Creating the Campaign (CSC)

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It's possible to pick up a novel and read the chapters out of sequence and still say you've read the book. The pulse-pounding action, convoluted intrigue, and character growth are all there, but the reader has wasted the book's true entertainment potential. Everything's taken out of context and there's no continuity.
In a like vein, players and DMs can have enormous fun playing individual, unrelated AD&D® game adventures without ever creating a game world or developing a continuing campaign. Campaign style play may not be for everyone. Still, like the out-of-sequence book, something is missing. The characters live their "lives" out of context. They have mighty adventures, yet no eternal mysteries are solved by their actions, no peoples are rescued by their deeds, and no world celebrates their glories. The players know the outcome of each episode, but are uninvolved in the book that could be.
A game campaign exists to provide a framework for a number of connected game adventures. The campaign is more than a game world or a clever plot line. It must be a place for the player characters to live, grow, and develop. For their character development to have any meaning beyond inflicting megadeath, acquiring zillions of experience points, and collecting vast, tax-free inventories of gold coins and arcane devices, the characters need a world upon which their actions, the outcomes of their adventures, can have a real effect; a world whose events, in turn, affect the player characters themselves.
When properly created, the campaign is a living, breathing, growing, and most importantly, changing game environment. It is a place that the DM builds, but which gains its life from the continued involvement of both the DM and his players.