# TSR settings sales numbers from Ben Riggs, starting with Lankmar, Maztica, Al-Qadim and Planescape!



## darjr (Jul 15, 2022)

Ben is releasing quite a few settings today so I thought I’d do a mega thread for those. I’ll update when things are posted.

Lankhmar is one of my favorite things. In fact after The Hobbit it was among the first fantasy I read.



	
		In 1985, TSR produced Lankhmar: City of Adventure based on the works of Fritz Leiber.

The chart below shows that it had pretty low sales compared to other setting releases in the 80s, not breaking even 100,000 copies in its first year.
		
	







And now we have Maztica. Another I never owned or got into.



	
		In 1991, the Forgotten Realms got a major expansion with a boxed set bringing Mesoamerican cultures into Faerun with Maztica. Apparently, TSR kept records for Maztica as though it was its own setting, which is why I have sales numbers for it. It repeats the pattern we’ve seen of a product's first year being its best year, and like so many other products we’ll look at today, that first year wasn’t so good from a historical perspective. 
		
	






And now Al-Qadim.




In 1992, TSR put out a middle eastern AD&D setting in Al Qadim. It broke up the release of the setting into Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures which was essentially all rules, and then a boxed set, Land of Fate, which truly detailed the setting.
		
	








	
		Because real life has interfered, I am stopping my posts for today. I'll start up again on Monday with TSR's less-famous settings: Red Steel, Planescape, Birthright, and Karameikos.
Have you preordered my book on D&D history, Slaying the Dragon, yet? If you preorder now, you get a free Jeff Easley bookplate! This offer ends in a mere four days, so take advantage of it now! 
		
	





Behold! Below are sales for the Planescape Boxed Set between 1994 and 1999. Despite being a work of genius, the setting did not sell like prior TSR settings did.

Next, I’ll post numbers for Karameikos, Red Steel, and Birthright. Then I’ll post a mammoth chart comparing total sales of all TSR settings from 79 to 98.

Have you preordered my book on D&D history, Slaying the Dragon, yet? THIS IS THE LAST DAY TO PREORDER! If you preorder now, you get a free Jeff Easley bookplate! This offer ends IN HOURS, so take advantage of it now!

Also, in comments below are snips of the actual data used to generate the charts.
		
	




Red Steel



Behold the lowest sales for any D&D setting published by TSR, Red Steel! (I would take this moment to point out that one of the motifs of late TSR is that the quality of the product had nothing to do with its sales.)

But yes, those first-year sales are less than 20,000 units. A mere 17,986 copies sold.

Next, we will look at the last of TSR’s minor settings, Birthright!
		
	






Birthright!


	
		Behold, the sales for the last setting to be published by TSR before it was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, Birthright!

Next, I will publish a comprehensive graph of TSR setting sales covering totals sold from ‘79 to ‘99
		
	






Here is the summary



Behold the cumulative sales for every AD&D setting from 1979 to 1999! 

Earlier settings did not just sell better. They sold EXPONENTIALLY better. Not to take anything away from Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, but it pains me to see the Planescape and Ravenloft numbers. I LOVED those settings, and I’m surprised they didn’t do better.

Have you preordered my book on D&D history, Slaying the Dragon, yet? THIS IS THE LAST DAY TO PREORDER! If you preorder now, you get a free Jeff Easley bookplate! This offer ends IN HOURS, so take advantage of it now! Link below!
		
	



Buy his book! Slaying the Dragon - Macmillan


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## Reynard (Jul 15, 2022)

@darjr Has he made any indication we will be seeing numbers including supplements, rather than just the main boxed sets/books?


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## darjr (Jul 15, 2022)




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## overgeeked (Jul 15, 2022)

Looking forward to Al-Qadim, Maztica, and Mystara.


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## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 15, 2022)

Lankhmar: City of Adventure ... was one of the best-written, best-loved, and least-known supplements released during the very end of the (first?) golden age of D&D.


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## darjr (Jul 15, 2022)

Reynard said:


> @darjr Has he made any indication we will be seeing numbers including supplements, rather than just the main boxed sets/books?



Not that I know of. I hope so.


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## darjr (Jul 15, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Lankhmar: City of Adventure ... was one of the best-written, best-loved, and least-known supplements released during the very end of the (first?) golden age of D&D.



And I never bought one. I do want one.


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## Jer (Jul 15, 2022)

For those curious about what that bump in 1993 is - that is when TSR released the 2nd edition of Lankhmar City of Adventure.  Under exactly the same name, which is an odd thing for them to have done.

I don't own the 2e version so I have no idea if it's the same book just with 2e stats or if it's something different with the same name.  It uses the same cover image though.


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## Jer (Jul 15, 2022)

Also as a Mystara fan I'm really not looking forward to seeing those Red Steel and Karameikos Kingdom of Adventure numbers.  They are going to be so tiny and make me sad.


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## Parmandur (Jul 15, 2022)

Lankhmar actually did pretty well, consider.

I wonder how many people just plopped it into Greyhawk and renamed it Dyvers or whatnot...? Or put Greyhawk and Faerun on the same continent...


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## darjr (Jul 15, 2022)

updated with Maztica, see op


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## overgeeked (Jul 15, 2022)

darjr said:


> updated with Maztica, see op



Oof.


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## grimslade (Jul 15, 2022)

Maztica was terrible. I am surprised it sold what it did. Poor Lankhmar. It was always sold out when I tried to get a copy. I wound up buying both Waterdeep City Box set and Greyhawk City to compensate...


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## Alzrius (Jul 15, 2022)

Does anyone else find the divisions of the Y-axes of these listings to be odd? I mean, having three markers breaking up divisions of twenty thousand in the Lankhmar listing, and the same for divisions of five thousand in the Maztica listing, just strikes me as not being very intuitive. And yet he's been consistent in graphing them that way.


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## overgeeked (Jul 15, 2022)

Alzrius said:


> Does anyone else find the divisions of the Y-axes of these listings to be odd? I mean, having three markers breaking up divisions of twenty thousand in the Lankhmar listing, and the same for divisions of five thousand in the Maztica listing, just strikes me as not being very intuitive. And yet he's been consistent in graphing them that way.



Most programs will take the highest number add a bit, and make that the top of the graph. They're not all listed side-by-side so they don't use the same scale.


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## bedir than (Jul 15, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Most programs will take the highest number add a bit, and make that the top of the graph. They're not all listed side-by-side so they don't use the same scale.



And he shares enough details rebuilding the chart is fairly easy


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## Alzrius (Jul 15, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Most programs will take the highest number add a bit, and make that the top of the graph. They're not all listed side-by-side so they don't use the same scale.



I didn't mean the differing scales between the graphs; I meant the use of three divisions between each listed number, despite said listings not being in multiples of three.


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## Reynard (Jul 15, 2022)

Do Hollow World next!


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## el-remmen (Jul 15, 2022)

I was one of those 50k+ people to buy Lankhmar City of Adventure in 1985 and somehow ended up with a second copy in the 90s. I am also one of a countless number who got rid of them and highly regrets it.


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## Reynard (Jul 15, 2022)

el-remmen said:


> I was one of those 50k+ people to buy Lankhmar City of Adventure in 1985 and somehow ended up with a second copy in the 90s. I am also one of a countless number who got rid of them and highly regrets it.



I occasionally purge my shelves and each and every time I end up regretting it some years later.


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## overgeeked (Jul 15, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I occasionally purge my shelves and each and every time I end up regretting it some years later.



I have gotten rid of entire collections of game books. At no point has that later been a happy thing. It always makes sense in the moment. Needing more shelf space, not wanting to box up and move hundreds of pounds of books, etc. I always...always regret it later.


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## Reynard (Jul 15, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> I have gotten rid of entire collections of game books. At no point has that later been a happy thing. It always makes sense in the moment. Needing more shelf space, not wanting to box up and move hundreds of pounds of books, etc. I always...always regret it later.



And it can be REALLY expensive to get that stuff back.


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## overgeeked (Jul 15, 2022)

Reynard said:


> And it can be REALLY expensive to get that stuff back.



One of the big reasons I switched predominantly to PDFs. They're cheaper and an external drive is easier to move than a few thousand books. Though I am coming back around to physical products. But only a select few.


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## R_J_K75 (Jul 15, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Lankhmar actually did pretty well, consider.
> 
> I wonder how many people just plopped it into Greyhawk and renamed it Dyvers or whatnot...? Or put Greyhawk and Faerun on the same continent...



I played as a PC in Lankhmar once, and the DM dropped it into his own homebrew.  It was a terrible, generic experience, so that left a bad taste in my mouth for the setting. I remember two things, the DM somehow forced the Ranger PC into the city who continuously said they didn't want to be there, so he was traumatized by city life and went psycho and started killing civilians with his polearm. We just wanted to get to the adventure, and I can't remember why but the DM kept beating around the bush and leading us around the city for no reason for about 4 hours.  I think he was trying to impress us with the new box set he bought.  Eventually one player asked the DM, "Is there an NPC somewhere wearing a sandwich bord that says "Adventure this way"? We never played in Lankhmar again. I saw the box sets in game stores used many times after and never bought it because I was so scarred from that one game session.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Jul 15, 2022)

Wow, talk about flatlining. Now I kinda wished I had picked up the Maztica boxed set, but even as a young teen I was put off by the rampant colonialism in it.

As for Lankhmar, in my opinion the DCC Lankhmar boxed set blows all the prior iterations of the setting out of the water. It got the mood right, the mechanics right, and Goodman Games' love of the source materials positively seeps from the pages.


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## darjr (Jul 15, 2022)

Updated to add Al-Qadin.

Note Ben has said he needs to attend to other things so until later, maybe Monday, I’ll update this thread.


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## jolt (Jul 15, 2022)

This is completely anecdotal, but in my area if you didn't get things like Maztica and Lankhmar when they first came out, you never did (they were never stocked again).  This was the pre-Internet era too; if you didn't see it in your local store, you often gave it no thought even if in the back of your mind you knew it existed.


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## darjr (Jul 15, 2022)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Wow, talk about flatlining. Now I kinda wished I had picked up the Maztica boxed set, but even as a young teen I was put off by the rampant colonialism in it.
> 
> As for Lankhmar, in my opinion the DCC Lankhmar boxed set blows all the prior iterations of the setting out of the water. It got the mood right, the mechanics right, and Goodman Games' love of the source materials positively seeps from the pages.



The author of the Goodman Games edition is a Fritz Leiber scholar and visited his personal museum and archives as part of his job to write it.

Note a D&D 5e Kickstarter is coming, mostly a monster book but I’ll bet it’ll have some setting info too. I’m going to back that and use it to support that boxed set in a campaign.


