The Gaming Den

Fucks wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote: "Mysterious Places" may not be about anything or provide any real information, but it is literally five times longer in terms of actual text than a first edition oWoD book.

That calls for a review!

Fair enough. I'm not actually going to do Mysterious Places, because I don't happen to have access to a copy of it. But Mysterious Places is actually just a single interchangeable part of a long list of shovelware books that White Wolf came out with for New World of Darkness. Starting with "Ghost Stories", nWoD was graced with a large line of functionally interchangeable books based on the premise of "presenting some rumors from the world of darkness" (128 pages, hard back). Now I know what you're thinking "Rumors? Like seriously just random, contradictory ideas with no semblance of a plot?" Yes. Exactly.

Each of these books is 128 pages long and specifically does not ttie into a metaplot of any kind. The actual premise is that the storyteller will use whatever they want from the book and change or ignore whatever they don't want, so there is no attempt at all to keep this shit consistent. And we're not talking about a single book here. Ghost Stories, Mysterious Places, Urban Legends, Tales From the 13th Precinct, Dogs of War, and the one we're actually rageviewing today: Midnight Roads. All of them are basically interchangeable. All of them could have been replaced with some wikipedia research, hell parts of them literally are cribbed from wiki entries already. But before I drink too much of my beer, let's start:

Road Gospel

Before we even get to a ToC, we are confronted with a story. It has a very busy background and is white text over dark grey pictures. It all comes in multiple layers and the official pdf is very poorly encoded. Background, pictures, text, they come in in that order. Even on a fast machine, the pdf reads slow as shit.

The first bit is a 10 page story about a guy who comes back to his home town and it is all dried up because the highway was decommissioned. And maybe there is a gang of vampires or junkies or something terrorizing the place. And he gets beaten up by a crazy road hermit and given highway powers in order to fight them. The end. The highway powers are, to my knowledge at least, not actually a thing in WoD, and the story is 10 pages long and takes until page 4 for there to even be any antagonists introduced. The antagonists are never named and the actual battle involve road powers versus a '68 Mustang full of possibly-supernatural hooligans is not shown. The road powers aren't even mentioned until page 9.

Table of Contents

After the Road Gospel story there is the copyright page, the Table of Contents, a full page picture of a werewolf moving a body from a broken down truck that is pretty cartoonish, and a one-page story about a guy getting taken over by some sort of alien monster from under the hood of his truck. The only reason I am even mentioning this is because the Table of Contents page numbers aren't even close to correct. The second chapter (called "Introduction") is supposed to start on page 12, but it actually starts on page 16. I need to drink more or this kind of shit is going to really bother me.

Introduction

Yes, the second chapter is called "Introduction". It's six pages long and helpfully informs you that nWoD is a very city-focused game with very little going on in the places in-between. Also it spits out some facts that were literally cribbed off of wikipedia about how much highway there is. There is a brief description of how you might want to shake things up by having adventures on the road with various types of supernaturals. More than half a page is taken up giving you a blurb about each flavor of supernatural. Not about how the supernaturals interact with this book, just a condensed schpiel about vampires and prometheans and stuff in general, in case this was the first book of the World of Darkness you picked up, or more likely because the author needed to use up a page of text and wanted to be able to copypasta it from other WoD books. The chapter ends with some capsule film reviews. It hits some "road" movies like Grindhouse and The Hitcher, but then for no particular reason it also includes Hot Fuzz. I'm guessing the author just really liked Hot Fuzz.

Just before turning over to the next chapter, you get another one page story. In keeping with the stories having seemingly nothing whatever to do with the World of Darkness, this one appears to be about a completely mundane serial killer. Or possibly just a man who is joshing with a scared hitchhiker, because nothing actually happens on camera.

Chapter 1: Journeys and Destinations

Yes. We are on Chapter 3, and it is labeled Chapter 1. Whatever. This chapter is 22 pages long. A lot of it is taken up with wikipedia-style information. Did you know that the interstate highway system was a plan drawn up under the Eisenhower administration? How about the fact that the word street comes from Latin "strata"? Well, you'd know that if you scoured wikipedia entries for road related factoids, and you'd know it if you read Midnight Roads and let the author give you his highway related book report as well. Lucky you.

