Hogwarts Legacy features several remote locations you can stumble on where a strange scene obviously played out. I call these tableaus. A tableau is a little mystery of its own and all the more satisfying if there are enough clues for the players to figure it out. I believe The Witcher 3 does something similar.

In each case, there’s just enough information to allow you to understand what happened there, such as a corpse with a letter. You can do something similar with little minor points of interest. Sometimes it can be like a crime scene, but it can also be more exploratory or just atmosphere tangent to the main adventure. They can shows the effect the villain is having on the land. Perhaps NPCs are fleeing the bad guys. Finding an abandoned cottage shows that.

Be careful, however, since players who are used to story-driven adventures may put a lot of importance on interesting but minor findings. You might roll for such things right in front of them to help make it clear that such a thing is random. Or… you might find a way to tie the tableau into the adventure by allowing the heroes to find a specific adventure clue within it or at least to identify the victim and notify the family.

Examples

1. An adventurer killed by a trap.
2. An alchemist killed by her own failed concoction.
3. An apothecary who blew up his tower, with notes that contain the errors he made. (Maybe the players can find the simple math error and succeed where he failed!)
4. A cage on wheels torn open by its former prisoner. There’s a creature on the loose now.
5. A ranger killed when her own mount (griffon, giant panther, etc.) was driven mad by drinking from a magical pool. The creature remains, grieving, having regained its senses.
6. The remains of a poached deer or boar, with a forgotten knife that identifies the poacher.
7. A druid slaughtered by orcs and left propped up as a warning. Orcs are about!
8. A summoning circle, with some clue as to what was summoned and by whom.
9. A merchant murdered in some secluded location by the contact he came to meet, according to the letter in his pouch.
10. The murder-suicide of a woman and her jilted lover, revealed by letters they carry.
11. The remnants of a camp where someone melted down something made of silver and poured it into arrow head molds to divvy up the loot… or to make silver arrows.
12. A traveler’s pack by a river, where someone tried to cross but was swept away. A rope tied to the pack suggested the traveler planned to pull the pack across once he or she reached the other side. (Perhaps the other end is still tied to the waist of the corpse.)
13. A bog body with a stone inscribed with his story: execution/sacrifice/revenge murder.
14. A fallen tower with evidence (footprints in the soft earth, etc.) that it was shoved over by a giant. Does that mean there are giants around here?
15. A cottage half-sunk in the ground, having fallen into a tunnel burrowed by a bulette.
16. A crashed flying ship with evidence of what brought it down. stripped by survivors.
17. The corpse of an adventurer caught in a death trap. It wears an amulet that would, if he were struck dead, erase the event that caused it. But, unable to escape or remove his armor to take off the amulet, he just made a tally mark for each time the amulet “saved” him until its magic finally failed.
18. Evidence that someone used a magic item here or activated the large portal that sits here.
19. An abandoned watchtower demonstrates the region is more peaceful than it once was.
20. An overgrown monument reveals lore about the local area.
21. An empty shack shows people are fleeing the area to avoid (or join?) the bad guys.
22. A ruined cottage shows the villain is actively evil.
23. An abandoned mill at a dry river bed, because the bad guys built a dam up-river.
24. A wrecked carriage serves to warn that the area is a wyvern hunting ground.