This last post for Land of the Lost month is about adventure hooks you can use in your “Lost World” setting. My assumption is that you’re not actually running a campaign in The Land of the Lost, but that you have a similar setting in your campaign, and that it contains analogues of The Land’s iconic characteristics (e.g., inhabitants and Strange Tech). With that in mind, use the concepts below as idea starters for any “Lost World” setting.
Adventure Guidelines
One thing to note, though: Just as the LotL writers discovered, you may find that there’s only so much you can do with dinosaurs, trippy glow crystals, chaka-people, and stranded time-travellers. I have two suggestions:
- Reveal the campaign’s mysteries slowly to keep the players hungry (but not satiated)
- Throw in a few mundane adventures to keep the players grounded (especially after revealing campaign mysteries)
Remember that there’s one thing working in your favour that the show’s writers didn’t have: active participants. You’re developing a campaign, not a television show. As your players engage with the setting, their actions will suggest new adventure hooks. Even if they appear mundane, you can always toss in a few “Lost World” memes. For example, if the PCs like dungeon crawls, give them a reason to explore the catacombs beneath the Lost City: a need for power crystals, rescuing Pakuni slaves from the sleestacks, destroying sleestack eggs, etc. Throw in a few puzzles that require a pylon matrix table to solve, or maybe introduce a new power crystal colour that has hitherto unknown properties. Create a PC dilemma: make the object of the dungeon crawl accessible only via a malfunctioning dimensional portal: if the portal’s fixed, the dungeon cannot be completed; if the portal’s broken, the characters risk trapping themselves in the dungeon.
The point is that, as with any other campaign, the players’ actions will inspire direction. While the characters are there, let them enjoy all the mystery, danger, and dino-action the “Lost World” has to offer. If, eventually, you do run out of adventure ideas, work on getting the PCs back home. Besides, no one ever really stays in a Lost World forever…
Basic Hooks
Taking examples from The Land, here are some overarching hooks for your “Lost World” setting. I say overarching because they influence what the characters do from the moment they arrive to whenever they leave. As such, they’ll form the backdrop for any actual adventures you plan.
Getting Home
A solid, if not trite, hook. The characters arrive by accident, decide that it’s Not Good, then try to get back to where they were. But it ain’t easy: there are different physical laws and you can’t figure out the matrix tables and you’re constantly retrieving your gear from the little man-people who steal it away at night.
But that gets railroady—after a number of unsuccessful attempt to return home, the PCs will accuse the GM of keeping them there deliberately, which is no fun. Better for the PCs to be compelled to stay. Meaning, getting home is achievable, but there’s a really good reason to hang around before checking out. Entice the characters with something they can’t find back home (a fountain of youth, berries that negate fatigue, a clan of chaka-men who treat the PCs as deities). Or there’s something worth doing there before going home—gathering power crystals, which are unobtainable anywhere else, or defeating the sleestack army that plans to invade the characters’ world. Perhaps the party helps an Enik-type character who ends up repaying the PCs with a some great knowledge/item/spell.
Discovering Stuff
There should be plenty of unknowns for the PCs to investigate. In The Land, there are pylons, power crystals, circular rivers, dimensional portals, and three moons—all odd things that characters will want to understand. Divining these secrets probably won’t be the heart of the campaign, but it should be a secondary goal of just about every plot you devise. If the mission is to find a lost Pakuni who’s wandered into dino-territory, make sure there’s a pylon on the way, or a few power crystals, or maybe even a matrix table. These things aren’t focal, but they reinforce the weirdness of the setting and provide an opportunity for the PCs to tinker with their new environment. Occasionally helping the characters with a clue or confirming some solid cause-and-effect while they’re experimenting is rewarding, not only because it gives them information that may save their bacon in the next encounter, but also because it reveals more about the setting they’re trying to figure out.
Sleestack Secrets
The same applies to whatever passes for your “Lost World” bogeyman race—it’s bound to have secrets. Or, at least, unfathomable practices that demand investigation. If the race is established as a PC antagonist, it’s worth figuring out as much as possible, if for no other reason than to find exploitable weaknesses. There is probably a connection between the race and another overarching hook (e.g., the power crystals needed to get home are guarded by sleestacks in the Lost City, or Enik sends the characters to the Library of Skulls for information before he will show the characters how to operate the matrix tables).
Sleestacks are a good example of an antagonist race, as they have many secrets: outside of their complete alien, shuffle-shuffle-hiss appearance, they live in a Lost City, worship an unnamed god living in a steam pit, go into hibernation part of the year, lay eggs in clutches that require a moth to fertilise, have a room full of telepathic sage-skulls, and turn out to be the devolved remnants of an ancient race of time-travelling dimension-hoppers. Also, they taste like lobster.
I’m guessing there’s something there you can work with.
Well Met, Sucker
As a sort of extra-dimensional transit station, The Land sees traffic from all times and places. In GM terms, this means you can introduce pretty much anyone or anything from any setting ever. Maybe this actually serves a plot purpose, but I’m going to assume that you’re just in the mood to screw with your players. Which is fine—they probably deserve (and secretly crave) it anyway.
While this is your chance to get all “Barrier Peaks” on your fantasy PCs, the opportunity is bigger than that. First, you can use the setting as a connection to other settings. This definitely includes alternate dimensions or planes of existence, so if your campaign involves such travel, use the setting as a sort of dimensional “hub” that connects each possible universe to all the others. Now you have a mechanism for travelling to the outer planes, or different planets, or simply from Greyhawk to the Wilderlands by way of Savage Narnia. Using this premise, maybe the characters actually plan to arrive in The Land before jumping off to another destination—too bad they lost their power crystals shortly after arrival. Now they’ll have to gather more before they can start the next leg of their journey…
Second, the setting is useful as a meeting place for other travellers. Again, this gives your PCs a chance to meet folks from different times, but you don’t have to limit these folks to NPCs. For example, Jeff writes that his World of Cinder fantasy campaign includes a basically modern guy with a chainsaw for a hand. Having a dimensional hub like The Land could help you introduce this kind of PC to your party. The same goes for monsters, which could explain why dinosaurs thrive (they’re transplants from prehistoric Earth). Along those lines, maybe there’s a behind-the-scenes group transplanting entire species from dying planets to viable worlds, using The Land as a “holding pen” in the process.
Final Words
Thus concludes my bit on the Land of the Lost and Why It’s A Good Campaign Setting Model. Drop me a line if you end up carving out a slice of “Lost World” in your campaign—I’d love to hear about it.