This came up in a thread on the AoW forum; since my reply was off-topic over there, and somewhat lost in the real topic of the thread, I thought it might be useful to get more opinions on it here in General Discussion.
Erik Mona wrote:
A dream situation would be not just to do a hardcover, but to do whole books based on the key locations (Diamond Lake, Free City, Alhaster) and fill them with lots of advice on how to keep the PCs on track and what to do when they wander off it. That's a lot to hope for, though, so it's almost not worth considering.
Hmm. This actually sounds pretty cool. I can't be the only GM who finds a lot of campaign worlds over-developed to the point of paralysis. I have no interest in running a Forgotten Realms campaign because of the sheer amount of canon, for example. (Yeah, I'm anal. Moving on...)
How about the Paizo Publishing Backdrop series - an ongoing series of 64/96 page softcovers that focus on creating a believable, fleshed out, specific place for a campaign? Include the major NPCs, and a handful of adventure hooks, but not necessarily any large-scale plots - this would be a supplement, rather than an adventure module.
The Styes, Diamond Lake, Alhaster - the first three entries in the series are already half-written.
As another fringe benefit to this, future Dungeon adventures could be set in these backdrop locations. Obviously, some amount of background would have to be included in the magazine for those who don't have the backdrop book, but for those who do, the adventure becomes deeper/more interesting, without increasing the magazine page count or the adventure size.
Just a thought.
Tangentially, it might be useful in the future to divide backdrops into player/GM sections; for something like AoW, where the PCs are ideally from Diamond Lake, it would be great to hand the players 5-6 pages of information they could use when developing their backgrounds.
