Hi My game I'm working on ur a mercenary group and u get hired to do odd jobs that would require a hired blade. I was brain storming ideas that werent part of the main story and thought it could be productive for other designers to share some ideas for side quests and such. Sure there is the typical, my kid is sick go get him the plant that will cure him, go collect x amount of animal hides, etc... But the little stories behind them I think are the interesting parts.

I'll start off with one.

A guy pissed off this magic chef (Miko for those who have seen my post) by eatting one of the chefs rare ingredients and miko cursed him with having no more taste for food. Life is sad and dull without any flavor. In order to have the curse lifted you need to go find another ingredient to replace the one eaten.

Interested to see others ideas hope we can help out the community

here is one just for the fun of it

"Yo, Shino!"
"What!"
"I've got a job for you."
"Good i need the cash. So what's up."
"Well the thing is, some dude at the Zeus Corp has some info on me that really shouldn't be known in the publik, if you know what i am talking about.He is using that info to blackmail me, ill pay you good if you can kill him and erase the info"

Quests are really dependent on what kind of game it's for. Linear games vs Open Games.

By your post, I'm assuming you're asking for Open Games? If you're asking for both, this thread will become too convoluted for anyone to filter through for a good quest idea.

How about a quest for sleep. An unusual person is having trouble sleeping. He has a rather odd condition where he can only sleep out in the wilderness. Problem is, the wilderness isn't always safe. You must find a place in the wilderness that's just right. (No monsters nearby, not near a city, has a "soft patch" somewhere on the ground.) +Points if it's sheltered by the elements.

Once you find a place, you must take the man and bring him to it. It's a small spin on your escort quests. the story is open, as the man can be cursed, giving a follow-up if you return and he's awake to find the person who cursed him.

Yeah I suppose it be for more open world games but dont think it would be to hard to convert for linear games. And I like it idea of the guy who has to sleep in the wilderness. Could easily see this in a TBS. Protect the sleeping guy for x amount of turns to win.

@zecke good old fashion blackmail is always fun.

Interested to see others ideas

Classic Slay the Monster quests

This would work best in an area that the players have already cleared a dungeon or two. Works best if some time has already passed. Since the player's involvement, the town has fared much since and the economy is growing again. However, a young drake has moved into the old cave and set up shop. Being a drake and all, he likes to eat livestock.

This once again is beginning to hamper economic growth and threatens to undo all the growth it has experienced in the past year. PCs must now go deal with this young dragon.

Several ways of handling this

1. kill it: most straight forward way of getting rid of it. You just head out there, and kill it.
2. persuade it to leave: if you have someone who can speak dragon (or is charismatic enough that the dragon is willing to speak common with him/her), you can try to talk it into leaving. Might require a gift or something.
3. poison bait. Bait a sheep that is poisonous. Drake flies by and tries to eat it, which then makes it sick, and thereby much easier to defeat in subsequent visits. However, the poison obviously is dangerous, and the farmers are still losing one sheep, so the cost is coming out of the player's pay.

Delivery Man

See this letter/object/McGuffin? So and so in this other city that is far away in a rather dangerous place needs this in the next couple days. Please get it there in time. If you REALLY want to mess with the players, turn on an actual count down timer.

I have a Lazy Town Mayor quest thats kinda fun. The Mayor makes a request that you, the player, retrieve some items that will help you in the near future, instructing you to enter the room behind him to do so. There is a hallway behind the mayor and on the back wall of the hallway a door. Now across the hall is another doorway, one that can't be seen by the camera.

If the player enters the "visible" door it takes them through a dungeon that eventually leads to a boss monster the players fight, and then leads them to the secret room the King mentioned. If the player takes the door to the secret room right away the mayor asks the player to go defeat the boss anyway, but the player has a convenient short cut through the secret door. It rewards multiple playthroughs at the very least. For me it also enables a "sarcasm" switch in the game that makes some of the dialogue more comical in nature.

I like quests with more then one possible outcome.

I have a quest early in my game where you come across a man freting over his lost coin bag. If you find it you have an option.. return the bag... or keep the coin for yourself. >:3

i kind of like this, though personaly i would choose to keep the coin bag... on the other hand i like to play games like fallout 3, oblivion and what not several times to do the gameplay differently

See there'd be room to expand upon a good deed like that later on in the game, if you returned the coin bag then you'd be rewarded later on say when you're in a desperate situation.

Having quests that revolve around your parties status also adds to the realism of the game itself. Depending on what kind of system the game has it could make things interesting, if you're just starting off then quests should be given to you out of either desperation or trust gaining.

If you've just been brought to the village and can't remember a thing and you're carrying a huge sword, you're more than likely not going to be asked to find this little lost puppy, keep things similar to the situation.


Make yourself useful one always wins for me, getting the party to benefit the town/village is always a safe choice. Monsters blocking trade routes, getting parts to do repairs on a bridge etc. thus opens more things in shops (seen as a plus for the town/village and an extra reward to the player).

Agreed. My game has an empathy system where doing deeds/quests may change how some npc's react to you, may open up more quests (cause your more friendly to that town) offer better rewards. But I keep that option there that some of these you don't HAVE to do or offer an alternative action (ie keeping the money bag rather then returning it) so your status don't change and may not get an added bonus/event/quest later on that you would have if you say gave the guy back his money bag.

