I'm the Map!

 Day 5 of GLoGtober brings us an interesting look at maps. In most D&D games I've been a part of, the map is usually something that gets handed out or shown off at the beginning of a campaign and is rarely used again (not unlike the ubiquitous map at the beginning pages of any handful of your favorite fantasy novels). Let's see if we can find a way to spice them up. 

Coffee stains that kinda look like a map? 

1d12 Map-Based Plot Hooks / Seeds

1. The King hands you a map with living ink that dynamically tracks every Adult Dragon within 100 miles, but reveals several to be located within the Castle itself. 
2. The cultists hand over the map....that's tattooed to the back of a frightened child that doesn't seem to share any languages with you. 
3. A noble who got robbed by street urchins hires you to recover a map that is a bag of marbles that when dumped out forms the shape of the continents and reveals the location of an island previously thought to be a myth. 
4. A githyanki runaway hides a map that leads to a flock of astral leviathans inside your second most recurring dream. 
5. You are gifted a mysterious map with an X marked on an unknown location. Rumors reveal that this map will either lead to its owners demise or greatest desire. 
6. Chaos wizards complete a ritual that destroy every map in the world, and prevents new maps from being drawn without glaring inaccuracies. 
7. The party finds a map to untold treasures that can only be read by undead. 
8. You find a map that leads to other maps. It's maps all the way down. 
9. You come across a bag of ashes that smells of sulphur and brimstone. A pinch of it thrown into an open flame causes the flames to reveal a map of the Plane of Fire. 
10. For your efforts, the djinn awards you a Sentient Map that can reveal the location of ancient and powerful artifacts, but is also rather moody. 
11. The Emperor hires the party to capture a demon that travels through maps as if they were gates in hopes of learning or using its power for the Defense of the Empire. 
12. The God of Cartography offers promise of glory and riches to any who can find and map the Edge of the Material Plane. 

If you want to get into it, here's the list with links to previous days: 

1 Guns

2 Blood

3 Goblins

4 Swirling rainbow vortices

5 Map

6 Food

7 Adventure

8 Mystery

9 Region

10 Mechanic

11 Space

12 Armor

13 Tribe

14 Table

15 Orb

16 Country

17 Bird

18 Biome

19 Quirky Magic Item

20 Dice

21 Artifact

22 GM tip

23 Hell

24 Disease

25 Myth

26 City

27 Villains

28 Orb, again

29 Gods

30 Crime

31 Candy