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## overgeeked (Jul 15, 2022)

Wow. At least Al-Qadim did a bit better. These numbers are all terrible though. 

Anyone complied them all yet?


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## South by Southwest (Jul 15, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Wow. At least Al-Qadim did a bit better. These numbers are all terrible though.



Yeah, it looks like the 90s were just a really hard time for TSR, which certainly fits the known history. It is still surprising to see just _how_ bad some of these numbers were, though. I mean, almost anything after 1994 or even 1992--wow.


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## overgeeked (Jul 15, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> Yeah, it looks like the 90s were just a really hard time for TSR, which certainly fits the known history. It is still surprising to see just _how_ bad some of these numbers were, though. I mean, almost anything after 1994 or even 1992--wow.



It's likely multiple things coming to a head. Huge swathes of the '80s fad players dropping out. The rise of Vampire: The Masquerade. Resistance to edition change. Player/referee inability to keep up with releases. Self-competition. Etc.


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## R_J_K75 (Jul 15, 2022)

jolt said:


> This is completely anecdotal, but in my area if you didn't get things like Maztica and Lankhmar when they first came out, you never did (they were never stocked again).  This was the pre-Internet era too; if you didn't see it in your local store, you often gave it no thought even if in the back of your mind you knew it existed.



Where I live it was the opposite. I used to see old boxed sets at local game, hobby stores and even bigger chains like Media Play all the time in the mid to late 90s. sometimes they were used but they were available. I usually never had a problem finding stuff, Actually I wasn't looking for specific stuff but could take a day once every few weeks and make the rounds and find something.


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## Jer (Jul 15, 2022)

R_J_K75 said:


> Where I live it was the opposite. I used to see old boxed sets at local game, hobby stores and *even bigger chains like Media Play *all the time in the mid to late 90s. sometimes they were used but they were available.



Oh wow.  Media Play.  That takes me back. I haven't thought about them in years.  They were the source of a lot of my D&D purchases as moving to a city with Media Play in it coincided with me getting my first actual job after college...

(From @darjr's update)


> Because real life has interfered, I am stopping my posts for today. I'll start up again on Monday with* TSR's less-famous settings*: Red Steel, *Planescape*, Birthright, and Karameikos.



Some suspense for the weekend - does this suggest that we're going to find out that the Planescape core sold in the same numbers as the other three boxed sets listed there?  I actually wouldn't have lumped Planescape in with those settings, because my perception was that it was a much more popular setting than the others...


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## Demetrios1453 (Jul 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> Oh wow.  Media Play.  That takes me back. I haven't thought about them in years.  They were the source of a lot of my D&D purchases as moving to a city with Media Play in it coincided with me getting my first actual job after college...
> 
> (From @darjr's update)
> 
> Some suspense for the weekend - does this suggest that we're going to find out that the Planescape core sold in the same numbers as the other three boxed sets listed there?  I actually wouldn't have lumped Planescape in with those settings, because my perception was that it was a much more popular setting than the others...



Heh, same with Media Play myself, although I also had a great comic/gaming book store nearby as well.

I'm pretty sure Planescape will be higher. I know a lot of people who purchased products from that line compared to the others, and it received a lot more support (and good support at that! It's still useful go-to material even today in 5e for campaigns that visit the planes).


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 15, 2022)

jolt said:


> This is completely anecdotal, but in my area if you didn't get things like Maztica and Lankhmar when they first came out, you never did (they were never stocked again).  This was the pre-Internet era too; if you didn't see it in your local store, you often gave it no thought even if in the back of your mind you knew it existed.



LOL, In Vermont it was the opposite. You could always find any old TSR stuff in the back of the FLGS. I remember those Lankhmar sets gathering dust on a rack back there for like 10 years. I wouldn't be too surprised if they are still there, lol. The owners of that shop were a bit odd though, they were rich as heck and were big comic book fans and collectors, the FLGS was just what they did with the upstairs space, and losing money was fine with them, they needed the tax writeoffs anyway. It was, still is AFAIK, a pretty good shop, but lets just say they didn't feel a ton of urgency about clearing out old stock!


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## Jer (Jul 15, 2022)

Demetrios1453 said:


> I'm pretty sure Planescape will be higher. I know a lot of people who purchased products from that line compared to the others, and it received a lot more support (and good support at that! It's still useful go-to material even today in 5e for campaigns that visit the planes).



One example of memory playing tricks on you is that I could have sworn that Planescape predated the merging of Mystara into the AD&D line by a couple of years.  But a quick Wikipedia check shows that the publication date of the Planescape set and the two Mystara sets here were all in 1994, and Birthright was just the year after.

1994 onward is really bad in the overall numbers for other products.  I'm expecting Planescape to be higher than the other three, but I'm also preparing for it to be smaller than I would have guessed from my own impressions.  All of these numbers have been along those lines.


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## Reynard (Jul 15, 2022)

It's really too bad we don't have supplement data. It would be interesting to see which settings held the attention of its fans better, regardless of the number of initial boxed sets/books sold.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 15, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> Yeah, it looks like the 90s were just a really hard time for TSR, which certainly fits the known history. It is still surprising to see just _how_ bad some of these numbers were, though. I mean, almost anything after 1994 or even 1992--wow.



Well, by the mid-90s at least they were pretty much broke and reprinting stuff, even if people wanted it, was a dream. As others have amply documented by that point they had warehouses full of excess inventory of stuff nobody wanted, and probably Lankhmar et al was completely sold out and impossible to get. The little pop when they did a 2e version kinda hints at that, there may have been some demand, but no supply! The other problem they had was nobody wanted to stock their stuff anymore, they'd pretty well burned the bridge with the book trade, and I can remember even the Hobby distributors were tired of getting stuck with demands that they stock Dragon Dice or whatever that was just never going to sell.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> Oh wow.  Media Play.  That takes me back. I haven't thought about them in years.  They were the source of a lot of my D&D purchases as moving to a city with Media Play in it coincided with me getting my first actual job after college...
> 
> (From @darjr's update)
> 
> Some suspense for the weekend - does this suggest that we're going to find out that the Planescape core sold in the same numbers as the other three boxed sets listed there?  I actually wouldn't have lumped Planescape in with those settings, because my perception was that it was a much more popular setting than the others...



Yeah, my impression is that SpellJammer and Planescape were in a whole other category. They also put out several products in each of those lines IIRC.


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## South by Southwest (Jul 15, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> I can remember even the Hobby distributors were tired of getting stuck with demands that they stock Dragon Dice or whatever that was just never going to sell.



Dragon Dice! Oh, wow--I had completely forgotten about that. Yeah, I don't know anyone who actually bought that thing.


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## Jer (Jul 15, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> Dragon Dice! Oh, wow--I had completely forgotten about that. Yeah, I don't know anyone who actually bought that thing.



I did!  It was actually a fun little dice game. But it was never going to be the MtG killer that TSR committed a whole bunch of money into trying to make.

BTW - it's still being sold.  The company that bought the rights (and all of the excess dice that TSR had made) from Wizards is still selling it.  I have no idea if they're still selling the original dice that TSR overmanufactured or if they've actually had to go back to press on it - I know they added new factions to the game over time. They've had a booth at Origins for a number of years and it was there again this year.  Their website is here: SFR Inc.


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## South by Southwest (Jul 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> *I did!  It was actually a fun little dice game*. But it was never going to be the MtG killer that TSR committed a whole bunch of money into trying to make.



No kidding?! Wild. I've never met anyone who played it before.


Jer said:


> *BTW - it's still being sold.*  The company that bought the rights (and all of the excess dice that TSR had made) from Wizards is still selling it.  I have no idea if they're still selling the original dice that TSR overmanufactured or if they've actually had to go back to press on it - I know they added new factions to the game over time. They've had a booth at Origins for a number of years and it was there again this year.  Their website is here: SFR Inc.



Dude, wow. Now you've got me intrigued...


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## Jer (Jul 15, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> No kidding?! Wild. I've never met anyone who played it before.
> 
> Dude, wow. Now you've got me intrigued...



I wouldn't spend too much money on it unless you're really into dice games.  It's still a collectable dice game after all, and it's a 25 year old one at this point to boot


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 15, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> Dragon Dice! Oh, wow--I had completely forgotten about that. Yeah, I don't know anyone who actually bought that thing.



It was like the other TSR stuff, it sold pretty well right out of the gate I guess. Honestly, by the mid '90s I really wasn't much interested in most TSR stuff anyway. We played quite a bit of 2e, but really bought very little product.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 15, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> No kidding?! Wild. I've never met anyone who played it before.
> 
> Dude, wow. Now you've got me intrigued...



Huh, yeah, looks like they made one other game, Daemon Dice, which I'd assume is basically a variant of the original game. 

I never did really understand what TSR was thinking. I mean, a dice game is kind of nice, but didn't they understand there's only so many dice you can really make, the possibilities for cards, as M:tG has proven, seem to be limitless.


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## South by Southwest (Jul 15, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> I never did really understand what TSR was thinking. I mean, a dice game is kind of nice, but didn't they understand there's only so many dice you can really make, the possibilities for cards, as M:tG has proven, seem to be limitless.



Yeah, there was no way they were going to compete with M:tG. Just no way.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Jul 15, 2022)

Yeah, the The Land of the Eight Cities sourcebook is a fascinating read, since it's based on an unpublished manuscript from the Fritz Leiber archives.

I'm very curious what their 5e monster book is going to be like. I hope it's very, very weird.



darjr said:


> The author of the Goodman Games edition is a Fritz Leiber scholar and visited his personal museum and archives as part of his job to write it.
> 
> Note a D&D 5e Kickstarter is coming, mostly a monster book but I’ll bet it’ll have some setting info too. I’m going to back that and use it to support that boxed set in a campaign.


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## Jer (Jul 15, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> I never did really understand what TSR was thinking. I mean, a dice game is kind of nice, but didn't they understand there's only so many dice you can really make, the possibilities for cards, as M:tG has proven, seem to be limitless.



They did try to make their own card game - a couple of them in fact.  Spellfire was their first attempt and it was ... fine.  The gameplay was okay 2 player but they used recycled artwork and the theme of the game was kind of muddled.  Later they made a Planescape themed game Blood Wars which I can't comment on because by the time it came out there was such a glut of CCGs on the market I was tired of even trying new ones.


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## R_J_K75 (Jul 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> Oh wow. Media Play. That takes me back.