Those are kind of quests I like cause it adds to a reply value. A 'what would happen if I did it this way' sort of deal.

How about... a village needs to domesticate some sort of wild animal like an ox or something, to plow their fields or whatever. To catch it, you need to be equipped with some sort of suboptimal weapon like a stun gun, a net, a tranquilizer dart, or whatever; but at the same time, you'll encounter mobs of real monsters as you're trying to randomly encounter an ox, and of course you'll have to fight them with this really crappy weapon.

Help a bunch of kids build a snow man...

Buy: Carrot, Hat
Find: a few pebbles, 2 sticks

LOL, it's something...

I'm just starting out with RPGMaker VX; it's really a cool system, and right now I'm trying to get my head around Ruby.

One idea I had for a series of quests was for an eccentric witch. She doesn't trust you enough to give you difficult tasks; instead she asks you to deliver unusual artifacts to people. She warns you not to eat/read/etc. the items. If curiosity gets the better of you, then different fun things will happen. Right now only have a couple:

A strange potion (Changes player's sex)

Fun thing about this is that on the second playthrough, you can see who exactly wanted to use this in the first place!

Old Book (Transport to pocket dimension)

Using this will take you to a sealed series of maps, and you have to find a way back. Why does the witch have a book like this? What use could it be?

If you keep ignoring the witch and seeing what these weird artifacts do, she'll refuse to give you any more tasks for a while.

Cooking!! Make some food and give it to the dude who gave you the quest! Simple no? I might do this but maybe not. But if you want a fun quest, how bout' a quest which you must protect a certain structure (perhaps a statue?) or the castle from being destroyed by invading monsters in an abs battle system (Yggdrassil Battle System will rock your world for this)!

Package delivery and monster slaying are the classic ones of course, but I found Arc the Lad II was good for coming up with some creative side quests. There was one, IIRC, about a girl trying to find her mother, which was part "go to A then to B" but there was also an element of solving a riddle in there - you go an idea of where to go next to find the next clue to the ongoing plot.

Making a side plot that runs between side quests is also a great way to take the focus from the main game for a while - done right you can build up a desire in the player to find out what happens next in the side quest.

While I agree with quests being more for open based games I still believe quests can still be implemented well in games following the Linear or Non Linear structure. For example, you could set it that when a player arrives to a certain point in the game,(I dunno maybe they have to wait for something...) quests are available that can be completed in the mean time and once you complete a certain quest the story can progress. This is a good way to obtain Items, gold and engage in subplots in the story that can keep the game more interesting. Games that didn't pull this off well are ones such as final fantasy 8 which was heavily focused on the story. It depends on what type of game you want the players to be engaged in. It's possible to mix up the 2 types together and I'm doing this with one of my current projects in VX.

Even so, I think to make a quest interesting requires people to have simple quests in the game to more complex ones. Quests should give rewards of some sort that somehow effects them during progress in the game such as giving them a mystery Item, rewarding them with gold, skills, gaining information about the setting and world we presume the game takes place in or maybe quests related to the main plot. The main protagonist of my game is a mercenary so he engages in quests to obtain the extra gold as it is part of his living, however he has also been set on a main quest too. The simple things I'm currently doing in my current game that are quest related to keep it interesting involve:

1) Simple monster slaying quests, involving a monster causing a problem of some sort in the game considering the main character being a mercenary.

2) Finding certain Items to be given to the npc's that set the quests who need these Items.

3) Delivering things like letters, messages or travelling to speak to someone because the npc can't do so in the game.

4) Lastly, it's important to make quests more varied and complicated every now and again. (You could make it that you might have to do one quest to be able to solve another quest.) (You could make quests more interesting by setting timers, having to answer certain questions related to the knowledge and understanding of the game to bypass parts of the quest, or limiting the time you have to do the quest to make it challenging.)(Make a quest affect the outcome of a story.)(Quests can also be engaging in mini games) (Or having to do something else featured in the game like fishing or mining to obtain an Item of some sort or whatever to complete the quest)

Making a quest based game will be challenging especially if you want to add it to a Linear or Non Linear based game. It's probably best not to make quests repetitive like go kill this monster, now go and kill this monster, now go and kill this monster. You need to make it more interesting such as adding a minor sub plot to the quest. The reason why I get bored of a lot of quest based games over Linear story based games is the fact that it gets repetitive and nothing new happens but the similarity of the same type or types of quest you engage in. Just add variation to keep the players engaged and wanting more.

There are several pros and cons to each type of quest. like the person above said, quests revolving around monsters get repetitive. But then, aren't most rpg quests battling ones? Repetition isn't necessarily bad; the player might get bored, sure, but you can still hold them with an excellent plotline. All the RPGs I've ever played revolve around battling. That isn't a bad thing: it becomes routine. the player knows what to expect. I'll use inotia as an example. The gameplay never changes. beat this kill that. But then, Inotia 3 has a 5 star rating. Why? Becuase of its excellent plotline.

Puzzle quests aren't repetitive as battle quests, but twice as annoying. How the heck was I supposed to know that I could get the keys in inotia by battling demons? the quest didn't exactly make it clear, by calling them orbs, which they weren't.

Lastly, delivery quests are both good and bad for the same reason. they can be accomplished effortlessly. Good, if you need money, but bad, if you are bored and want something to do.