An ogre once enslaved and trained at a gladiatorial school has managed to escape and find his way back home again. He has used his training to good effect, moving up the crude ogre social ladder to be a very young cheiftain.
He has used his position to bully the other ogres into drilling and practicing manuevers. Many of them tried to revolt, but he slayed them and now has a group of ogres (14) who travel together and use effective tactics to gain land and goods.
The adventurers should hear of an area infrequently travelled because of a small band of trolls, none of whom have been seen for a while.
Their leader is a fighter3/rouge1 and he has 2 of his party trained as 2nd level fighters.
In the enchanted forest there is an ogre mage who lives in a manse and is supported by his enslaved children. He gets the children either by capturing them himself or by buying them from the local hags and witches. He forces the children to grow vegetables for him and uses them for foul purposes. Every night, one of the children is put on the spit and eaten for the Ogre Mage's dinner.
While in hiding, the PC's see the Ogre Mage walking towards his manse with a sack over his back. The sack is squirming...
Note: this plot hook is a blatant rip off from Vance.
The latest fashion in a nearby metropolis is to keep a live grey ooze in a great copper pot on the doorstep. However, one day the buzz wears off and someone will have to get rid of these several dozen potted grey oozes.
A thief recently stole a holy golden relic from a temple, and the heroes are hired to bring the thief and the relic back. They track him into a dungeon complex. In one doorway, they see the relic hanging in midair, but no trace of the thief.
The question is: are they stupid/inattentive enough to reach into the gelatinous cube occupying the doorway to grab the relic? The thief obviously was.
Locals have been disappearing in a church dedicated to (insert god here). Most stories seem to point out folks going to the church and not coming back, but noone has actually seen anyone disappear.
It seems an ochre jelly has taken up residence in the concave top of a confessional and is consuming anyone who comes by after dark. The jelly cannot be spotted from the floor of the church, and to be teased out someone must sit in the confessional booth and start speaking. The booth is cramped and will cause anyone attacked inside it to suffer a -4 to attacks and AC from the constricted space.
A local town (village) suffered misfortune when a Black pudding crawled out of the nearby swamp and terrorized the townsfolk, until a band of adventurers managed to capture it by luring it into a deep pit constructed for the purpose. The adventurers informed the town to finish off the creature by fire, and left it to them to finish the job. (Bad judgment call.) The townsfolk decided instead to use the new ooze as a garbage pit, and to rid themselves of criminals also, pushing them into the pit for quick and easy elimination. The Pudding, unable to crawl out of the deep hole, stayed in the pit.
Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, the Pudding occasionally took damage from the garbage and condemned people pushed into the pit. The Pudding not only grew, but divided, and divided, and divided...
The PC's have just stopped into town on their way to another destination. The Puddings (multiple) are now so large and numerous that many of them are able to crawl from the pit, and into town, wreaking havoc and feeding off of the tasty people...
The elder council of a small village of orcs has hired a wandering adventuring party to assist in the protection of their village. Recently, it has been the subject of malicious nightime attacks and raids from a nearby settlement that wants the area so they can mine the gold from the river, which they claim is theirs (despite the orcs living there long before the establishment of that settlement). Of course, the ones responsible for the nightime raids are human...
An island ruled by a lawful evil orcish dictator is trying to join a trade federation that powerful mercantile nations have set up. The orcs have lots of natural resources and if they can become accepted as a civilized race, adventurers will no longer be free to come murder their people. He has a few human and dwarven subjects, but his island nation is composed of a strongly lawful sect of orcs whose patron deity is a lawful neutral god normally associated with more good-aligned followers in the campaign; the orcish warlord uses this as a powerful political tool in dealing with other races.
The orcs can't simply conquer everywhere they go because there just aren't enough of them. They have grown crafty and will attempt to use contracts, negotiations, business deals, etc. to their best advantage. If he deems it necessary, the dictator is willing to use force -- but he looks to the long-term consequences. He could potentially be a long-term campaign adversary the PCs could deal with until they are very high level, depending on his class and level.
While exploring some underground complex, the party finds the wrinkled body of a dead dwarf preventing the sliding door of a secret passage to close back. Further examination of the body may reveal it was a derro and a Heal check (DC 15) will reveal he died of some disease (DC 25 indicates it is Filth Fever).
The secret passage leads to an underground derro complex. This particular passage was seldom used and shows signs of disuse. The complex is completely uninhabited; only corpses appear in the streets wrinkled and fetid, most of them dead from the same disease. There is plenty to loot here if one is willing to risk contagion; however, dwelling for too long in the caves will draw the attention of a group of mutated otyugh that used to live in the lower-levels the Duergar threw their garbage in. There are over 20 creatures in the group but they only hunt in clusters of 2-4.
These mutated otyugh, like some fish from the dark, deeper recesses of the sea, has developed some kind of biochemical light, something like a lamp on a stalk that juts from over its maw and that the creatures use to lure pray. This biochemical light, however, affects Derro like sunlight (slowly reducing their Constitution). The lightstalks can be salvaged out of a dead creature and kept in effect for a couple of weeks before waning out, the effect of the light has never been tested against any other kind of creature and may be efficient against other creatures of the dark, perhaps even vampires.
Another crazy mage insists he knows the way to train owlbears. You would think mages would learn better from all the past failures, but no...
Anyway, he wants a couple of adult owlbears, and of course he wants healthy ones that have not been tramatized by adventurers beating them up. Well, it's still gold...