it literally anywhere.
(Obligatory “don’t railroad your players” here.)
Stringing together these arbitrary, generic interactions, however, will often begin to breed a meaningless lack of care in the players: The figurative envelope is, ultimately, empty. The first NPC is not telling them to seek the second NPC because that actually matters; they are doing so in order to move the PCs to the next place they’re supposed to go. And the players are not doing it because they care about what happens; they’re doing it because the GM is telling them to do it.
This, by itself, is a terrible malaise that will sap the strength and vitality of a campaign. But it can become particularly cancerous if this attitude feeds back into the Game Master: Seeing that their players don’t care about the content of the hook (because that content is, of course, a mirage), the GM stops caring, too. The whole structure now becomes a kind of cargo cult: The NPCs, of course, must have a “reason” why the PCs need to go where they tell them to go, but since the reason doesn’t matter, it simply degenerates into a rote recitation divorced from true cause and effect.
The Descent Into Avernus campaign for D&D 5th Edition is a textbook example of what this looks like in practice. The entire campaign follows this structure of a mail carrier railroad. In one notable example, the PCs are trying to reconstruct the lost memories of an amnesiac friend. They are told that a particular NPC knew their amnesiac friend during the period of their friend’s lost memories. So they seek out the NPC who, of course, recognizes their amnesiac friend and then… nothing. The adventure provides no explanation of what the NPC’s memories of their friend are.
Because, of course, the NPC’s role is not to provide those memories. That would be meaningful and this is a cargo cult which has forgotten meaning. The NPC’s role is to tell the PCs to go and talk to a different NPC, and they do that. And, having done that, the expectation is that the PCs will continue on to the next NPC. It’s assumed that the players are on the same page; that they won’t actually care about why they were sent here, because they have been trained to discount meaning.
If you aren’t part of the cargo cult, the result seems utterly bizarre. The presence of an envelope surely implies the presence of a letter; if you are sent to hear the memories of an NPC, then surely those memories will be shared. But in the cargo cult, of course, the act of delivering an envelope has become entirely separated from the concept of a letter.
The result, of course, is disastrous.
When this structure becomes full-blown, the whole backbone of the campaign is built on nonsense. The inevitable consequence is that this rot will spread into the rest of the campaign. If you’ve learned that the central plot you’re following has no meaning, then it’s a pretty short step towards believing that nothing else in the campaign has meaning.
SCENARIO HOOKS THAT MATTER
The key solution here is to use scenario hooks that matter. If the players care about what they’re doing and/or if what they’re doing is important, that escalates everything else that happens at the table.
Once we understand this, we can see that a mail carrier hook is not fundamentally wrong. The trick is recognizing that the structure of a mail carrier hook is so utterly devoid of purpose that it becomes crucial for the message itself to be of great import.
In Storm King’s Thunder, another 5th Edition D&D campaign, for example, there are number of mail carrier hooks. Some of them are quite mediocre; things like, “Hey, could you deliver some horse harnesses for me?”
But there’s also mail carrier hooks like, “Giants are invading! The Harpers must be warned!” And that’s clearly meaningful. It matters. The PCs will feel important being asked to do that.
So how do we make scenarios hooks that matter? How do we make the players care about the hook?
Well, one way, as we’ve seen, is to increase the stakes. Put big important stuff — people’s lives — on the line. The entire movie of 1917 is not only one shot; it hangs entirely on the single goal of delivering a message that will save thousands of lives. And it is absolutely compelling.
The most effective thing you can do, though, is simply listen to your players. What do they already care about? People, places, things, goals. Whatever it is, simply tie your hook to that and your work is already done. You just need to make sure that the tie is significant. (Someone the PCs caring about asking them to deliver a generic message isn’t inherently significant. You need to make the message important or, better yet, vital to them.)
