Mirror of the Fire Demon

[from another forum]

We once talked... about adventure seeds and my preference for dynamically unstable situations as adventure hooks, instead of status quo. Here's a concrete example:

I'm prepping Mirror of the Fire Demon. It's a good adventure in many ways with lots of mechanically interesting stuff going on: interesting terrain, monsters that hear combat and come out to investigate, at least one really tough fight, and so on.

But the central hook of "there's a megalomaniac gathering a horde of monsters to take over the world, and the wind spirit will tell you how to stop him" leaves me cold.

In particular, I feel that it makes roleplay more difficult than it needs to be. If the adventure is going to be purely hack and slash, "there's an evil warlord with a magic mirror, go take it" would suffice. The existence of hooks can only be to support roleplaying elements such as character motivation or informing interactions with monsters and rival adventuring parties, or aiding suspension of disbelief, and yet the default hook makes me feel like it raises more questions than it answers such as "what exactly has the bad guy done so far with his tens of thousands of troops, and why aren't there more of them at his main headquarters?"

So in the course of prepping this adventure I plan to make the situation more dynamic.

Rather than "this bad guy is gathering an army but hasn't done anything yet and everyone wants to stop him," which is a mission to maintain the status quo, it will work better at my table if it's "this bad dude has been in power for a while, doing terrible things to his subjects, but now for reasons unknown (to you) he's missing! His generals are jockeying for position, it looks like maybe a succession war is brewing, his armies are hunkering down and unsure which internal faction they're going to support... and in the middle of all this, word gets out that his old spymaster has defected and is selling secrets about bad dude's sources of power. Agents of nearby nations are greedily eyeing each other on their way to rendezvous with said spymaster. That's where you come in..."

Now you've got a huge horde which is fearful and somewhat passive, rival agents/adventurers who are greedy, an oracle of sorts (the spymaster) hiding in a cave but with a clear motive to dispense information for a price, and a mystery for future adventuring: what happened to bad dude and is he coming back? BTW the answer is "he got careless in his troop movements and elven armies took the opportunity to ambush him and his company of soldiers, at a high price in blood, but unless someone breaks the mirror he's got Unkillable 3 and will come back angrier than ever."

That helps me roleplay everyone involved, because they've all got clear motivations for what they're doing and not doing. It also tells me to insert more civilians into the wasteland parts of the adventure, to showcase the bad things the bad dude and his armies have been doing, like putting orphans to work as forced labor growing food.