# From Forgotten Realms to Red Steel: Here's That Full D&D Setting Sales Chart



## Von Ether (Jul 18, 2022)

In those waning conditions, Birthright seemed to sell as well as it could. I had Red Steel. It was an odd ball setting that I liked but I can also see why it didn't take off.

It didn't help that it was really a mini-setting inside FR and thus had to also waste time on rules for why Red Steel infected characters lost their powers when going back to FR proper.

If it had been set in it's own universe, it might have been fun to see how the infection impacted things beyond the region.

[EDIT: Doh! It was in Mystara, which was one of the reasons I picked it up! ]


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## Dice Dragon Dan (Jul 18, 2022)

Red Steel was part of Mystara, not the Realms.

But yeah it was an oddball thing that had all those fiddly rules that could have worked as a larger world.


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## schneeland (Jul 18, 2022)

Interesting! I didn't expect Oriental Adventures to be the third best-selling setting, beating Dragonlance.
Not that I expect WotC to bring the setting back, but still a nice bit of D&D history.


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## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

Morrus said:


> View attachment 254234



I think someone should add first year sales to this chart.


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## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

schneeland said:


> Interesting! I didn't expect Oriental Adventures to be the third best-selling setting, beating Dragonlance.
> Not that I expect WotC to bring the setting back, but still a nice bit of D&D history.



I think it might be a little unfair, since OA isn't just a setting book but an actual rules manual.


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## J.Quondam (Jul 18, 2022)

What does it mean when a "sales" number dips below zero?

_* Also, why on earth are all those charts formatted differently?_


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## Inxanity (Jul 18, 2022)

Did Red Steel really have _negative_ sales for a whole year starting in '95? Oof. Hope that's just a sloppy drawing lol


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## Ath-kethin (Jul 18, 2022)

Really the most surprising thing on that chart is that Planescape didn't sell better. I guess I wasn't the only one left wholly unimpressed by it (aside from DiTerlizzi's exquisite art, anyway).

The 2nd most surprising? The popularity of Oriental Adventures. I knew it was big, but I never thought it was THAT big.


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## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

Inxanity said:


> Did Red Steel really have _negative_ sales for a whole year starting in '95? Oof. Hope that's just a sloppy drawing lol



Returns?


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## Morrus (Jul 18, 2022)

J.Quondam said:


> What does it mean when a "sales" number dips below zero?
> 
> _* Also, why on earth are all those charts formatted differently?_



Returns, I guess? Not sure!


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## Parmandur (Jul 18, 2022)

Morrus said:


> Returns, I guess? Not sure!



Yup, returns by distributors, which TSR had to pay for.


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## Inxanity (Jul 18, 2022)

Yeah, it's definitely returns, but yeouch.


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## Maxperson (Jul 18, 2022)

J.Quondam said:


> What does it mean when a "sales" number dips below zero?
> 
> _* Also, why on earth are all those charts formatted differently?_



Refunds?


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## James Mishler (Jul 18, 2022)

Would love to see the Gazetteer sales separate from overall Basic sales to be able to compare Mystara and the other settings. But then, that's not quite measuring the same thing, as the charts only measure core boxes.

I would think the Oriental Adventures chart refers to the Kara-Tur boxed set, unless a mistake was made in sending the charts.

RE: negative sales, that might represent returns from the book and Mass market trade. Overall sales of other lines were likely broad enough that returns were less than sales for the year, but Red Steel... Probably not...


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## robowieland (Jul 18, 2022)

OA isn't that surprising. It was the 80s and Japanese (and related) stuff was HOT.


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## James Mishler (Jul 18, 2022)

Ah, OA from 85 indeed means they are including the related books, as the Kara-Tur boxed set was not released until later and associated with FR.

That's why the OA numbers are so high. The AD&D OA rule book was sold before 1E started to seriously decline in sales.

A more accurate measure on all of these would be simply the one, single core box set (and folio, in the case of Greyhawk) through it's various editions. After all, which books and boxes were considered "core" for these purposes?


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## FitzTheRuke (Jul 18, 2022)

Everyone I knew back then had a copy of OA. 

I owned my store by '93 and so I've ordered and sold every D&D product made since then. I find it amusing that I don't even _remember_ Karameikos or Red Steel even existing. (Both as a D&D fan AND as a retailer!)


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## Sacrosanct (Jul 18, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I think it might be a little unfair, since OA isn't just a setting book but an actual rules manual.



So was Dragonlance then as well 

I admit I had Red Steel.  I also admit I only skimmed it and never used it.


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## aco175 (Jul 18, 2022)

I would be interested to see sales on DMsGuild on these books now they are being resold in PDF and POD.  I would think that sales are only in the 1000s rather than these charts show for the time period.


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## Sacrosanct (Jul 18, 2022)

robowieland said:


> OA isn't that surprising. It was the 80s and Japanese (and related) stuff was HOT.



This.  Ninjas to the left of me.  Ninjas to the right.  Everywhere I look, ninjas!


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## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> So was Dragonlance then as well



I assume that's satire.


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## Morrus (Jul 18, 2022)

aco175 said:


> I would be interested to see sales on DMsGuild on these books now they are being resold in PDF and POD.  I would think that sales are only in the 1000s rather than these charts show for the time period.



I assume you could get a rough idea by looking at the medals.


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## Sacrosanct (Jul 18, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I assume that's satire.



No, I'm serious.  The Dragonlance book was the same as OA, content-wise.  They both had setting material and a lot of character option material.  People bought OA to play a ninja or samurai, and people bought DL to use the Knights and Mage classes.


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## RuinousPowers (Jul 18, 2022)

I would not have guessed Spelljammer outsold Planescape.


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## Dungeonosophy (Jul 18, 2022)

Glad for this research. Yet calling these simply “settings” feels a bit misleading. Maybe “selected campaign setting products” would be more accurate.

If 2e Karameikos boxed set counts as a “setting”, then why not also include the sales of GAZ1 Karameikos? And the 2e Glantri boxed set and the BECMI Glantri Gazetteer? And all the Gazetteers?

What about the Hollow World boxed set?


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## Hussar (Jul 18, 2022)

What is the point of nit-picking the information here?  It is what it is.  A comparison of the core setting material for each setting.  Full stop.  There is no "misleading".  People keep trying to make this far more than it is. It's just a comparison of the main setting set.  Maybe a setting did better in later splats?  I don't know.  That information is probably in the book.  If you want more information, wouldn't the best thing be to go actually buy the book and look it up?

There's no real conclusions to be drawn here other than the main one that about a very short time after release, virtually every print product cratered in sales.  It does explain the constant book churn out business model and also explains why we had (depending on how you count) several editions and different game lines.  So long as each book starts with that fairly high sales number, that's good enough to keep the boat afloat, but, you're constantly trying to patch the holes in your boat and it will eventually sink, giving rise to a new edition.


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## Reynard (Jul 18, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> No, I'm serious.  The Dragonlance book was the same as OA, content-wise.  They both had setting material and a lot of character option material.  People bought OA to play a ninja or samurai, and people bought DL to use the Knights and Mage classes.



That is absolutely silly.


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## Dungeonosophy (Jul 19, 2022)

Hussar said:


> What is the point of nit-picking the information here? It is what it is.  A comparison of the core setting material for each setting.  Full stop.



I appreciate the research. But research is open to comments, suggestions, and enquiry. That's not just "nit-picking."

Okay, then what is the "core setting material" for Mystara? The AD&D Karameikos boxed set? (!) A product which arrived at the very, very end of a 15-year product run, spanning hundreds of campaign setting books? It's cool to see the Karameikos boxed set numbers. But still.

Other "core setting material" not on the chart (yet): Hollow World, Champions of Mystara (Voyage of the Princess Ark), Time of the Dragon (Taladas), Hordelands. All boxed sets. Also the original Ravenloft module and the GAZetteer series were "core setting material".



> That information is probably in the book. If you want more information, wouldn't the best thing be to go actually buy the book and look it up?




What are you, the book agent? How do you know what's in the book?

Anyway, Ben's doing great work.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

James Mishler said:


> That's why the OA numbers are so high. The AD&D OA rule book was sold before 1E started to seriously decline in sales.



Yes I think that's correct.


James Mishler said:


> A more accurate measure on all of these would be simply the one, single core box set (and folio, in the case of Greyhawk) through it's various editions. After all, which books and boxes were considered "core" for these purposes?



If you view these all as separate products rather than aggregating them into a single number across settings, what you see is after about 1989 an almost linear relationship between the year the product was released and the number of lifetime sales it achieved.  There are outliers of course (Maztica is very low for its year, and 1992 overall was a bad year according to these numbers), but you can track the reduction in sales over time along that line.



Hussar said:


> What is the point of nit-picking the information here?  It is what it is.  A comparison of the core setting material for each setting.  Full stop.  There is no "misleading".  People keep trying to make this far more than it is.



People seem to want this to be some kind of indication of setting popularity or quality or something.  Or potential monetary value of these properties to Wizards. But all it actually seems to be is a visible metric of late era TSR's floundering to do anything to stop the decline of their company.


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## Lanefan (Jul 19, 2022)

The one setting that's impossible to pin from those numbers is Mystara/Known World, as the material was sold piecemeal rather than in one big box.


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## Bedrockgames (Jul 19, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> So was Dragonlance then as well
> 
> I admit I had Red Steel.  I also admit I only skimmed it and never used it.




I had red steel and liked the boxed set. Was not able to arrange much table play with it. But I remember really liking the flavor of the setting.


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## Lidgar (Jul 19, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> This.  Ninjas to the left of me.  Ninjas to the right.  Everywhere I look, ninjas!



No doubt. By the mid-to late 80's, I think EVERY SINGLE PARTY had at least one ninja. It was the glorious era of GI Joe and Kung Fu!


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## MockingBird (Jul 19, 2022)

I wanted the Planescape box set, just couldn't ever find it during that time. There were a lot of books I wanted that I couldn't find at that time. The only thing I readily available was the PHB, DMG, FR greybox, Domains of Dread and random brown books of special characters "book of cleric". This was in the 90s.


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## Sacrosanct (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> That is absolutely silly.



What's silly about it?  Give me examples, because both books are very similar in design.  They have setting info, and then a bunch of stuff for PCs (new classes, etc).


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## Von Ether (Jul 19, 2022)

Von Ether said:


> In those waning conditions, Birthright seemed to sell as well as it could. I had Red Steel It was an odd ball setting that I liked but I can also see why it didn't take off.
> 
> It did help that it was really a mini-setting inside FR and thus had to also waste time on rules for why Red Steel infected characters lost their powers when going back to FR proper.
> 
> If it had been set in it's own universe, it might have been fun to see how the infection impacted things beyond the region.






FitzTheRuke said:


> Everyone I knew back then had a copy of OA.
> 
> I owned my store by '93 and so I've ordered and sold every D&D product made since then. I find it amusing that I don't even _remember_ Karameikos or Red Steel even existing. (Both as a D&D fan AND as a retailer!)




I picked up Karameikos as a Mystara fan but ended up enjoy it more than I expected because the setting was so straightforward that they had to lean into the politics to make something out of it. No iconic characters or NPCs to steal the show. Just who trusted who and who hated who.


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## BenRiggs (Jul 19, 2022)

Dungeonosophy said:


> Glad for this research. Yet calling these simply “settings” feels a bit misleading. Maybe “selected campaign setting products” would be more accurate.
> 
> If 2e Karameikos boxed set counts as a “setting”, then why not also include the sales of GAZ1 Karameikos? And the 2e Glantri boxed set and the BECMI Glantri Gazetteer? And all the Gazetteers?
> 
> What about the Hollow World boxed set?



Ben Riggs here! 
These numbers are taken from internal company documents I've been given. As such, they are apparently what the company considered settings. Your points are well taken. But I'm a historian at the mercy of what data has trickled down to us from the past. There's tons of data I don't have. Everything in your post for example. Also, I have no data on the vast majority of novels, and the vast majority of adventures.


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## BenRiggs (Jul 19, 2022)

Lanefan said:


> The one setting that's impossible to pin from those numbers is Mystara/Known World, as the material was sold piecemeal rather than in one big box.



I would add I have zero D&D Known World data, so unless a source sees this and decides to cough up some info, that may be lost to history...


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## Parmandur (Jul 19, 2022)

BenRiggs said:


> Ben Riggs here!
> These numbers are taken from internal company documents I've been given. As such, they are apparently what the company considered settings. Your points are well taken. But I'm a historian at the mercy of what data has trickled down to us from the past. There's tons of data I don't have. Everything in your post for example. Also, I have no data on the vast majority of novels, and the vast majority of adventures.