If you’re using a published adventure, take the time to identify the generic hooks and make them specific and important to the PCs. The difficulty of this can vary, but it’s generally a lot easier than you might think. The key thing is to identify elements in the published adventure which can be adapted or recast to fit the existing lore of your campaign. (At the beginning of the campaign, this will primarily be drawn from the PCs’ backgrounds. Later it will build on your shared experiences at the table.) This is a topic I discuss at greater length in The Campaign Stitch.
Interesting then that the paradigmatic Paranoia quest is delivering a letter. Exactly WHAT that says about Paranoia and its commentary on the genre isn’t as clear, but it’s certainly interesting that such a task is the classic “so simple it seems impossible to mess up” mission for beginning Troubleshooters
These sort of quests can serve a useful purpose in open-world games, though they don’t always serve it well. Every starting zone in World of Warcraft has you deliver a package to the inn in the capital city, and usually has a delivery quest to teach flight paths. I wouldn’t call these quests interesting or say they should be imitated, but the reasoning behind them isn’t just filler, it’s to get the player somewhere they want to be: cities are interesting and inns are useful. Since there is no overarching plot, the player doesn’t have to care about the delivery as long as it gets them somewhere where they will find interesting things and get to choose what to do next.
The first time I played Skyrim, I had not figured out the stagecoach, and I wanted to be a mage. So I walked to Winterhold, which was sort of an adventure in itself (wandering around, poking my head into dungeons, getting attacked by bears). I didn’t have a formal quest to go there, but NPCs mentioned it and it sounded like a place I wanted to go if I was playing a mage.
I’m working on a sandbox/Hexcrawl/West Marches or whatever you want to call it sort of thing. An open world with lots to do but nothing the players feel they *have* to do. So I’m designing most quests to be simple, and the more elaborate “adventure” will come from the combination of working on multiple tasks at a time and having random encounters and other emergent complications. (The real adventure was the encounters we made along the way).
So a decent number of the hooks are deliveries or fetch quests, or even something like a pilgrimage inspired by https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7156/roleplaying-games/thought-of-the-day-sponsored-pilgrimages. Basically a way to send them from here to there (hopefully in an interesting or compelling way) but not an adventure in and of itself until the other complications come in. For example, any player who is a worshipper of Moor (this is Warhammer Fantasy) will be told, “You’ve never been to the Temple of Moor? You really should check it out and introduce yourself to the priestess there.” (Trying to avoid this just being “have you ever been to the Cloud District”). That’s the whole quest. But the way there is going to involve peril, and cross paths with other unrelated plot hooks. And the priestess of Moor will have her own stuff going on that the players may or may not want to help her with, and that area in general will have stuff to do for anyone who is looking for it.
So I definitely agree that a delivery run does not make its own quest. But “go from here to there” can work as a minor element to move between interesting content. I have not tried this open world style sandbox that I have been writing yet, and it has been almost entirely inspired by what I have read as I binged this blog over the past couple months. So I’d certainly appreciate any advice or warnings about using this sort of hook in an open world.
Increasing the stakes is one great way to do it: the 1917 reference is perfect for this, but also Paul Revere, the Red Arrow in LotR, even Roland’s horn kinda.
Another way is the Hamlet approach: the mail carrier is delivering a message that (twist!) contains a request that the mail carrier be arrested and executed upon delivery! The carrier is given an incentive to read, even alter, the message. Make the message sender a rascal (and/or the mail carrier), and suddenly that message becomes an array of options, not just a pointless delivery quest.
I feel like copying the video game approach often misses out on volume. One delivery quest creates boring rails, but a dozen of them sprinkled with other quests just adds some bulk to the quest list.
The flipside of the Hooks That Matter is explaining why the hook hasn’t fired for someone else. Like, there needs to be a reason why they didn’t just hand it off to the most recent traveling merchants. If they’re asking adventurers, it’s probably dangerous or sensitive in some way. Integrating that into the hook can give the players a little information about what they’re getting into… and why it’s actually an adventure.
One last thing I like to use the for is signposting when the PCs can handle a certain trip or area. If the delivery needs to go through the Forest of Untimely Death, the questgiver is only going to hand it out to people they think can survive the area. Whether the NPC is right is a separate question.