But it's not all wiki-based info dump. Sometimes there are actual plot hooks. Sometimes. Each subsection has itself some subsections of their own that often as not don't interact. For example, there's the Subsection "Trucks", which is about trailer truckers. It has the headings "gear" (which assures you that trucks are important to truckers), "Stops" (which is about how there are showers at truck stops), "The Load" (which is about how truckers don't like downtime), "Prostitutes" (which is about Prostitutes), and finally "Plot Hooks". The "Plot Hooks" bit provides three "trucker" related plot hooks. They are "There's a mummy and/or sacrificial victims in your trailer", "nothing appears to be happening at the truck stop" (I am not making that one up), and "there's a trailer full of werewolf hunters". The next subsection is "Hitchhiking", but there's also a textbox about supernatural creatures doing long-haul trucking that is cleverly entitled "monster trucks".

Basically, it's a pretty similar setup to a Tome book. Difference being that there are no mechanics here, and really no attempt to make the mechanics work into the world. The suggested supernatural plothooks are not "someone has used ability X to do event Y" it's "here's a completely arbitrary magical effect that I just made up and have no mechanics for, have fun with that". The plothooks are as telegraphic as the ones in "High Adventure in the Lower Planes", but way longer individually so you get less of them. Also there is no attempt to tie the player characters to many of them. Here's a real example:

Midnight Roads wrote:• A half-dozen hitchhikers have disappeared, from spots all over the Midwest. Evidence of a bad ride? Not if they all took rides with different people . . . up until they vanished at their final destinations. Whoever is stalking the hitchers has been watching their communications on the Internet, pinpointing where they’re going. Why does the kidnapper need travelers, though?

Wat.

OK, how is that a plot hook? It's inter-state, so it only becomes "a case" once the FBI looks into it and connects the dots. Once that happens, it's an FBI case and the players don't even get to know it's a case at all unless the FBI tells them for some reason. Really, I can't even generously call that a plot hook - a plot hook by definition is something that gets the PCs into the story. This doesn't do that. It's just backstory, any actual plot hook the Storyteller would have to write their own damn selves.

The final one-page story is about some sort of inhuman monster that controls gusts of wind and is angry at someone for having stopped their car to piss off the side of the road. I find it difficult to imagine an inhuman monster actually caring whether animals piss in the woods. But whatever.

Chapter 2: Construction Ahead

Here it is: on page 44 we find the first identifiable mechanics in this book. They are that you have to roll Wits + Survival to find food in a wilderness setting. I think this needs to called out specifically because that is the normal rules for foraging found in the basic book. The book then spends five pages with only slightly less ridiculous "new skill uses" (for example, did you guess that you could make a Survival check to find shelter? Or perhaps make a Subterfuge check to borrow someone's cell phone and then run away with it?). Next up we have a short piece on tricking out cars with expensive crap and then there's a bit highlighting how incredibly terrible the New World of Darkness rules for building/sabotaging things are. See, in order to cut a break line, you need to make a whole fuck tonne of Dexterity + Crafts checks, until you accumulate seven successes (average successes: 1 per three dice per roll). There is no consequence of failure on any particular roll, no limit to the number of times you can roll, and no amount of time listed for making a roll (a combat round defaults to a handful of seconds). And you stop as soon as you hit seven and nothing happens if you overshoot or use up less attempts. So there is a massive die rolling extravaganza (average 23.4 dice thrown at the table in however many piles) and then it makes absolutely no difference because there is absolutely no game effect generated by any particularly good or bad rolls. WTF?

There are a couple pages telling you to use the normal rules for chases and combat when performing chases or combat involving cars. I don't know how they can spend a couple of pages on that. I am looking at it right now and I still don't know how they can do that. There's a bit about magic cars that you do not want (would you like to pay health levels instead of gasoline to run your car? Not in a game with abstracted wealth, that's for damn sure!). There are some merits that are amongst the most obscure character generation options in the game, but thankfully for game balance they are incredibly worthless and no one gives a shit. The one page story at the end of the chapter is about a circus of demon clowns that steal children from an obscure town in the middle of whogivesafuckistan.

Chapter 3: Road Hazards

It's 28 pages long and is among the lowest density writing you will ever see. Each piece is a plot hook mixed in with some incomplete sample characters. I think I can let the book explain this better than I:

Midnight Roads wrote:The story hooks presented here are less specific than the ones found in the following chapter.

