Looking for a kick start to a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign? Or trying to come up with an adventure or side quest to spice up an ongoing game? Here are fifty campaign hooks you can use right now for use in your games on StartPlaying and beyond.

1. A wizard dedicated to helping a small, remote village has gone senile and suffers from dementia. His enchantments are becoming as unstable as his sense of reality.
2. A mountain has been possessed by a demon and is now plotting to destroy the town it towers over.
3. A caravan delivering precious magic items across hostile territory hires the party to protect it. A band of lizardfolk desperadoes looks to steal the haul.
4. A merfolk kingdom plans to advance relations with the landborn society nearby. They are hosting a landlubbing delegate and have hired the party to escort them.
5. Pirates have hired the party to raise a small fleet to help steal their booty back from a dragon.
6. After you all turn in for the night, the scary stories you told around the campfire start coming true.
7. You discover a tiny model of a kingdom, and then further discover that it is a real kingdom full of living elves that was magically shrunk down millennia ago.
8. The party members dressed up in animal costumes for a parade. A wizard cursed the party and everyone turned into the animals they dressed as.
9. Someone in the party inherits a giant unexplored swampland.
10. The party happens upon an amusement park run by orcs. They challenge the party to a series of competitive games.
11. The party has been turned into a bunch of plants by a druid.
12. Sigil has been mostly abandoned and is open to real estate development. The part is first to arrive on the scene and take control of the portals. But what cleared out the residents in the first place? And what if it comes back?
13. The party is hired by a wizarding cartel, dealing in illegal substances and items that enhance magical powers.
14. The party is hired to guard a barbarian war leader, who decides to win glory by traversing a swathe of land ravaged by wild magic. As they venture further, things get… weird.
15. The party is hired to retrieve a prince who has been tricked into marriage with a djinni, who absconded with him.
16. A group of barbarians recently invaded and sacked a monastic college. To create continuous wealth, they turn the place into a diploma mill and start sabotaging and sacking nearby schools.
17. The party is hired to protect a group of young wizard scouts on a hiking expedition.
18. The local museum just received a donation of fascinating items, but since it arrived, statues and paintings have been coming alive and long-inert magical items have been going haywire.
19. The party meets a goblin who is in the process of raising an army to challenge Maglubiyet and become the new god of the goblins. 
20. Clerics and paladins have discovered the ruins of a temple that was previously thought lost. The only problem is kobolds have turned it into a vacation resort. Will the party run the kobolds out or help the kobolds protect the place?
21. A bard creates a self-playing instrument. Unfortunately, it’s really annoying and goes around to all the pubs playing obnoxious music. People have tried to destroy it, but it’s defended itself.
22. A large, twisting tower has suddenly appeared in the middle of town.
23. The new theater troupe in town is very popular, but lately their grim tales of horror, intrigue, and murder have been coming true.
24. All the plants in town have suddenly become sentient and started talking to people. Some of them speak of a danger approaching that threatens to kill all the plants in the region.
25. A swarm of rats in the sewers of the city have gotten their tails tangled and become a horrific rat king. The entity has become incredibly intelligent and has taken over the sewers, running a criminal empire of enchanted critters. Can the party end the rat king’s tyranny?
26. The party finds a strange stone with a psychic presence that promises it can lead them across the planes if they promise to help break the enchantment that binds the spirit to the stone.
27. A group of tree spirits hire the party to venture into a desert and kill the lich there that is sapping the life out of the surrounding wilderness so that the tree spirits can begin regrowing.
28. The barrier between realms has become weakened and the town the party is in is overlapping with one from the feywild. Can the group find the cause and stop it before the two planes destroy each other?
29. A devil who has been living on the material plane is going home to Avernus for a friend’s wedding. To make sure he isn’t forced to stay, he hires the party to protect him and ensure his safe return.
30. An undead invasion destroys a town. The villagers flee and make it to a town of orcs who do them all the solid of not immediately murdering them but do not open the gates. The undead horde is coming. Can the party get the humans and orcs to work together to defend themselves?
31. The party decides to take a winter vacation at a remote mountain. They find themselves in the middle of a conflict between a tribe of skiing goblins and a tribe of snowboarding goblins, who are vying for control of the sickest slopes.
32. The party meets a famous paladin who turns out to be a fake.
33. Well-known criminals have suddenly been turning new leaves and becoming upstanding citizens. Saints, even. The party discovers a powerful cleric has been forcefully converting evildoers into mindless goody-two-shoes citizens. The cleric learns of some previous dubious exploits done by the party and targets them next.
34. The party encounters an oddly-dressed tortle who claims to be the manager of a band on an inter-planar tour. He was separated from the group after an all-night bender in the City of Brass and asks the party’s help in tracking them down across the planes.
35. A new restaurant in town is all the rage, but frequent customers are starting to have visions and gain telepathic powers.
36. The party uncovers a statue that guards the entrance to a temple. The statue promises great riches to anyone who can pass its series of magical tests and retrieve an artifact from deep within the heart of the temple.
37. A young wizard has pranked the town by turning the lighthouse into a giant wand of wonder. Every hour, it casts another spell, orders of magnitude stronger and with much greater range than a regular wand of wonder. 
38. A group of paladins have been corrupted by a demon and are marching onto town.
39. A town celebrates its Day of the Dead by bringing the dead back to life for a night. The undead are well-behaved and retain their sense of self of who they were when they were alive. After one year’s celebrations got out of hand and caused some property destruction at a nearby manor, though, the lord of the manor plans to undo the undead permanently.
40. A friendless goblin wizard has asked the party to be ringers in the Tournament of Goblins(!) to impress a lady goblin. He magically turns the party into goblins to disguise them.
41. A talking magical sword promises to lead the party to the rest of its owner’s treasure, but it actually leads them to its owner: a draugr.
42. A carnival appears in town. After it has settled in town, however, no one is able to leave.
43. Magic has been declared illegal and officials come to capture the magic users in the party.
44. On the evening of a town’s bicentennial celebration, the statue of its founder at the center of town suddenly comes to life and tells an alternate version of the town’s founding.
45. The party is taking a cruise trip that gets waylaid by a kraken.
46. The party hears about a sailing race around the Moonshae Islands with an incredible prize for the winning crew: a bag of holding and its held items previously owned by a famous wizard.
47. A group of gnomes have created an army of automatons that has gotten out of their control and threatens to overrun a city.
48. A port town is suffering from being in close proximity with a bunch of pirates who have taken to port and won’t leave, for fear of a ghost ship out on the seas capturing crews.
49. A storm approaches the party. As it gets closer, the party can see that the storm is bringing with it wild magic effects, causing chaos as it travels across the land.
50. The party uncovers a mysterious canister covered in glyphs of warding. If the party can open it, they will find inside several potions that turn the user into a giant.

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Mike Martino is a writer, editor, & playwright in Chicago.