I didn't remember them being around until 2006, they might have closed in my area sooner.  In 2000, I just by happenstance drove about 45 minutes to one in Niagara Falls and found a whole bookshelf of Star Wars WEG books at between 50%-75% off. Over the next month or two I cleaned it all out.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 15, 2022)

Jer said:


> They did try to make their own card game - a couple of them in fact.  Spellfire was their first attempt and it was ... fine.  The gameplay was okay 2 player but they used recycled artwork and the theme of the game was kind of muddled.  Later they made a Planescape themed game Blood Wars which I can't comment on because by the time it came out there was such a glut of CCGs on the market I was tired of even trying new ones.



Yeah, I remember. I think the thing with the whole CCG market was that M:tG was and is SO GOOD that it really just sucked the air right out of the fantasy-themed CCG space. You could make other good games, like Spellfire, but M:tG's network effects were just too strong, few of them survived long enough to really put out much material. I honestly cannot say that any other CCG has really got the excellent game play, the community, etc. Even when I was playing in the early days of the game it was clear this was IT, the one and only dominant game in its category. Poor TSR just missed the boat and WotC caught lightning in a bottle.


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## Stormonu (Jul 15, 2022)

Ugh - Dragon Dice and Spellfire.  I'll never forgive TSR for those two abominations.  

I bought a fair amount of Dragon Dice; the game wasn't very good at all and pretty confusing actually.  I kept the D12 dragon dice though.

Spellfire was a mess.  My brother was big into MtG (Top 8) and I tried to get him interested in Spellfire, but after 3 games that ended in checkmates/draws we saw how terrible it was and I ditched the cards.

I collected a few packs & boosters of the Blood Wars cards for Planescape, but never could get anyone to play it and try it out after the Spellfire fiasco.


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## humble minion (Jul 16, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Wow. At least Al-Qadim did a bit better. These numbers are all terrible though.



I absolutely loved Al-Qadim and bought everything from the line I could afford (which, in the 90s, wasn’t very much).

But what amazes me is how the line progressed after these sales numbers. The near-unique thing about Al-Qadim was that after the generic Arabian Adventures book it was almost entirely boxed sets. There was the odd supplemental book like the Complete Sha’ir’s Handbook (talk about niche! I wonder how many copies THAT sold?) but in general the standard Al-Qadim release was a boxed set detailing a region of Zakhara and containing a campaign set in that area. And once all of Zakhara was covered, the line was deemed complete and basically abandoned. Some of these products were great (Ruined Kingdoms, Secrets of the Lamp, City of Delights, etc etc) but it was an unusual way for TSR to run a setting. Normally there’d be a mass of paperback adventure books etc.

And while I’m not complaining because I loved this stuff, imagine being the TSR head honcho who approved the Corsairs of the Great Sea boxed set (or whatever) based on those sales numbers. The supplement boxes must have sold much less than the core setting book/box. At least with Maztica they cut their losses relatively early.


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## jdrakeh (Jul 16, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Lankhmar: City of Adventure ... was one of the best-written, best-loved, and least-known supplements released during the very end of the (first?) golden age of D&D.




Ugh. It took all of the cool of Lankhmar and mangled it horribly to shoehorn it into AD&D, IMO. The Newhon material in Deities & Demigod was (again, IMO) handled with much more care. To each their own, however.


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## Shardstone (Jul 16, 2022)

As someone who studied and wrote about the Mesoamerican cultures extensively in my grad program, I think Maztica is altogether an untasteful attempt at bridging those peoples' mythology and the fantasy that is D&D. I think it could be done very well, but Maztica felt like it wholly missed the point of everything that mythos was talking about, and failed to depict an actual good cultural pastiche in Maztica itself. Much lower quality than Al-Qadim.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 16, 2022)

jdrakeh said:


> Ugh. It took all of the cool of Lankhmar and mangled it horribly to shoehorn it into AD&D, IMO. The Newhon material in Deities & Demigod was (again, IMO) handled with much more care. To each their own, however.



Well, this was, IMHO, the issue with handling any literary, mythological, historical, or folklore based kind of setting, or even a lot of other material. D&D is just this weird genre all of its own, and a lot of that is really embedded in the way the game is played and designed. It is very hard to do something like Lankhmar, or Elric, or for that matter LoTR using D&D, it just doesn't work out well. You can add some of the flavor of something though, and certainly things like geography can be be reproduced. D&D was always at its best when making up settings and material from whole cloth, IMHO, and at its worst with trying to emulate other fantasy literature.


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## jdrakeh (Jul 16, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> Well, this was, IMHO, the issue with handling any literary, mythological, historical, or folklore based kind of setting, or even a lot of other material. D&D is just this weird genre all of its own, and a lot of that is really embedded in the way the game is played and designed. It is very hard to do something like Lankhmar, or Elric, or for that matter LoTR using D&D, it just doesn't work out well. You can add some of the flavor of something though, and certainly things like geography can be be reproduced. D&D was always at its best when making up settings and material from whole cloth, IMHO, and at its worst with trying to emulate other fantasy literature.




I think this is a good take. This was certainly the main issue with the AD&D Lankhmar material in my opinion. I would rather see licensed properties get their own games, built from the ground up to model the fiction, rather than see the settings adapted to existing systems that were designed to do something different. Some such adaptations will be better than others, naturally, (e.g. the various Elric/Stormbringer games by Chaosium) but I don't think any of them will _ever_ be as good as a purpose-built system.


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## humble minion (Jul 16, 2022)

Shardstone said:


> As someone who studied and wrote about the Mesoamerican cultures extensively in my grad program, I think Maztica is altogether an untasteful attempt at bridging those peoples' mythology and the fantasy that is D&D. I think it could be done very well, but Maztica felt like it wholly missed the point of everything that mythos was talking about, and failed to depict an actual good cultural pastiche in Maztica itself. Much lower quality than Al-Qadim.



As someone who had basically no knowledge of mesoamerican cultures at the time and just liked cool new settings inspired by interesting bits of the world, the Maztica line drove me up the wall because it blew the whole setting up in a distinctly mediocre novel trilogy before the boxed set even came out, and lost all the uniqueness and interest to the place straight off the bat. ‘Hey, here’s a d&d setting completely different to anything you’ve seen before, boom haha no now there’s orcs and stuff here and it’s the same as everything else, sucker’. I wanted to play as a Maztican in Maztica going through a maztican adventure fighting maztican monsters, but TSR only let me run around cleaning up after their NPCs.

I became more aware of the unpleasant colonialist smell of the whole business later on as I got older, but aside from that purely as a playable setting, Maztica really suffered from being released in TSRs ‘we are a game company but we only actually make money from novels’ era. And I was very far from the only one to make the observation at the time. I expect this botched start had a large impact on the failure of the line, though as long as the Maztica Trilogy novels sold enough to keep the lights on for a while, I suspect TSR didn’t care very much.


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## MGibster (Jul 16, 2022)

darjr said:


> And now we have Maztica. Another I never owned or got into.



Maztica was a terrible, terrible product.  I don't remember what made it so bad, I just remember being sorely disappointed in it.  



darjr said:


> And now Al-Qadim.



On the other hand, I have fond memories of Al-Qadim.  But I don't think I ever played it after 1993 or so.


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## jdrakeh (Jul 16, 2022)

Stormonu said:


> Spellfire was a mess.  My brother was big into MtG (Top 8) and I tried to get him interested in Spellfire, but after 3 games that ended in checkmates/draws we saw how terrible it was and I ditched the cards.




The local hobby shop where I lived at the time that Spellfire came out was giving away decks and boosters with the purchase of literally anything else, using them as a loss leader because people just wouldn't pay actual money for them.


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## MGibster (Jul 16, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> Dragon Dice! Oh, wow--I had completely forgotten about that. Yeah, I don't know anyone who actually bought that thing.



I have a friend that bought and still has a metric butt load of Dragon Dice.  The funny thing is, Dragon Dice was a fairly successful game.  At least until TSR produced to many dice and they ran out of people interested in purchasing more.


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## Stormonu (Jul 16, 2022)

humble minion said:


> As someone who had basically no knowledge of mesoamerican cultures at the time and just liked cool new settings inspired by interesting bits of the world, the Maztica line drove me up the wall because it blew the whole setting up in a distinctly mediocre novel trilogy before the boxed set even came out, and lost all the uniqueness and interest to the place straight off the bat. ‘Hey, here’s a d&d setting completely different to anything you’ve seen before, boom haha no now there’s orcs and stuff here and it’s the same as everything else, sucker’. I wanted to play as a Maztican in Maztica going through a maztican adventure fighting maztican monsters, but TSR only let me run around cleaning up after their NPCs.
> 
> I became more aware of the unpleasant colonialist smell of the whole business later on as I got older, but aside from that purely as a playable setting, Maztica really suffered from being released in TSRs ‘we are a game company but we only actually make money from novels’ era. And I was very far from the only one to make the observation at the time. I expect this botched start had a large impact on the failure of the line, though as long as the Maztica Trilogy novels sold enough to keep the lights on for a while, I suspect TSR didn’t care very much.



Same boat.

TSR made the same mistakes with Horde - a campaign "setting" so bad most people seem to totally forget it even existed.


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## Stormonu (Jul 16, 2022)

MGibster said:


> I have a friend that bought and still has a metric butt load of Dragon Dice.  The funny thing is, Dragon Dice was a fairly successful game.  At least until TSR produced to many dice and they ran out of people interested in purchasing more.



We RPGers are suckers for dice - I bought into the game as well, the dice were "cool".  I only got to play a game or two because I found the rules so confusing.  To me it was "interesting idea, horrible follow-through".


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## Twiggly the Gnome (Jul 16, 2022)

When it comes to Maztica, I liked the Eagle and Jaguar warriors and Pluma and Hishna magic. The rest was completely disposable.


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## Alzrius (Jul 16, 2022)

MGibster said:


> I have a friend that bought and still has a metric butt load of Dragon Dice.  The funny thing is, Dragon Dice was a fairly successful game.  At least until TSR produced to many dice and they ran out of people interested in purchasing more.



For what it's worth, Dragon Dice was one of the few properties that WotC was willing to sell off, and today there are enough people who enjoy it that SFR still produces the game (and related media, such as reprinting the old novels as well as some new ones).






						SFR Inc.
					

SFR Inc. - Creators of the popular dice games Dragon Dice and Daemon Dice!



					www.dragondice.com


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## billd91 (Jul 16, 2022)

Stormonu said:


> Same boat.
> 
> TSR made the same mistakes with Horde - a campaign "setting" so bad most people seem to totally forget it even existed.



I’m going to argue that the Horde setting boxed set is actually pretty interesting. It made for a nice companion to Kara Tur. Not so keen on either the modules or the trilogy of books, though.