What it means by "less specific" is that the character plots and even character writeups are not finished. For example, the first character is suggested to be written up as a Changeling, or maybe a Promethean, you know, whatever. I'm not really sure what the point of writing a character sheet up at all is supposed to be if you aren't going to actually finish character generation. If I wanted to go through normal chargen rules, I could do it myself. But it does use up half a page. There are also italicized story bits that are supposed to be evocative of the plot hooks, but aren't directly tied into anything. These also take up a fair bit of space. Editing in this is atrocious. The story hooks for "vanishing hitchhikers" are labeled "On the Lam story hooks", for example. Even reading this thing, I can't tell how many story hooks there are supposed to be. Is "Watching the World Go By" supposed to be a different hook from "Motel Hell"? I have no fucking clue, the heading format doesn't seem to be used consistently.

The final page story is about someone dying in a car crash and then running over to see their own corpse. Interesting in that it is the first such story in this book that could possibly actually happen with the specific cast of supernatural creatures present in the nWoD. The character is apparently a ghost. Although not a Geist, because nWoD is fucked up like that.

Chapter Four: Dangerous Intersections

At 38 pages, this is the longest chapter in the book. There are five story seeds in it. Each one is written up in a fair amount of detail. Each one is presented with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Many important characters are given minimal writeups. Each of the adventures contains a big "fuck you" of some kind. There is a mirror that opens up into a one way portal to an extradimensional jail cell that you can't ever escape from (seriously). There is an adventure where the finale is that the boss is actually just a dumpy guy who has no magic powers at all and just killed for a fake demon he made up. There's an adventure where the enemies are Shadow Monster Steves that are wholly made up for this scenario (rather than use any of the dozens and dozens of monster types the nWoD already has), thereby causing all the players' attempts to figure out what the fuck is going on to automagically fail.

This chapter doesn't have a final page of story, but you hardly notice because it's already 38 pages of story.

-Username17

Ah, shovelwear.

The thing that is surprising is really how little there is to say about it. It's 91k words, which is about 13k longer than the Holy Koran. And yet, it's such an inefficient use of words that there really isn't much to comment on.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:The second chapter (called "Introduction") is supposed to start on page 12, but it actually starts on page 16. I need to drink more or this kind of shit is going to really bother me.

Know how in some stories, vampires all had OCD? Just saiyan.

I'm guessing the author just really liked Hot Fuzz.

To be fair, it's an awesome movie. Relevant? No, unless you include "going from the big city to rural towns where crazy cults reside and the police do nothing about it" as being road-related. I dunno, in WoD that's supposed to be every place, so you don't have to drive far to go there. But still, awesome movie.

Dogs of War had some cool merits and equipment. The rest of the "series" was about equally crap.

Which isn't to say that Dogs of War wasn't crap, just that it was crap that also included some mechanics you might ever use.

Dogs of War is actually one of the books most hated by the nWoD fanbase (limited though that fanbase is). It is shovelware put out by people with no particular knowledge of the subject and a good deal of it is cribbed from wikis and very little of the book is about the supernatural element or any particular plot. Like Midnight Roads, it is almost entirely given over to to vague pronouncements about how shit works in the normal world (as revealed by casual internet searching).

Problem: army buffs hate the book because it gets many details of the military "wrong" (note: you cannot get three military history afficianados to agree on pizza toppings, let alone the veracity of military trivia, but even within that context, a lot of the shit in Dogs of War is wrong).

Problem2: White Wolf "roleplay not rollplay" feebs hate the book is about heavy weapons and characters for whom it is in character to have combat skills.

Problem3: My goodness those military mechanics are terribad. If I cared that much about trying to make a nWoD campaign work, I would probably hate the book too.

-Username17

good review

Probable spambot above me. This must be the shortest in-depth review ever for such a long book, so holy crap you aren't kidding about wasted space.

Surgo wrote:This must be the shortest in-depth review ever for such a long book, so holy crap you aren't kidding about wasted space.

Yeah, there's not really even that much you can say about the nWoD shovelware books. They don't say or do anything. Some of this can be laid at the feet of the format of nWoD itself: every time a skill use or power is described, they have to tell you four possible outcomes, even though one of them ("Dramatic Failure") is literally impossible on almost all rolls you will ever make, and success and failure are quite often self explanatory. So to an extent it's understandable from a format perspective that it would take literally 600 words to describe "Finding Food" (that is to say: "make a Survival check to find food", a statement that just used 593 less words than the piece in Midnight Roads). But the fact that this exact rule is already in the World of Darkness core rulebook, and thus that they just spent 600 words providing essentially no new information at all is perplexing.

