Wherein I take an excerpt from something I read in the past week and use it as inspiration for adventure hooks. Today's excerpt:

"And forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to perplex his good lady by a whole week's absence. After the door has closed behind him, she perceives it thrust partly open, and a vision of her husband's face, through the aperture, smiling on her, and gone in a moment. For the time, this little incident is dismissed without a thought. But, long afterwards, when she has been more years a widow than a wife, that smile recurs, and flickers across all her reminiscences of Wakefield's visage." --Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Wakefield"

• The distraught Mrs. Wakefield contacts the PCs with a puzzling situation. Its seems Mr. Wakefield, before becoming a man of political or mercantile prominence in the city, was an adventurer. Though many years have passed since his presumed death abroad, a wizard claiming to be one of Mr. Wakefield's old adventuring companions arrives at Mrs. Wakefield's door one day and demands to see her husband, who he calls a thief. Evidently Mr. Wakefield has been stealing the components of a power device their party recovered long ago and decided to dismantle so none of them would be tempted to use it, but Mr. Wakefield seems to have had a change of heart...
• A small-town constable contacts the PCs, telling them that a strange man has wandered into his town who seems to have lost all his memories and all of his belongings save a signet ring with an embossed "W." While it's difficult enough to return this man to his home, the real trouble begins when another person is found wandering the woods without any memories, and then another. What force lurks within those dark thickets? Does the answer lie in the strange man's mind, if only the PCs could coax his memories back?
• The smile that haunts Mrs. Wakefield is more than a memory. Though Mr. Wakefield didn't say as much when he left her side so many years ago, he was after a manuscript of considerable eldritch power. On his way back from this shadowy deal, having only partially perused the document, his stagecoach was ambushed by bandits and his party killed. He now lurks about the recesses of Mrs. Wakefield's mind, urging her to recover the manuscript and guiding her down the path of arcane power...