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## Zardnaar (Jul 16, 2022)

humble minion said:


> As someone who had basically no knowledge of mesoamerican cultures at the time and just liked cool new settings inspired by interesting bits of the world, the Maztica line drove me up the wall because it blew the whole setting up in a distinctly mediocre novel trilogy before the boxed set even came out, and lost all the uniqueness and interest to the place straight off the bat. ‘Hey, here’s a d&d setting completely different to anything you’ve seen before, boom haha no now there’s orcs and stuff here and it’s the same as everything else, sucker’. I wanted to play as a Maztican in Maztica going through a maztican adventure fighting maztican monsters, but TSR only let me run around cleaning up after their NPCs.
> 
> I became more aware of the unpleasant colonialist smell of the whole business later on as I got older, but aside from that purely as a playable setting, Maztica really suffered from being released in TSRs ‘we are a game company but we only actually make money from novels’ era. And I was very far from the only one to make the observation at the time. I expect this botched start had a large impact on the failure of the line, though as long as the Maztica Trilogy novels sold enough to keep the lights on for a while, I suspect TSR didn’t care very much.




By the time I read Viperhand (age 17/18) I had already read about the Aztecs (age 11/12 or so). Had a basic level f knowledge about Mesoamerican culture. 

  I thought it was just a lame knock off of real world events.


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## QuentinGeorge (Jul 16, 2022)

billd91 said:


> I’m going to argue that the Horde setting boxed set is actually pretty interesting. It made for a nice companion to Kara Tur. Not so keen on either the modules or the trilogy of books, though.



The problem with the Horde, Maztica, and almost all the post 2nd edition campaign settings that were released was TSR's obsession with recreating what they did with Dragonlance - a big ol' event with RPG material, adventures, novels etc. But they didn't stop to pay attention to what the "multimedia" event of Dragonlance did to Dragonlance.

*It killed the setting as an RPG. *The release of the Dragonlance novels began Dragonlance's transformation from a series of railroading 1st edition modules to a best-selling novel line that happened to have a vestigial RPG appendage dangling off it for the next twenty odd years. Dragonlance as a role playing setting died and was resurrected over and over again, but never recaptured its success. Dragonlance as a novel line sold well throughout TSR.

Trying to shoehorn that model for Maztica and the Horde (and the Avatar Trilogy in FR) gave rise to the dreaded metaplot, where module writers started effectively writing fiction, changing settings underneath the feet of players and DMs. It left D&D players feeling they had to keep up with a mountain of lore to play in any of these settings, and, worst of all, that their characters were overshadowed by NPCs developed in novels. WoTC's decision to blow up FR in 4th edition was a belated and wrongheaded attempt to kill the metaplot related problems.


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## UngeheuerLich (Jul 16, 2022)

I really liked the al quadim computer game. I also liked that setting but never played there. I hope it gets rebooted (with cultural sensitivity of course).


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 16, 2022)

QuentinGeorge said:


> The problem with the Horde, Maztica, and almost all the post 2nd edition campaign settings that were released was TSR's obsession with recreating what they did with Dragonlance - a big ol' event with RPG material, adventures, novels etc. But they didn't stop to pay attention to what the "multimedia" event of Dragonlance did to Dragonlance.
> 
> *It killed the setting as an RPG. *The release of the Dragonlance novels began Dragonlance's transformation from a series of railroading 1st edition modules to a best-selling novel line that happened to have a vestigial RPG appendage dangling off it for the next twenty odd years. Dragonlance as a role playing setting died and was resurrected over and over again, but never recaptured its success. Dragonlance as a novel line sold well throughout TSR.
> 
> Trying to shoehorn that model for Maztica and the Horde (and the Avatar Trilogy in FR) gave rise to the dreaded metaplot, where module writers started effectively writing fiction, changing settings underneath the feet of players and DMs. It left D&D players feeling they had to keep up with a mountain of lore to play in any of these settings, and, worst of all, that their characters were overshadowed by NPCs developed in novels. WoTC's decision to blow up FR in 4th edition was a belated and wrongheaded attempt to kill the metaplot related problems.



Actually the poster child for all of this was Dark Sun more than Dragonlance. The meta-plot derived from the books pretty much cratered the setting. As I understand it the 4e version is basically a reset to the original state, although I didn't honestly pay a ton of attention to the setting itself (some of the rules material was widely used elsewhere). It was fairly popular in any case. 

I think you're right though in terms of TSR trying to 'capture lightning in a bottle'. DS books did pretty well from what I remember, and the setting itself was quite popular, maybe even more so than DL.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 17, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Lankhmar: City of Adventure ... was one of the best-written, best-loved, and least-known supplements released during the very end of the (first?) golden age of D&D.




 What was the second Golden Age of D&D.


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## bedir than (Jul 17, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> What was the second Golden Age of D&D.



Now


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## humble minion (Jul 17, 2022)

QuentinGeorge said:


> The problem with the Horde, Maztica, and almost all the post 2nd edition campaign settings that were released was TSR's obsession with recreating what they did with Dragonlance - a big ol' event with RPG material, adventures, novels etc. But they didn't stop to pay attention to what the "multimedia" event of Dragonlance did to Dragonlance.
> 
> *It killed the setting as an RPG. *The release of the Dragonlance novels began Dragonlance's transformation from a series of railroading 1st edition modules to a best-selling novel line that happened to have a vestigial RPG appendage dangling off it for the next twenty odd years. Dragonlance as a role playing setting died and was resurrected over and over again, but never recaptured its success. Dragonlance as a novel line sold well throughout TSR.
> 
> Trying to shoehorn that model for Maztica and the Horde (and the Avatar Trilogy in FR) gave rise to the dreaded metaplot, where module writers started effectively writing fiction, changing settings underneath the feet of players and DMs. It left D&D players feeling they had to keep up with a mountain of lore to play in any of these settings, and, worst of all, that their characters were overshadowed by NPCs developed in novels. WoTC's decision to blow up FR in 4th edition was a belated and wrongheaded attempt to kill the metaplot related problems.



The thing is, I think TSR actually was aware of the problems they’d caused themselves with the tension between the novel and game lines in Dragonlance. You can kinda see what appears to be their attempts to find solutions to the dilemma in later lines, though it’s not a problem they ever really solved.

The big complaint about the dragonlance novels was that they duplicated (spoiled?) the story, so anyone playing through the modules knew what was going to happen, and it was weird having your dwarf rogue pc or whatever playing through an iconic scene that Sturm or someone did in the novels.

You can sorta see the solutions they tried.

In Dark Sun the setting was released first and then the novels - but the novels turned the setting upside down and invalidated the actual boxed set within months of release, and the modules basically had the PCs running around doing second-string b-plot stuff while novel characters were the heroes. Which everyone hated, of course. Troy Denning came out later and claimed that the intention was that the novels wouldn’t be canon within the game line and were just intended to be an example of a Dark Sun story that COULD be told in the setting. But to be honest, I don’t believe a word of that. The modules and the novels were being written at the same time, and if this claim were true, the modules wouldnt have been tied as tightly to the novels as they were.

 In Maztica, the events of the novels happened and became canon in the game line, and PCs were assumed to be adventuring in the aftermath. So at least the boxed set wasn’t instantly invalidated, though this was of course unsatisfactory because once again, the PCs were understudies for novel characters and everything that made the setting interesting had been thoroughly blown up by the time the PCs actually got there.

Probably the most successful solution they came up with was in FR, with novels like the earlier Drizzt books, or the Arilyn/Danilo books by Elaine Cunningham (I think the Brimstone Angels books followed this template too, though I haven’t read them) Books in which the stakes were smaller and more personal, so they could act as examples of the sort of story that could be told in a setting, and which could be canonical without actually damaging or radically changing the setting itself. But TSR never managed (or bothered) to make this philosophy policy, so this sort of FR novel was greatly outnumbered by the sort (the Avatar books, the Horde, Rage of Dragons, Threat from the Sea, Shadow of the Avatar, Spellfire, Cormyr/Putple Dragon etc etc etc) where some apocalyptic threat arose and was put down and left the game line floundering in the wake of the metaplot. Again. And over time, this led to a huge overpopulation of powerful novel heroes running around in the setting, and a steadily diminishing number of unresolved plot hooks from the sourcebooks as authors mined them and had novel characters solve all the problems.

And of course there were lines like Planescape and Al-Qadim which had minimal or nonexistent novel lines, but given TSR was losing money on game material and only kept afloat by novel sales at this point, this strategy (while artistically satisfying) wasn’t exactly commercially viable.


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## Stormonu (Jul 17, 2022)

One of my beefs with Kara-Tur, Maztica, Al-Qadim and Horde was tying them to FR.  I wish they hadn't done that, and each had been its own world (Horde and Kara-Tur may have shared some space, but that's about it).

I've always been fascinated with the material from above, but if they do reapproach these realms, I hope they drop the "historical plopped into a supernatural setting" to unique, fantastic realms divorced of real-life baggage.


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## bedir than (Jul 17, 2022)

Stormonu said:


> One of my beefs with Kara-Tur, Maztica, Al-Qadim and Horde was tying them to FR.  I wish they hadn't done that, and each had been its own world (Horde and Kara-Tur may have shared some space, but that's about it).
> 
> I've always been fascinated with the material from above, but if they do reapproach these realms, I hope they drop the "historical plopped into a supernatural setting" to unique, fantastic realms divorced of real-life baggage.



You should enjoy Radiant Citadel


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## QuentinGeorge (Jul 17, 2022)

humble minion said:


> The thing is, I think TSR actually was aware of the problems they’d caused themselves with the tension between the novel and game lines in Dragonlance. You can kinda see what appears to be their attempts to find solutions to the dilemma in later lines, though it’s not a problem they ever really solved.
> 
> The big complaint about the dragonlance novels was that they duplicated (spoiled?) the story, so anyone playing through the modules knew what was going to happen, and it was weird having your dwarf rogue pc or whatever playing through an iconic scene that Sturm or someone did in the novels.
> 
> ...



A lot of that makes sense to me. I think the best for canon novels is, as you say, low stakes stuff that doesn't change the setting, or in essence, novels that set the scene for the setting portrayed in the material, ie, how did the world get to the situation its in, and then no novels set after the campaign premise. (Except low stakes). See it allows the novels to support the setting in the best way, by providing flavour and background material for your games, not destroying what was already there.

FR's Avatar novels/modules were another example of poor handling - the NPCs become gods while you get to do stupid errands.