Any other Wildcard sales numbers that stand out as historically curious?


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Dungeonosophy said:


> Okay, then what is the "core setting material" for Mystara?



No such thing exists. The setting was presented and marketed in an entirely different way than all the others. It is probably impossible to pin down exactly how popular it was relative to FR or Spelljammer or whatever.


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## sevenbastard (Jul 19, 2022)

I am assuming that mid 90s bump in Lankhmar is the orange box starter set?

Underrated in my opinion. But probably didn't sell well as I picked up one about 10 years ago for cheap still shrink-wraped.


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## Erdric Dragin (Jul 19, 2022)

Does this mean we'll finally get a remastered and culturally appropriate Kara-Tur setting again? 

Or will WotC chicken out as usual?


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## Pauper (Jul 19, 2022)

Erdric Dragin said:


> Does this mean we'll finally get a remastered and culturally appropriate Kara-Tur setting again?



Not sure why this would be a priority, when Legend of the Five Rings exists.

As unimpressed as I am personally with Spelljammer as a setting, seeing how popular it was in its original release, plus that there is very little out there, even today, that resembles it (maybe Space: 1899?) goes a long way to explaining why WotC would bring the setting back.

--
Pauper


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## Hussar (Jul 19, 2022)

I would think that the primary reason that spelljammer is getting the nod is because unlike other settings, there doesn’t seem to be this group of gate keeping super fans who will scream from the mountaintops about how every little change is ruining the setting, DnD is dead and anyone who disagrees isn’t really a fan 

In other words SJmmer doesn’t have this mass of toxic fans.


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## SakanaSensei (Jul 19, 2022)

Hussar said:


> I would think that the primary reason that spelljammer is getting the nod is because unlike other settings, there doesn’t seem to be this group of gate keeping super fans who will scream from the mountaintops about how every little change is ruining the setting, DnD is dead and anyone who disagrees isn’t really a fan
> 
> In other words SJmmer doesn’t have this mass of toxic fans.



Idk man, have you SEEN the number of comments about how WotC changing the Phlogiston and Crystal Spheres into things that functionally work the same way but have different names is ABSOLUTELY RUINING THE SETTING HOW DARE YOU?


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## ENWorldUser (Jul 19, 2022)

Any records of overseas sales? 
Basic Set (Mentzer) was incredibly popular outside of the USA. It was the only D&D book we could buy in my city outside of specialist RPG stores.
In my own country there were zero distributor returns due to very large shipping costs. Unsold books were heavily discounted. (According to 1 local source who sold D&D in the mid to late 90's)


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## ENWorldUser (Jul 19, 2022)

The setting sales don't surprise me at all. 
Anything revised included WSE's that put the original buyers off.
Red Steel was the 3rd iteration of that area after X series plain Savage Coast, and peaked with the popular Princess Ark series in Dragon Mag. 
BECMI/RC Mystara fans didn't follow through to the Karameikos boxed set and Red Steel as a whole. 
Do you have the RC sales? The Basic Set new peak in 91 looks like it was the Black version.


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## Hussar (Jul 19, 2022)

Mister_Fish said:


> Idk man, have you SEEN the number of comments about how WotC changing the Phlogiston and Crystal Spheres into things that functionally work the same way but have different names is ABSOLUTELY RUINING THE SETTING HOW DARE YOU?



No.  To be honest, I actually haven't.  Other than a couple of minor cries, I've hardly seen any resistance to the new Spelljammer.  But, maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.  

But, compared to the absolute freakout when WotC tried to change the Planes in 4e?  Yeah, not even close.


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## LuisCarlos17f (Jul 19, 2022)

_Playmobil Dragonlance conf... oh, wait, wrong threat!_

Now I wonder if the new title for OA should be something like "Isekai Adventures", or "Isekai & Xuanhuan". Let's rembember today manga is being sold better than superheroes comics, in the Western market itself. 

Red Steel/Savage Coast could enjoy a second oportunity in the future, or at least some spiritual succesor as Spelljammer spin-off. But here the game designers would need a lot of work about the mutations and superpowers. But also it could work as a first step for a new edition of Gamma World. Lots of things from this could be recycled and retold for a rebooted version of Red Steel. And fantasy+pirates is a popular subgenre now thanks Jack Parrow and company.

I imagine Hollow World as an artificial demiplane created by gods as a mixture of "theme park + museum" and a "backup in the space-time continium" to avoid paradoxes by possible chronomancers and time-travelers. 

Dragonlance needs the option of alternate timelines to allow fandom more creative freedom to write their fanart stories.


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## Mezuka (Jul 19, 2022)

I'm wondering if Riggs got numbers for other games like Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Gamma World, Gang Busters and Top Secret. Would be interesting to see how they fared against D&D settings.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Morrus said:


> Whether this will end a thousand internet arguments or fuel another thousand, Ben Riggs, author of Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons and Dragons, has finally published the combined chart of cumulative sales for every AD&D setting from 1979 to 1999.
> 
> _Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Oriental Adventures_, and _Dragonlance_ lead the pack. The least selling setting was _Red Steel_ in 1994. There was a clear decline in sales of all settings from 1989 onwards, so that's not necessary a comment on quality. _Planescape_, certainly a cult favourite, sold surprisingly few copies.
> 
> ...



There goes that whole no one likes Greyhawk argument people love to throw out there. Second most popular.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> So was Dragonlance then as well
> 
> I admit I had Red Steel.  I also admit I only skimmed it and never used it.



No Dragonlance was a setting with rules for its specific classics and priests. It set up 2e priest prototypes though.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

teitan said:


> There goes that whole no one likes Greyhawk argument people love to throw out there. Second most popular.



I wonder how it compared in the 3E era (the last time it was published). That would probably be of much greater interest to WotC now, as to whether to lean into Greyhawk.


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## MGibster (Jul 19, 2022)

Ath-kethin said:


> Really the most surprising thing on that chart is that Planescape didn't sell better. I guess I wasn't the only one left wholly unimpressed by it (aside from DiTerlizzi's exquisite art, anyway).



I missed out on Planescape in the 1990s.  What kept me away was the weird looking art and I had no interested in the planes.  But when I looked at Planescape a few years ago, I realized just how beautiful the art really was and what a great place Sigil was to adventure.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Dungeonosophy said:


> I appreciate the research. But research is open to comments, suggestions, and enquiry. That's not just "nit-picking."
> 
> Okay, then what is the "core setting material" for Mystara? The AD&D Karameikos boxed set? (!) A product which arrived at the very, very end of a 15-year product run, spanning hundreds of campaign setting books? It's cool to see the Karameikos boxed set numbers. But still.
> 
> ...



It’s obvious it is AD&D settings.


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## MGibster (Jul 19, 2022)

schneeland said:


> nteresting! I didn't expect Oriental Adventures to be the third best-selling setting, beating Dragonlance.
> Not that I expect WotC to bring the setting back, but still a nice bit of D&D history.



I didn't expect OA to be #3 either.  Back in 1985, OA was met with overwhelmingly positive reviews, and despite the problems I can see with the book now, I still think it's one of the best 1st edition AD&D books ever published.  While I'm not surprised the book sold well, I didn't think it'd make it so high on the list.  I thought for sure Dragonlance would have beaten it.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I wonder how it compared in the 3E era (the last time it was published). That would probably be of much greater interest to WotC now, as to whether to lean into Greyhawk.



The 3e era saw 2 products, the D&D Gazeteer and the LGG. Both were OOP by the time 3.5 rolled around and essentially rendered as useless as Song & Silence or Tome & Blood. The Living Greyhawk campaign was very popular until the end of the 3.x era. The real gauge for WOTC is Saltmarsh in the same way that CoS was for Ravenloft. If Saltmarsh was huge (and it seems to have been) then they may carry that over to a setting book (and they probably are for the anniversary).

 The surprise is more that people love to dump on Greyhawk as being “not popular” when it really seems to have actually been… it was Gary’s baby when you look at this data. By the time Carl’s work came out it was dying off for sure but they’d emphasized the Realms and pushed out intentionally bad GH products like their Castle Greyhawk and was it “Puppets” or something? So bad. 

These sales numbers just show that it was more popular, than some of the popularly believed to be more successful settings like Dark Sun or Ravenloft. It was more successful than Dragonlance. Very surprising to see.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Pauper said:


> Not sure why this would be a priority, when Legend of the Five Rings exists.
> 
> As unimpressed as I am personally with Spelljammer as a setting, seeing how popular it was in its original release, plus that there is very little out there, even today, that resembles it (maybe Space: 1899?) goes a long way to explaining why WotC would bring the setting back.
> 
> ...



The initial release was popular but it ranked fast. It was not around long at all. I think it was 15 months or something between the boxed set and the final product coming out. It was very quickly shelved.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

teitan said:


> The real gauge for WOTC is Saltmarsh in the same way that CoS was for Ravenloft.



I don't know about that. Saltmarsh is an adventure anthology, not an AP, and it's connections to Greyhawk are tenuous and easily ignored. Ovbiously that is not the case with CoS.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Hussar said:


> I would think that the primary reason that spelljammer is getting the nod is because unlike other settings, there doesn’t seem to be this group of gate keeping super fans who will scream from the mountaintops about how every little change is ruining the setting, DnD is dead and anyone who disagrees isn’t really a fan
> 
> In other words SJmmer doesn’t have this mass of toxic fans.



That’s because Newjammer looks infinitely better than the I’ll conceived concepts of Oldjammer. I’m actually enticed by Newjammer and I’m a huge Starfinder fan and didn’t see a real need for Newjammer.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I don't know about that. Saltmarsh is an adventure anthology, not an AP, and it's connections to Greyhawk are tenuous and easily ignored. Ovbiously that is not the case with CoS.



It’s still Greyhawk and a Greyhawk location. CoS is similarly a location within a larger setting named for that one location within that larger setting. It doesn’t matter if it’s an anthology, they’re Greyhawk adventures and WOTC considers them as such. They don’t have that FR flavor they go for, they’re very GH, darker Fantasy kinda vibe going on. Plus 300+k sales for the core historically? That’s gonna factor in somewhere with the right product.

Doing the math the difference between GH and FR is about 57k with GH having a head start and then a dead period. So only coming up 57k less than FR is essentially meaningless in the core set sales category because it could have been a very different case had Lorraine not ground an axe when Gary left.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

Hussar said:


> I would think that the primary reason that spelljammer is getting the nod is because unlike other settings, there doesn’t seem to be this group of gate keeping super fans who will scream from the mountaintops about how every little change is ruining the setting, DnD is dead and anyone who disagrees isn’t really a fan
> 
> In other words SJmmer doesn’t have this mass of toxic fans.



I think even that is overvaluing the impact of the loud minority of fans on the internet for settings.

Honestly I think the reason why Spelljammer is getting an update is because a) Chris Perkins likes it and he has a lot of pull on what direction to take, b) multiverses are in right now and since D&D has always had one it's time to bring it back, c) the current broad D&D community seems love Star Wars Cantina style D&D, and Spelljammer is a perfect setting for that approach and d) Spelljammer can be made to look distinctive from Magic the Gathering's multiverse ideas in a way that is probably harder to do with Planescape/Manual of the Planes.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

teitan said:


> It’s still Greyhawk and a Greyhawk location. CoS is similarly a location within a larger setting named for that one location within that larger setting. It doesn’t matter if it’s an anthology, they’re Greyhawk adventures and WOTC considers them as such. They don’t have that FR flavor they go for, they’re very GH, darker Fantasy kinda vibe going on. Plus 300+k sales for the core historically? That’s gonna factor in somewhere with the right product.



I'm not arguing about how whether it "feels" like Greyhawk rather than FR, I'm just saying it is not comparable to CoS as a setting segue. One would think that an AP set in Castle Greyhawk or against the Eight(?) or whateverwould be the only think comparable, from an iconic perspective.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 19, 2022)

teitan said:


> It’s still Greyhawk and a Greyhawk location. CoS is similarly a location within a larger setting named for that one location within that larger setting. It doesn’t matter if it’s an anthology, they’re Greyhawk adventures and WOTC considers them as such. They don’t have that FR flavor they go for, they’re very GH, darker Fantasy kinda vibe going on. Plus 300+k sales for the core historically? That’s gonna factor in somewhere with the right product.
> 
> Doing the math the difference between GH and FR is about 57k with GH having a head start and then a dead period. So only coming up 57k less than FR is essentially meaningless in the core set sales category because it could have been a very different case had Lorraine not ground an axe when Gary left.



