4 D&D Tables for Exploration Inspiration

Along with coming up with homebrew rules and features for Dungeons & Dragons 5e, I've also been compiling lists of just general ideas for elements to put into future campaigns. I figured I may as well share them here for your use in campaigns, if you wish. Especially since I'll probably keep accumulating ideas faster than I can implement them. Feel free to roll on a table if you need inspiration.

1d12 Interesting NPCs

1. A young woman who red books about the other planes as a child and who has always dreamed of visiting another realm of existence.
2. An old man who always talks about all the things he had in his childhood village that was destroyed. He wishes he could go back and get his things someday.
3. A man with a mental or physical condition or is essentially a vegetable in bed. His wife is overwhelmed with taking care of him and secretly wishes he would die so she can move on with her life.
4. A guy who misses his sweetheart in his home village a few days' travel away. (She's since married to someone else, but he doesn't know this)
5. A single dad who just wants his son to get a good education in the city instead of being a poor farmhand (The kid's super smart, but the family's poor).
6. A woman who wants the PCs to take her son as an apprentice adventurer.
7. A mysterious ranger with a stutter, with many tokens of extremely dangerous beasts around his neck.
8. A young awkward man who thinks the only way he can get a girl to marry him is by becoming an adventurer.
9. A halfling merchant who sells "discount spell components." 33% the price, but have a 50% chance of failing and wasting the spell cast (e.g., a cubic zirconia gem that can be used as a diamond component in raise dead, but only costs 250 gp)
10. A paladin who has sworn a vow of silence. His warhorse has had an awaken spell placed upon it and speaks for him.
11. A half-orc that sounds stupid when speaking Common but very intelligent and dapper when speaking Orcish.
12. A wizard who tattoos spells on his skin with the arcane ink instead of into a spellbook. The ones he has prepared glow faintly.

1d20 Plot Hooks

1. An old stone statue on a mountain is actually the petrified body of an ancient hero. Or maybe his body was broken into several pieces and scattered to different towns as relics.
2. It starts snowing in the summer or having some other type of weird weather. A storm giant or insane druid might be to blame.
3. The adventurers reach a town being threatened by a swooping young green dragon. A lone hero is charging the town all their money in return for slaying it. He's actually in a deal with the green dragon's father, and if the heroes actually kill the dragon instead of fake-killing it like he planned to, he could be in huge trouble with its parent.
4. A thief steals an artifact from an NPC, location, or PC, and flees into a cave. He's found dead inside the cave, killed by traps, and something deeper within the cave has taken the artifact farther within.
5. The party receives a letter that begins "Once upon a time there were four adventurers..." describing the PCs exactly, and ending with "Little did they know that someone was plotting their doom..."
6. A furious storm hits the PCs, to the point where they start taking cold damage and exhaustion if they don't take shelter. A nearby barrow den or cave may as well be explored while they wait for the storm to end.
7. A bard wishes to obtain an instrument of wonder and hires the PCs to find one from an ancient bard's tomb.
8. A druid or ranger who hates civilization is sending animals and plant creatures to harass a town.
9. A crying woman pleads with you to save her kidnapped baby from a werebear in the woods. The baby is actually a werebear cub, and the woman is actually a hag in disguise.
10. A desert peak rages with a swirling sandstorm, which is actually a storm giant quintessant. It guards a lamp wherein lies a genie who will grant a single wish for its freedom.
11. Bandits seem to know exactly where each trading caravan is at any given time. A shopkeeper is an informant, as evidenced by his caravans never getting robbed.
12. The PCs find a map showing their country, but with four cities on it that they have never heard of.
13. A wizard wants a live specimen of a troll to study.
14. A kingdom has been ruled by an ancient gold dragon king for centuries. His wyrmling prince son has been kidnapped by an evil princess and must be saved.
15. A player's personal business is sneakily taken over by a doppelganger, or worse, a rakshasa.
16. A graveyard holds the key to a quest's completion, but a retired paladin keeps a very watchful eye on you and vows to kill you if you desecrate the holy place.
17. People are dying in their sleep in a specific district of town. If the PCs fall asleep in that district and fail on a DC 15 Wisdom saving throw, they enter a dream world. All damage dealt to them is psychic damage in the dream, and they can focus (with Wisdom checks, probably) to manipulate the dream world in small ways as they find out what is going on.
18. The players are summoned by an extraplanar creature using the conjure humanoids spell. They are dominated until the creature's concentration breaks. Afterward, if they die, they reform in the Material Plane, but all their possessions would stay in the other plane.
19. The sun freezes in place in the sky, and the day/night cycle stops. The Diamond of the World was stolen from an ancient cave and must be returned to bring the world back to normal.
20. A cleric has been framed for a crime by a cambion posing as a captain of the guard who wishes to sacrifice him.

