I had an idea for a set piece where my party encounters some poor farmers who are driving their crops to market, and are worried about bandits. They offer a small fee to the party to act as security. The wagon train does indeed get attacked on the road, but the party should (🤞) be able to handle them without too much difficulty. When they arrive in the city, the embarrassed farmers admit that they don't have the gold they promised. They pass a hat around and collect 14 coppers, and offer that as all they have. If the players insist on payment, the farmers offer to pay them once they've sold their crop, and suggest they meet the next day in the market square to settle up.
They may discover this during the trip or after, but eventually they realize that the farmers weren't transporting ordinary crops. They were smuggling powerfully magic mushrooms that only grow in a few caves in the world. They aren't illegal per se, but they are so valuable that their production is tightly controlled (and heavily taxed) by whichever noble can field enough army to defend their cave, so there is a lot of money to be made in smuggling them. There are only two producing caves in this part of the world, and they are on opposite sides of the same mountain. Each is controlled by a ruling family and they are embroiled in a permanent, semi-formal Hatfields and McCoys type situation. Since the party defended a Hatfield shipment, and killed the McCoy attackers, they are now considered Hatfield operatives by the McCoys. Also there will be at least one pair of star-crossed lovers separated by their warring houses but that's more of a B plot.
All that is to say, I don't usually trick my players into plot hooks. It seems like the kinda thing that would be fun, and I will see if I can work it into the game, but it seems like the kind of thing that some players or tables might not vibe with. Have you tried it? What are your thoughts?