I just got back from a long weekend on Isle Royale. It was tough to be so far from phone, internet, or any kind of communication. It did leave me with a lot of time to think and come up with ideas for new locations, monsters, hazards, and adventures.
Just about any area of the real world is filled with evocative places and names for settings and NPCs that can be liberally stolen or usurped for our games. One location visible from the Isle Royale park is a Canadian park called “The Sleeping Giant.” It’s a mountain ridge near Thunder Bay (also a great setting name) that looks like supine person, about 25 miles long. It’s easy to imagine a giant laying down to sleep for millennia and getting overgrown with flora. Making this setting even more awesome is that the native Ojibway people already had a legend about the place: a great spirit was turned to stone because they betrayed the secret of his silver mine.
There’s a lot of interesting hooks from this location. Here are two suggestions:
- The players have to wake the giant in order to enlist it’s help to fight a bigger, badder giant.
- They have to wake the giant to obtain information about a treasure or ancient enemy.
- They players have to discover the mine and obtain the treasure without waking and incurring the wrath of the giant.