A reminder that Ben's numbers are entirely missing the 1980 Greyhawk Folio, which Jon Peterson has confirmed sold quite well for a few years.  Which only makes sense, given that it was the first real campaign setting TSR released, it had those famously wonderful Darlene maps, and it was released during the first full year of D&D's fad period.  If Ben had those numbers, it might even pass FR on these charts.  It'd at least be close.

That being said, I think sales in the 80s are not necessarily a good indicator of what settings will sell today.

But I would certainly like to see some sort of Greyhawk product/project for the 50th anniversary, and if historical sales do weigh in at all for WotC's decision making, they would seem to add some to those chances.


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## wicked cool (Jul 19, 2022)

robowieland said:


> OA isn't that surprising. It was the 80s and Japanese (and related) stuff was HOT.



i remember playing Shogun in 86 when it came out. i never made the connection until now. 80's were also big with people buying throwing  stars and other weapons of that market


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## Blue Orange (Jul 19, 2022)

We who are about to game salute you.


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## Bedrockgames (Jul 19, 2022)

BenRiggs said:


> Ben Riggs here!
> These numbers are taken from internal company documents I've been given. As such, they are apparently what the company considered settings. Your points are well taken. But I'm a historian at the mercy of what data has trickled down to us from the past. There's tons of data I don't have. Everything in your post for example. Also, I have no data on the vast majority of novels, and the vast majority of adventures.



Thanks for the info! It’s good to have some actual numbers for these kinds of conversations. Do you have any guess in the margin for error with the data, and are there any red flags that trigger your historian antennae in the data? (In terms of spots you feel numbers aee more likely to be missing, inaccurate, etc)


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## wicked cool (Jul 19, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> A reminder that Ben's numbers are entirely missing the 1980 Greyhawk Folio, which Jon Peterson has confirmed sold quite well for a few years.  Which only makes sense, given that it was the first real campaign setting TSR released, it had those famously wonderful Darlene maps, and it was released during the first full year of D&D's fad period.  If Ben had those numbers, it might even pass FR on these charts.  It'd at least be close.
> 
> That being said, I think sales in the 80s are not necessarily a good indicator of what settings will sell today.
> 
> But I would certainly like to see some sort of anniversary Greyhawk product/project for the 50th anniversary, and if historical sales do weigh in at all for WotC's decision making, they would seem to add some to those chances.



Ravenloft seems to be doing better now than it did then . Its the quality of the product. OA was a good product for its time . i had a lot of fun with that setting. i would argue that the adventures of then for the most part are better than the adventures now

Take the delorean back to the 80's. you cant strongly argue that todays adventures/settings are better than those. In fact 4 of the top 10 adventures of today are just remakes of those adventures    

Now obviously  the OA  would be highly offensive now however it felt like a more complete setting than new settings including say the critical role setting and i love critical role .     

People all over this board alone are begging for a return to darksun and spell jammer etc

Whats really sad is that theres no "new "  box setting like forgotten realms or hardcover OA type thing thats taken over. I think Mercer could be that person however its more like a loose guide and no setting world with established stuff   . Everything now is less is more where the majority want a take us from point a -z  but give us this world full of npcs etc (strahd)


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## Blue Orange (Jul 19, 2022)

In all seriousness (IMHO of course):

1. Greyhawk's #2, eh? I wonder why there's so little interest in bringing it out now--the fans just aged out?

2. OA is #3. I know there are all the concerns about cultural appropriation, but seems like Hasbro (unlike indie developers) has enough money to hire enough people with cultural competence in Japan (or at least enough to satisfy American activists?) to pull off a pseudo-Japanese setting at least. I do wonder if concerns about the portrayal of fantasy-China (Shou Lung in the old setting?) might slip into a Sino-American kerfluffle with someone taking something out of context and the Chinese government actually getting offended and starting an international incident. (Same problem with al-Qadim, only more so. And Maztica, plus it was never that popular.)

3. I guess Lankhmar doesn't have the modern fanbase, but I'm curious to see if there are real attempts at urban fantasy. I guess they have the rights to Waterdeep. 

4. I'm surprised nobody tried to bring back Planescape--I'm guessing the actual 17th-century slang and piercings and spiky hair look too 90s? Maybe that's exactly what will sell it in a few years when 90s nostalgia gets going.

5. Birthright--no way they're bringing that back. Genetically determined powers and kingdoms are going to sound way too white nationalist (yes, I know this is perfectly normal premodern thinking around the world historically, I'm talking about the way it's going to come off).

6. Spelljammer probably had (as other people said) enough of an obscure fanbase to not start flame wars and little enough material they could give it their own stamp. 

7. Why _don't_ they bring back Dark Sun? The Brom pics  (Brom did as much for our view of Dark Sun as DiTerlizzi did for Planescape, and they both played a huge role in creating my view at least of the setting and giving it a unified artistic vision) look too Frazetta-y and toxically masculine? You could easily make muscular nonbinary and female warriors too. I'm guessing psionics were so divisive they figured it wasn't a good bet.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Blue Orange said:


> In all seriousness (IMHO of course):
> 
> 1. Greyhawk's #2, eh? I wonder why there's so little interest in bringing it out now--the fans just aged out?



I think that is largely it. Greyhawk had its heyday early in the 80s and appealed to older players given its darker tone, i think. There are just fewer of those folks around.


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## Sacrosanct (Jul 19, 2022)

teitan said:


> No Dragonlance was a setting with rules for its specific classics and priests. .



So did OA.  It was a setting that has new class and race rules.  Exactly like Dragonlance.


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## ART! (Jul 19, 2022)

I'm not well-versed in these things, but I'm surprised how relatively close in sales Greyhawk did compared to FR. GH had the advantage of being the first setting, and FR had the advantage of coming out at the height of AD&D, when D&D had become very popular. 

_Oriental Adventures_ came out in that same period, and I remember how exciting it was, opening up a whole new world of possibilities.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 19, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> So did OA.  It was a setting that has new class and race rules.  Exactly like Dragonlance.



I would say that OA goes a bit further, as it basically replaces the existing AD&D classes entirely, whereas DA supplements them.

That being said, I agree that they're pretty similar.  Both had a lot of mechanical content, in addition to being setting books.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

ART! said:


> I'm not well-versed in these things, but I'm surprised how relatively close in sales Greyhawk did compared to FR. GH had the advantage of being the first setting, and FR had the advantage of coming out at the height of AD&D, when D&D had become very popular.



One of the major Greyhawk products - the Greyhawk Folio - is missing and would have pushed Greyhawk even higher if it were included.

But FR didn't come out at AD&D's height - at least sales wise.  These numbers suggest that AD&D's height of sales was between 1980 and 1984 - with the Greyhawk boxed set coming out at the end of AD&D's biggest sales era.  Another reason to think that if the Greyhawk Folio numbers were known they'd likely be very high since it was published in 1980 just as AD&D coming out and entering that 80-84 high sales period.


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## Bedrockgames (Jul 19, 2022)

wicked cool said:


> i remember playing Shogun in 86 when it came out. i never made the connection until now. 80's were also big with people buying throwing  stars and other weapons of that market




There was a huge boom in this stuff at that time. The shotgun (edit: SHOGUN lol) miniseries is one of the shows I have my first memories of watching (think it aired in like 81). I am pretty sure that helped kick off a lot of interest. There was a ton of interest in karate, samurai, and ninja (the whole ninja craze thing was in full swing). I remember seeing a bunch of ninja movies like Pray for Death in the mid 80s. The Karate Kid was 84. And like you say there were throwing stars and other weapons at flee markets and stores (I remember kids making paper throwing stars being a big thing). Ninja costumes were pretty common at Halloween.

And in general the 80s pop culture was filled with an interest in traditional martial arts. Even a movie like Commando you see Arnold doing forms with his daughter at the beginning (not to mention any random Chuck Norris or Van Damme movie). Even Taekwondo had Best of the Best


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Jer said:


> One of the major Greyhawk products - the Greyhawk Folio - is missing and would have pushed Greyhawk even higher if it were included.
> 
> But FR didn't come out at AD&D's height - at least sales wise.  These numbers suggest that AD&D's height of sales was between 1980 and 1984 - with the Greyhawk boxed set coming out at the end of AD&D's biggest sales era.  Another reason to think that if the Greyhawk Folio numbers were known they'd likely be very high since it was published in 1980 just as AD&D coming out and entering that 80-84 high sales period.



At the same time, we can see that Greyhawk never regained its position -- probably because of the situation with gygax and Williams and that whole mess. I think folks that are clamoring for a Greyhawk resurgence are mostly a loud minority and don't imagine a modern Greyhawk book would a) be a particularly strong seller compared to FR or Eberron, or b) make many old fans happy given how much would likely be changed.


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## LoganRan (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I think it might be a little unfair, since OA isn't just a setting book but an actual rules manual.



True but IIRC Dragonlance Advnentures was also a source book with a lot of new rules (I think I had that product). Personally, I attribute OA's popularity (I did NOT own OA) to the fact that it seemed like Kung Fu and Ninjas were very much a "thing" at that time.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> don't imagine a modern Greyhawk book would... *make many old fans happy given how much would likely be changed.*



This is why I keep thinking that even though the 50th anniversary is a good point for Wizards to do a Greyhawk thing, it's also impossible for me to think of a Greyhawk thing they could do that wouldn't make older fans angry while also bringing new people to the setting who have never cared about it and also being a meaningful anniversary celebration thing.  Anything they do is likely going to either be like poking a bear or fall flat - it seems impossible that they'd be able to thread that needle.


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## darjr (Jul 19, 2022)

Darksun Novel Sales









						D&D General - Darksun novel sales! From Ben Riggs.
					

I have my Darksun novels sitting in the bookshelf right next to me now. Just took them out again, may read them. Actual! Dark Sun novel! Sales numbers!  TSR alumni are cultural treasures and gaming icons. One point that a lot of TSR alumni have been making on my posts is that while setting sales...




					www.enworld.org


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## Mark Craddock (Jul 19, 2022)

Oriental Adventures at #3 was surprising to me. It was published before I got into 2E so I had no frame of reference.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

LoganRan said:


> True but IIRC Dragonlance Advnentures was also a source book with a lot of new rules (I think I had that product). Personally, I attribute OA's popularity (I did NOT own OA) to the fact that it seemed like Kung Fu and Ninjas were very much a "thing" at that time.



I just bought both PDFs to look. OA has about 8 pages of Kara Tur setting information. Even if half of DL's page count is "rules" it is still far and away a much more traditional setting book than OA. OA is effectively an alternate PHB and both authors' forwards back that up.


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## Jimmy Dick (Jul 19, 2022)

This supports what I surmised years ago, that TSR created too many campaign worlds which required more man-hours of development and had a shorter shelf life. Only two of those worlds broke 100k in sales. I think they just kept throwing products at the market hoping something would sell well until that strategy ultimately failed them. Basically, the game industry changed in directions the company didn't follow. That and the emergence of the cardboard crack games caused TSR's failure.


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## Lord Rasputin (Jul 19, 2022)

The aggregate sales figures are all a little misleading as to a setting's scope. As in, notice how almost all of these have a drop-off for each successive edition. What's happening is that TSR was selling the revised editions to same crowd who already had bought the original version.

Also, note that hardbound books are more popular than boxed sets. Oriental Adventures and Dragonlance Adventures had massive sales of their initial hardbound books. The Forgotten Realms actually had a small uptick of sales when TSR issued a hardbound book. (Even so, the initial sales of any version of the Forgotten Realms are much less than the hardbound versions of Oriental Adventures and Dragonlance Adventures. Based on these charts, its dubious to say that how popular the Realms really ever were.) I suppose books are more likely to have player options (see Al-Qadim), but still, the format itself is notable. Greyhawk Adventures is an exception to this; the weird 1e/2e nature of the book might have hurt matters.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 19, 2022)

Jer said:


> This is why I keep thinking that even though the 50th anniversary is a good point for Wizards to do a Greyhawk thing, it's also impossible for me to think of a Greyhawk thing they could do that wouldn't make older fans angry while also bringing new people to the setting who have never cared about it and also being a meaningful anniversary celebration thing.  Anything they do is likely going to either be like poking a bear or fall flat - it seems impossible that they'd be able to thread that needle.



The holy grail would be a fun, playable rendition of Castle Greyhawk.  

Of course, to do it in a way which would please the grognards it might need to be in a format similar to Goodman's OAR series.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> The holy grail would be a fun, playable rendition of Castle Greyhawk.



I don't think Wizards actually owns the original Castle Greyhawk materials though - didn't Gygax publish what he had under the name Castle Zagyg with Troll Lord?  So if they did anything like that it would be basically a revamp of the Greyhawk Ruins module (which they already did once in 3.5e).  I could be wrong, but I suspect that that isn't what people would actually want.  

