There wasn't much advance planning. I've found that it's easier to build a campaign from the center and work outward, that way you don't have any hard and fast rules from day one that you regret making. Naturally, some things have been added retroactively here and there (like towns the characters have never been to) but it's all part of building the world.
Phil: I never thought of that... It'd sure confuse everyone, especially the "fake" Liriandra, who truly believes she's real...
>>From past experience my gut feel is often way off-beam. Has anyone run any of these, and if so, what was your experience of them? Has anyone attempted to string them together into a campaign?
I ran most of them when they first came out. They worked OK with little modification. To me they almost strung together too easily. One author kept centering his adventures around a city, I think named "Desburg", that eventually became filled with adventure an ongoing hooks! I ran many more than once, and while I was doing freelance for AEG I jumped at the chance to redo them all for 3.5 with minor adjustments and suggestions at the end of each for stringing other adventures in (Adventure I and Adventure II).
When you say some were a little wonky, there are times I can tell you there were some very inconsistent and illogical moves by many of the bit players regarding the story. While I was allowed to fix these minor complications, I was told to keep the basic plots intact. There were 1 or 2 however that I petitioned to do heavy rewrites on, and little of their original remain. Still, like others have said here, many of the locations became permanent revisit locations for the characters in my campaigns.
I have run a few of these and my review of Adventure I & II are in the reviews page (here and here.)
Out of Body / Out of Mind is one of my favorites and was an instant classic in my game.
The possession thing went off beautifully.
Dark Elf City of Hossuth I originally ran in the pamphlet format. The pamphlet format of the city modules didn't leave much room for stat blocks, so it didn't have any... so I made up my own. I ran a high level game around it with high level dark elf villains (see here.) My players loved that one, too.
Earlier in that same game, I adapted Sundered Faith and it worked out pretty well, too.
Adventure I & II add some meat to some of the weaker adventure and address some of the balance issues in the likes of Servants of the Blood Moon -- but there are still some adventures therein I would not touch, like Murder of the Seven Points. I generally like them because the backstories in them are light enough that you can tweak them a little and fit them to your campaign fairly easily. None of these got dropped into my campaign as-is (though Out of Body, Out of Mind and Gardon Manor were pretty close.)
Not sure what adventures are in those compilations, but I have run "Against the Barrow King." It went pretty well paired with "Iriandel" (from Dungeon) and was a good precursor to "The Standing Stone."