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## Demetrios1453 (Jul 17, 2022)

Stormonu said:


> One of my beefs with Kara-Tur, Maztica, Al-Qadim and Horde was tying them to FR.  I wish they hadn't done that, and each had been its own world (Horde and Kara-Tur may have shared some space, but that's about it).
> 
> I've always been fascinated with the material from above, but if they do reapproach these realms, I hope they drop the "historical plopped into a supernatural setting" to unique, fantastic realms divorced of real-life baggage.




The Hordelands were (mostly) in Greenwood's pre-TSR Realms.

D&D General - Ed Greenwood's Original Forgotten Realms Map

That entire northeastern section (everything east of Thay and north of Raurin) makes up about 70% of the area covered in the Horde boxed set.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 17, 2022)

humble minion said:


> The thing is, I think TSR actually was aware of the problems they’d caused themselves with the tension between the novel and game lines in Dragonlance. You can kinda see what appears to be their attempts to find solutions to the dilemma in later lines, though it’s not a problem they ever really solved.
> 
> The big complaint about the dragonlance novels was that they duplicated (spoiled?) the story, so anyone playing through the modules knew what was going to happen, and it was weird having your dwarf rogue pc or whatever playing through an iconic scene that Sturm or someone did in the novels.
> 
> ...




 You over state your case,  the majority of FR novels aren't realms shaking events,  and for every plot hook resolved in a novel,  a dozen open up else where in other novels and supplements. 

 Yes FR has a lot of powerful Hero NPCs,  but they are out numbered by the shear volume of powerful villians by orders of magnitude and a lot of them are too busy doing things like research,  governing,  etc... To spend all their time adventuring and monster slaying.


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## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)




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## South by Southwest (Jul 18, 2022)

^ This is the one I'm really waiting on.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 18, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> ^ This is the one I'm really waiting on.



Yeah, that and Spelljammer. I think those two outsold all the minor settings so far discussed by a good bit, with maybe the exception of DL. Some Dark Sun numbers would be interesting as well, though maybe they have been published somewhere else already, I dunno.


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## South by Southwest (Jul 18, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> Yeah, that and Spelljammer. I think those two outsold all the minor settings so far discussed by a good bit, with maybe the exception of DL. Some Dark Sun numbers would be interesting as well, though maybe they have been published somewhere else already, I dunno.











						Darksun TSR sales! From Benjamin Riggs.
					

Actual! Dark Sun! Sales numbers!  Dark Sun follows the same pattern we’ve seen with so many other AD&D 2nd edition settings. The first release sells best, sales decline and then fall off a cliff. Follow-up releases fail to do as well as initial releases and then sputter out as well.  Here you...




					www.enworld.org


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## Jer (Jul 18, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> Yeah, that and Spelljammer. I think those two outsold all the minor settings so far discussed by a good bit, with maybe the exception of DL. Some Dark Sun numbers would be interesting as well, though maybe they have been published somewhere else already, I dunno.



If you're looking at total lifetime sales - not just initial release year sales - according to these numbers Spelljammer is actually one of the worse selling of the various settings.  Dragonlance absolutely sold more - the 1e Dragonlance Adventures hardcover alone sold more than double in its lifetime what the Spelljammer boxed set sold.  The original Ravenloft Black Box sold more - Spelljammer outsold it in the first year, but Ravenloft held onto sales over the following few years while Spelljammer tanked.  The original Dark Sun boxed set sold about 10K more over its lifetime even before you add in the revised boxed set - another example of it having lower sales than Spelljammer in its first year but then holding onto sales better over the following years.  Spelljammer outsold Al-Qadim and Maztica both by a good bit, and sold about 10K more copies than Lankhmar did, but that's about it.


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## grimslade (Jul 18, 2022)

I can't wait to see the Planescape numbers. I suspect they will be in line with Dark Sun and Ravenloft. I can see why WotC has been so setting shy with 5E. The numbers reported lend themselves more to a strategy of combining setting into a module to hit as many target groups as you can.


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## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

And now planescape! Timing is perfect!


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## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

Behold! Below are sales for the Planescape Boxed Set between 1994 and 1999. Despite being a work of genius, the setting did not sell like prior TSR settings did.

Next, I’ll post numbers for Karameikos, Red Steel, and Birthright. Then I’ll post a mammoth chart comparing total sales of all TSR settings from 79 to 98.

Have you preordered my book on D&D history, Slaying the Dragon, yet? THIS IS THE LAST DAY TO PREORDER! If you preorder now, you get a free Jeff Easley bookplate! This offer ends IN HOURS, so take advantage of it now!

Also, in comments below are snips of the actual data used to generate the charts.


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## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> Behold! Below are sales for the Planescape Boxed Set between 1994 and 1999. Despite being a work of genius, the setting did not sell like prior TSR settings did.
> 
> Next, I’ll post numbers for Karameikos, Red Steel, and Birthright. Then I’ll post a mammoth chart comparing total sales of all TSR settings from 79 to 98.
> 
> ...



Yeah, goes to show that critical reception and memory are not tied to sales...


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## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Yeah, goes to show that critical reception and memory are not tied to sales...



Yup


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## Jer (Jul 18, 2022)

grimslade said:


> I can't wait to see the Planescape numbers. I suspect they will be in line with Dark Sun and Ravenloft.



And as it turns out - they're less than Spelljammer. Both for year of initial release and total lifetime sales.

The 20-something in me who was really into Planescape is shocked, but the much older guy who has been watching these numbers get posted this last week thinks they're right in line what what he was expecting.  The only thing that will shock me is if the remaining settings - Karameikos, Red Steel, and Birthright - post close to Planescape's numbers in sales.


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## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

Usually I’m fine being wrong. But dang this one kinda stings. Just a tiny bit.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 18, 2022)

grimslade said:


> I can't wait to see the Planescape numbers. I suspect they will be in line with Dark Sun and Ravenloft. I can see why WotC has been so setting shy with 5E. The numbers reported lend themselves more to a strategy of combining setting into a module to hit as many target groups as you can.



Eh, I don't know, I am not convinced Planescape did any better than Spelljammer. They were both more 'out there' in fantasy terms, but honestly a lot of people were perfectly happy with a Greyhawk/FR style fairly generic setting. I assume that's why those were the big sellers, and why they have continued to be supported over the years while many of the niche settings have languished. Still, it doesn't surprise me at all that Spelljammer outsold stuff like Maztica, that sort of just doesn't quite hit either itch. Its not 'out there', and its not quite 'generic fantasy' either.

I'm curious, have numbers come out on OA sales? I'd assume it probably had to outsell the K-T boxed set and such...

EDIT: Ninjaed, lol. Guess my hunch was right...


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## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> Eh, I don't know, I am not convinced Planescape did any better than Spelljammer. They were both more 'out there' in fantasy terms, but honestly a lot of people were perfectly happy with a Greyhawk/FR style fairly generic setting. I assume that's why those were the big sellers, and why they have continued to be supported over the years while many of the niche settings have languished. Still, it doesn't surprise me at all that Spelljammer outsold stuff like Maztica, that sort of just doesn't quite hit either itch. Its not 'out there', and its not quite 'generic fantasy' either.
> 
> I'm curious, have numbers come out on OA sales? I'd assume it probably had to outsell the K-T boxed set and such...



The OA hardcover was covered in one of the first posts. It sold bery well compared to the 90's stuff, but less than GH, FR or DL.


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## Jer (Jul 18, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> I'm curious, have numbers come out on OA sales? I'd assume it probably had to outsell the K-T boxed set and such...



Yes here: Ben Riggs Releases Historical Sales Numbers for D&D Settings


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## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> Usually I’m fine being wrong. But dang this one kinda stings. Just a tiny bit.



I avoided Spelljammer, Dark Sun and Planescape for similar reasons -- they looked too far removed from baseline D&D for me to feel comfortable making them my own. I didn't use FR as a setting, either, but I could steal lots of it for my own games. I played in the Known World, but becasue I was a BECMI player all the way up to Immortals. The only AD&D setting that I full embraced was Dragonlance.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 18, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> The OA hardcover was covered in one of the first posts. It sold bery well compared to the 90's stuff, but less than GH, FR or DL.



Yeah, that makes sense. It was a pretty solid offering in a lot of ways, despite some serious flaws in how it presented non-Japanese stuff (in particular, I know people have other beefs with it for various reasons which I'm definitely not claiming are OK).


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## Jer (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> Usually I’m fine being wrong. But dang this one kinda stings. Just a tiny bit.



Keep in mind that these numbers represent TSR failing to find an audience for what they were publishing. Most of that is on TSR spiraling into bankruptcy rather than any fault in the material itself.  There's a trend through the 90s that can be explained by TSR just shedding customers willing to buy their stuff with each year that passes.


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## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

That’s really funny to me. Despite all the nose-in-the-air nonsense a lot of Planescape fans did and looking down at Spelljammer...Spelljammer actually outsold Planescape.


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## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

Jer said:


> Keep in mind that these numbers represent TSR failing to find an audience for what they were publishing. Most of that is on TSR spiraling into bankruptcy rather than any fault in the material itself.  There's a trend through the 90s that can be explained by TSR just shedding customers willing to buy their stuff with each year that passes.



Well, it's a weird situation where TSR's financial practices demanded a constant firehouse of product, which means needing to constantly push the boundaries. The creative side dealt with this very well, constantly finding new and more out there stuff to explore...but the audience shrinks the farther out you get, and the firehouse release strategy actually discourages sales. The 5E slow and steady approach has really worked to grow the audience over time, organically.


----------



## Scribe (Jul 18, 2022)

I reject your reality and substitute my own!

For the MMA fans...

Planescape never die!


----------



## South by Southwest (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> That’s really funny to me. Despite all the nose-in-the-air nonsense a lot of Planescape fans did and looking down at Spelljammer...Spelljammer actually outsold Planescape.



Planescape fans looked down their noses at Spelljammer?? Huh. I'm a big fan of Planescape if only because I'm a big fan of the planes and of finding some way to allow players to travel across them, but smirking at other people's fun has never made sense to me.

A: _"My kind of weird is the only respectable weird; yours is just Hamsters in Space." >chuckles snottily<_
Me: _"And Hamsters in Space is bad because...???"_ (Actually, the more I look at that description, the more I like it.)


----------



## Shardstone (Jul 18, 2022)

Planescape and Spelljammer, and I know this will sound more pretentious than it is but this is still a pretentious statement, were in no way mainstream ideas in the past, and were much more likely to resound with people who would write in one of their top 3 traits "creative." Or, in other words, a lot of people who were happy with the "box" of standard D&D were very unlikely to care about hyper-niche D&D, even if it still had elves and dwarves and what not in it. In fact, this seems to also prove that having elves and dwarves in Dark Sun really didn't help it all that much, if at all.