(I suppose they could license Castle Zagyg and rework it and release it as "Castle Greyhawk", but that sounds like something they wouldn't do.  And something that would probably be more along the lines of what Goodman would want to do.)


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## Mannahnin (Jul 19, 2022)

Jer said:


> I don't think Wizards actually owns the original Castle Greyhawk materials though - didn't Gygax publish what he had under the name Castle Zagyg with Troll Lord?  So if they did anything like that it would be basically a revamp of the Greyhawk Ruins module (which they already did once in 3.5e).  I could be wrong, but I suspect that that isn't what people would actually want.
> 
> (I suppose they could license Castle Zagyg and rework it and release it as "Castle Greyhawk", but that sounds like something they wouldn't do.  And something that would probably be more along the lines of what Goodman would want to do.)



They don't own Gary's CG maps & notes.  They'd have to get the license from Gail, but it seems obvious to me that's she's been angling for that over the last 14 years.  Now, it may be that they aren't willing to pay what she thinks it's worth, but if they were ever going to do it, the 50th anniversary seems like a logical time.

Castle Zagyg was basically a complete re-do for the Troll Lords co-written with Jeff Talanian.  They never completed it before Gary passed, unfortunately.  They did a big five book set on just the upper works and first couple of levels.  Apparently Gary and Jeff had a general plan for the rest, which Jeff theoretically could have finished, but Gail shut that down.

I'm not saying the chances are good.  I'm just suggesting it as the one product I can think of that could potentially meet the criteria you laid out.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> They don't own Gary's CG maps & notes.  They'd have to get the license from Gail, but it seems obvious to me that's she's been angling for that over the last 14 years.  Now, it may be that they aren't willing to pay what she thinks it's worth, but if they were ever going to do it, the 50th anniversary seems like a logical time.
> 
> Castle Zagyg was basically a complete re-do for the Troll Lords co-written with Jeff Talanian.  They never completed it before Gary passed, unfortunately.  They did a big five book set on just the upper works and first couple of levels.  Apparently Gary and Jeff had a general plan for the rest, which Jeff theoretically could have finished, but Gail shut that down.
> 
> I'm not saying the chances are good.  I'm just suggesting it as the one product I can think of that could potentially meet the criteria you laid out.



The other question is whether there is a market for a 5E megadungeon of that scope, beyond being a historical curiosity. 5E isn't really designed for that kind of play.


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## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 19, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> They don't own Gary's CG maps & notes.  They'd have to get the license from Gail, but it seems obvious to me that's she's been angling for that over the last 14 years.  Now, it may be that they aren't willing to pay what she thinks it's worth, but if they were ever going to do it, the 50th anniversary seems like a logical time.
> 
> Castle Zagyg was basically a complete re-do for the Troll Lords co-written with Jeff Talanian.  They never completed it before Gary passed, unfortunately.  They did a big five book set on just the upper works and first couple of levels.  Apparently Gary and Jeff had a general plan for the rest, which Jeff theoretically could have finished, but Gail shut that down.
> 
> I'm not saying the chances are good.  I'm just suggesting it as the one product I can think of that could potentially meet the criteria you laid out.




I think I need to wade in to this, given that I've written on this before.

1. Greyhawk on or just before the 50th Anniversary is, IMO, a no-brainer. That's when you release it, that's when you celebrate it.

2. Some grognards are going to complain no matter what you do. You can't cater to them. Instead, release a good product. If there's a little "fan service" in there, it will make the grognards happy, but the main thing is that it has to be good. That's it. A good product will, in the end, always triumph over nostalgia.

3. The market isn't grognards. It's new players.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2022)

I'd love to see the numbers for Mystara, but it would be nearly impossible to do.  Especially in a way that might be comparable to the other campaign settings.

There was never anything like a "Mystara Boxed Set" or a "Mystara Campaign Guide."  The Mystara setting was written, mapped, and defined gradually over all four boxed sets and dozens of adventure modules (starting with single-paragraph descriptions and a centerfold map in X1 _The Isle of Dread,_ and then expanded as new adventure modules were released:  X4, X5, X10, X13, CM1...  Eventually it got so big that TSR released a detailed, formal write-up of the setting in a 15-book series that focused on each of the individual nations.

So first you would have to decide if the "Mystara Campaign" is just the BECMI boxed sets, the  adventure modules, the Gazetteers, or some combination of those three.  And regardless of how you define it, there's no fair way to compare it to the other Campaign Settings that might only have 1d3 books.

But I'm not interested in such comparisons; I'm just curious how well it sold overall.  I'm a fan; I don't really care how well it compares to the other campaign settings.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> I think I need to wade in to this, given that I've written on this before.
> 
> 1. Greyhawk on or just before the 50th Anniversary is, IMO, a no-brainer. That's when you release it, that's when you celebrate it.
> 
> ...



Emphasis mine.

That's the part that makes me wonder whether Greyhawk is a good choice.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> The other question is whether there is a market for a 5E megadungeon of that scope, beyond being a historical curiosity. 5E isn't really designed for that kind of play.



Even if it's not the focus, they did do Dungeon of the Mad Mage, right?  

Again, just spitballing, but they could include a couple of pages of basic dungeon crawling procedures, similar to, say, what @iserith composed for their 5E game.


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## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> Emphasis mine.
> 
> That's the part that makes me wonder whether Greyhawk is a good choice.




Of course it is. This is IP 101.

Greyhawk (and all the associated artifacts, relics, NPCs, monsters, and places) is the foundation of D&D. 

If they reboot it, think of all of the youtube videos etc. of people "explaining" the history. Of the Easter Eggs. Not to mention it's great for the brand.

It would be criminal mismanagement to NOT use the 50th to re-introduce it.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2022)

Hm.  Snarf makes an excellent point.  At first I was dubious, but I'm coming 'round to that way of thinking.  A "Greyhawk 50th Anniversary" book would be like printing money.  It's a no-brainer.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

CleverNickName said:


> I'd love to see the numbers for Mystara, but it would be nearly impossible to do.  Especially in a way that might be comparable to the other campaign settings.



The best proxy for it would be to look at the individual Gazetteer sales without aggregating them together into one chunk.  It would be nice to see how Gaz1 compares to other items on this list (though it came out in the same year as the FR grey box and the Dragonlance Adventures hardcover, so it both benefits from being released in a year when TSR was still making fairly reasonable numbers on their products but also would likely be hurt by the comparison to those two books - though the FR grey box didn't sell as high as I might have thought, so who knows?)



CleverNickName said:


> But I'm not interested in such comparisons; I'm just curious how well it sold overall.  I'm a fan.



Agreed.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> Even if it's not the focus, they did do Dungeon of the Mad Mage, right?
> 
> Again, just spitballing, but they could include a couple of pages of basic dungeon crawling procedures, similar to, say, what @iserith composed for their 5E game.



Was there a less well liked and successful 5E adventure than DotMM?

Also, you need more than a couple procedures to make 5E work with old school style megadungeon exploration.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Of course it is. This is IP 101.
> 
> Greyhawk (and all the associated artifacts, relics, NPCs, monsters, and places) is the foundation of D&D.
> 
> ...



If you say so. I think a lot of the current audience would "Ok boomer" that book and leave it right on the shelf.


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## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> If you say so. I think a lot of the current audience would "Ok boomer" that book and leave it right on the shelf.




Sure. Just like they "OK BOOMERed" Ravenloft, because that's old IP?
Or they are going to "OK BOOMER" Spelljammer?
Or they "OK BOOMER" D&D? Because, c'mon, that's an old game.

This is kinda sorta insulting. We have Ghosts of Saltmarsh (well regarded). We have Mordenkainen (that's one of the OGs of Greyhawk). We have Tasha (also Greyhawk). We have Vecna in the news (guess where Vecna started).

At a certain point, the gratuitous insults about Greyhawk and the assumptions about grognards passes from disagreement to something a little less nice.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> Sure. Just like they "OK BOOMERed" Ravenloft, because that's old IP?
> Or they are going to "OK BOOMER" Spelljammer?
> Or they "OK BOOMER" D&D? Because, c'mon, that's an old game.
> 
> ...



You can choose to be insulted if you want, but that wasn't my intent.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> Was there a less well liked and successful 5E adventure than DotMM?



I don't know.  Do you have numbers or data to support the premise that it did particularly badly?



Reynard said:


> Also, you need more than a couple procedures to make 5E work with old school style megadungeon exploration.



Have you read iserith's procedures?  They're pretty simple and straightforward and evidently work.

Obviously 5E is not B/X, but it doesn't take much to make dungeon crawling more procedural and fun.  If I were giving a megadungeon a second chance in 5E (5.5), it seems to me like a great place to showcase the return of dungeon crawling mechanics.


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## darjr (Jul 19, 2022)

If Spelljammer is being OK boomered then I’m sure WotC will want more of that.
It’s like at the top 100 out of all books on Amazon US in preorder.


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## Snarf Zagyg (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> You can choose to be insulted if you want, but that wasn't my intent.




….that’s some interesting phrasing.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

darjr said:


> If Spelljammer is being OK boomered then I’m sure WotC will want more of that.
> It’s like at the top 100 out of all books on Amazon US in preorder.



I could absolutely be wrong but I don't think Greyhawk and Spelljammer are in the same category. Greyhawk is at least a decade earlier, a whole generation of gamers, and Spelljammer has its easily recognizable visual cues. I mean, how long did WotC seed Spelljammer in other modules and jokes on podcasts and such?

Anyway, I am happy to be proven wrong. I am not making any quality judgement on GH.


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## darjr (Jul 19, 2022)

Well it was being poo pooed. So many wanted too that Jeff Grubb actually told people to chill.


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## Bedrockgames (Jul 19, 2022)

Snarf Zagyg said:


> 3. The market isn't grognards. It's new players.




You will all be grognards one day. I remember laughing at the grognards in my youth. Then suddenly I found myself a grognard. 

My feeling is they can attract new fans and still appeal to old ones. The people who have been with the hobby for a long time are an important life support for the hobby. Right now we are in a boom, just like we were in a boom in the early 80s. But I remember how much the hobby started dying and you really needed those die hard gamers to keep it alive through that.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Bedrockgames said:


> You will all be grognards one day. I remember laughing at the grognards in my youth. Then suddenly I found myself a grognard.
> 
> My feeling is they can attract new fans and still appeal to old ones. The people who have been with the hobby for a long time are an important life support for the hobby. Right now we are in a boom, just like we were in a boom in the early 80s. But I remember how much the hobby started dying and you really needed those die hard gamers to keep it alive through that.



We are actually kind of overdue for a bust cycle, which is interesting.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I could absolutely be wrong but I don't think Greyhawk and Spelljammer are in the same category. Greyhawk is at least a decade earlier, a whole generation of gamers, and Spelljammer has its easily recognizable visual cues. I mean, how long did WotC seed Spelljammer in other modules and jokes on podcasts and such?
> 
> Anyway, I am happy to be proven wrong. I am not making any quality judgement on GH.



Is there that much difference between thirty years ago and forty years ago in the eyes of new gamers starting today, or say, in the last five years?

Obviously modern marketing for either has to appeal to the young gamers.


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## Blue Orange (Jul 19, 2022)

Bedrockgames said:


> You will all be grognards one day. I remember laughing at the grognards in my youth. Then suddenly I found myself a grognard.



The beards have all grown longer overnight...


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## schneeland (Jul 19, 2022)

Bedrockgames said:


> You will all be grognards one day. I remember laughing at the grognards in my youth. Then suddenly I found myself a grognard.



Also, grognards often have more disposable income for gaming. I'm not saying, you should target only grognards (even though there's a market for that, too, IMO), but trying to also make the people who stayed with your brand for a long time happen once in a while is probably not a bad move.


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

schneeland said:


> Also, grognards often have more disposable income for gaming. I'm not saying, you should target only grognards (even though there's a market for that, too, IMO), but trying to also make the people who stayed with your brand for a long time happen once in a while is probably not a bad move.



Generally speaking, older people are more set in their ways (this isn't always true, of course) so you can probably expect some resistance to the kind of changes you need to update old settings. Exhibit A: the poopstorm following the Ravenloft book release. I fully expect one following the Spelljammer release, too. The farther apart the "old" and "new" customers are, the less likely you can make a product that appeals to both, and there's a certain point where the benefits of appealing to the old at all just disappears.


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## schneeland (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> Generally speaking, older people are more set in their ways (this isn't always true, of course) so you can probably expect some resistance to the kind of changes you need to update old settings. Exhibit A: the poopstorm following the Ravenloft book release. I fully expect one following the Spelljammer release, too. The farther apart the "old" and "new" customers are, the less likely you can make a product that appeals to both, and there's a certain point where the benefits of appealing to the old at all just disappears.



