How to get back onto Primary quest path

This is my second time attempting to follow the primary PVE quest path for Proph. I take a few area quests, but my main objective is to progress through the campaign. When I reach a certain point, I turn in a primary quest and am not given a new primary quest. I guess it is my responsibility to find the quest giver for next link in the Primary quest chain, but how am I supposed to guess who the quest giver is?

This must be a common occurrence, because the quest list is obliterated when one logs out of the game (even though persistence quest lists work just great with other MMOs... maybe it's only area quests that get purged?). Should I just do area quests until I happen to stumble across the next primary quest, or maybe I missed some milestone to prevent the game story from proceeding?

When you enter a town or outpost look to see if it says Enter Mission underneath the Party box, if it does then look for an NPC with a Green Blob type thing over his head,to find an NPC hold down Alt button and look round.

Are you in a mission place? There are several places where you hand in a primary quest and then have to do a mission, in one case 2 missions before you can pick up the quest path again

Quest list is maintained except for instance quests, if you're in a quest that is only for that instance and go elsewhere before completing it will reset

Yes, as vergerefosh says, if you are transported to a place to do something (as opposed to walking into an explorable area through a gate/door/shiny thing) then the quest list is only good for as long as you are in that area. Hitting the Enter Mission button on the Party window when in a mission town is like this. I don't think there are too many quests like that in Prophecies, but I may be misremembering.

Are you still in Pre-Searing? If so, then there isn't a lot of primary questing to be done there. I think you really just have to get your secondary profession done and then you can talk to Sir Tydus in Ascalon City to go on to the next part of the game.

If you've already done that, then the way the story line works is that you get primary quest that will take you to a mission town, use the Enter Mission Button there to do the mission, and that will take you to the next city which will either be another mission town, or will have a person with the next primary quest in it.

If you can tell us what the last primary quest you did was, or what cities you have (Great Northern Wall, Fort Ranik, Ruins of Surmia) completed (when you hit the Map button the city will have one or two swords through it if you have completed the mission before) we'll be able to give you more specific information.

Thanks very much for the helpful advice.

I had finished King's Mesage and was not ready for any Mission. After spending a lot of time digging through quest and mission databases, I found that Tydus has the next primary quest, Defend the Wall. So, BladeDVD's suggestion to talk to Tydus was right, even though I've already seared.

I don't like it that I finish one primary quest (King's Message) then am left with no clue as to who has the next primary quest. I guess the alternatives are to visit every NPC who has the quest "!" (only one of whom has the next primary quest) or search online databases to track down details on remaining primary quests. IMO, if the designers saw fit to chain 9/10 of the primary quests directly to one another, they should do it consistently all of the time (unless some instructions are going to come up, like if a Mission is next).