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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 3438520" data-attributes="member: 1106">We can argue back and forth over whether the adventure or the setting "owns" the hook, but I'll dispute you on two counts:1) A hook that is attached to an adventure is much more likely to be used.  A hook without an adventure behind it is a backless maiden until you write the adventure.  So write the adventure first, create the setting as an afterthought.  I know this breaks with tradition, but this tradition of setting uber alles, IMO, is wrong.2) The only way the PCs can really affect the world is in the context of the adventure.  The PCs should affect the world through their heroics.  Heroics require encounters...plots, traps, fights, twists, locations, NPCs, and these are the trappings of an adventure.  The setting can theorise about lamp posts and elven migrations all it likes, but until these things are rooted in something solid, there's nothing truly there.By concocting adventures and status quo "encounter-level" locations (i.e. status quo adventures) which players can interact with, the outcome of the PC's interaction with which affects the setting.By determining the type of adventures you want to run, an then adapting the setting to support them.  If you want an adventure based on the PCs distracting elven refugees from a bugbear force, then adapt the setting to include bugbears on the march and elven refugees.  This is the way it should be: horse before cart.  The adventures are the place in the campaign where the rubber meets the road, so should be put first and foremost in terms priority and of meeting their needs IMO.Campaign arcs of a bunch of adventures bolted together, or in a less railroady campaign, an "adventure playground" which the players can interact with, and the results of their interaction determining the course of the campaign arc.  Afterwards, once you've invented the villains and organisations which the adventures need, maybe you can invent entire cultures and towns to support these NPCs.  All of this can be improvised if you've spent all your time on elven migrations set a thousand years ago, but such time is much better spent elsewhere IMO, for reasons I've detailed.Invent the NPC first, then the culture which he or she requires.  Yes, you can have a single BBEG as the cause of an entire culture, because the BBEG is more important to the campaign than his culture is, in most cases.By inventing the consistent setting as a result of the needs of the adventures.  This is not a tall order; if your campaign arc requires a recurring NPC who is a gnome with a crazy uncle who invents stuff for him, you put gnomes and a crazy uncle gnome somewhere in your setting.  If your adventure calls for pegasus knights, you can incorporate them somewhere into the setting.Much more stifling is needing a pegasi knight in your adventure, and in fact an entire fortress of eyrie knights fighting dragons like that Elmore painting, but knowing that your campaign setting has nowhere for a culture with pegasus knights to come from, let alone an eyrie city on the map.  You discard the idea, your adventure suffers, and the campaign is worse off for it.Yes, it is.  Too much time is spent on macro-level material of dubious usefulness because PCs cannot interact with it until it's micro-level manifestation is invented, and such material is put up as higher in priority (and has much more time spent on it) than the micro-level material that PCs actually interact with, imposing arbitrary restrictions on the actual nature of the campaign.  This has it precisely backwards, IMO.</blockquote>

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