Real World Adventure Hooks for D&D — Ghost Girl

For a Game Master descriptions are vitally important when running a tabletop roleplaying game like fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Fantastic artwork can be a tremendous visual aid, and there’s countless miniatures and accessories to enhance your gaming table whether you play on a virtual tabletop or a physical one. So I’m always on the lookout for visual data to draw from and help paint a picture for players. I recently came across a remarkable sculpture by Kevin Francis Gray that struck me immediately and went directly into the GM toolbox in my imagination. Even better, Ghost Girl opened a window into this artists other works, a collection of incredible sculptures dripping with evocative imagery. Taking inspiration from fantasy art gets a lot of mileage for me as a GM, and the best works give ideas for adventure hooks.

“Ghost Girl” by London-based sculptor Kevin Francis Gray.

D&D adventure hooks from real life

Ghost Girl is a statue of a young woman, facedown and veiled by a stream of glass crystal beads by London-based sculptor Kevin Francis Gray. I read the sculptor’s work often includes hints of secrecy and surrealism, and if you click the image above and check out more sculptures on the website you’ll find this to be very true. Behind the veil is a skeletal face, and the Ghost Girl’s arms, hidden behind her back, bear numerous scars. All of Gray’s works contain this element of cloaking keeping some part of the figure obscured whether a mask, a cascade of beads like Ghost Girl or a sheet draped over the entire body.

Beneath Ghost Girl’s jeweled veil.

I’m no art critic but to me there’s a sense of pain or trauma in Ghost Girl and other works by the artist. And since we’re looking at adventure hooks for D&D there’s potentially a whole lot more going on through magic and other supernatural means. Right off the bat, any creature able to turn other creatures to stone is a suspect. Protip for players: if your Dungeon Master makes a point to describe the statues in a room, there’s probably something up with them. Red alert if they describe how lifelike they appear.

In our own real lives art resonates with us emotionally. You could look at Ghost Girl and see a sad story there. Now imagine evoking those feelings except the sculpture is a real person. Helping Ghost Girl escape her stone prison, and then in picking up the pieces of her life would make for some compelling adventure hooks and storytelling. Don’t worry you can still defeat monsters, explore exciting places and discover treasure along the way but a powerful purpose like this connects adventurers to the world in a personal way and likely prompts some interesting decision making.

So that’s one adventure hook inspired by Ghost Girl. Cure the curse of stone and aid in her quest to overcome past trauma. It’s dramatic! For more adventure hooks I recommend checking out the artist’s website here and considering his other works as fantasy art to inspire any of these. Also worth noting there’s six adventure hooks here so give your d6 a roll:

1. Ghost Girl’s jeweled veil of tears makes a tempting target for dungeon looting. It’s just another weird statue the party came across down here anyway. But a thief who gazes beneath the veil at Ghost Girl’s skeletal visage begins experiencing haunting dreams of a restless spirit.
2. A string of deaths share a gruesome coincidence. Their bodies show no signs of injury or struggle except one — their faces are gone leaving a macabre skeletal face.
3. Adventurers encounter wretched shambling humanoids with faces distorted and mashed up like they were made of clay. To their horror the heroes discover these are people who went missing, and an insane fleshsculptor is practicing their craft on kidnapped people.
4. A dungeon delve reveals hidden chambers unseen for thousands of years. The architecture is bizarre, and the busts of what adventurers could presume were the people who built this place are disturbing. What sorts of people were they, with such unusual physiology?
5. Statues with jeweled veils, in different colors, configuration and number, stand at various places in the dungeon. A diary describes an art collector’s obsession with the sculptures. They were certain the statues guarded powerful secrets, and uncovering them all would grant some power. No one in the party knows anything more about them, so it might be time to make friends with an art history major?
6. Adventurers encounter a gallery of cold marble filled with busts. Like, dozens or hundreds of them. Each bust is carved to look it a shroud covers its head but features are still visible beneath. While looking around the party discovers busts of themselves. What does it mean?

D&D adventure hooks are everywhere we look. This one comes from Ghost Girl, a sculpture with fantasy art elements. I was intrigued enough to look at more work from the artist and got all sorts of ideas for weird stuff that happens during a D&D game. Sometimes a great adventure hook emerges simply by describing something to the players and capturing their imagination.

How would you use the Ghost Girl sculpture in your game? Have you ever used fantasy art, in or out of a game, to help create adventure hooks? What adventure hooks do you think of from this sculpture? Share them below (seriously, I’m always in the market for adventure hooks).