Meanwhile, people who prefer to approach D&D as a canvas for a lot of weird ideas they have or similar concepts likely resonated _very strongly _with the non-trad settings of Planescape, Spelljammer, and Dark Sun. These "outside the box" fantasy ideas showed them more ways to do things they had never imagined, whereas most consumers (and I'm pulling this all straight out of my ass) likely are just happy making stories/experiences with just the tools given, no more and no less.

I am not saying either crowd is better than the other, but this is what the data + so many people's unique perspectives seems to be telling me.

That said, still surprised that Spelljammer outsold Planescape. Kind of makes sense though. Fantasy -> Space -> Weird Mysticism probably tracks to how mainstream tastes are in movies, shows, books, comics, etc too.


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

Red Steel.



Behold the lowest sales for any D&D setting published by TSR, Red Steel! (I would take this moment to point out that one of the motifs of late TSR is that the quality of the product had nothing to do with its sales.)

But yes, those first-year sales are less than 20,000 units. A mere 17,986 copies sold.

Next, we will look at the last of TSR’s minor settings, Birthright!


----------



## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> Red Steel.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Did he ever drop any other Mystara stuff.


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

The story of later TSR and the sale to Wizards of the Coast are detailed in his new book. 





						Slaying the Dragon - Macmillan
					

The secret and untold story of how TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, then ...



					read.macmillan.com


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Did he ever drop any other Mystara stuff.



Not that I know of.


----------



## Jer (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> Red Steel.



Ouch.  

Not only are the first year sales less than 20K - with the returns in the following years it actually sold fewer units in its lifetime than it did in the first year - fewer than 17K units.  And yet TSR was apparently planning to do a revised Savage Coast setting for some reason that Wizards eventually released the manuscripts for onto the web.  So weird.

He's also posted the Birthright numbers on twitter now - it did better than Red Steel, not as good as Planescape.  

Did I miss the Karameikos Boxed set?


----------



## Shardstone (Jul 18, 2022)

Also, another detail, and that is on quality of the products.

The Forgotten Realms campaign setting is one that I own, the old AD&D one. That book bangs. It is super useful, with a lot of plots and adventure hooks and actual hexes with naughty word in it to do. But, let's look at Dark Sun. Dark Sun is very, very hard to use. The monster books are 10/10 imo, but the setting itself gives you nothing but broad strokes. FR campaign gives you both broad strokes (easy to fill in if you've read lord of the rings) and microstrokes (actual immedietly gamable information like fully developed hexes).

Meanwhile, Dark Sun, Planescape, both of whose box sets I own, just don't give you enough material to use their very alien settings. It takes a lot more effort to engage with these settings and to produce a game than it does the Forgotten Realms. This, to me, makes the FR feel like a higher quality gaming product, and it allows FR as a setting to grow a lot faster as well (especially coupled with the endless amount of novels being pumped out for it).

If Dark Sun and the other niche settings had tried to solve this very difficult-to-solve puzzle of making hyper gameable content to make their niche products more functional, the lifetime sells may look a pretty picture different. This is all hypothetical, and I could be totally wrong,  but I do consider this problem of "Usable setting" vs "Alien setting" a part of the narrative in the data.

One last note...I tried to run Planescape two years ago. Extremely difficult to do. I was basically inventing everything, from cultures to environs to settings, because those books really only give you barebones materials.


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

Birthright!



Behold, the sales for the last setting to be published by TSR before it was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, Birthright!

Next, I will publish a comprehensive graph of TSR setting sales covering totals sold from ‘79 to ‘99


----------



## billd91 (Jul 18, 2022)

Shardstone said:


> That said, still surprised that Spelljammer outsold Planescape. Kind of makes sense though. Fantasy -> Space -> Weird Mysticism probably tracks to how mainstream tastes are in movies, shows, books, comics, etc too.



There's also the environment to consider, not just content. Spelljammer was released in 1989. That was fairly quickly followed by Ravenloft, Mazteca, Dark Sun, Al Qadim, and that's just by TSR. From other companies, you've got Magic and Vampire. By the time Planescape comes up, *ALL* of those are out before it.
I don't know about the rest of you who remember those days, but there was *NO WAY* for me to keep up with all of them and the 2e Complete Handbooks as well as pay my rent (shocking, I know).


----------



## vecna00 (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> Birthright!
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I wonder if that bump in sales came from the video game. I'm not sure exactly when it came out though.


----------



## billd91 (Jul 18, 2022)

And on the subject of content, I liked much of the idea behind Planescape and I *loved* the visual aesthetic.

I *HATED* the textual aesthetic and the planar patois it used. I really cannot emphasize that enough.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 18, 2022)

billd91 said:


> I don't know about the rest of you who remember those days, but there was *NO WAY* for me to keep up with all of them and the 2e Complete Handbooks as well as pay my rent (shocking, I know).




On the plus side, that's better than today.

Today, a person can't pay rent ... because they can't pay rent. 






I'm sure there are younger people today who are looking at this, shaking their heads and saying, "Wait.... people used to be able to pay rent AND have a disposable income? When was this magical time????"


----------



## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> That’s really funny to me. Despite all the nose-in-the-air nonsense a lot of Planescape fans did and looking down at Spelljammer...Spelljammer actually outsold Planescape.



Spelljammer is just more accessible than Planescape. You can just go from some standard D&D play to jumping on this cool magical ship and shooting off into 'space' and doing whatever, and then maybe you just come back. I mean, yes, you could just use Planescape as more or less a kind of super detailed MotP, but it introduced a LOT of fairly significant cosmology and whatnot, whereas Spelljammer is just kind of out there in its own realm and its easy enough to pick and choose what you use. So I think SJ is the more accessible of the two, overall.


----------



## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 18, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Well, it's a weird situation where TSR's financial practices demanded a constant firehouse of product, which means needing to constantly push the boundaries. The creative side dealt with this very well, constantly finding new and more out there stuff to explore...but the audience shrinks the farther out you get, and the firehouse release strategy actually discourages sales. The 5E slow and steady approach has really worked to grow the audience over time, organically.



part of the problem though was that as time went on the overall product quality deteriorated, particularly in the last 4-5 years. A lot of what was put out after 1993 or so was just crap. It wasn't well edited, playtesting was non-existent, and they clearly weren't doing good market research. So the worse their fortunes got, the less likely it was they were going to put out something that would right the ship. I think they were just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping something would stick. However, even when/if they had a decent product, how could they even get it to market anymore? By 1996 it was going to be virtually impossible to get stuff printed and distributed in any quantity, so there was no real possibility of a recovery at that point, whatever they put out in the last couple of years was basically just a last dying gasp.


----------



## Jer (Jul 18, 2022)

vecna00 said:


> I wonder if that bump in sales came from the video game. I'm not sure exactly when it came out though.



That bump in sales is after Wizards bought TSR's assets. I suspect it came from actually having the money and staff to actually fulfill the orders that were coming in rather than anything to do with Birthright's marketing per se.

One thing we don't know from these numbers is how many _orders_ there were rather than how many _sales_ were made.  Those sales numbers in 1997 are wonky and I strongly suspect it's because of the bankruptcy and TSR shutting down for a while.  So I wouldn't trust that bump to be anything more than Wizards fulfilling the back orders that TSR had once they were able to.


----------



## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 18, 2022)

Shardstone said:


> Meanwhile, people who prefer to approach D&D as a canvas for a lot of weird ideas they have or similar concepts likely resonated _very strongly _with the non-trad settings of Planescape, Spelljammer, and Dark Sun. These "outside the box" fantasy ideas showed them more ways to do things they had never imagined, whereas most consumers (and I'm pulling this all straight out of my ass) likely are just happy making stories/experiences with just the tools given, no more and no less.



I think your basically right in terms of most people didn't really need or 'get' PS or SJ, but DS is a different story. It clearly falls into the 'swords and sandals' kind of fiction category and is pretty easily identifiable with anyone who read Gor, Conan, Barsoom, etc. back in the day (or Fred Saberhagen stuff). D&D cites those sources quite clearly and thus I don't think DS was much of a departure at all. Beyond that it was pushed as being kind of a more hard-core setting where the PCs would be tough, but survival would be HARD by default. That appealed a lot to many D&D players, a sort of slightly reformulated meat grinder with more story and slightly more heroic themes. PS and SJ by contrast are just 'out there', they don't relate to ANY fiction I know of at all, really.


----------



## Twiggly the Gnome (Jul 18, 2022)

billd91 said:


> I *HATED* the textual aesthetic and the planar patois it used. I really cannot emphasize that enough



I didn't mind it so much for in character quotes, but for some damn fool reason they thought it was a good idea to use it *rules *text.


----------



## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

Jer said:


> Ouch.
> 
> Not only are the first year sales less than 20K - with the returns in the following years it actually sold fewer units in its lifetime than it did in the first year - fewer than 17K units.  And yet TSR was apparently planning to do a revised Savage Coast setting for some reason that Wizards eventually released the manuscripts for onto the web.  So weird.
> 
> ...



TSR finance side apparently never gave the creative side any sales feedback. They didn't care what they made, as long as the advances kept coming from Random House.

Stan! has reported thinking that DL Saga was a huge success from inside the creative team right up until he meeting at WotC where the creative team was given the years old sales numbers for the first time.


----------



## Zardnaar (Jul 18, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> On the plus side, that's better than today.
> 
> Today, a person can't pay rent ... because they can't pay rent.
> 
> ...




 Here a boxed set or phb was about a weeks rent in a student flat. 

 Think I paid $45 NZD for phb in 95, $40 for Tales of the Lance 1996. 

 Friends rent was $40 a room 1996 student allowance was $150.

 Now a phb full price is about half a weeks rent. Normal inflation marginally cheaper vs inflation rate, alot cheaper for minimum wage types.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 18, 2022)

Zardnaar said:


> Here a boxed set or phb was about a weeks rent in a student flat.
> 
> Think I paid $45 NZD for phb in 95, $49 for Tales of the Lance 1996.
> 
> Friends rent was $40 a room 1996 student allowance was $150.




So ... how are home prices and rent prices doin' in that imaginary land of New Zealandia?

...._don't think you've mentioned that....._


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

Compiled setting numbers. I’ll update the op but should there be a separate thread? Maybe link all these in there? Close em?



	
		Behold the cumulative sales for every AD&D setting from 1979 to 1999! 

Earlier settings did not just sell better. They sold EXPONENTIALLY better. Not to take anything away from Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms, but it pains me to see the Planescape and Ravenloft numbers. I LOVED those settings, and I’m surprised they didn’t do better.