What few plot hooks there are are pretty amazingly not fleshed out. I just flipped to the chapter that has hanging plot hooks and picked one at random, here it is:

Some campgrounds are woefully decrepit. The “cost” to enter relies on an element of trust where drivers put a bit of money in a box and take a ticket to display in the windshield. It might look as if someone hasn’t checked the box in about six years (maybe the bottom has rotted out and money put in just drops into a dirty puddle below). Characters who endeavor to camp at such a place find themselves completely alone . . . at first. At night, the vagrants and cast-offs who populate the dark campsite come crawl-ing out of the woods. Maybe they want food. Maybe they siphon gas. Maybe it’s been awhile since they’ve enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve been living out here so long, existing totally unchecked, that the forest has become a part of them, and they’re all possessed by various wild fey spirits.

That's 152 words. It cannot, by any possible measure be considered a plot hook. First of all: there's no plot. At all. It's just an establishing shot: you stop at a campground and it's deserted and unmaintained. There might be vagrants who come out at night. That still isn't a plot, because a plot requires events and conflict. It's also not a hook, since there is absolutely no incentive for the player characters to stay at this particular campground. This isn't a plot or a hook, it's just an event. The actual story would have to come 100% from the players and storyteller.

Also: to the best of my knowledge, people are not "possessed by fey spirits" in nWoD. The Fey are like flesh and blood dudes. There is exactly one mention of possession in Changeling, and that is in the context of noting that ghosts can possess mortals. So not only is the what and why of the vagrants not explained at all - there isn't even a rule you could go back to as the magical effect alluded to in that description isn't an actual thing in the game. Changeling is a monstrously large document (258 thousand words, 349 pages), but while it has many many things in it, fairies that possess hobos is not actually one of them.

The pieces in the later chapters are even more ridiculous in their verbosity to coherence ratio. Let's flip to a random bit in "Road Hazards": we find "Snow". This mini segment uses up an impressive 1184 words and covers one encounter: "Snow Brides". These are Steves who look like sexy ladies and trick men into wandering off into the snow, taking off their clothes, and dying of exposure. They are given stats, where we are assured that they are supernatural creatures who are Steves and thus don't actually use any of the rules for supernatural powers that any of the other supernatural creatures do. Also: they do not have any special power to make people take off their clothes and die in the snow. Their power called "Lure" is actually just a really weak version of D&D's disguise self that lets them appear as if they were wearing any sort of appropriate clothing. But getting you to strip in a snowstorm is really 100% left up to them have a Manipulation and Subterfuge of 3 (or maybe their Strength of 4 and Brawl of 3?). So not only does this bit not tie in with any part of the nWoD, I don't even see how it's possible to run it in the rules. It really seems like they'd need some actual power to get people to not notice or not care that they were dying of exposure, but they seriously don't have one.

-Username17

I think it's unfair to pick on them for saying "Fey Spirits" when they meant "Wilderness Spirits" (in Werewolf, who possess hobos and turn them evil, like, all the time.)

Especially when everything else you said is entirely true, and the book is pretty worthless.

I will say, I liked some of their shovelware. There was one that had evil demonic flashmobs in it; I liked that one. Urban Legends, I think it was? It was hit or miss, and a lot of it was indeed just copied (without attribution) from various places around the web, but at least it wasn't book-report filler dumped verbatim from wikipedia. And several of the urban legends in it were quite cool.

I recall that the editing and consistency was poor, though.

I liked their Immortals shovelware. It was badly designed and mostly useless, but I could see the appeal.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure they meant "wilderness spirit possessed" and to plug Changing Breeds, and the editor was asleep.

Prak_Anima wrote:Yeah, I'm pretty sure they meant "wilderness spirit possessed" and to plug Changing Breeds, and the editor was asleep.

