Interconnections

Connecting the storyline of a game into one massive kuzdu is a perpetual debate in my corner of the Roleplaying Games community.  Whether individual subplots should really be separate with little or no effect on each other, or if the trail should lead back inexorably to the campaign's primary antagonist.  There are two schools of thought here, so I'll try to describe both of them before putting in my own opinions on how this applies to Ten Years on Terra.

First, there's the concept of each subplot being a story unto itself.  Certainly, there is more freedom for the GM in this circumstance; new plots can be cut out of whole cloth, with little regard to how they impact the other plots that are occurring.  In a large and sprawling world, there are many actors trying to achieve various goals, none or few of whom are actively collaborating with each other.  The practical result is that players feel like the world they are playing in really is an enormous place, full of different characters doing whatever they think is best.

The counterpoint is that a campaign is a story, and for maximum integrity in that narrative, everything should be relevant to the primary arc.  The subplots should contribute to the story's primary tale, by exploring alternate ways in which the main plot affects other people, or to support or build the antagonist's character, organization, or motivations.

In Ten Years on Terra, there is an obvious antagonistic organization that ties together all of the subplots; the Word of Blake.  That said, the Word of Blake is a many-headed beast, often at odds with itself during the Jihad.  You can make strong arguments that different groups within the Word are really different antagonists; the Word Militia is encountering friction with the Manei Domini, and TerraSec is arguably doing what they've always done, just for a different authority.

At the beginning of this campaign, I decided that the ultimate Big Bad for the campaign wouldn't be The Master or Cameron St. Jaimes, but rather David Alsace, so while the side-arcs are interesting in that they deal with non-TerraSec operations the party would like to interfere with as the ComStar party continues their mission to disrupt the Word's operations on Terra, they don't contribute to the main goal of safeguarding the party from the law enforcement officers attempting to apprehend them.

As a result, most of my subplots are free-standing, but they lead back to a "Bad Guy" the party knew from the start -- the Word.  Which method of storyline connection I'm using really depends on if you see the Word of Blake as a single entity, or as a collection of independent groups.

It also occurs to me as I write this that there are a number of different ways my players might be interpreting the behavior of the Word of Blake, and they might try to convert TerraSec rather than escape them, but I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it.