Careful modernization is indeed tricky and you are right that Ravenloft sparked debate (I also think it's not exactly WotC's strength). I was rather thinking about things like Runequest (both the Runequest 2 re-issue and the new edition) or Goodman Game's Original Adventure series as indication that there is clearly people who are willing to spend money on nostalgia-inducing products.


----------



## vecna00 (Jul 19, 2022)

This has been a very fun and informative ride, and I'm sad that it's going to be over soon.

Seeing all of these numbers really put a lot of things into perspective for me about the history of our hobby. Comparing these numbers to the setting survey results could produce some interesting results. We may not have numbers for that settings survey, comparing sales numbers to the tiers would still be interesting!


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## Ralif Redhammer (Jul 19, 2022)

I suspect it benefitted from hitting at just the right time, in the wake of Shogun, the American Ninja series, and Sho Kosugi, not to mention the lingering effects of 70s wuxia flicks. The trend continued well past OA's release date with Big Trouble in Little China, videogames like Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi, and so on. Ninjas were big in the 80s:





I suspect the only way we'll see an OA-style product would be as a Magic the Gathering 5e setting book.



schneeland said:


> Interesting! I didn't expect Oriental Adventures to be the third best-selling setting, beating Dragonlance.
> Not that I expect WotC to bring the setting back, but still a nice bit of D&D history.




That is a fascinating list. The top 5 all make sense to me, but never in a million years would I have put Lankhmar ahead of Planescape for sales.



Morrus said:


> In order, the best-selling settings were:
> 
> Forgotten Realms
> Greyhawk
> ...


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## Bedrockgames (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> Generally speaking, older people are more set in their ways (this isn't always true, of course) so you can probably expect some resistance to the kind of changes you need to update old settings. Exhibit A: the poopstorm following the Ravenloft book release. I fully expect one following the Spelljammer release, too. The farther apart the "old" and "new" customers are, the less likely you can make a product that appeals to both, and there's a certain point where the benefits of appealing to the old at all just disappears.




Some of it is just in how you do it. I think a lot of media these days almost intentionally splits the fanbase. You can be modern and still attract older gamers. But I think if one or the other feels disrespected or dismissed by the direction, you risk losing them. That is true, not just of generational demographics but of demographics around taste and play style too (as we saw with the splits in fandom before with D&D).


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## Von Ether (Jul 19, 2022)

LOL! Out on the socials, there's a bit envy/competition. "Well, we don't know the whole story about setting X, if only they had included (modules, setting guides, etc.), we'd get the true story about my (obvious pet setting.)"


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## Reynard (Jul 19, 2022)

Von Ether said:


> LOL! Out on the socials, there's a bit envy/competition. "Well, we don't know the whole story about setting X, if only they had included (modules, setting guides, etc.), we'd get the true story about my (obvious pet setting.)"



I would loved to see detailed breakdowns of every line, just out of pure curiosity.


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## Von Ether (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I would loved to see detailed breakdowns of every line, just out of pure curiosity.



No doubt, but you can tell that for some, the numbers ruffled some feathers.


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## timbannock (Jul 19, 2022)

Reynard said:


> The other question is whether there is a market for a 5E megadungeon of that scope, beyond being a historical curiosity. 5E isn't really designed for that kind of play.



If the effort was made to make Castle Greyhawk a really solid puzzle dungeon, I could see it working. That's my biggest wish, and also something that I think is fairly unique and has a lot of fertile ground, especially with WOTC's resources. They didn't do anything "new" with the castle part of Castle Ravenloft with CoS, so it'd be easy to make it feel different.

But...



Reynard said:


> Was there a less well liked and successful 5E adventure than DotMM?
> 
> Also, you need more than a couple procedures to make 5E work with old school style megadungeon exploration.



This is why I doubt anything truly great will be done with Castle Greyhawk anytime soon. For all of the good things WOTC has done with their adventures, dungeon-crawling simply isn't one of their strengths. And puzzles, too. They are great at self-referential stories, epic scope campaigns, and, on occasion, they do a decent job of making certain set-piece locations really wild and out there. But they never seem to maximize that, and they certainly don't capitalize on it.

Castle Ravenloft: almost a word-for-word reprint of the actual physical parts of the castle; very few puzzles, just moody rooms.

Avernus: the whole "Mad Max in Hell" idea was great, but there was almost no purpose to it in the arc of the adventure.

Out of the Abyss: Gravenhollow was just a "poke around the library" scene, and the big rumble with the demon lords was entirely handwaved as far as locations.

Storm King's Thunder: Mostly just larger dungeon rooms; very few unique layouts. Absolutely zero terrain/battle map info in the open world sandbox portion of the adventure. I don't recall a single puzzle in the whole adventure, just a mystery of who killed who (and it wasn't even that important).

And I could go on. There's a lot I like about the adventures despite all the complaining, but...I don't see them ever using Castle Greyhawk for anything interesting.


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## Von Ether (Jul 19, 2022)

schneeland said:


> Also, grognards often have more disposable income for gaming. I'm not saying, you should target only grognards (even though there's a market for that, too, IMO), but trying to also make the people who stayed with your brand for a long time happen once in a while is probably not a bad move.




It's a double edged sword. Yeah, they keep a game on life support but not necessarly alive. 

In watching Battletech, I've seen demo games go totally awry because the demo guys is so desperate to run a huge battle with tons of lore and two hours of prep that he overwhelm/bores the newbies when a much simpler set up would have done the job much better.  

And long before that, I had two BT groups that insisted I read three or four books before they'd deign to let me and play (They didn't have the patience to play "simple" games so I could learn.) Or how a lot of the art design didn't age well but there seemed to be some tug of war between updating those designs in fear of upsetting the grognards. (And I am not talking about the Unseen- that's a whole other issue.)

BT has come back, but it was a combination of new video games (which updated the look of the older mechs and was a huge exposure to a new audience), 3D printing (to get those mechs designs on the table and even in different scales) and a miniatures game rule set (Alpha Strike which helped some grognards use more of their  their figs in a faster game that fit into their busy lives).

The latest news is that it seems some disaffected 40K fans are now giving BT a try, or at least love all the compliments on their paint jobs. 

So overall grognards seem to me to be a life preserver that slowly becomes a lead weight that holds back ways to innovate.

The only exception to that seems to be the OSR, but that movement may be in spite of grognards, not because of them.


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## teitan (Jul 19, 2022)

Sacrosanct said:


> So did OA.  It was a setting that has new class and race rules.  Exactly like Dragonlance.



It was a much shorter section and not the focus of the book. Dragonlance adventures was designed to sell a setting. OA was a rules supplement with an example setting but it’s included so TSR considered it a setting book.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 19, 2022)

Mister_Fish said:


> Idk man, have you SEEN the number of comments about how WotC changing the Phlogiston and Crystal Spheres into things that functionally work the same way but have different names is ABSOLUTELY RUINING THE SETTING HOW DARE YOU?




 Your understating how fundlemental the charges to the setting are,  it now blurs the line between Spelljammer and Planescape to nearly none existent. I like the change,  but mostly because I hate trying to spell Phligizon,  blasted word,  Astral Plane I can spell just fine.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 19, 2022)

Blue Orange said:


> In all seriousness (IMHO of course):
> 
> 1. Greyhawk's #2, eh? I wonder why there's so little interest in bringing it out now--the fans just aged out?
> 
> ...




 1. Greyhawk had a complete monopoly for a long time years so it's numbers were misleading. 

 2. WotC has tons of cultural consultants, including 3 or 4 East Asian writers on Radiant Citadel (it has a fantasy Thailand,  China,  and Japan,  maybe one other),  and several South Asian (Indian), writers on the book too,  and Middle Eastern (Persian). Plus the crew who worked on Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. In fact I susect the only reason Kamigawa didn't get a D&D book is because something is planned for Kara Tur. Btw OA is a MITHIRIL BESTSELLER, and Kara Tur is PLATINIUM BESTSELLER, so the setting is as popular as ever.

 3. Urban Fantasy they have Waterdeep,  Baldur's Gate,  Ravnica,  Radiant Citadel,  and probably next year Sigil.

 4. The Planescape lingo and attidude was annoying,but Planescape Torment was glorious.

 5. Silly

 6. They don't give a crap about fan out cries or rage as long as they keep o. making tons of money, they only care when things fall apart.

 7. Psionics isn't solved. The rest I'm not even touching.


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## SakanaSensei (Jul 19, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> Your understating how fundlemental the charges to the setting are,  it now blurs the line between Spelljammer and Planescape to nearly none existent. I like the change,  but mostly because I hate trying to spell Phligizon,  blasted word,  Astral Plane I can spell just fine.



I understand the differences just fine, on an intellectual level. But my players are going to see “fly to the edges of this system, transfer to the fantasy hyperspace equivalent, maybe see some stuff go down then pop back out into your destination.” 

Basically, the whole thing reeks of distinction without a difference because play experience isn’t going to change much if at all. And discussion spaces around this game in particular seem to be lousy with distinctions without differences.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

> 7. Why _don't_ they bring back Dark Sun?



They did.  Up until Ravenloft it was the only non-FR TSR setting that Wizards had done an updated book for (unless you count Gamma World I guess)  - except it was for 4e so I assume many folks have forgotten it existed.

(Updated book because of course Star Drive and Star Frontiers both got a kinda-sorta update with d20 Future, but not a full setting update).


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 19, 2022)

Mister_Fish said:


> I understand the differences just fine, on an intellectual level. But my players are going to see “fly to the edges of this system, transfer to the fantasy hyperspace equivalent, maybe see some stuff go down then pop back out into your destination.”
> 
> Basically, the whole thing reeks of distinction without a difference because play experience isn’t going to change much if at all. And discussion spaces around this game in particular seem to be lousy with distinctions without differences.





 When your players get lost in the Astral Plane and their Spelljammer ends up in Hell your players will care about the difference.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 19, 2022)

Von Ether said:


> LOL! Out on the socials, there's a bit envy/competition. "Well, we don't know the whole story about setting X, if only they had included (modules, setting guides, etc.), we'd get the true story about my (obvious pet setting.)"



Agreed, and I'm no exception (Mystara is my pet favorite).  I'm not really driven by competition or envy, though.  I'm being propelled along by pure curiosity.


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## Hussar (Jul 19, 2022)

teitan said:


> It was a much shorter section and not the focus of the book. Dragonlance adventures was designed to sell a setting. OA was a rules supplement with an example setting but it’s included so TSR considered it a setting book.




That’s a fairly fair way of looking at it. 

After all, most people who bought DL Adventures were likely already setting fans. The modules and the novels preceded DLA by some time. 

OA otoh had no such lead up. It was presented more or less as a complete product in and of itself. The OA modules and other stuff all came out afterwards. 

They have an almost opposite history.


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## darjr (Jul 19, 2022)

Seeing TSR luminaries posting in Bens threads is rather cool.


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## Jer (Jul 19, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> When your players get lost in the Astral Plane and their Spelljammer ends up in Hell your players will care about the difference.



And they will thank you for it.

Come on - the visual of a Spelljammer flying through space and into Hell is just too good.  I think that I now either have a campaign concept or a metal album cover in my head that I'm going to need to figure out what to do with...


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## SakanaSensei (Jul 20, 2022)

Jer said:


> And they will thank you for it.
> 
> Come on - the visual of a Spelljammer flying through space and into Hell is just too good.  I think that I now either have a campaign concept or a metal album cover in my head that I'm going to need to figure out what to do with...



I'm with you on "that sounds super cool, so why would there be complaints?"

But I also take some issue with the "you're totally wrong, this is a big difference that you can't see because you don't know enough and you'll be sorry, you'll see!" tone of the original message, here. Like, why do we have to be so confrontational over something so minor?

And if you don't want to have your players deal with Outer Plane stuff while using the Astral as a go-between, just... don't? It's really not hard.


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## Reynard (Jul 20, 2022)

Jer said:


> And they will thank you for it.
> 
> Come on - the visual of a Spelljammer flying through space and into Hell is just too good.  I think that I now either have a campaign concept or a metal album cover in my head that I'm going to need to figure out what to do with...



The into to BG3 has entered the chat...


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 20, 2022)

Mister_Fish said:


> I'm with you on "that sounds super cool, so why would there be complaints?"
> 
> But I also take some issue with the "you're totally wrong, this is a big difference that you can't see because you don't know enough and you'll be sorry, you'll see!" tone of the original message, here. Like, why do we have to be so confrontational over something so minor?
> 
> And if you don't want to have your players deal with Outer Plane stuff while using the Astral as a go-between, just... don't? It's really not hard.





