Dungeons & Dragons Online Producer Letter

Turbine's official Dungeons & Dragons Online website has been updated with a letter from executive producer Judith Hoffman in which she discusses the day-to-day tasks involved in creating the MMORPG. Here's a snip to get you started:
Let's look at something basic: quests. Our ideas come from lots of different sources they're inspired by books, movies, our in-house PnP campaigns, Content Designers being hit over the head repeatedly, and so on. Once a quest idea is in place, the designer writes up a description of the quest detailing how it's received, how it can be completed, how it fits into the campaign as a whole, and of course, the phat loot received for completing the quest.

The Content Designer also identifies the assets NPCs, dungeons, items, special effects, etc., needed in order for the quest to work. We try to reuse existing assets whenever possible, but we usually have to create at least some of them from scratch.