Trouble coming up with plotlines in an exploration campaign

[TinyMushroom]

If you know my identity irl, please don't read this post. You know who you are, missy!

Hey everyone. I'm a new DM, and I'm having rather a bit of trouble coming up with plotlines for my Pathfinder campaign. My main problem is that I don't really know how to consistently generate plots out of just "the PCs are travelling towards this one location". I have a collection of interesting location/plot ideas that stem from my setting but I keep getting writer's block when coming up with a way to justify placing it into the setting...

So for my next session, this is the situation:
- The party has been travelling towards a desert trader country (think: Islamic Golden Age Persia, big themes are alchemy, the elements and dream magic)
- They've arrived at a giant monument with lots of statues of angels, many of which are patron deities to the Royal Family. Some party members have personal ties to these angels, and they're probably going to learn some personal lore about them.
- An excavation is going on, carried out by the military of the trader country.
- Under the surface, a giant network of tree roots seems to spring up.
- Their current mission is to find information on a plague (they've discovered a haunted city that has been wiped out by that plague, and they have been instructed to learn more about it). For this purpose they're travelling to a university in the trader country.
- They're travelling with a priestess, the sole survivor of that incident. Unbeknownst to the players she is carrying the souls of the dead of that city in her body, and is seeking revenge against the priesthood that abandoned her city when they needed help the most. They know that she's angry at her religious order, but they don't really know why she's acting strangely. I was planning on having her separate from the party after not too long so she can be a subplot brewing in the background.

So that's a lot of plot, and my players seem to be enjoying it. But I really don't know where to concretely... do next. If anyone has some ideas, that'd be greatly appreciated.

Additionally, if you have more generic advice for a travel/exploration-type campaign, that'd be appreciated too

[Bohandas]

I would think that the thingnto do with this is a series of unrelated vignette adventures showcasing the various cultures and environmants between their starting point and their destination

[TinyMushroom]

Yeah, I suppose that could work. Sometimes I forget that as a DM, I am just "allowed" to do things like timeskips if I want.

[Spriteless]

I'd get a random encounter chart, with monsters, cool scenery, and even boons. I'd get some random weather charts, appropriate to the terrain the party travels. I'd roll both right in front of them, then tell them their pack animals seem to want to take cover if a storm is headed towards them.

Then I'd have exactly one encounter between each destination because I am kind of flightly.

[Zarrgon]

Well, you might want to make sure you have the right campaign.

A pure exploration campaign would be the characters exploring the unknown because they want to (and obvisily the players want to also). So when the characters is anything, they will stop and investigate.

Now your plot has them going somewhere and following a plot. So it's not exactly "exploration", the characters are going from A to B. And a lot of players don't like to get side trekked into "exploration" : they want to get to where they are going and advance that plot.

And the trick is, many a DM gives the characters a plot to follow with a destination...and then just throws endless things at the characters to keep them busy, but makes sure then never get to the destination. Even just two things can take hours or whole games to do. So it can be very common for players to react when the DM says "oh, up ahead you see" with a quick "we turn and run the other way...are we there yet?".

So you might want to skip the "exploration" and just get them to the destination. But if you do want to do an exploration campaign, then make the exploration the focus. Like they get to the city....only to find it has just been attacked by bandits...and the bandits got away with the special map. Now the PCs must enter the Wild Lands and explore and try to track and hunt down the bandits.

[NigelWalmsley]

There's a big difference between a "travel campaign" and an "exploration campaign". One is inherently based around a concrete goal (get from point A to point B, whatever those points actually are). The other is much more open-ended.

In terms of "what to do next", it sounds like you have a pretty interesting sandbox set up. I would concentrate less on a specific "what", and more on ensuring that there's something interesting to do for each of the hooks you've presented to the PCs. The key to running an effective exploration campaign is figuring out how to produce a maximally-interesting setting without overwhelming your ability to prepare content.

[Knaight]

This sounds like you've got a working campaign structure that doesn't play well with defined plotlines. I'd recommend staying that course - make interesting encounters (in a broad sense, not just fights) that the PCs can run across, populate your world with interesting characters and other setting elements, run the game in the moment, and let the plot emerge.

[Yora]

I am currently running an Isle of Dread campaign. I ran the adventure Against the Cult of the Reptile God first and used it to give the players some hooks to get started.
- Prople have been taken from the mainland and send to the Isle of Dread as slaves.
- Naga have recently returned from the southern jungles after thousands of years and a group of them is planning something on the Isle of Dread.
- Someone has been raiding ships belonging to powerful smuggler lords on the mainland, and clues point to pirates working with the naga on the Isle of Dread.

These are hooks, but they are not quests. The fighter in the group is on a mission to win allies for his city by impressing the peoole of nearby independent towns. The warlock is searching for ancient arcane power. One of the rogues is working for one of the smuggler bosses and was send to find out why a merchant did not deliver a package. These are all things the players came up with themselves, based on how I pitched the starting adventure to them. Rescuing slaves and investigating naga activity are things I had planned in advance. That the pirates sank ships of the smugglers and work with the naga is something I made up after the campaign started and I knew about the rogue's background.

I decided that when they get to the isle, the missing villagers they are looking for will be in the first major base of the naga they discover, because that's the one thing the players currently feel is "the mission the campaign was set up for". I would have no problem with them abandoning that effort at any point, but I think until those slaves are rescued, they will regard it as their top priority.
Technically I didn't tell them that that's what they are supposed to do. But from common everyday expectations about RPGs, the simple fact that not all captives have been saved yet and there are plenty of leads how to find them obviously feels like it's meant to be the party's next quest.

By the time they saved those people, I hope they will have learned about enough other things on the Isle of Dread to really set their own goals. But those other things on the isle are not plot lines to pick and choose from. They are just local factions having problems and some NPCs having goals. There are no stories where these things are going, if anywhere. New additional material will be set up based on what the players already did and how they are approaching the situation.