 Never said I'd complain,  just pointing out it's a much more serious change then maybe it appeared at first glance.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 20, 2022)

If funny that the broader FR (including Kara Tur, Faerun, Al Qadim, Maztica) occupies so many slots. One can't help wondering if TSR hadn't gone under, how many more Forgotten Realms expansions would we have gotten?


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## SakanaSensei (Jul 20, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> Never said I'd complain,  just pointing out it's a much more serious change then maybe it appeared at first glance.



We'll just have to disagree on what constitutes a "serious change," it feels extremely minor to the point of being nothing to me.


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## Peter BOSCO'S (Jul 20, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> If funny that the broader FR (including Kara Tur, Faerun, Al Qadim, Maztica) occupies so many slots. One can't help wondering if TSR hadn't gone under, how many more Forgotten Realms expansions would we have gotten?



We are still waiting on a treatment for Osse (oversized FR "Australia"), Katashaka (FR "South America"), Anchorome (FR "North America") (although small parts of each were sort of covered in Maztica, the "Central America" analog), and Laerakon (which was "visiting" Toril during 4th ed).


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## dave2008 (Jul 20, 2022)

J.Quondam said:


> What does it mean when a "sales" number dips below zero?
> 
> _* Also, why on earth are all those charts formatted differently?_



The author explained it in one of his earlier posts. It means returns were greater than sales.


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## Scott Christian (Jul 20, 2022)

Ath-kethin said:


> Really the most surprising thing on that chart is that Planescape didn't sell better. I guess I wasn't the only one left wholly unimpressed by it (aside from DiTerlizzi's exquisite art, anyway).
> 
> The 2nd most surprising? The popularity of Oriental Adventures. I knew it was big, but I never thought it was THAT big.



Although we never knew anything about the numbers or even advertising for the game back then, this directly matches my friends' and our group's purchases. We were just teenagers, but apparently we were the "market."


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## DorkForge (Jul 20, 2022)

As a person that started playing in 5E here's why I don't really have any interest in Greyhawk as a property:

It's just a fantasy setting, or at least, that's what it comes across as.

Eberron, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Dark Sun etc. are all dramatically different from a typical fantasy setting, they have gimmicks and novelties that set them apart and draw interest. Whilst there is a touch of Greyhawk in 5e, I'd wager that most players didn't notice and don't care, Saltmarsh being set there is just a bit of 'neat' trivia to me personally, it doesn't fundamentally change the experience. 

That said, should they choose to sell Greyhawk stuff it will sell well, not because of Grognards with disposable income, but because 5e sells well.


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## Von Ether (Jul 20, 2022)

DorkForge said:


> As a person that started playing in 5E here's why I don't really have any interest in Greyhawk as a property:
> 
> It's just a fantasy setting, or at least, that's what it comes across as.
> 
> ...




And even then, WotC pitched 5e Ravenloft as gothic fantasy and 5e Eberron as Noir Fantasy.

I totally get that viewpoint to the point since the aughts I haven't bought anything Greyhawk/Dragon Lance/Forgotten Realms even as retro PDF. They are all too vanilla for me.

For the fans, though, there are nuances:
Greyhawk is more old school swords and sorcery where things are tough and the villains tougher, though some may say GH has gotten more vanilla over time.

Dragon Lance is more romanticized fantasy with knights, evil dragons, and love triangles

Forgotten Realms is now it's own beast. Part high fantasy, part pulpy fantasy, party superheros, part Earth cultural analog. With that big of an umbrella, though, you can fit the adventures you want to run in the other two setting in FR.


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## Dungeonosophy (Jul 20, 2022)

BenRiggs said:


> Ben Riggs here!
> These numbers are taken from internal company documents I've been given. As such, they are apparently what the company considered settings. Your points are well taken. But I'm a historian at the mercy of what data has trickled down to us from the past. There's tons of data I don't have. Everything in your post for example. Also, I have no data on the vast majority of novels, and the vast majority of adventures.



Ben, thanks for replying! Right, I mistakenly pictured that you had a gigantic spreadsheet with, like, sales numbers for every product published in the 80s and 90s. So I was perplexed why some products were highlighted in the charts and some weren’t. But yeah, Im glad you shared what you did. I look forward to the book!


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## Parmandur (Jul 20, 2022)

DorkForge said:


> As a person that started playing in 5E here's why I don't really have any interest in Greyhawk as a property:
> 
> It's just a fantasy setting, or at least, that's what it comes across as.
> 
> ...



That's exactly why it is such a popular Setting, same as Forgotten Realms and Exandria. Gimmicks are not as useful for game proposal as generic material is.


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## Blue Orange (Jul 20, 2022)

They


Henadic Theologian said:


> 1. Greyhawk had a complete monopoly for a long time years so it's numbers were misleading.
> 
> 2. WotC has tons of cultural consultants, including 3 or 4 East Asian writers on Radiant Citadel (it has a fantasy Thailand,  China,  and Japan,  maybe one other),  and several South Asian (Indian), writers on the book too,  and Middle Eastern (Persian). Plus the crew who worked on Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. In fact I susect the only reason Kamigawa didn't get a D&D book is because something is planned for Kara Tur. Btw OA is a MITHIRIL BESTSELLER, and Kara Tur is PLATINIUM BESTSELLER, so the setting is as popular as ever.
> 
> ...



If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I was kind of wondering why Torment was so popular but they never resurrected the setting after 3e. Thanks for clarifying on 2.


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## DorkForge (Jul 20, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> That's exactly why it is such a popular Setting, same as Forgotten Realms and Exandria. Gimmicks are not as useful for game proposal as generic material is.



Generic fantasy doesn't really need multiple setttings nowadays, FR has that covered which is why I don't see a need for GH. I would strongly argue, however, that it is popular because of how it was the original setting more than anything else.

Exandria is popular because Critical Role is popular. They could publish anything and it would sell.


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## Dungeonosophy (Jul 20, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> That's exactly why it is such a popular Setting, same as Forgotten Realms and Exandria. Gimmicks are not as useful for game proposal as generic material is.



Greyhawk has a bit of a “grimdark” “Warhammer” “amoral” “shades of grey” vibe which could be further drawn out in order to distinguish the setting. “WotC’s Mörk Borg.”


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## darjr (Jul 20, 2022)

Dungeonosophy said:


> Greyhawk has a bit of a “grimdark” “Warhammer” “amoral” “shades of grey” vibe which could be further drawn out in order to distinguish the setting. “WotC’s Mörk Borg.”



Well. Cool


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## Reynard (Jul 20, 2022)

Dungeonosophy said:


> Greyhawk has a bit of a “grimdark” “Warhammer” “amoral” “shades of grey” vibe which could be further drawn out in order to distinguish the setting. “WotC’s Mörk Borg.”



I for one am looking forward the absolute poopstorm that would occur if WotC actually did this. "You did WHAT to Greyhawk?!?"

If WotC really wanted to make GH relevant, they could do far worse than making it the D&D setting that really embraces the Old School style in 5E. Trim out the extraneous races and classes. Put class and level limits back in. Make equipment matter. Up the ante on resource management. Give the DM even more authority. Put it out in a boxed set or standalone book.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 20, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I for one am looking forward the absolute poopstorm that would occur if WotC actually did this. "You did WHAT to Greyhawk?!?"
> 
> If WotC really wanted to make GH relevant, they could do far worse than making it the D&D setting that really embraces the Old School style in 5E. Trim out the extraneous races and classes. Put class and level limits back in. Make equipment matter. Up the ante on resource management. Give the DM even more authority. Put it out in a boxed set or standalone book.



I'm in the camp that feels 5E already embraces "the Old School style" of play.  To me, 5E feels a lot more retro than the previous three editions did.


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## Reynard (Jul 20, 2022)

CleverNickName said:


> I'm in the camp that feels 5E already embraces "the Old School style" of play.  To me, 5E feels a lot more retro than the previous three editions did.



I disagree a lot, but I won't argue about it.


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## Parmandur (Jul 20, 2022)

DorkForge said:


> Generic fantasy doesn't really need multiple setttings nowadays, FR has that covered which is why I don't see a need for GH. I would strongly argue, however, that it is popular because of how it was the original setting more than anything else.
> 
> Exandria is popular because Critical Role is popular. They could publish anything and it would sell.



Critical Role's popularity is a Chicken and egg problem: I would say the friendly generic nature of the world that the wacky characters interact with is a big part of the secret sauce. People like generic fantasy, a lot.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 20, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I for one am looking forward the absolute poopstorm that would occur if WotC actually did this. "You did WHAT to Greyhawk?!?"
> 
> If WotC really wanted to make GH relevant, they could do far worse than making it the D&D setting that really embraces the Old School style in 5E. Trim out the extraneous races and classes. Put class and level limits back in. Make equipment matter. Up the ante on resource management. Give the DM even more authority. Put it out in a boxed set or standalone book.



I don't think you have to go crazy with it, but I do think using the Old School cred would be a logical part of the marketing.  Play up the Swords & Sorcery a bit, as well as the grim foes, including legendary evils like Vecna and Iuz.  Not Black Metal grim/funny, but focusing a bit more on warring states, the balance between good and evil being a bit more tilted in evil's favor in the Flanaess.

Doing a bit more with equipment and resource management, and putting real (but fairly lightweight) dungeon crawl procedures in the 5.5e books could synergize really well with a Greyhawk relaunch, including either a revamped Castle Greyhawk (if they can work out a reasonable deal with Gail Gygax) or a revamped Village of Hommlet and Temple of Elemental Evil, for iconic dungeon play.


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## Dungeonosophy (Jul 20, 2022)

As for distinguishing Mystara from Forgotten Realms, I’d lean into these themes:

1) Full-blown BECMI "red box" retro graphic design. Like how the 4E Starter Set did it, but with the BECMI fonts throughout. Elmore "Ancient Red" cover for the win!

2) D&D-meets-1980s-Cartoon-Action-Hour setting: He-Man and She-Ra meet Warduke meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or rather Tortles!)

3) D&D-meets-Marvel mutant-superheroes setting. The Red Curse has expanded throughout the world...and expanded into seven rainbow colors! (Blue Curse, Orange Curse, etc.). Seven different Inheritor (mutant) classes, modeled on existing OGL superhero archetypes. (BTW, I strongly suspect the AD&D "red letter" MYSTARA logo was partly inspired by the MARVEL logo.)

5) D&D-meet-furries setting: Tortles, Rakastas, and Lupins are core Mystaran races. They're present throughout the world, in nearly every city and village and culture. People don't even blink an eye. They're like the "animal people" you see in the background crowd scenes of Earth in Dragonball Z, like: "Oh, the police officer is a dog-man? I never noticed." Could add other animal-folk as well: Chameleon Folk, etc.

6) Rewind to 1000 AC. But somewhat reboot the continuity, just as WotC has done for all 5E worlds.

7) Bargle and Aleena as narrators: the "Mordenkainen", "Fizban" and "Tasha" of Mystara.

8) Fill out the whole world map, Hollow World map, and Invisible Moon map from the start. Why not? Let's get on with it! 

9) 5E stats for all the Mystaran / BECMI monsters which haven't been covered in 5E yet.

10) Blackmoor relics (i.e. modern tech) can found as treasure throughout the setting.

11) Include "cosmic" level rules for Immortal play.

12) Hire writers and artists from the same Real World cultures to depict the Real World-based cultures of Mystara. Where there's an equivalent culture in the Radiant Citadel, tie their lore together, saying that they're connected via a portal. Of course, some "classic" depictions (e.g. GAZ10) will need to be heavily reconceived. But it can be done.

I posted a bunch of other thoughts on 5E Mystara here (back in 2018!): Mike Mearls tweet: Is the Known World of Mystara coming to 5e? (What's Cool About Mystara?)


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## DorkForge (Jul 20, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Critical Role's popularity is a Chicken and egg problem: I would say the friendly generic nature of the world that the wacky characters interact with is a big part of the secret sauce. People like generic fantasy, a lot.



You can argue the merits of their world, but I'm not seeing the chicken and egg problem. People like watching a group of professional voice actors play D&D, I've never heard a fan rave about the world but plenty of them are happy to talk about their favourite character.

I don't think their success would have been weakened by playing in an established setting, for example.


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## MGibster (Jul 20, 2022)

wicked cool said:


> i remember playing Shogun in 86 when it came out. i never made the connection until now. 80's were also big with people buying throwing stars and other weapons of that market



Karate movies have never gone out of style, but there was a martial arts fad in the United States starting in the 70s and going into the 80s.  Like the song said, everyone was Kung-Fu fighting, their hands were fast as lightning, and it was a little bit frightening.  We had television shows like The Master starring Lee Van Cleef and Kung Fu starring David Carradine not to mention movies about ninjas, Kung-Fu fighters, and one armed boxers produced by in the United States and imported from China and Japan.  I've always considered OA to be part of that fad.


