Summary
WhileDungeons & Dragonsis about exploring the titular dungeons, a good campaign has other moving parts. Along with a safe space to trade and tend to wounds, settlements provide rumors and adventure hooks that your players can use as the start of a new adventure.
The best side quests draw upon things important to your PCs or the group’s favorite NPCs. Conflict creates interest, and you’re going to need plenty of smaller conflicts to generate interesting side quests. Here are some ideas for generating all kinds of tensionin your citiesand towns.
8Religious Rivalries
Nothing Better Than Sects And Violence
While most D&D settings are polytheistic according to lore, most people don’t worship every single god. It’s entirely possible for a settlement to generate conflict when its people are divided between followers of two diametrically opposed gods, such as Selune and Shar in the Forgotten Realms.
If your party has a cleric or paladin, you can up the stakes by having one of the religious factions be the clergy for their respective god. That being said, your party has more freedom to pick sides (or stay neutral) if none of their deities are represented in the conflict.
The Perfect Snack For Any Adventuring Party
While plenty of PCs come from noble or wealthy backgrounds, the ultrarich don’t garner much sympathy when they’re NPCs. If a wealthy NPC is grossly exploiting the populace, your players are bound to take notice. They’re even more bound to kill the rich NPC in question and loot their mansion.
This conflict is well-suited to humanoid NPCs, but there’s no reason to keep it to regular folks if you don’t want to. Dragons and cloud giants are canonically known to hoard wealth, and can provide more of a combat challenge if you don’t feel like giving your rich bastard class levels or an extensive security detail.
6Sacrificial Lambs
For When Your Players Actually Care About NPCs
While tensions between different sects are a good conflict if you love intrigue and faction play, sometimes you just want to run aspooky evil cult. There’s nothing wrong with this, especially if an NPC your players have taken a liking to gets kidnapped and offered up as a sacrifice.
Of course, there are other ways to put NPCs in distress if you don’t want to put a cult in your game. Perhaps a cannibalistic monster has terrorized the town for ages, demanding a person as tribute every year (or however long you want to make it). This keeps the fundamentals the same while offering up a different flavor for your players.
5Star-Crossed Lovers
If You Like Romeo And Juliet
Imagine arriving at a settlement only to find out an NPC you were supposed to meet up with is being forced into an arranged marriage. This alone is likely to resonate with players who care about personal autonomy and free will, but you canadd some romanceto give things a little razzle dazzle.
The reasons for the community disapproving of two characters' romance can be whatever you want, as long as your players are comfortable with the explanation. Having both romantic partners be NPCs is bound to have your players wondering why they should care, so consider making the pair a player character and their established NPC love interest.
4Hag-ling For Deals
Start Practicing That Cackle
The Monster Manual and assorted splatbooks have a huge variety of different hags for you to choose from when building an encounter. Hags can be found in or near just about every humanoid settlement, taking on names and appearances that help them blend in with the local populace.
If you want to build a side quest around a hag, focus on the nasty consequences faced by the people she’s made deals with. Your players are sure to find plenty of miserable NPCs who would be all too happy to share their sad story. What’s more, the hag’s lair can be looted if NPCs don’t have the means to reward your players.
3There Is An Impostor Among Us
Will Your Players Know Who To Trust?
Sometimes, you have a good idea of what creature you want to build an encounter around. Other times, you have a vague idea for a scenario leading up to a monster encounter. This conflict is for the latter, and can be easily customized to fit your needs no matter what the settlement is like.
The basics are pretty simple:an important authority figure(or someone beloved by the community) has been abducted or killed, with an impostor secretly put in their place. To pull this off, you need to strike the right balance between suspicion and plausible deniability.
Doppelgangers are the most obvious go-to for this encounter, but fiends also fit the archetype well.
2Nature’s Revenge
Don’t Cut Down That Tree
Sometimes the mundane details of building a settlement run into conflicts of their own, especially when environmental concerns are at play. If the residents of a town cut down a dryad’s tree or polluted the ocean hideout of a marid, they’re probably going to suffer some painful consequences in the near future.
Fey and elementals are the most appropriate creatures for these types of encounters. This is the perfect conflict if you have one or more druids in your party, but you’re able to run it if your group is druid-free as well. Just be warned that druidless parties are probably going to solve the issue differently from what you may have imagined.
1Family Feuds
If You Really, Really Like Romeo And Juliet
As the subtitle implies, this conflict dovetails nicely with the ‘star-crossed lovers’ scenario, but you may just as easily run it without any romance. Dealing with family feuds is a great way to allow your players to pick a faction to ally themselves with, especially if both sides contain likeable NPCs.
Rival noble houses are the most obvious choice for this conflict and are an excellent go-to if you want a campaign heavy with political intrigue. This easily adapts itself to drow houses if you’re running an Underdark game, or you can use competing crime syndicates if you’re running an urban adventure.