See, I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that, because it's part of a larger pattern of ignoring the rules and using World of Darkness terminology poorly. When they have a dude who is supposed to be a Changeling, they don't actually give him stats as a changeling. This is a bit that is literally attached to one of the sample characters:

Midnight Roads wrote:Michael could be a changeling, fresh from the Hedge and fearing the hoof-beats of his Keeper’s Hunt on his trail, if the Storyteller wants to incorporate Changeling: The Lost into her game. Just slap a starting changeling template on the Traits below and run with it. Or, for a Storyteller with an interest in Promethean: The Created , he could be newly made, a Galateid who has escaped an obsessive creator and knows little about who (or what) he is. Add a Refinement and a few Transmutations, and you’re ready to go. Likewise, he could be a werewolf just out of his First Change or a vampire’s ghoul on the run from his (now-deceased) master’s enemies. Or, he could be just what he seems — a frightened young man with a case of amnesia and possibly a checkered past, whose good looks likely led him into places he should never have gone. In that case, use the Traits below as offered and add in background worthy of him being pursued by supernatural creatures, the Mafia or the police.

See here's the thing: name dropping of mechanics from other books is done very "high level" if at all. All the monsters are Steves or you're told to go look at the relevant books to find mechanics and mix-n-match according to the rules in those books. What this adds up to is that the Author either couldn't be fucked to look up the other books when writing this one, or he straight up did not have access to anything other than the basic World of Darkness book. I think it's especially telling that while the author name-drops refinements and transmutations (implying that they have at least thumbed through Promethean), they don't use the words contract, mien, or wyrd at all in that context. I think the inescapable conclusion is that the author of this book had never actually read Changeling: the Lost.

So I think when the author is talking about fey spirits, he really means fey spirits, because he seriously has no idea what words mean. Having never read Changeling, all mentions of Changeling effects are basically shots in the dark. Here is for example a real example of how to incorporate a Lost Hitchhiker plot line into Changeling (incorrectly labeled as an "On the Lam Story Hook", but whatever):

Changeling
Quote: Sorry. I made a mistake. You can let me out.
She doesn’t remember her name, where she is from or anything about her human life. She does remember the land beyond the Thorns, and what her Mistress made her do, every day, for hours. She won’t speak of that. She isn’t going back.

She remembers the car, though. She was in a car when her Mistress took her and pulled her screaming into the Thorns. The car was red . . . maybe tan. It was small . . . but it could have been one of those not-quite-SUV-sized cars. Maybe a Jeep. She gets into a lot of cars now, and when she realizes that they aren’t her car, she gets out. Most times the drivers don’t notice.

If she ever finds the car, maybe she will remember herself, and maybe get away from this highway. For now, she lives at truck stops. Some people call her a “lot lizard,” and she doesn’t know what that means, but she does know that what the truckers want her to do is better than what Mistress made her do.

Does that sound like it was written by someone who had read any part of Changeling other than the back cover?

-Username17

Given that I haven't read changeling, I'm not the best judge, but given that the only real hint of Changeling is that he capitalized "thorns" to imply a place, no, not really. I do see your point. It really does seem like it was written completely apart from any other WoD book, as well as misusing the term plot hooks, which really should have been called "starting concepts" or "spitballing" or something, because they're at least decent as a starting idea to work from, but terrible plothooks.

"Mind flayer has devastated a village, and is now sequestered in a mine protected by head crab style intellect devourers" is a shorter, and better plot hook than anything mentioned from Midnight Roads. And not just because that was literally the last adventure I ran in my D&D campaign.

K wrote:I liked their Immortals shovelware. It was badly designed and mostly useless, but I could see the appeal.

Immortals is actually part of a different line. The "shovelware" line is a series of 128 page works of filler text that are largely copypasta and not intended to do anything. Immortals is actually part of the "quasi splats" which are about semi-playable stuff. They are stand-alone, have a variable page length (Skin Changers is only 127, Immortals is 143, and Second Sight is 159), and introduce stuff that's probably underpowered but probably obscure enough that it might be kind of OK to play in a Superfriends game where everyone can remember the weaknesses of the characters playing things out of "real" splats.

The Immortals book in particular introduces three flavors of immortality and provides a supernatural template and associated pile of available magic powers for each. You got Blood Bathers (weak vampires essentially), Body Jumpers, and "Purified" who are basically spirits who possess their own body and have a completely arbitrary afterlife to interact with that is different from everyone else's.

-Username17

Prak_Anima wrote:"Mind flayer has devastated a village, and is now sequestered in a mine protected by head crab style intellect devourers" is a shorter, and better plot hook than anything mentioned from Midnight Roads. And not just because that was literally the last adventure I ran in my D&D campaign.