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## Willie the Duck (Jul 20, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> They don't own Gary's CG maps & notes.  They'd have to get the license from Gail, but it seems obvious to me that's she's been angling for that over the last 14 years.  Now, it may be that they aren't willing to pay what she thinks it's worth, but if they were ever going to do it, the 50th anniversary seems like a logical time.






CleverNickName said:


> Hm.  Snarf makes an excellent point.  At first I was dubious, but I'm coming 'round to that way of thinking.  A "Greyhawk 50th Anniversary" book would be like printing money.  It's a no-brainer.



Here's why I don't think this is so: People played in Greyhawk. People did not play in the Castle Greyhawk megadungeon. I mean, sure, Luke and Ernie Gygax, Rob K, Geezer/Gronan, probably also Tim K, Alon Lucion, Jeff Key and a bunch of other individuals played in it (and, last time I checked, were people, some of whom even show up here now and again). However, for the most part the gamer base never got to see that castle (as it was never published). 

Thus, people that are nostalgic for Greyhawk are nostalgic for the campaign setting (the one that, in total, is only somewhat linked to Gary's version, which itself is both larger and distinct from the megadungeon castle). For them, the name Castle Greyhawk is a draw, but it's not the setting which I think is what they really want. 

There are, as well, people with no attachment to the Greyhawk world, but like the idea that this was something from one of the original game creators. For them, there will be some initial interest from such a sales announcement simply from what the thing is (although if there was a huge market for this, there would have been more buzz around the Castle Zyggag project back when it was in development, and I don't remember that being the case). That said, what they will get is either 1) a megadungeon designed around game principles wildly divorced from what the game evolved into even in the first couple years of existing (again I posit that more evolution took place within oD&D than between it and everything that came after it), or 2) something someone at WotC derived from Gary's notes but put their own interpretation on to make it fit modern game ideas (even OSR ones), kinda defeating the 'from Gary' aspect.


CleverNickName said:


> Agreed, and I'm no exception (Mystara is my pet favorite).  I'm not really driven by competition or envy, though.  I'm being propelled along by pure curiosity.



Mystara always was an interesting beast -- a default setting for the basic-classic line once Gary wanted Greyhawk for AD&D, yet one learned precious little about it unless you partook in some of the highly optional accessories like Gazetteers, _Dragon _articles, or at the very least adventure modules. It would be interesting to see exactly how much impact it had and how much people bought new material to learn more about the implied world. Probably impossible to suss out, but an interesting idea.


Micah Sweet said:


> I disagree. TSR reserved high levels for kingdom-building and keeping high-level they felt should be in the game but largely out of reach for PCs.  After 9th level or so, you're supposed to re-focus your efforts on the big picture, and leave the life of an adventurer behind for the most part.  That idea wasn't popular so it was gradually dropped, leaving us with the high level mess we have now.






Umbran said:


> With respect, in AD&D they gave you some followers, and told you jack about how to play kingdom building.
> "They knew what to do with it, but didn't actually do it," seems an odd assertion.



Each of the TSR editions certainly suggested taht this was the post-name-level gameplay you were supposed to follow (if nothing else, few if any salient benefits to levelling for non-casters past a certain point suggested that you should find other things about which to get excited). However, excepting BECMI's domain management rules (which were probably too little, too late for most people and honestly are fine but not enough to sustain my interest in the game when actual domain-running games like _Civilization _exist in computer form and are purpose-built for the role), there never really was any support other than those followers and some prices for building castles. I understand the initial issue was that EGG assumed that everyone would just transition to Braunstein or Diplomacy or whatever system they had on their shelves (being avid wargamers and probably having a dozen), but it's odd that once it was clear that the average person to pick up A/D&D wouldn't be avid wargamers, why TSR didn't make their own or add such rules between ~'75 and '84.


----------



## Micah Sweet (Jul 20, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> Here's why I don't think this is so: People played in Greyhawk. People did not play in the Castle Greyhawk megadungeon. I mean, sure, Luke and Ernie Gygax, Rob K, Geezer/Gronan, probably also Tim K, Alon Lucion, Jeff Key and a bunch of other individuals played in it (and, last time I checked, were people, some of whom even show up here now and again). However, for the most part the gamer base never got to see that castle (as it was never published).
> 
> Thus, people that are nostalgic for Greyhawk are nostalgic for the campaign setting (the one that, in total, is only somewhat linked to Gary's version, which itself is both larger and distinct from the megadungeon castle). For them, the name Castle Greyhawk is a draw, but it's not the setting which I think is what they really want.
> 
> ...



I agree.  Fortunately this oversight was eventually corrected.


----------



## Henadic Theologian (Jul 20, 2022)

MGibster said:


> Karate movies have never gone out of style, but there was a martial arts fad in the United States starting in the 70s and going into the 80s.  Like the song said, everyone was Kung-Fu fighting, their hands were fast as lightning, and it was a little bit frightening.  We had television shows like The Master starring Lee Van Cleef and Kung Fu starring David Carradine not to mention movies about ninjas, Kung-Fu fighters, and one armed boxers produced by in the United States and imported from China and Japan.  I've always considered OA to be part of that fad.




 It could be coming again with the likes of shows like Kobra Kai.


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## Willie the Duck (Jul 20, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> It could be coming again with the likes of shows like Kobra Kai.




It's always possible, but thus far it's one show. That so many people on this thread have been able to throw out so many disparate examples and have different ideas about which ones were the cause and which ones just followed the trend highlight just how much of it there was out there*. _Kung Fu_ and _The Master_, the Carl Douglas song, _The Karate Kid, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, _Chuck Norris/Jean-Claude van Damme/Steven Seagal, not just _Ninja Gaidan_ but a half dozen or more similar video games each year for each system out there.
*Admittedly, across maybe almost 20 years from the mid-late 70s through the mid-90s

Mind you, it never really went away totally (more just subsumed into a broader mélange of action movies,  Asian media, and general international entertainment), so of course it could come back as a discrete thing.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 20, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> It's always possible, but thus far it's one show. That so many people on this thread have been able to throw out so many disparate examples and have different ideas about which ones were the cause and which ones just followed the trend highlight just how much of it there was out there*. _Kung Fu_ and _The Master_, the Carl Douglas song, _The Karate Kid, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, _Chuck Norris/Jean-Claude van Damme/Steven Seagal, not just _Ninja Gaidan_ but a half dozen or more similar video games each year for each system out there.
> *Admittedly, across maybe almost 20 years from the mid-late 70s through the mid-90s
> 
> Mind you, it never really went away totally (more just subsumed into a broader mélange of action movies,  Asian media, and general international entertainment), so of course it could come back as a discrete thing.




 For now,  but there are plans for Kobra Kai spin offs,  fans are taking about a Mr. Miyagi origin spin off. 

 And Manga and Anime have become huge in the west,  with Manga out selling DC and Marvel.


----------



## Parmandur (Jul 20, 2022)

DorkForge said:


> You can argue the merits of their world, but I'm not seeing the chicken and egg problem. People like watching a group of professional voice actors play D&D, I've never heard a fan rave about the world but plenty of them are happy to talk about their favourite character.
> 
> I don't think their success would have been weakened by playing in an established setting, for example.



I think it would have been weakened if they were playing a niche, gimmick Setting.


----------



## Umbran (Jul 20, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> , but it's odd that once it was clear that the average person to pick up A/D&D wouldn't be avid wargamers, why TSR didn't make their own or add such rules between ~'75 and '84.




I don't know.

Perhaps because they were, in fact, wargamers, and such a game was simply outside their wheelhouse?


----------



## Reynard (Jul 20, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> I don't think you have to go crazy with it, but I do think using the Old School cred would be a logical part of the marketing.  Play up the Swords & Sorcery a bit, as well as the grim foes, including legendary evils like Vecna and Iuz.  Not Black Metal grim/funny, but focusing a bit more on warring states, the balance between good and evil being a bit more tilted in evil's favor in the Flanaess.
> 
> Doing a bit more with equipment and resource management, and putting real (but fairly lightweight) dungeon crawl procedures in the 5.5e books could synergize really well with a Greyhawk relaunch, including either a revamped Castle Greyhawk (if they can work out a reasonable deal with Gail Gygax) or a revamped Village of Hommlet and Temple of Elemental Evil, for iconic dungeon play.



I don't  understand why people are so against actually doing dungeon crawls correctly in 5e is. All the talk of "old school sensibilities" of 5e and the popularity of OSR and the suggestion of actually making an official Old School 5E thing and people just can't. 

It's weird.


----------



## CleverNickName (Jul 20, 2022)

Reynard said:


> I don't  understand why people are so against actually doing dungeon crawls correctly in 5e is. All the talk of "old school sensibilities" of 5e and the popularity of OSR and the suggestion of actually making an official Old School 5E thing and people just can't.
> 
> It's weird.



Not sure what you mean by "doing dungeon crawls correctly in 5E."  There are lots of ways to run a dungeon, and some are easier than others, but is there a such thing as a _correct_ method?


----------



## Reynard (Jul 21, 2022)

CleverNickName said:


> Not sure what you mean by "doing dungeon crawls correctly in 5E."  There are lots of ways to run a dungeon, and some are easier than others, but is there a such thing as a _correct_ method?



There are indeed a lot of ways to run a dungeon crawl, but we were talking explicitly about Old school, Greyhawk era dungeon crawling -- which, while not monolithic, definitely fits intoa  tighter definition than it does in the modern era. Saying one doesn't need to alter 5E to make it work for that era of dungeon crawling is, IMO, entirely ignoring the procedures and playstyle of that kind of play.


----------



## Hussar (Jul 21, 2022)

DorkForge said:


> As a person that started playing in 5E here's why I don't really have any interest in Greyhawk as a property:
> 
> It's just a fantasy setting, or at least, that's what it comes across as.
> 
> ...



If I could toss this into the mix.

There's a fantastic Dungeon Magazine adventure from the tail end of Paizo running Dungeon magazine.  Erik Mona is a MASSIVE Greyhawk nerd and just loves the setting and you can see it in a lot of the adventures that Paizo Dungeon banged out.  I mean, they didn't call it PaizoHawk for nothing.  All three of the first Adventure Paths - Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tides were love letters to Greyhawk.  They really were Greyhawk adventures, just with the serial numbers filed off.  

But, there was one stand out adventure that really caught my eye as probably encapsulating Greyhawk the best called War of the Wielded (Dungeon 149).  Here's the elevator pitch:



> Centuries ago, two rival thieves' guilds crafted a number of intelligent weapons to aid them in their conflicts. Although the guilds are now long dead, their weapons remain, and have begun to recruit new soldiers from the people of Sasserine. Can your PCs put an end to this deathless war?




This, to me, just highlights everything Greyhawk.  You have ancient magic - check.  You have a completely morally ambiguous conflict (the two factions were both evil) - check.  You have a conflict which is ultimately futile and nihilistic - check.  There are no heroes in this story really.  The conflict is pointless, everyone who was fighting this war is long dead but, the evil of the conflict lingers, causing pain and destruction long after the war is over.  It's a REALLY dark story and, honestly, I'd LOVE to turn this into a full blown campaign.  What a fantastic seed - the PC's are now embroiled in this secret war being fought between intelligent weapons which use their power to take over people and continue the war.

THIS is a Greyhawk adventure in a nutshell.  It just hits all the right notes.  You wouldn't generally see this kind of adventure in Forgotten Realms (not that you couldn't, of course, but, rather, it just doesn't really fit with the general tone of FR adventures).  FR adventures are mostly pretty heroic - Hoard of the Dragon Queen being a prime example.  The baddies are really bad.  The party is good.  Same with most of the WotC Forgotten Realms based AP's in 5e.  Evil cultists (generally) are trying to enact some scheme and the heroic PC's are trying to stop them from their dastardly deeds.  

To me, this is what sets Greyhawk apart from Forgotten Realms.  This whole morally grey nature.  Even in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, the main source of trade in Saltmarsh as far as the PC's are concerned anyway (she's the only source of magical items for sale) is a tiefling in Saltmarsh, there to trade for food for Iuz.  Since Keoland isn't at war with Iuz, she has no real problems doing business in Saltmarsh.  This isn't something I've generally seen in Waterdeep where the "good folks" only really deal with other "good folks" and the "bad folks" keep to the "bad folks".  I don't see free trade between Waterdeep and some Underdark city, for example.  Which is something you totally would see in Greyhawk.

