Dark Sun - Quick Plot Hooks: Sand Vortex vs. Dhaot

The party is traveling along a silt sink or silt estuary when they encounter a young boy, wandering about the scene of a destroyed caravan.  He tells them his name is Dras (only his mother calls him Andrais), and that he wants to go home, but can't find his way.  He's quick to tell the party to avoid walking near the silt here, as there's a "tentacles and teeth" monster in the silt (it's a Sand Vortex).  

The child is of course a Dhaot, but fortunately his bones lie in the road (he hid under the wagon when the "monster" attacked, but the Inix spooked, and he got crushed under the wagon wheels).

Dras knows his home is a farm outside Nibenay.  Once there, his mother (a farm slave) insists that they all go demand that Dras be interred in the noble family's mausoleum.  She tells the party that Dras' father is the noble in charge of the farming village and that he had Dras sold off when the boy's paternity started to become undeniable.   

The nobleman vehemently denies being the boys' father, but relents when Dras' mother promises to the nobleman's wife (his wife is a shrill and proud woman - she may not love him, but she'll make his life hell if she discovers he had a bastard with a slave woman).  The family mausoleum might be haunted, at the DM's option.

Before fading away to the Grey, Dras tells the party that his caravan's pay chest got dragged into the silt along with some of the guards.  They'll just have to kill the "tentacles and teeth" monster if they want it...

Dark Sun - Quick Plot Hooks: Renegade Halfling vs. Kaisharga

Once, long ago, Dokala was a young Halfling girl living in a village in the Ringing Mountains.  When she came of age, she decided to set out and see more of the world.  No more than a few days travel from the tree line, she was captured by slavers and was eventually sold to a noble in Ur Draxa.  There, it was discovered that she was very gifted in the Will (psionics) and received training.  In time, she was a respected (though still owned) adviser to the nobleman (now a Templar of Borys - The Dragon).  He owner decided that she was indispensable and that the only to assure retention of her services was to have her raised as a Kaisharga.

After several centuries, Ur Draxa was destroyed and her creator/owner was killed, freeing Dokala at last.  She returned to the Forest Ridge to see how her tribe had fared, but found that they had been deemed Renegades and driven out of the Forest Ridge and were now barely surviving in the foothills of the Ringing Mountains.

Dokala has setup in a nearby ruin and uses her psionics and ability to create/control undead to keep the stronger predators away from her people without tipping them off to her presence.  

For their part, the Halfling tribe knows that there is a ruin nearby and that it is haunted by undead, but they have been lucky in that the undead seem to keep the fierce predators away from the tribe but never hassle them.  They would be horrified to know that an undead former member of their tribe had been protecting them for so long.