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Lately, mine has been just reading the Environment chapter in the CRB. It's really quite amazing for both wilderness and cities. I kind of wish APs included them more explicitly. I have a few stories I'd like to see in Pathfinder, and that chapter helps make the act of adventuring come alive.
What inspires you to want to write your adventure?
Last full on campaign I started on (that I never did get to finish, much less actually run) came from my own explanation for an unexplained setting event.
In the 3.5e Eberron setting, there is a nation that was destroyed in an event called The Mourning, which basically wiped the entire country out of existence. A wall of mist extends precisely along the boarders, the laws of time and space don't function within it, its like a hole in the universe.
My explanation for it was that the Mourning was caused by Truenaming (the 3.5e magic system that relied on the idea that everything had a true name, and if you knew that true name you could speak it and gain power over that creature/object/event/etc). I worked the whole thing out, wove it seamlessly (IMO) into existing lore, and tied up quite a few loose ends in the setting with it.
So I had an entire campaign mapped out from recruiting the PCs in the main city of the setting (Sharn), that would lead to ever stacking reveals, all the way up to lvl 20 and learning not only the answers to things like the Mourning, but even to things like the true meaning of life and it's place in the universe.
Never did sit down to write the whole thing out though.
My current campaign came from a confluence of 3 things:
1. Random rolls for a settlement and surrounding hexes
2. A random roll on a 1st level monster random encounter table resulting in "2d4 kobolds"
3. Looking over the rules on kobolds to re-discover that NPC levels count as CR-3 for these guys instead of CR-2.
Suddenly I had this epiphany. Kobolds worship dragons and an Adept with minor tweaks to the spells can reflect either arcanists or divine casters. Then tack on the fact that you get a familiar at level 2 adept and with the new rules familiars can get made combat-ready with the addition of the Mauler archetype. These little underdogs suddenly became a really viable villain beyond just hiding in trap-line caves.
So I took a look at the region I'd made. 2 areas of "swamp/bog/marsh", forested hills, and a giant lake forming the eastern border. I could have a few different types of these creatures, with accompanying "gods" all with their own designs on the wilds. There could be competition, the manipulation of support monsters and such, with the town caught in the crossfire. Bam; instant campaign.
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I take, copy, rework, remix, anything that I like from the media. It could be a movie, a tv show, an episode, a book, video games etc...basically anything that I find exciting , then I try to incorporate into my games. Hell even bad movies have a place in this, sometime, you watch a movie and think, wouldn't be cool if the director did this or that? Guess what, as the DM, you are like a movie director with an unlimited budget.
Also recently, I took an advice from the PAX GM panel, paraphrasing a bit:
I do every sessions like it is the last session that we will ever play. You will always have cool ideas, if you have one cool idea just use it. Stop thinking about epic encounters for the end of your campaign, you will always have cool ideas but the people playing, this might be the last time you play with them for whatever reason.
I get a lot of inspiration when looking at artwork. I have designed many encounters after looking at paintings. For me they are like little seeds that grow in my mind.
But the players are the most inspirational. Backstories are always ripe with ideas and during play players knowing or unknowingly lead me in the right direction.
I'm huge on character design, so often when I GM, campaign stories are actually based on character concepts and potentially cool interactions, or even on character artwork.
Or, sometimes locations provide the inspiration for the story. A cool map or an amazing nature photo can do wonders to inspire adventures, or even entire campaigns!
As an advid reader I get a lot of inspiration from there. I listen to a lot of music as well and occasionally get inspired that way as well. My last inspirational material is non hollywood films (though i do get inspiration there too) particularily from Japan, China, and European.
I've never GMed, but I know a lot of my inspiration for characters comes from books and (to a slightly lesser extent) movies. I don't tend to do blatant, ripped-straight-from-the-story references, but I love working in interesting concepts from story characters that are reimagined and recombined to make something new and cool. My next character in line to play was a mix of inspirations from The Dresden Files, Disney-Hunchback of Notre Dame, deity descriptions and backstories from Inner Sea Gods, and ideas sparked by half-orc racial traits, as well as (I'm pretty sure) a few other stories that I can't even specifically attribute.
In terms of developing a campaign storyline, I know that something I've really appreciated about the game I'm in right now is that our GM has purposely designed special events (usually holiday-related) specifically to help us develop character stories. Our Christmas special introduced a new character into the group after one had died, and our Valentine's special was the wedding of two of our PCs. It's helped to make the story a lot more "ours", especially since it's a pre-written adventure that otherwise would be a little more difficult to really personalize.
I went down the wikipedia rabbit hole of the Glorious Revolution and ended up creating a whole home-brew world set around it. Well, that, and picking up Elder Evils and reading the Ragnorra chapter. So, it's a fantasy setting similar, but not equivalent to, England during the Glorious Revolution (Much like Game of Thrones is similar to War of th Roses... a historical context for a jumping off point) which also happens to be under threat of destruction from an ancient aberration demigoddess. That campaign's been going for a while on and off.
I think it's a fun campaign challenge idea to choose a year at random, (post-Neolithic, pre-Industrial Revolution, I suppose) go to wikipedia and find something that happened in that year in the world, and then build a campaign around it.
The inspiration for my setting comes from a few influences. My love of the elements (I even added another 4, for a total of 8 primary elements), my hatred of humanocentric settings (humans have all but been eliminated, and they are hated within mine), my hatred of "enemy races", my love of dragons, and reading fantasy books.
Inspiration for different smaller scale things, have been inspired by reading what others have said about their settings, and my wanting to be different when it comes to certain annoying cliches/tropes (no more trickster illusionist gnomes, no slaver gnolls, no rampaging bloodthirsty orcs, etc).
On a side note but still relavent to the topic. I had read a book called The Art Of Steal. It's about how artists viewing other artists works and then improving upon that art to sell. I have to admit that I have also done this with adventures.
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Lately, mine has been just reading the Environment chapter in the CRB. It's really quite amazing for both wilderness and cities. I kind of wish APs included them more explicitly. I have a few stories I'd like to see in Pathfinder, and that chapter helps make the act of adventuring come alive.
This would run the risk of making Endurance useful.
You have to leave now.
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For one campaign (a Dark Sun PbP I'm running here) the inspiration was very visual - a political cartoon about the (potential) collapse of the euro, which happened round about the same time as that meteorite hit Russia. So it was a picture of the euro crashing to earth in a ball of flame and people running in terror. Nothing happened immediately, but suddenly I had a brainwave about meteors as doomsday weapons. That then slotted in with something I'd been reading in the Creature Catalogue, and the campaign was born.
Of course, I say I had a brainwave but I realised afterwards my idea had a lot in common with the Second Darkness AP. Whether I was thinking in parallel or unconsciously drew upon it, I may never know.
Another one is related to a lot of the war stuff going on in the media - Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and so on and so on - coupled with a reading of the Five Nations book for Eberron. Proxy wars, war criminals, more doomsday weapons (of a different kind), and so on. Another idea I've been toying with relates to the Andoran banking system and our own recent financial crisis, based on my background working in finance. So I'd say a lot of ideas come from a mixture of reading sourcebooks and what is going on in the news.
That said, I don't write much down, as I prefer to develop the details as I go along. But I certainly have an outline in mind.