My favorite example of a meaningful delivery tale comes from one of my open table sessions.
Sulandingo is a frontier way-port on the coast of a deep, largely unknown jungle.
The players come across a newly arrived group of 10 families, their children and a priest, who have a royal decree granting them land, if they can successfully civilize it, in the jungle across a known river tributary. The players are engaged to lead the way and protect these folks from the hazards of the jungle.
There’s a catch. The player characters know the Wandinga people who live in that land. They helped them clear a temple of dangerous monsters so they could once again seek blessings from the gods for their jungle crops. So the players don’t want this expedition to succeed.
The players look at all the equipment and furniture of the colonists and declare that it cannot be taken on the canoes and needs to be sent for later. The players provide a warehouse and then immediately start selling everything for a profit. While this is going on one of the players starts making wooden toys for the children. Suddenly the players can’t just let the mission fail with death of the colonists. It has to somehow fail gracefully perhaps. Then they protect the convoy from underworld thugs but kill one who lived at home with his mum. So they feel guilty and set his mum up with funds.
Then off the expedition goes, except the priest who has “matters to attend to”. The players work out the priest was a con artist and the royal charter is probably a scam.
There followed several trials and tribulations. The players trying to fend off danger, negotiate with tribes folk to allow passage despite everything, while attempting to convince the colonists to turn back.
Finally the players had to leave the colonists at the destination in the deep jungle, promising to return and see how they are doing.
When the players return at a later session they find some of the colonists in the temple under the thrall of a Yuan-Ti. They have to rescue them. Also some of the older children have gone a bit lord of the flies / Tarzan, and are engaged in a war with kobolds in their territory, and the rest have been taken in by the Wandinga to form a new Wandinga village and territory, and exchange knowledge and ideas.
All from a “deliver the people to location B”.
Nice to see you’ve organized your thoughts on this one. 🙂
I have my suspicions that part of why adventure path writing has devolved from coherent but linear narratives to loose chains of mail carrier quests is because that’s the quickest and easiest way to have a couple dozen people write a scenario in six months. Just Lego the pieces together and you have something you can rush out the door, quality be damned.
It strikes me as particularly odd that they’ve decided to take this route instead of focusing on quality, though. In particular, there’s a lens through which an adventure designer could think about less-generic scenario hooks baked right into 5e: backgrounds. Why might a charlatan care about this scenario? Why might an outlander? Why might a sage? And so on… It wouldn’t be as good as a GM’s ability to tailor things, but it would actually give a foothold for them to even begin doing so, and spark the idea of trying — and it was never before possible in D&D, because backgrounds weren’t a game mechanic at all.
@DanDare2050: Seems like a lot of fun to play on your table.
I had two thoughts when reading through this.
First, a good litmus test for a *meaningful* mail-carrier quest is whether the *content* of the letter actually matters (preferably to the PCs, not just the recipient). If the adventure doesn’t bother to tell you the content of the letter, that may be a bad sign. Ditto if it does tell you, but you could replace it with a recipe or shopping list without any meaningful impact on the adventure. On the flip side, Hamlet (also Uriah) is a good example of a case where the letter’s content *does* matter.
Secondly, fetch quests are older than gaming, being a key feature of a particular type of fairy tale (Aarne-Thompson type 550, to be exact). The hero needs X, which is in the possession of Person A. Person A tells them, “I’ll give you X if you bring me Y from Person B.” Hero travels to Person B, who says “I’ll give you Y if you bring me Z from Person C.” And so on. In an RPG, if acquiring X is important to the PCs, it gives them motivation to complete the quests (although obviously this could get tiresome if it drags on too long). However, a good litmus test for railroading is whether the PCs can circumvent the chain of quests — for instance, by offering Q in place of Y, or finding a different source of Y, or a different source of X, or simply taking X by force or guile.
