I'm making it easy on myself in my campaign world (really more a large city and the surrounding countryside currently) by having it be very mission based, stuff you can make up on the fly.
Essentially to start with the PCs are part of a crime syndicate, where they can undertake a variety of both above board and below board jobs (Anything from kidnapping/assassination/burglary, to guarding a caravan as they travel from A to B or protecting a client).
You should be able to think of a whole bunch of beginner quests (and more challenging ones later, to lead into a more overarching story) from a hub of some sort like that. Change it to a mercenary headquarters or a "Companions of Justice" sort of deal where they can help people in different ways and you're set for a non neutral/evil campaign.
Escort the vivacious and pampered concubine and her personal guard to anther nation, making sure she is protected and her every need is met.
Save the village from a contingent of gnolls.
Rescue the farmer's daughter.
Prove to the king that the prince or princess is plotting his assassination. Oh, and he loves his kids and doesn't like you.
Scooby-doo the adventure: make a ghost adventure where it's really a merchant in town trying to scare off his main competition.
Check out TPK Games; they've got some great (read: vicious) one shot adventures.
Stop a fetchling slaver guild - they are wrangling pretty girls for an evil queen.
Keep an evil undeath cult from unleashing a wave of modified ghouls whose bite saps charisma instead of dexterity; the cult is siphoning stolen charisma for darker purposes.
A mother's ghost hunts for her missing child, but the baby went missing over a century ago. Find a way to either destroy her for good or bring proof of the child's survival and put her to rest.
Track down and recover the lost honor sword of a nearly-defunct noble line; the line is well respected but broke.
Help a dryad rid the nearby woods of a blight of vermin and mites, only to discover that the mites are go-betweens for an apocryphal being calling itself the Swarmlord who has plans for worse destruction.
Rescue a little girl who slipped into a demiplane of dark woods created by a powerful hag who calls herself "Granny." The little girl has gone over the river and through the woods to deliver a basket of goodies to Granny's house; she's wearing a brilliant red hood on her head to mark her as untouchable to the monsters of the forest, such as wolves and a charmed and mutated "woodsman."
Stop a fear cult - a group of mites, a witch, and a piece of a minor artifact. They are combining all their powers along with dream spider venom and a little alchemy as well to kidnap people and drain their wisdom; the mites scare them with Doom and the alchemically treated venom deals the damage, so the victims stay perpetually frightened. Over the course of a few days the victims drain down to 0 Wis at which point they're draged into the lower halls, hit with modified witch curses fueled by the artifact piece in a ritual that turns them into mites themselves. This transformation is permanent once complete.
A dryad's spirit asks you to save her forlarren daughter from a dungeon. Factions in the dungeon want her dead for she's a skilled barbarian who his cheesed them all off and stolen some of their treasure; one of these factions is actually an infernal agent of her father. The dryad however requires her alive so that she can trade her own immortal spirit to divine agents who promise in return to cleanse the girl of her infernal taint and transform her into a child of nature.
Intercept an airship loaded with [insert level appropriate danger here] before the airship reaches a populated area. If the players are high enough level, add additional airships which may or may not be decoys.
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my favorite campaigns to play in are the ones where the world keeps turning regardless of what the players do, and simultaneously "adapt" to the players' accomplishments.
for instance:
The party just finished escorting a merchant caravan loaded down with grain to a large town. The caravan was continually harassed by bandits the entire trip, and killed a number of the drivers/merchants/guards in the process. The PCs go to the merchant's guild to collect payment, and get short-changed since they must not have done a very good job in protecting their NPC counterparts. The merchant guild offers them full payment + a commensurate reward for taking care of the bandit problem.
In the meantime, crime is at an all-time high in the city because the merchant guild is really behind the bandits in order to starve the city and skyrocket the price of grain. The effects are already being felt, as food is 10x the cost of what it normally is, and peasants and commoners are beggaring themselves and stealing to feed their families. The town guardsmen, beleaguered with keeping the peace and keeping the masses just coolheaded enough not to riot, have no time to thwart the usual activities of the small thieves' guild. Recognizing the opportunity to pull off crimes and get away scot-free, the thieves' guild has been heisting larger manors and bigger targets than ever before. One of their targets happens to be the PCs their first night in town.
The king of this city-state, always eager for war with the rival fiefdoms to the north, decides to blame the northern cities for the grain shortage. The king has his advisors and spies spread rumors throughout the city that this is the case, slowly driving the people into a frenzy to exact vengeance, go to war and plunder the northern towns.
