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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tormyr" data-source="post: 6553278" data-attributes="member: 6776887">Essentially.  The early ones, like Age of Worms, were separately published adventures that were designed to be played in order.  The recent 5e ones are more tightly coupled (and published) as one long adventure. I really liked Chris Perkins influence of having three major plot lines. You don't know how they end, but it informs how the world grows and develops outside of the PCs influence.  This was part of what helped MiBG and LotCS seem like such rich adventures (that and the great setting books). Things were always happening, and the PCs had to make decisions as to where they would go and how they would influence things.  Where that adventure design seemed to come from is Chris Perkins' concept of having multiple plot lines going in a campaign setting. To summarize horribly, Chris Perkins campaign setting had the Dragovar (Dragonborn) empire ruling the majority of the world. The Sea Kings (pirate/merchant lords) were a semi-autonomous group that handle trade (think Dune or Star Wars for an example) within the empire. An invasion is being planned by star beings (think Warlock patron), as well as the Illithid empire from behind a magical barrier.  They are placing brains/souls of fallen warriors in mechanical bodies for their armies (warforged). The details in that were horribly mangled, but you get the idea.Within that setting, there were doctors experimenting on children to make super soldiers, devils making pacts with the PCs, competing spy networks, floating cities, competing merchant kings, dragons a plenty, and lots of other things that can start an adventure. Many NPCs were generated on the fly, but he writes down each one so he can refer back to it. One of the nice things about his own blog is that he had two different groups on two different nights going through the campaign setting.  The examples of goings on that he writes about let the reader see how different groups can go through the same setting and end up in wildly different places.I can't recommend enough taking a few hours to go through the blog from back to front.  Newer DMs who are thinking about starting their own campaign setting will receive a wealth of good ideas, and there are good tips for anyone in there.</blockquote>

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