The key is to fill in the envelope. Some of the players already like want a letter delivered, but it’s really a pretense to check in on their “vagabond” nephew in another town. That nephew is in trouble. An adventure results. How they tell the original person what happened is a problem that any adventuring party would relish discussing.
One interesting thing I find with mystery scenarios is that they can feel like mail delivery quests after a certain point. It can feel like the players are going from clue to clue without really a particular point to it apart from “we need to do it to complete the mystery”
I know there is the three clue rule and node based design, and I do use these systems. But in the game it can’t help but feel the players get very easily disconnected when they actually start the mystery and that they are just being railroaded from breadcrumb to breadcrumb even if I’ve designed it to have more flexibility.
@Xercies — just throwing out ideas here, but maybe you need to give them a dead end or two to make them feel like they’re doing a bit more work to solve the puzzle. The advice on rpg mysteries is usually not to complicate them, because it’s really easy for you as GM to underestimate how complicated it is already — but if you have players getting bored, then maybe they need some more complication.
Alternately, take a cue from Raymond Chandler rather than Agatha Christie. Ask yourself, “why should people care about solving the mystery?” Is it intrinsically about solving a puzzle, or is it about the trouble that comes up when the dark secret is revealed? Chandler’s stories are always really about “now that you’ve found what they were trying to hide, what are you going to do about it?”
@Xercies — I pondered the problem of players treating clues as though they were collectible MacGuffins instead of pieces of a puzzle for over a decade before hitting on the idea that there are more states for a clue than them being collected or uncollected, and that it might help to call attention to this. I still haven’t had a chance to test this hypothesis, but my idea of how to put this into practice is to sort collected clues into:
* Unshared (one PC knows and hasn’t told the others)
* Shared but untheorized (the whole party knows about it, but no one has a guess what it means)
* Theorized but unproven (the party has a guess what it means, but they haven’t actually proven that’s how it fits in)
* Proven (it’s an established fact that this clue means this specific thing)
…and make clear that while the default action in some scenes may well be “search for clues”, the default action in others is “advance the status of a clue”.
@Xercies I think PuzzleSecretary is on the right track.
A clue is a thing that leads players toward a conclusion.
How do players know its a clue?
The way some GMs do it is to tell the players they have found a clue, which is going to lead players to often wonder “why is it a clue? Why does my character think its a clue?”.
I think a lot of people think of it like the children’s treasure hunt game. Clue 1 says “look in the wardrobe”. Clue 2 (found in the wardrobe) says “look under the bed”.
My way is to have “clues to clues”, that is things that prompt contextualizing questions so when the characters find a clue they connect it to the context in their mind and go “aha!”.
So say characters (C) are trying to solve where someone (S) put the box. S has has forgotten what they did with it as they absently pottered about the house.
C: “what do you remember doing last?”
S: “I remember putting something in the wardrobe”
C: “Ah,lets look there then”.
In the wardrobe they find no box, just a set of golf clubs, and for some reason a pillow from the bed.
C: “What is this pillow doing here?”
S: “Oh, I took it off the bed to put in the linen cupboard. Must have unthinkingly put it here by mistake”
C: “Did you still have the box with you when you did that?”
S: “No I’m pretty sure I didn’t.”
C: “Ok, let’s look at the bed then”. (Or perhaps they might look in the linen cupboard to see if the box was substituted for the pillow)
Fundamentally, the reason people care about clues is that there’s a question they’re interested in, and they want to know the answer. If the mystery is just, “where do we go to have the fight?” then the mystery is going to feel like mail delivery. On the other hand, if the mystery is “holy crap, what is even going *on* here???” then the players will care about whatever helps resolve their bafflement.
Reading through this makes me design an adventure where the PC are send to mail a “important” letter no matter the cost to X. Arriving in X (or before if they want to check what is so special about it) they find out the envelope is empty and they have been sent on a wild goose chase by their patron.
Did someone want them gone from the original town?
Were they just practice bunnies to see if someone could eve make it through the Mountains alive? who knows…