Thinking about this more, in the first 30 years that I was playing, I'm pretty sure I never saw "caravan guard" as a hook, either in play or in modules. Ditto for "rando hires you". I might have seen "adventurers met in a bar" once. I was surprised to see how common these were, both online and in the last 15 years of modules. If you publish phoned-in hooks, you are going to teach phoned-in hooks.
I was looking at some early modules for how they handle this. B1 gives a single column backstory, and is ambiguous about whether it is player facing. It has a rumor table. And it says this:
Once the players have completed their preparations for the game, the referee finishes "setting the stage" by bringing the player characters from the background story to the place where the game adventure will begin. This is usually simply a matter of providing a brief narrative (such as, "Your group,
after purchasing supplies and getting organized, left their town and went cross country till a deserted pathway was found which led into the hills, and finally to a craggy outcropping of rock . . ."). Use of the LEGEND TABLE (described elsewhere in this booklet) is also made at this time.
B2 also has a rumor table, and its hook is two paragraphs of flavour text that amount to, "You have traveled into the borderlands and are now in front of a keep, please introduce yourselves to the guards." And it has advice about making the adventure your own, generally sprinkled throughout the introductory part of the module.
T1 has no rumor table, and the hook is three paragraphs of flavour text that amount to, "You show up in Hommlet broke and hoping to make your fortune." It also stresses making the module your own, for example, "there is sufficient latitude for you to completely personalize the module to fit your style of play and satisfy your players."
So all three of these have essentially the same hook, which in a practical sense is more or less, "This is what we are playing tonight." But unlike modern modules, these expressly state that there are going to be blanks that the DM needs to fill in. So they are starting from a position of "DM is expected to make stuff up." Modern modules tend not to give this sort of permission.
Take, for example, the 3e teaching module
The Fright at Tristor. It says nothing about DMs making the module their own, and does not acknowledge that there might be gaps. It just says to read the boxed text to players, tells where the monster stats can be found, and indicates that encounter difficulty is stated in the encounters.
There are four hooks: (1) you have a relative in Tristor and hear there is weird stuff going on there an decide the check it out; (2) you hear a rumor that weird stuff is going on and a reward is being offered to check it out; (3) Druids hear weird stuff is going on and ask you to check it out; and (4) you hear rumors of loot in a king's barrow, but you can't find that adventure but you decide to chase after this one instead. None of these give any flavour for the situation.
Of particular note, the hook involving your relative, who is an NPC in the module, gives you no information the the player about their character's relative. Although five pages later there is a sidebar that tells you she is the town herbalist, she knows nothing of use, you can't crash at her place,
and she suggests you leave town(?). Nothing is given of her personality or appearance (although her actions suggest she is kind of a jerk), and she has no further connection to the module. (People who call this kind of module "vanilla" are wrong; it is utterly flavourless.)
I say again, if you want people to play in the Classic and/or OSR style, your published work needs to show them what that style looks like, and you need to give them permission to colour outside the lines.
BTW, apropos of nothing,
@EOTB, I loved your discussion of adjudicating illusions in CAG.
