Possible level 0 adventures

These are the meet-cutes, how the characters meet and start having adventures together. It's most fun if we all figure out which one has the most appeal as a starting point.
(Some of these intros/settings could be combined, i.e. putting on an opera in the ruined baths, or in the courtyard of the Furthermore.)

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Snakequest!

The hill caves on the northern side of the Malfa peninsula are mostly, usually, shallow and empty. But sometimes, especially at new moon, they lead somewhere they shouldn’t, portal-style. For instance, a few years ago a whole lot of snakes came up out of the caves; they were everywhere in the city. Malfa prides itself on taking these things in stride, and many of those snakes are now favoured pets or neighbourhood mascots.
Lately, a great keening can be heard from the hills in the evenings, and all the snakes seem upset. Is there another snake event coming? A bigger snake in distress up there? Somebody should probably find out.

Possible character hooks:

• You are a monster veterinarian in training, and you sense distress
• You are Maveren, or a Maveren thrall; somebody superior to you in your household has told you to check it out
• You sense a monetizable opportunity if it’s more snakes, people love the snakes
• In your line of work, whatever it is, it pays to keep on top of the local magical shenanigans
• You’re down on your luck and you’ve been sleeping rough lately, sometimes in the hill caves

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Musical theatre kids

Most drama in Malfa is recitative; a group of poets stand on stage declaiming verse in character. Both Maveren and dwarven culture favour this mode. But now, a group of performers from overseas have come to Malfa, and they’re determined to form a real opera troupe in the city. These are their stories!

Possible character hooks:

• You’re one of the performers
• You’re a starry-eyed local who would like to be one of the performers
• You’re a local poet (“skald”) checking out the competition
• Same, but you’re one of the local poets’ goons
• The troupe has hired you to do the special effects (illusions or other)
• One of the performers is in Malfa because they skipped town back home; you traced them here
• You just happened to be walking by and you’re curious what “opera” is

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Grand hotel

People who work live and/or in the Furthermore, a.k.a. the Great Guest House of Malfa, an enormous caravanserai-style inn. (The name “Furthermore” was an old joke nobody remembers anymore.)

Possible character hooks:

• You’re new in town, and you got a job working in the stables
• Same, except you’re a quadruped beast of burden, and you’re currently living in the stables
• You’re a pickpocket/con artist/jewel thief working the Furthermore
• You live semi-permanently in the Furthermore, doing services for travellers (fortunetelling, sex work, scout/tour guide, what have you)
• You’re an apprentice whose boss brought you with them to Malfa on a business trip
• You were somewhere else a few minutes ago, in a cave far away, and then you wandered up a random set of stairs and now you’re in a hotel in Malfa. What the hell?

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Priestsitting: almost as bad as babies

A visiting cleric from inland has come to the Stone Mother's House, and somebody needs to show them around the city. They’re pompous and naïve, and they have some religious views that make them unpopular in Malfa—or maybe there’s some other reason they keep running into trouble. What’s going on?

Possible character hooks:

• You work for the temple in some capacity
• You’re a local who owes the priests a favour
• showing tourists around is actually what you do for a living
• You’re new around here yourself, and ask to tag along, hiding your ulterior motive
• You sense an easy mark
• You have nothing to do with this, but the cleric literally trips over you while attempting not to be abducted

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Ruin porn

Long ago the Maveren built public waterways and baths for the hygiene of their thralls, but as Malfa grew in size, the old autocrats lost interest in doing nice things for the riffraff. The big public baths in the old town has been a ruin for decades. What could be in there?

Possible character hooks:

• Somebody’s throwing a massive party on the bath grounds tonight, in a public I-dare-you move to the nightlife of Malfa. It’s supposed to be limited to the open grounds just outside the ruins, not the ruins themselves, but you know how it is. Lots of people show up, things happen
• (This is the most open intro, characters just show up because it’s a public party. There’s fun to be had, money to be made, idiots to be avoided on your way home from work, whatever)

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The fey doors, the Madwitch, and the juice bar

this is as close as I can get to your basic MMPORG-like adventurer's guild with a home base. I struggle disproportionately with the character motivation of random adventurers in a specific cultural context, so this structure is for adventurers who might have any motivation whatsoever.
Everybody knows that the Feywild is a real place, that occupies the other half of the world; the mortal world is a hemisphere that sits on top of the shapeless chaos of the Feywild. What not many people know is that there are holes, like portals, riddled through the mortal world that lead into or through the Feywild into different places. Fey doors always pop up in different places, and lead to different destinations; some of those destinations are only accessible through the fey doors. Are they in the Feywild? In some inbetween space?
The closer to fey a people are, the more likely they are to know about the fey doors and the other beings that use them. One of these beings is the Madwitch, a figure of legend who supposedly lives in the inbetween places between the doors. Sometimes people will venture through the fey doors specifically to find the Madwitch and ask her something—a risky venture, because the fey doors rarely lead where you want them to, and if you do find the Madwitch, well, she’s mad.
And yet people keep doing this for some reason. If you keep on trying the fey doors, you might repeatedly stumble across one of the inbetween places; you might run into other travellers there. At one of these places, somehow, there is a small open-air stand that serves non-alcoholic beverages. The people who work there say that they work for the Madwitch, and the Madwitch seems to leave messages there for her, ah, clients. But nobody, even the employees, have ever met her.
The Madwitch’s juice bar is a place where longtime wanderers tend to run into each other, trade favours, etc. Access to it from any particular place is tricky and depends on time, place, and possibly the mood of the juice bar, but one of the places that pretty often seems to be an exit from the juice bar is in the back of Friar's, a coffeehouse in Malfa. Since the juice bar isn’t an inn and has no place to stay, there is a small trickle of otherworldly weirdos who shack up in Malfa until they can find the way into the fey doors again.

Possible character hooks:

Anything, really. This is the giant-umbrella option for a super-diverse cast of characters.