OK, I am all for Xa-ar. Now I need to get my hands on the setting.
Here are my ideas on what needs to be done.
1) Find the setting we can corrupt....er, work with. - We might have located it in Xa-ar.
2) Define the starting point - nice village that has a viable economy. This is because people would want to stay here, if they were living hand-to-mouth come a disaster they would leave and start fresh elsewhere. Also, it give out heroes a source of income and equipment.
a) Say a town of 3,000 - 5,000 people. This could include people living at neighboring farms and the like. This gives us a diverse enough population to have specialists in town (blacksmith, apothecary, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, so to say).
b) A bank of viable NPCs. Again to allow our heroes someone to interact with and buy ad sell items, get healing, and gather information. A small library or temple archives might be a good idea.
c) A economy base - Is this a fishing village? A farming center that runs a farmer market on a certain day of the month?
3) The story arc
a) While the adventures do not have to be lockstep (you cannot play this unless you have played X, Y, or Z) They do need to have a feel of growth and advancement through the path. We start out with inexperienced people that might be know locally ("That Sam helped me out when those bullies tried to bust up my store.") But have never seen the wide world outside.
b) There should be an eventual goal - prevent a war, stop an invasion, close a gate to the Pale...etc
c) Each adventure should reveal a bit more of the overreaching arc. As a corollary each adventure should "look back" and reveal what is known. This could be done in character packs ("Here is what you know") Or my favorite a section in the beginning where rumors and tales are told. Giving a recounting of the past events.
4) The Individual Adventures -
a) How many? - I think the number has been proposed of 6-10, am I correct?
b) Deadlines - How often are we "publishing"?
c) Rule set - Are we using RMU Beta 2 to start and manipulate it, if changes are made before publication pf the rule set? This would allow us to have a nice adventure path that can start with the publication of RMU (kind of like Vog Mur for thos who remember that), and then sales starting a few weeks/months later of the next few adventures.
Sorry for the shotgun affect here, but wanted to get some concrete brainstorming out there. And please feel free to tell me I am crazy with my ideas, not everyone thinks a like and I can be completely wrong.
-BP