by Eric Weiss
Most DnD campaign ideas start small. What begins with a simple fetch quest quickly balloons into a multi-session epic in which the fate of the world is hanging in the balance.
That sense of progression is what can make a DnD campaign fun, but it also presents a challenge for DMs. Many D&D side quest ideas seem like diversions from the bigger story you’re trying to tell. How do you make that intro quest relevant to your end game? And more importantly, how do you do that without giving away too much at the beginning?
In this article, we’ve got some great tips for anyone looking to turn their D&D side quest ideas into full-fledged campaigns. You can also check out Lore Master’s Deck, which is a great tool for weaving the threads of your world together. The Story Engine is sponsoring Free RPG Day on June 27, and you can try Lore Master’s Deck for free if you pick up one of our 35-card sample packs from a participating location (you can find the store locator here).
In the meantime, keep reading for some simple steps you can follow when expanding on your D&D quest ideas!
Leave a trail of breadcrumbs with your D&D quest ideas
If your players are starting out at level 1, there’s no reason for them to be involved in the giant conspiracy at the heart of your campaign. Not yet, anyway.
That doesn’t mean they can’t find some clues along the way. The players are a part of the world where the plot is unfolding, so they should have some basic knowledge about how things work in this realm. That means they should notice when something doesn’t fit.
You just have to find a way to tie all your D&D quest ideas together organically.
That’s where good worldbuilding comes into play. Conspiracies like to operate in the shadows, but if something big is happening, there will be signs that affect people further down the line. That gives you an opportunity to onboard players into a bigger plot. You don’t have to introduce everything at once. Each one of your D&D quest ideas can drop a bigger breadcrumb, until you’ve finally got enough crumbs for a whole loaf of bread.
(OK, breadcrumbs don’t work like that. But you get the idea.)
Let’s walk through a sample D&D quest idea to show you what we mean:
Step 1: Start small
Our adventure starts with one of the standard D&D quest ideas. It’s the beginning of the game. The heroes have just met for the first time. One of the local children has wandered off, and the parents need someone to find them and bring them back.
This kind of quest has big stakes for the child and their parents, but not necessarily for the world beyond. It’s really more of an icebreaker - a chance for the players to get to know one another and learn more about the setting they’ll be exploring. It’s a true DnD side quest, a job for hire where the party gets some experience and a wayward kid gets to come home safe.
However, it is possible to plant the seeds of some larger DnD campaign ideas.
Let’s say the child got lost in some nearby ruins. Kids play there all the time (that’s why the party was told to look there in the first place). There’s nothing remarkable about them - except for the fact that all of the buildings are covered in glowing vines that weren’t there a week ago.
The vines aren’t part of the side quest. But should the party keep an eye on them for later?
Step 2: Expand the field of view
A few sessions have passed since that first job. The party has moved on to another city. You’ve run them through a few more of your D&D side quest ideas. They’ve also seen more vines along the way. One area with an especially high density of vines is more barren and withered, as if the vines are choking out every other form of life.
Now people in the area are starting to panic as the vines threaten the local food supply. The next side quest asks the party to investigate, and they learn the vines are associated with an ancient prophecy where they devour the world. That same legend says a magic jewel was designed to keep the vines at bay. Unfortunately, that jewel went missing just before the vines started to appear.
A progression like this is effective because each new DnD side quest takes the party deeper into the campaign. The vines started as a footnote then grew into a bigger problem. Tracing that problem to its root led the party to a world-shaping threat and a quest to find a missing jewel.
It also creates a mystery that will have to be solved later. Who’s responsible for the missing jewel? And what is that person hoping to accomplish?
Step 3: Tie it all together
The quest for the missing jewel eventually leads the party to the culprit - a botanist who has been growing the vines to enact the prophecy for their own selfish ends. Now our campaign has a villain - one who makes sense given the side quests the party has already completed.
That’s ultimately why the sequence works. The reveal isn’t a twist that comes out of nowhere. The party was looking for the mastermind the scheme based on what they learned about the jewel. The vines point to someone with an affinity for plants. You could introduce the botanist earlier in the campaign (before revealing they’re the villain), but it’s not strictly necessary. Each reveal builds on the one that came before it, delivering a satisfying progression as the story builds to its conclusion.
So how do you weave your D&D side quest ideas into a unified narrative thread?
We assembled this DnD campaign idea using cards from Lore Master’s Deck, but you don’t need to use the same strategy to get similar results. It’s more important to ask the right questions, and to search for logical points of connection as you build out the plot.
This list is by no means exhaustive, but these are some helpful questions you should be asking if you want to expand on any of your D&D quest ideas:
Question 1: How is everything connected?
This isn’t about making a conspiracy theory.
It’s about thinking of your world as a complex ecosystem, where one action has a butterfly effect somewhere else. If someone builds a dam (or grows some vines), the river dries up for the villages downstream. If the season is dry (or the vines kill everything else), there’s not enough food for the city at the harvest.
Lore Master’s Deck is great at making the connections between different lore elements, tying everything together with a string that leads from one reveal to the next throughout the whole campaign!
Question 2: What does the villain need?
This is a good question for figuring out what lore elements will matter to the story.
Resources are finite. In Star Wars, the Empire had to stripmine planets to get enough raw material to build the Death Star. If your BBEG is building their own ultimate weapon (or preparing the ultimate ritual), chances are that it will place a similar drain on the resources of your world.
If that’s the case, other people are going to feel the results. A quest to help NPCs with the problem at the local level makes for a good DnD side quest or starter quest. A quest to solve the problem permanently is good fodder for creating a campaign.
It’s also worth noting that the answer doesn’t need to be a natural resource. It could be anything that the villain wants to control, including:
- A material
- A magic object
- A population (of people or creatures)
- A location (more on that below)
- A narrative (in the public relations sense)
The answer could change from one side quest to the next. Pick the one that makes the most sense for each stage with your larger DnD campaign ideas!
Question 3: What’s special about the location?
This follows from the list above.
Your D&D quest has to happen somewhere. That should affect the story in some way. Is it a lair? Does it hold some kind of secret? Why does this side quest need to happen here? How does the answer connect to the other lore elements you’ve created?
That doesn’t mean everything needs to tie into the campaign. You can use one location for a single D&D quest idea and then move on, as in the case with the ruins at the start of our sample campaign. The point is that the location has to be relevant to that side quest, and there has to be at least one piece that leads the party to the next one.
You should ask those questions every time the campaign has a change of scenery. Every location is different. Every location matters. Why is this side quest happening here?
Question 4: What does the party need to know right now?
You don’t need to reveal every piece of the puzzle all at once. If the party is only getting a look at one small portion of the world, it stands to reason that they should only see one portion of the broader campaign. In our example, they don’t know about the prophecy the first time they see the vines, and they don’t need to. It’s not relevant to their side quest to save a missing child.
Give your party the information they need to complete the current quest, not the information they’ll need to complete a future one. You can give them that information when they get there.
Withholding information preserves some of the mystery. It also gives you some flexibility if you do want to change your plans later in the campaign to incorporate some of the things the party does along the way!
One final point
Not every detail needs to be crucial to the central story. It’s OK to let your D&D side quest ideas be simple side quests that develop the world and the characters in other ways.
You just have to make sure there’s something holding your world together - and something that will intrigue your players when the answers fall into place.
Check out the Lore Master’s Deck demo on June 27 to start brainstorming your next D&D quest ideas!