Have you preordered my book on D&D history, Slaying the Dragon, yet? THIS IS THE LAST DAY TO PREORDER! If you preorder now, you get a free Jeff Easley bookplate! This offer ends IN HOURS, so take advantage of it now! Link below!
		
	










						Slaying the Dragon - Macmillan
					

The secret and untold story of how TSR, the company that created Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, then ...



					read.macmillan.com


----------



## Zardnaar (Jul 18, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> So ... how are home prices and rent prices doin' in that imaginary land of New Zealandia?
> 
> ...._don't think you've mentioned that....._




 Nova Zealandia Imperium to the likes of you.

 What USA is complaining about now started several years ago here was an issue 5 years ago. Then got worse. 









						Accommodation supplement review needed as rents double - Salvation Army
					

As rental prices rise beyond people's ability to pay, an urgent review of social housing support is needed, the Salvation Army says.




					www.rnz.co.nz
				




 Today's news. Didn't even have too look for it.


----------



## South by Southwest (Jul 18, 2022)

Zardnaar said:


> Nova Zealandia Imperium to the likes of you.
> 
> What USA is complaining about now started several years ago here was an issue 5 years ago. Then got worse.
> 
> ...



I once saw it referred to as the "God Zone" on a world map (clearly from the NZ point of view).


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 18, 2022)

Zardnaar said:


> Today's news. Didn't even have too look for it.




I was being facetious; the only thing you've talked about more than the housing costs in that imaginary land are the terrible* pizza toppings that the imaginary people would subject themselves too. 


*
	

	
	
		
		

		
			






AT LEAST ATLANTEANS HAVE BETTER TASTE IN PIZZA!!!111!!!!!


----------



## Zardnaar (Jul 18, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> I once saw it referred to as the "God Zone" on a world map (clearly from the NZ point of view).




 It's probably derived from God's own. 

 Kinda pretty here early colonists "Gods own land". Nickname basically.


----------



## Zardnaar (Jul 18, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> I was being facetious; the only thing you've talked about more than the housing costs in that imaginary land are the terrible* pizza toppings that the imaginary people would subject themselves too.
> 
> 
> *
> ...




 Won't be laughing when we annex you. Check out US population 1776, NZ now. We're coming for you!!! Just might take a few decades.


----------



## South by Southwest (Jul 18, 2022)

Zardnaar said:


> It's probably derived from God's own.
> 
> Kinda pretty here early colonists "Gods own land".



Yeah, I think it was something like that. The whole thing was tongue-in-cheek and really entertaining. NZ was listed as a nation still loyal to the Queen (and therefore right-thinking), while IIRC they put AU as the "Disunited States of Autralia" or something like that (and there were a lot of "Disunited States of _X_" in there). Again, my memory is vague, but I think somewhere in the NZ portion they also had a Doctor Who reference.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 18, 2022)

Zardnaar said:


> Won't be laughing when we annex you. Check out US population 1776, NZ now. We're coming for you!!! Just might take a few decades.




WOLVERINES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You can never overcome the combined charisma of Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. NEVER. 

#TIGERBLOOD
#PAINDONTHURT


----------



## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> I think your basically right in terms of most people didn't really need or 'get' PS or SJ, but DS is a different story. It clearly falls into the 'swords and sandals' kind of fiction category and is pretty easily identifiable with anyone who read Gor, Conan, Barsoom, etc. back in the day (or Fred Saberhagen stuff). D&D cites those sources quite clearly and thus I don't think DS was much of a departure at all. Beyond that it was pushed as being kind of a more hard-core setting where the PCs would be tough, but survival would be HARD by default. That appealed a lot to many D&D players, a sort of slightly reformulated meat grinder with more story and slightly more heroic themes. PS and SJ by contrast are just 'out there', they don't relate to ANY fiction I know of at all, really.



It was entirely too wrapped up in its own lore to be useful to someone like me, a huge Howard and S&S fan who wanted to do S&S with D&D without Dragon kings and Seas of Dust and, most important, psionics. Dark Sun was no less esoteric and self absorbed than Planescape.


----------



## CleverNickName (Jul 18, 2022)

Oh man.  I knew Red Steel (my favorite) wasn't going to do well, given it's release date.  But OOOF.


----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

What’s wild is that OA was the third highest selling setting. And yet WotC has done nothing with it for 5E. I mean, I get it, but hire some experts and writers from China, Japan, Korea, etc to make something for it. Clearly there’s a huge draw there. Especially with how popular anime is. Seems so obvious...yet nothing. Oh, right. Isn’t L5R doing a 5E version?


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> What’s wild is that OA was the third highest selling setting. And yet WotC has done nothing with it for 5E. I mean, I get it, but hire some experts and writers from China, Japan, Korea, etc to make something for it. Clearly there’s a huge draw there. Especially with how popular anime is. Seems so obvious...yet nothing. Oh, right. Isn’t L5R doing a 5E version?



Keep an eye in Radiant Citadel stuff on DMSGuild.


----------



## billd91 (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> What’s wild is that OA was the third highest selling setting. And yet WotC has done nothing with it for 5E. I mean, I get it, but hire some experts and writers from China, Japan, Korea, etc to make something for it. Clearly there’s a huge draw there. Especially with how popular anime is. Seems so obvious...yet nothing. Oh, right. Isn’t L5R doing a 5E version?



Maybe the 3e version of OA didn't do so well?


----------



## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> What’s wild is that OA was the third highest selling setting. And yet WotC has done nothing with it for 5E. I mean, I get it, but hire some experts and writers from China, Japan, Korea, etc to make something for it. Clearly there’s a huge draw there. Especially with how popular anime is. Seems so obvious...yet nothing. Oh, right. Isn’t L5R doing a 5E version?



You realize that Fantasy Anime usually has a Medievel Western European Setting inspired by D&D...?


----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> You realize that Fantasy Anime usually has a Medievel Western European Setting inspired by D&D...?



Some of it yes. Certainly not most.


----------



## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

CleverNickName said:


> Oh man.  I knew Red Steel (my favorite) wasn't going to do well, given it's release date.  But OOOF.



red steel is a great campaign setting. It just came out at the wrong time, I think.


----------



## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Some of it yes. Certainly not most.



I mean, other than stuff set in modern Japan.


----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> Keep an eye in Radiant Citadel stuff on DMSGuild.



Unless Radiant Citadel specifically mentions a world it’s going to be tricky with the DM’s Guild rules to make your own setting. If fact, it’s specifically forbidden.









						Content and Format Questions
					

What can I use in my titles on the Dungeon Masters Guild? When you create your own title for the Dungeon Masters Guild, you get access to a hoard of resources. Your work can use any of the 5th Edit...




					support.dmsguild.com
				




Unless they change the rules. Which is possible.


----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> I mean, other than stuff set in modern Japan.



And except everything that’s fantasy Japan. Which is a lot.


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Unless Radiant Citadel specifically mentions a world it’s going to be tricky with the DM’s Guild rules to make your own setting. If fact, it’s specifically forbidden.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I meant fleshing out the Radiant Citadel worlds


----------



## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Unless Radiant Citadel specifically mentions a world it’s going to be tricky with the DM’s Guild rules to make your own setting. If fact, it’s specifically forbidden.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



All 16 worlds in Radiant Cithare being made DMsGuild eliglble.


----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

darjr said:


> I meant fleshing out the Radiant Citadel worlds



Sure. Are there any worlds in RC that are OA adjacent? I haven’t kept up with what’s in it besides the _Día de Muertos_ setting/adventure.


----------



## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Sure. Are there any worlds in RC that are OA adjacent? I haven’t kept up with what’s in it besides the _Día de Muertos_ setting/adventure.



There are 5 East Asian Settings: Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Filipino inspired. And a pair of Persian and Indian Setting, to boot.


----------



## Zardnaar (Jul 18, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> WOLVERINES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> 
> You can never overcome the combined charisma of Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen. NEVER.
> 
> ...




 Won't be military invasion you'll be begging to join. Rarest resources on earth here.


----------



## Zardnaar (Jul 18, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> Yeah, I think it was something like that. The whole thing was tongue-in-cheek and really entertaining. NZ was listed as a nation still loyal to the Queen (and therefore right-thinking), while IIRC they put AU as the "Disunited States of Autralia" or something like that (and there were a lot of "Disunited States of _X_" in there). Again, my memory is vague, but I think somewhere in the NZ portion they also had a Doctor Who reference.




Queen will be diaplaced. Well more likely her descendents. Treaty of Waitangi 2 we'll give the UK to the Maori.


----------



## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 18, 2022)

Zardnaar said:


> Won't be military invasion you'll be begging to join. Rarest resources on earth here.




Bad pizza is not a rare resource, my friend. It is depressingly common.


----------



## Jer (Jul 18, 2022)

billd91 said:


> Maybe the 3e version of OA didn't do so well?



This would be my guess.

Also its a brand name that isn't going to fly in 2022. So not even a nostalgia market to tap.


----------



## darjr (Jul 18, 2022)




----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

Jer said:


> This would be my guess.
> 
> Also its a brand name that isn't going to fly in 2022. So not even a nostalgia market to tap.



Those two are not mutually exclusive. A property having a name that’s out of fashion has nothing to do with whether people have nostalgia for that thing. There almost certainly is a nostalgia market to tap. WotC chooses not to tap it based on the name…except, you know, selling the line as PDFs on drivethrurpg. 

Also, it’s really weird how focused this is. I live near three markets wholly owned and operated by people of Asian descent and all three have the word “oriental” in the sign. Several more nearby Asian markets are more specific, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese.


----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> There are 5 East Asian Settings: Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Filipino inspired. And a pair of Persian and Indian Setting, to boot.



Nice. Those could all be a lot if fun. I wonder who did the Indian setting. Any info on that one specifically?


----------



## overgeeked (Jul 18, 2022)

overgeeked said:


> Nice. Those could all be a lot if fun. I wonder who did the Indian setting. Any info on that one specifically?



Answering my own question. Found this. Sounds awesome.









						Ancient Bengali legends inspired an epic D&D adventure in 'Radiant Citadel'
					

Writer Mimi Mondal reveals how ancient Bengali cultures inspired her Radiant Citadel adventure “In the Mists of Manivarsha.”




					www.inverse.com


----------



## grimslade (Jul 18, 2022)

Hmm, so my experience with Planescape sales was not just anecdata or at least corresponded with the actual data. What is interesting is what happened after WotC acquired TSR and what happened with setting sales. 3E focused mainly on FR and Eberron with 2 small Greyhawk books to promote RPGA. 4E focused on FR and DS. We know WotC was skeptical of releasing Eberron in 5E. VRGtR and Spelljammer 5E will also give a lot of data on how sales of campaign material will do in the current market. 
I am omitting the MtG setting books and Exandria because the data would be determinable by the size of those properties' fandoms. They were much easier decisions to make.