So what does the party do? Do they get side-tracked into exacting revenge on whoever stole from them their first night in the inn? Do they decide to pursue the bandits and get rewarded, while the king in the meantime starts an unjust war to the north that the PCs may or may not know anything about? Do they discover the rumors that the northern towns are responsible for the famine, and more importantly do they discover if those rumors are false.... and if so, can they convince the generals to disobey the king since the true threat to the city lies elsewhere?
Or does the party decide that this town is ripe for the picking, ally themselves with the northern towns, and warn them of an impending war that can be prepared for and set themselves up as heros in an entirely different area? What happens in this case.... does the thieves' guild prosper unchecked, and expand to the northern town to again plague the PCs with little warning? If the PCs go north, does the merchants' guild strangle enough coin out of the grain crisis to abandon town and let things resolve however they may?
Those are the kinds of campaigns I enjoy playing, where PC decisions have a lasting reward and a lasting consequence. I don't always know what they are at the time, but a few game sessions down the road when you find out it's EXTREMELY gratifying as a player to know the course of major events was affected by the party's actions. The "save the king's daughter" plot types can be fun, but are too cut-and-dry for my taste and don't allow for nearly as much roleplay or party interaction.
My best advice is start with some or all of the characters' backgrounds, and derive quest goals from there. It rewards the players for being creative.
Example: Barbarian leaves his homeland and tribe to seek out the evil wizard who slew his grandparents
Plot Hook: Barbarian player sees a group of mercenaries in town wearing symbols of that same wizard (sound familiar?)
Example: Rogue sets out to become accepted to the local thieves guild
Plot Hook: Rogue gets word of a very valuable item in the possession of a traveling bard and his crew and sees an opportunity
The best quest lines are the ones that branch off from people they've already met, or even quests they've already done. This is the stuff that makes up a campaign.
Example: Barbarian (and party) find out that magician they slew is a member of a "Council of Magicians" that have set out to subjugate every ruler in the realm. They've just made some major enemies, BUT they may have made some new (powerful) allies who are willing to hire them to help stop this evil.
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. . . totally not fave-ing the thread just to steal ideas . . . muwahahahah . . . .
Random thoughts to add to the mix:
*One of the PCs gets word that there's a strange sickness affecting his hometown - it seems to be spread by flocks of odd-looking birds. The sickness hasn't proven to be lethal, yet, but it affects the sanity of the victims and causes them to behave more and more erratically. The local healers are stumped for a cure, and think that the local-boy-done-good might be able to find an answer.
*Party acquires a very old, masterwork instrument of some kind in a treasure horde. One of the party members begins to hear faint snatches of music from "nearby," but is unable to locate the source of the music. If the PC carries the instrument, the music becomes more distinct. He can't get the tune out of his head. If the character tries to write the tune down, he finds that it keeps changing on the paper. Where is the music coming from, and what does it mean?
*An animal has started to follow the party around, staying just at the edge of sight. It vanishes if anyone actively searches for it, only to reappear a short while later. It appears a little odd for its type - the coloration is slightly off, the eyes look intelligent, other animals can't quite figure out its scent, the tracks appear far too heavy for a creature of its apparent size (and degrade swiftly, in a matter of a few rounds). What is this strange beast, and what is its purpose?
Not really full-on quests, but good idea-fodder for you.
DM's Handbook II
While none of them give actual rules or even the whole story, there is a thread that's been made to offer quest idea starts and seeds for those who may want to use them.
You can find it here: HERE!!!
You should be able to get some good starts from them if you so desire.
Another good one is the Tome of Adventure Design by Frog God Games. A buddy of mine lent me his copy. It's basically a compilation of any and every random table you might need for designing a single, stand-alone adventure.
As a mental exercise I used another book to randomly generate the City of Inderwick; a Small City which was hit head on by a calamity in my homebrew where the forest magically grew 10 times its normal rate and consumed a fifth of the settlement. Now in that town there are some grippli who have become civilized (sort of) and settled in the city while others of their race remain in the nearby wooded bogs. Then, as part of the exercise, I rolled up a completely random adventure from this book:
The Mission section involved the objective of lead or coordinate a rebellion. Another section of the mission said the location would be a swamp. I put the 2 together and decided that the 2 factions of the grippli had finally and irrevocably been split; a new upstart savage leader had taken over in the wooded bogs and declared open war on the "filthy wall-dwellers" in Inderwick. Subsequently the heroes learn of several of the city-dwelling grippli who've gone missing and are approached by a contingent of the frog-folk for help insighting a rebellion.