Okay, that's the plot. Now where's the hook?

"You will get paid by the mine owner to get rid of it."

NineInchNall wrote: Okay, that's the plot. Now where's the hook?

Yeah, a "Plot Hook" has exactly two parts: the plot and the hook. The plot is the thing that's happening that drives the adventure. The hook is the part where the PCs get involved. The "plot hooks" in Midnight Roads are awful because they fail to deliver those two things.

Consider the "people got abducted after someone tracked a bunch of hitchhikers to their destinations over the internet" one: that has a plot, but there's no hook. Or consider the "decrepit campground gets overrun by hobos at night" one: there's a hook (a bunch of hobos show up out of the woods; surprise), but there's no plot.

And just to show that I'm not completely talking out of my ass, here's a bit me and K did for the Tome of Fiends:

High Adventure in the Lower Planes: Acheron wrote:Ten Mid Level Adventures in Acheron
An emissary of hoary Surog, the ice count, contacts you. He has (the ring, the antidote, the code) you need, and he'll give it you, but first…

• 
  
• One of his lieutenants has betrayed him; since you are random strangers, he can trust you to find out which one.
  
• His daughter has run off with the blue falcon, that accursed do-gooder. Bring her home, do with him as you wish.
  
• His daughter is the blue falcon. Stop her, but don't kill her.
  
• His daughter is the blue falcon, and Surog's rival, Cardinal Valgos, has put-her-in-a-death-trap. Rescue her, without letting on that Surog knows her identity.
  
• Cardinal Valgos has found some route to smuggle forces into Yevekh. Find how they're getting in.
  
• Cardinal Valgos is planning an attack, and Surog is not prepared. Infiltrate his mercenary forces and cause as much delay as possible.
  
• Cardinal Valgos has placed Surog in some kind of suspended animation! You have to lift the curse before one of Surog's underlings makes a play for power.
  
• A blue crossbow bolt with a head shaped like a stylized raptor strikes the emissary from nowhere, killing him before he can deliver your mission! Who is trying to stop you, and why?
  
• Cardinal Valgos has Imag's heir, or so he claims. Prove the heir is false, or steal him away.
  
• Cardinal Valgos has tricked the fox of the mountains, Dagipert, into allying with him. Break up this alliance one way or another.
  

That's 258 words. Ten plots, all of which are tied to 1 hook. Count Surog offers the PCs a deal, and if they take it, they commit to solving the plot. That is how you fucking do it.

-Username17

Yeah, this shit isn't hard. You really can go with "The President has been kidnapped by ninjas" if the party happens to be made up of bad dudes who vote straight ticket democrat.

I hate to be contrarian, but - *I* actually wrote those ten.

I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin', you have like 10 pp of that to choose from and you pick the one block of plot hooks that you and K didn't write? That stings, man.

But seriously -
Allies in the spirit world have told you of a seemingly-unclaimed Feng Shui site located at an abandoned camp ground in the Appalachian hill country. When set up camp to attune the place, cannibalistic spirit-possessed hobos attack you at night!
[*] Your so-called "allies" are plotting to eliminate you in a place of power, they're possessing the hobos, they own the Feng Shui site themselves.
[*] Your so-called "allies" are from a court opposed to the hobo-possessing spirits; they want the artifact that powers the Feng Shui site detroyed.
[*] The mutant hobos are the result of Marduk Society experiments run amok. The Marduk society actually owns the Feng Shui site.
[*] The possessed hobos are just peaceful nature worshipers who want to be left alone to follow "the old ways". Why harsh their mellow?
[*] It's sorta like fight-club, except you let demons take over your body and then go on a rampage. The participants think it's a hoot and they'll get really serious about killing you, if they discover you're not there to participate in the fun. Play your cards right and you can attune the Feng Shui site without even bothering them.

NineInchNall wrote:

Prak_Anima wrote:"Mind flayer has devastated a village, and is now sequestered in a mine protected by head crab style intellect devourers" is a shorter, and better plot hook than anything mentioned from Midnight Roads. And not just because that was literally the last adventure I ran in my D&D campaign.

Okay, that's the plot. Now where's the hook?

The adventurers were looking for shit to do while traveling, so the hook was "it's the village you're in, and intellect devourers are attacking you."