1d20 Traps and Puzzles

1. A magical barrier prevents all metal from passing through it. In order to pass, you must remove all metal from your person.
2. A stone giant engraving shows the answer to a riddle if a light source is placed at a certain point, showing shadows in hidden angles to the engraving.
3. A large handprint engraving on a door has holes at each fingertip. When the correct fingers are placed in each hole (it will require more than one person due to the hand's size), the door will open.
4. A gypsy caravan parks next to the side of the road and offers food in exchange for directions. They also perform for the PCs if they agree, singing and dancing. Wisdom saving throw (DC 14, at disadvantage if they drank the wine the gypsies offered). On a failure, they become enraptured by the music. After one more hour of singing and one more Wisdom saving throw, a second failure puts a PC to sleep. The gypsies steal from any sleeping players and are gone when they wake up.
5. Luminous fey lichen growing on a cave wall reacts to emotions of those near it, changing color and temperature depending on the nearby creatures' moods.
6. A lake of boiling water blocks the path.
7. Every minion in the dungeon has a key, but only one of them (at random) is the correct one.
8. A hallway with a precious elven artifact at the end of it. The farther down the hallway you go, the more you age. Only a young elf can make it all the way down without dying of old age, since it ages you 500 years by the time you reach the end of it.
9. A basin of water lies in the middle of the misty room. At the bottom of the water is a strange symbol, but it is a red herring—the real danger is the hallucinogenic mist.
10. Opening a door triggers a pit trap in the room, but the door's just a facade. The real exit from the room is at the bottom of the pit.
11. A room has three pressure plates that must be pressed simultaneously. When this occurs, force walls appear forcing the PCs to fight ghouls individually. When a ghoul dies, the player can move through the force walls.
12. A strangely intelligent chicken wanders around the dungeon. If the chicken is killed and eaten, that person is true polymorphed (DC 19) into a chicken.
13. A small silver hand mirror shows a different reflection than the creature who looks in it. If gazed into for more than a few seconds, the one gazing into the mirror must make a DC 16 Charisma saving throw or have their face transformed into that of the creature of the mirror. Their own former visage replaces that which the mirror once held. The mirror never works on the same being twice in a row. The first person who looked at the mirror is walking around without a face somewhere. (Or maybe they're in another room in this dungeon...)
14. A pristine-looking house in the middle of a dilapidated old village is actually a gargantuan mimic! (Use an encounter with 4 mimics skinned as one)
15. The local peasants say that to enter the nearby dungeon, you must take the ashes of horse bones and sprinkle them over the threshold, then speak the magic words in Halfling. It turns out, the dungeon door just has a flawed mechanism that makes it only open once every 4 times you try. The rest is mislaid superstition.
16. A field of saturated mana where slots are not expended. Instead, you take force damage equal to 1d8 x the spell’s level each time you cast. Cantrips deal 1d4 force damage instead.
17. Cursed ground prevents any spell higher than 2nd level from being cast. Higher spell slots are cast at 1st level. Great for a higher-level party.
18. A super creepy and suspicious tunnel that ends with a blanket-covered treasure chest. No traps. Possibly the treasure chest is full of gems covered in clay.
19. A room contains a couch, clock, and table with a bowl of fruit on it. The door locks behind the group, and they must find out that turning the clock backward and forward changes the flow of time in the room for its objects, including the fruit and the door.
20. A dangerous-looking room that’s actually completely disabled with a key in the wall on the other side. Remove the key, and the trap begins again.

1d12 Discoveries and Encounters

1. A forlorn altar on the top of a hill has runes that glow every night of a full moon. If a silver cup of water is placed on the altar before midnight, it will be enchanted to be a potion of greater restoration.
2. A graveyard where animals come to die reanimates—tons of different skeletal dogs and cats and stuff attack. Easy to kill, but swarms.
3. An old tribal woman (perhaps a goliath), fighting for her life against a pack of wolves. If you kill the wolves, she scolds you, saying that her time had come to die and she wanted to go out in an honorable way.
4. A roped off area with warning signs (“no metal!”). A giant lodestone stands embedded in the earth with weapons and pieces of metal stuck to it. Characters wearing metal who get too close get sucked toward it (DC 14 Strength saving throw).
5. A super creepy farmhouse that has absolutely nothing wrong with it and nothing inside it of value to be found.
6. A shining diamond or gold vein shines exposed in a rock. Several dead kobolds lay scattered about with their brains knocked out. It’s actually an earth elemental that doesn’t want to be hit with pickaxes.
7. A “desert medusa” with cobras for hair that turns people into sandstone, or a hydra medusa whose gaze turns people into gold.
8. A rogue clockwork kraken that looks like a clock tower.
9. A troll with a 10-foot radius of magical silence following it. Dangerous if encountered at night.
10.  A wide chasm in a desert with the ruined remains of an ancient land bridge. A humming blur nearby is a thinning in the rift between the material plane and the Shadowfell, which can be opened by expending a spell slot of 2nd level or higher (DC 13 Arcana check to realize this). In the Shadowfell’s mirrored version of the world, the bridge is intact, but shades and an ogre skeleton are threatening there.
11. You free a young bronze dragon in a dungeon. The dragon fights by your side, but a powerful spellcaster polymorphs the dragon into a crystal. Thereafter, you have a crystal that can allow you to summon the dragon for 5 seconds per day, to allow you to fly, breathe lightning, or use its prodigious strength. Maybe at some point in the future, an adventure could unlock the crystal so that you could have the dragon as a semi-permanent companion.
12. Beehives that have enchanted honeycomb due to the bees getting the nectar from magical flowers nearby. Or, the honey makes you lucky because it’s from lucky clovers