----------



## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2022)

I think that _Eberron_ was the first completely new and original D&D campaign setting produced by Wizards of the Coast...is that right?   And it was the only completely new and original campaign setting for almost two decades, until _Exandria _was released in 2019.  Every other campaign setting they've published has either been a re-release of older campaign settings, or was based on other games and IP (Diablo II, Warcraft, Magic: the Gathering).  And it can be argued that _Exandria_ isn't a WotC original, since it was first published by Green Ronin two years earlier.

For better or worse, TSR released 14 new and original campaign settings in 16 years, while WotC has only published two in 22 years.   Is this an example of "less is more," or maybe "quality over quantity?"  It seems like the safer strategy for WotC, at any rate:  if they only spend money developing things that are tried and true, that already have a fan base, they can eliminate a lot of market uncertainty.

TSR took a lot more risks than WotC.  To their ruin, it would seem.


----------



## Zardnaar (Jul 19, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Bad pizza is not a rare resource, my friend. It is depressingly common.




 True I was referring to common sense. Can't really export that though.


----------



## QuentinGeorge (Jul 19, 2022)

CleverNickName said:


> I think that _Eberron_ was the first completely new and original D&D campaign setting produced by Wizards of the Coast...is that right?   And it was the only completely new and original campaign setting for almost two decades, until _Exandria _was released in 2019.  Every other campaign setting they've published has either been a re-release of older campaign settings, or was based on other games and IP (Diablo II, Warcraft, Magic: the Gathering).  And it can be argued that _Exandria_ isn't a WotC original, since it was first published by Green Ronin two years earlier.
> 
> For better or worse, TSR released 14 new and original campaign settings in 16 years, while WotC has only published two in 22 years.   Is this an example of "less is more," or maybe "quality over quantity?"  It seems like the safer strategy for WotC, at any rate:  if they only spend money developing things that are tried and true, that already have a fan base, they can eliminate a lot of market uncertainty.
> 
> TSR took a lot more risks than WotC.  To their ruin, it would seem.



You forgot Ghostwalk, and technically Jakandor.


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## South by Southwest (Jul 19, 2022)

Zardnaar said:


> It's probably derived from God's own.
> 
> Kinda pretty here early colonists "Gods own land". Nickname basically.



Found it! It's The Wizard's map (and it turns out I still had my copy down in my basement):


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

QuentinGeorge said:


> You forgot Ghostwalk, and technically Jakandor.



If I recall, Jakandor was one of the "left over" products?


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## Zardnaar (Jul 19, 2022)

South by Southwest said:


> Found it! It's The Wizard's map (and it turns out I still had my copy down in my basement):




 Well we're on the map I suppose that's different.


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## QuentinGeorge (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> If I recall, Jakandor was one of the "left over" products?



Sure, that’s why I added technically. And Ghostwalk was one and done. I suspect WotC knew the proliferation of settings had contributed to TSRs issues and was gun shy for quit a while. Eberron arrived when 3E sales started to flag perhaps.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

QuentinGeorge said:


> Sure, that’s why I added technically. And Ghostwalk was one and done. I suspect WotC knew the proliferation of settings had contributed to TSRs issues and was gun shy for quit a while. Eberron arrived when 3E sales started to flag perhaps.



I think Eberron's timing proves that 3.5 was planned from the very beginning.


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## grimslade (Jul 19, 2022)

QuentinGeorge said:


> Sure, that’s why I added technically. And Ghostwalk was one and done. I suspect WotC knew the proliferation of settings had contributed to TSRs issues and was gun shy for quit a while. Eberron arrived when 3E sales started to flag perhaps.



I believe the setting contest was a brilliant marketing device. Eberron was a campaign by committee ultimately, but Keith Baker's passion for the setting has been a constant. I think that is what a lot of the smaller selling settings lacked, a champion and face to put to the setting. FR has Ed Greenwood. Greyhawk is Gygaxian and has had many champions over the years. Dragonlance has Hickman and Weiss. Dark Sun? Troy Denning was the author of the DS Prism Pentad, but he is a prodigious author of lots of material in lots of settings. Planescape? Ravenloft? There is no 'go to' person for answers about what is the setting about.


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## Riley (Jul 19, 2022)

grimslade said:


> II think that is what a lot of the smaller selling settings lacked, a champion and face to put to the setting. FR has Ed Greenwood. Greyhawk is Gygaxian and has had many champions over the years. Dragonlance has Hickman and Weiss. Dark Sun? Troy Denning was the author of the DS Prism Pentad, but he is a prodigious author of lots of material in lots of settings. Planescape? Ravenloft? There is no 'go to' person for answers about what is the setting about.



For me, Dark Sun is defined by Brom, and Planescape by Tony Diterlizzi. The art is the setting. (and I love them both for it.)


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## Bedrockgames (Jul 19, 2022)

Riley said:


> For me, Dark Sun is defined by Brom, and Planescape by Tony Diterlizzi. The art is the setting. (and I love them both for it.)




Brom was amazing. I didn't really run Darksun. I loved that first box set and that did create my initial impression and respect for the setting, but it was hard to be a gamer in the 90s and not be impacted just seeing Brom's covers for the dark sun line on those shelves (even if you were buying books for other setting material). Never read anything beyond the first boxed set for Dark Sun but those images made me very curious about the setting modules and supplements.


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## grimslade (Jul 19, 2022)

And that is the problem of Planescape and Dark Sun. They are defined by artists who had a definitive style that they applied to their own art and other products. I loved the art of Dark Sun. I only used the original box set for the games I ran. The setting immediately was changed dramatically and the rest of the line had less and less definitive art and style. A more central figure to promote the setting may have boosted the signal. Many fans over the years have done the herculean task of keeping the hope alive for Dark Sun, Planescape, and Spelljammer. But they sometimes have different ideas of where to go and often were undercut by official releases either in Dragon i.e. Spelljamer or, for Dark Sun, the 4E version of the setting.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 20, 2022)

grimslade said:


> Hmm, so my experience with Planescape sales was not just anecdata or at least corresponded with the actual data. What is interesting is what happened after WotC acquired TSR and what happened with setting sales. 3E focused mainly on FR and Eberron with 2 small Greyhawk books to promote RPGA. 4E focused on FR and DS. We know WotC was skeptical of releasing Eberron in 5E. VRGtR and Spelljammer 5E will also give a lot of data on how sales of campaign material will do in the current market.
> I am omitting the MtG setting books and Exandria because the data would be determinable by the size of those properties' fandoms. They were much easier decisions to make.



4e also had very good support for Eberron. And of course you could consider the inherent PoLand to be a rather well-supported setting as well, though there isn't any specific product which covers it.


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## Reynard (Jul 20, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> 4e also had very good support for Eberron.



Eberron is an inspired D&D setting. I wish it had gotten much more support in 5E than it has. They could have easily done multiple big campaign adventures in Eberron, but for whatever reason they chose the most inoffensively boring option possible and we got the Sword Coast again and again and again.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 20, 2022)

QuentinGeorge said:


> Sure, that’s why I added technically. And Ghostwalk was one and done. I suspect WotC knew the proliferation of settings had contributed to TSRs issues and was gun shy for quit a while. Eberron arrived when 3E sales started to flag perhaps.



Honestly? Why publish new settings? The existing TSR offerings cover a pretty hefty chunk of the spectrum! I mean, you could argue there may be a niche or two here and there that could still be filled. Eberron was pretty precisely calibrated to fill the need for a 'magitec' setting, which is really the biggest thing missing from TSR's offerings (Spelljammer is KINDA magitec, but not really). I think WotC sees settings as more of an adjunct to other parts of their product line, frankly. They're willing to put out something like an M:tG inspired setting for instance, but that seems calculated to increase sales of both 5e and M:tG products. I doubt they believe it will make money on its own!


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## Reynard (Jul 20, 2022)

AbdulAlhazred said:


> Honestly? Why publish new settings? The existing TSR offerings cover a pretty hefty chunk of the spectrum! I mean, you could argue there may be a niche or two here and there that could still be filled. Eberron was pretty precisely calibrated to fill the need for a 'magitec' setting, which is really the biggest thing missing from TSR's offerings (Spelljammer is KINDA magitec, but not really). I think WotC sees settings as more of an adjunct to other parts of their product line, frankly. They're willing to put out something like an M:tG inspired setting for instance, but that seems calculated to increase sales of both 5e and M:tG products. I doubt they believe it will make money on its own!



I like the idea of one shot settings with very focused uses. Both Ravenloft and Dragonlance SHOULD be one off settings. A setting like Eberron or Spelljammer is wide open, though, and deserves plenty of official support.


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## AbdulAlhazred (Jul 20, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I like the idea of one shot settings with very focused uses. Both Ravenloft and Dragonlance SHOULD be one off settings. A setting like Eberron or Spelljammer is wide open, though, and deserves plenty of official support.



Well, Ravenloft was originally just an adventure, but it does kind of naturally beg to be a bit more, and TSR leveraged it to create a classic horror genre 'setting' (though, honestly, it seems more like a bunch of very loosely affiliated "and now, another Boris Karloff movie knockoff!" kind of things. I mean, later they sort of tried to tie it all together in some sense, but I never much saw the point. 4e giving us the Shadowfell as a home for all this stuff was a pretty nice move, and to a degree gave them all a PoLand (or at least World Axis) home.


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## darjr (Aug 18, 2022)

The video game planescape torment eventually sold 400,000 copies but it’s first year was a bit substandard at 70,000. More than the boxed set ttrpg at 40,000. I suspect the crpg is were a lot of the nostalgia comes from.


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## ulamthelucky (Sep 27, 2022)

el-remmen said:


> I was one of those 50k+ people to buy Lankhmar City of Adventure in 1985 and somehow ended up with a second copy in the 90s. I am also one of a countless number who got rid of them and highly regrets it.



I still have mine.


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## Riley (Sep 27, 2022)

ulamthelucky said:


> I still have mine.



I apparently have two copies- one from 1985, and another 1e reprint with the 1991-92 2e-era gold TSR logo.






That reprint seems worth mentioning, as TSR apparenty sold approximately zero copies of Lankhmar in 1991 and 1992 (and very few even in 1990).





(The 1993 spike was when they released a 2nd edition version of the setting.)


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## David Howery (Sep 27, 2022)

I was one of the few people who bought the Maztica set.  But I bought all the FR sets.  Wish I'd have kept them, just have the 2E FR set left...


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