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45 Biblical Adventure Hooks
Publisher: Church Basement Games
by Ian M. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/28/2019 03:27:48

The Bible, especially the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible if you want to take a neutral perspective on it), is an absolute goldmine for adventure plots. More than the rest of the Old Testament, Genesis bleeds pulpy sword and sorcery flavor. In this one book you have cruel kings, wicked wizards, wand a world filled with angels, all under the auspices of a near and unknowable deity that has a certain fear of his creations. It wouldn't take much to imagine Conan strutting through the city gates of "Ur of the Chaldeans," or any other Biblical city.

In terms of time covered, Genesis is the densest book in the Bible, and has enough stories in it that you could probably squeeze at least twenty adventure hooks out of it alone. This list pulls the first two from Genesis, and then moves on. Fair enough. There's a lot of Bible, and if you're going to do 45 spread from the whole thing you need to get a move on.

That said, it is an issue, and it's an issue that I think is probably responsible for the three major issues with this list. The first is that some of the stories are too famous - prompt number three is the story of Moses and the plagues of Egypt. It has a twist - the same twist that the film Prince of Egypt. In that movie, both sides of the conflict are portrayed somewhat sympathetically. In the prompt the author mentions that the players are free to side with the wicked king. That isn't enough to make it interesting, and the story is too obvious to the players. The second is that too many of the adventure hooks aren't adventure hooks. They don't have built-in conflict, and there really isn't any reason for the PCs to get involved. #4 is a pretty good example of this - it's the begining of the Israelite conquest of Canaan, but the prompt leaves off at Nephilim or whatever stand ins living in their cities. The hook doesn't provide an ongoing conflict for PCs to get involved it. The third, and perhaps worst, is that only a few of these hooks inspire imagination. For example, look at the contrast between number #36 and #38. Both set up escort missions, but #36 is brimming with conflict and character. From this one prompt you can pull at least one entertaining (and panicky!) NPC. This prompt also puts player investment upfront, and, due to the way its written, allows for a lot more player agency. Number 38, by contrast, doesn't present any choices for the players to make out of the gate, and more importantly, is boring. It also doesn't present recurring conflict in a way that makes it useful. You can pull recurring conflict from it, since it sets up a villain that won't be happy with the player's involvement, but even that is boring. The villian isn't going to send assassins after the chumps hired to oppose him, he's going to go after the real target. Unortunately, it doesn't set up a reason for players to still be involved after they've resolved the immediate issue.

There are also a fair number of missing words and grammatical errors. #20 refers to "an united kingdom," where it should be "a united kingdom." This mistake is understandable, because "united" written out is spelled with a vowel even though it is pronounced with a consonant. The same prompt also has a tense error. There are also a couple missing articles and suchlike in a few of the other prompts. The product could definitely benefit from a good once over to catch these mistakes.

I enjoyed promots #6, #29, #33 and #36. Prompt #17 is also fairly good, though it is in need of edittng. There are some other good ones in this, but most of the remaining fall into one of the three categories I mentioned above - too obvious, not really hooks, or just boring.

With all of that said, I recommend giving this a look through. There are some good prompts here. Just remember that it is a free product, and you get what you pay for. A more developed version, with 10 or so of the more imagination sparking ideas and commentary on how to incorporate, twist, and play with them would be absolutely fantastic.



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45 Biblical Adventure Hooks
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