Anyway, I've rambled on too long.  I hope this does make it clear though what the difference between the settings is.


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## Parmandur (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> If I could toss this into the mix.
> 
> There's a fantastic Dungeon Magazine adventure from the tail end of Paizo running Dungeon magazine.  Erik Mona is a MASSIVE Greyhawk nerd and just loves the setting and you can see it in a lot of the adventures that Paizo Dungeon banged out.  I mean, they didn't call it PaizoHawk for nothing.  All three of the first Adventure Paths - Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tides were love letters to Greyhawk.  They really were Greyhawk adventures, just with the serial numbers filed off.
> 
> ...



I mean, there us an entire Underground city to facilitate trade between Waterdeep and the Underdark and outer space at the same time, there is plenty of moral ambiguity to go around.

I'd be so cheeky is to say that the real difference is that the Forgotten Realms is a Canadian conception of Heroic Fantasy, while Greyhawk is American Midwestern.


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## Hussar (Jul 21, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> I mean, there us an entire Underground city to facilitate trade between Waterdeep and the Underdark and outer space at the same time, there is plenty of moral ambiguity to go around.
> 
> I'd be so cheeky is to say that the real difference is that the Forgotten Realms is a Canadian conception of Heroic Fantasy, while Greyhawk is American Midwestern.



Kinda sorta?  Sure, the underground city exists in Waterdeep - but, it's illegal.  It's not part of Waterdeep really.  Or, well, of course it's part of the setting, but, it's not something that some random Waterdhavian commoner can just walk into and do business.  Skullport is meant as a black market, quite literally.

As I said, compare that to Saltmarsh.  Not only is the representative of an evil god openly doing business on the main street of Saltmarsh, but also the party is expected to not really have any problem with this.  Add to this, the fact that half of Saltmarsh is in favor of smuggling and the town is in conflict over the imposition of the rule of law from Keoland.  It's a major element of the Saltmarsh setting - those who are in favor of the new prosperity offered by increased intervention from the Crown and those who want things to remain as they were - a little light smuggling and whatnot is an amusing peccadillo.  

Thinking about it, your cheeky assertion isn't too far off the mark I'd say.


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## CleverNickName (Jul 21, 2022)

Reynard said:


> There are indeed a lot of ways to run a dungeon crawl, but we were talking explicitly about Old school, Greyhawk era dungeon crawling -- which, while not monolithic, definitely fits intoa  tighter definition than it does in the modern era. Saying one doesn't need to alter 5E to make it work for that era of dungeon crawling is, IMO, entirely ignoring the procedures and playstyle of that kind of play.



Yeah, I'm going to echo one of your earlier posts.  I strongly disagree, but I'm not gonna argue about it.


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## DorkForge (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> If I could toss this into the mix.
> 
> There's a fantastic Dungeon Magazine adventure from the tail end of Paizo running Dungeon magazine.  Erik Mona is a MASSIVE Greyhawk nerd and just loves the setting and you can see it in a lot of the adventures that Paizo Dungeon banged out.  I mean, they didn't call it PaizoHawk for nothing.  All three of the first Adventure Paths - Shackled City, Age of Worms and Savage Tides were love letters to Greyhawk.  They really were Greyhawk adventures, just with the serial numbers filed off.
> 
> ...



Whilst I'm sure that does a good showing of Greyhawk, I just don't see how that exact thing couldn't happen in any number of fantasy settings. Which is my point, there's literally nothing stopping these kind of story beats happening in a place like FR (I'm not attached to the realms, it's just serving as the generic fantasy setting). Like dealing with someone that isn't 'good' that's entirely story dependent and just takes the adventure saying they're there, but if you want an actual example from the WotC realms, I'm running dragonheist right now as an evil campaign. I didn't even have to adjust the game for a faction, the game presents the Zhentarim as an option by default. 

Ultimately the in depth parts of FR and GH that matter for these things don't matter to new players, if it's the 'tone' that sets it apart that tone can be imposed on any setting via the adventure you're running. Only fans of those settings will know, appreciate and actual care that certain things are inherent to the setting. 

Whereas other settings offer actual differences in style of play and play options, which is really what people (IMO) want from settings nowadays.


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## Hussar (Jul 21, 2022)

DorkForge said:


> Whilst I'm sure that does a good showing of Greyhawk, I just don't see how that exact thing couldn't happen in any number of fantasy settings. Which is my point, there's literally nothing stopping these kind of story beats happening in a place like FR (I'm not attached to the realms, it's just serving as the generic fantasy setting). Like dealing with someone that isn't 'good' that's entirely story dependent and just takes the adventure saying they're there, but if you want an actual example from the WotC realms, I'm running dragonheist right now as an evil campaign. I didn't even have to adjust the game for a faction, the game presents the Zhentarim as an option by default.
> 
> Ultimately the in depth parts of FR and GH that matter for these things don't matter to new players, if it's the 'tone' that sets it apart that tone can be imposed on any setting via the adventure you're running. Only fans of those settings will know, appreciate and actual care that certain things are inherent to the setting.
> 
> Whereas other settings offer actual differences in style of play and play options, which is really what people (IMO) want from settings nowadays.



I'm not really sure I agree with that actually.  Tone matters.  Like, a lot.

After all, what sets Ravenloft apart from Forgotten Realms?  The only real difference is tone.  You certainly could do horror stories in FR.  Heck, my players joked that the first half of Candlekeep Mysteries feels much more like Ravenloft than Forgotten Realms - they are predominantly horror stories for the first four or five modules.

There's nothing particularly mechanically distinct about, say, Darksun.  More psionics?  Maybe?  But, it's still very distinctly D&D.  Even Spelljammer is actually set (currently anyway) right in Forgotten Realms.  

So, no, I'm going to disagree that play options play much of a role in what people want in settings.  There's extremely little different in the play options between most settings.  Play options aren't what set Eberron apart from Forgotten Realms.  It's almost entirely about tone.


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## wellis (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> After all, what sets Ravenloft apart from Forgotten Realms? The only real difference is tone.



Tone, culture, and tech level. From what I've read of Ravenloft, the Domains are far more humanocentric, the tech level feels more distinctly Renaissance (guns are bigger thing), and it leans more on gothic horror tropes and such.


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## DorkForge (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> I'm not really sure I agree with that actually.  Tone matters.  Like, a lot.
> 
> After all, what sets Ravenloft apart from Forgotten Realms?  The only real difference is tone.  You certainly could do horror stories in FR.  Heck, my players joked that the first half of Candlekeep Mysteries feels much more like Ravenloft than Forgotten Realms - they are predominantly horror stories for the first four or five modules.
> 
> ...




The tone of Raveloft is achieved through it being an inescapable place controlled overall by mysterious forces and immediately, probably by an evil character that's almost like a god in their own domain. That is not the same as just creating a horror game in other settings.

Dark Sun isn't distinctive? A giant desert where you're heavily restricted on resources, where metal weapons are valuable and magic weapons are incredibly precious. where arcane magic not only functions differently but has a social stigma to it. And yes, heavy presence of Psionics as well as other playable races.

The point of Spelljammer is that you get to go on a fantasy spaceship, as well as the variety of weird and wonderful races that come packaged with that.

The wide magic sets Eberron apart from most settings, but typically when players are excited about playing in Eberron they're also excited about playing Eberron options: Changlings, Shifters, and Warforged, not to mention Artificers that fit more naturally in the world.

Ravenloft gave you the change to play a half vampire among other things, I just don't see the claim there isn't much difference for the play options between those settings.

On the other hand, I don't see the difference in play options between GH and any other largely stock fantasy setting.


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## wellis (Jul 21, 2022)

I have to admit unfortunately, perhaps due to Forgotten Realms borrowing quite a bit from Greyhawk, that Greyhawk & Forgotten Realms feel somewhat interchangeable in some ways.


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## Hussar (Jul 21, 2022)

wellis said:


> Tone, culture, and tech level. From what I've read of Ravenloft, the Domains are far more humanocentric, the tech level feels more distinctly Renaissance (guns are bigger thing), and it leans more on gothic horror tropes and such.



Ahh, are we talking about 5e Ravenloft, or earlier, because that will change the answer a bit.

But most of the changes in Darksun are largely cosmetic.  Sure, no metal weapons, but, your mechanics for a sword are still the same - d8 damage and whatnot.  Yes, there's defiling, so, that's a thing.  But, big desert?  That's just tone.  There are certainly honking big deserts in FR where you could have the same monsters, same cities, and races and whatnot.  So, yeah, it's tone that sets the difference, not mechanics.  

I dunno, I seem to feel that most of what you, @DorkForge are pointing to is mostly just flavor stuff.  It's not mechanical differences.  Yup, you can play a warforged in Eberron.  But, then, there's no problem playing warforged in Forgotten Realms too.  I know because I have one right now.  And certainly not the first one either.  

Note, I said that there was very little _mechanically _distinctive about these different settings.  They're all D&D.  The classes are (more or less) exactly the same.  The spells are the same.  A magic missile is still a magic missile no matter what setting you are in.  What really distinguishes these different settings are the tones.  Darksun is all about survival, Man Vs Nature stuff, lots of post-apocalyptic tropes.  Ravenloft is Gothic horror.  Spelljammer is more or less steampunk.  Mechanically?  Not really a whole lot of differences and far more similarities.  But thematically?  Oh, totally different settings.  

Could you do post apocalyptic survival stuff in Forgotten Realms?  Sure.  yeah, you absolutely could.  But, we generally don't.  Same as we generally don't do Gothic Horror or Steampunk.  Because FR is high fantasy.  It's very much good heroes fighting the good fight against the baddies.  Great stuff.  Greyhawk, OTOH, leans far more in the direction of, say, Moorcock to use an older example, or Glen Cook's Black Company series for a newer approach.  

To put it another way, if you were going to set, say, Game of Thrones in a setting - neither of us would use Ravenloft or Darksun, I don't think.  Just totally bad fit.  But, Game of Thrones thematically fits Greyhawk far, far better than Forgotten Realms.  Simply because that's the stories that are typically told in the different settings.  It's not a value judgement at all, in case anyone thinks I think one is superior to the other.  Very much not.  Witcher is another good example of a Greyhawk style setting.  Very morally ambiguous.  Whereas what I know of Wheel of Time or Shanarra (sp?), or Tad William's Dragonbone Chair are far better fits for Forgotten Realms.


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## Micah Sweet (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> I'm not really sure I agree with that actually.  Tone matters.  Like, a lot.
> 
> After all, what sets Ravenloft apart from Forgotten Realms?  The only real difference is tone.  You certainly could do horror stories in FR.  Heck, my players joked that the first half of Candlekeep Mysteries feels much more like Ravenloft than Forgotten Realms - they are predominantly horror stories for the first four or five modules.
> 
> ...



The story of those settings is what makes them matter.  That's why I was so irritated with VRGtR.  They changed the story.


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## Hussar (Jul 21, 2022)

Micah Sweet said:


> The story of those settings is what makes them matter.  That's why I was so irritated with VRGtR.  They changed the story.



For all the things we disagree about, this I am totally with you on.  And, a perfect way to phrase it.  It's the "story of the setting" that matters.

((to be honest, on the specifics of Van Richten's Guide, I have no opinion.  Haven't read it and haven't even looked at it.     But, I totally agree with the basic sentiment.))


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## Micah Sweet (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> For all the things we disagree about, this I am totally with you on.  And, a perfect way to phrase it.  It's the "story of the setting" that matters.
> 
> ((to be honest, on the specifics of Van Richten's Guide, I have no opinion.  Haven't read it and haven't even looked at it.     But, I totally agree with the basic sentiment.))



Nice to find some common ground.  Worth calling out when it happens.


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## wellis (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> Ahh, are we talking about 5e Ravenloft, or earlier, because that will change the answer a bit.



Earlier I guess. What are the big changes for 5e Ravenloft? I've heard itbwasn't considered a great conversion?


Hussar said:


> But most of the changes in Darksun are largely cosmetic. Sure, no metal weapons, but, your mechanics for a sword are still the same - d8 damage and whatnot. Yes, there's defiling, so, that's a thing. But, big desert? That's just tone. There are certainly honking big deserts in FR where you could have the same monsters, same cities, and races and whatnot. So, yeah, it's tone that sets the difference, not mechanics.



Dark Sun has breakage issues for weapons (and armor I think) and extreme heat. Hence why metal weapons are especially prized for their ability to go through the armors of the setting much better.

Also, all the nasty city-state rulers (though as I recall Hamanu was pretty nuanced for an evil bastard).

Also, Dark Sun feels a little limited as well. It's a really cool setting but adventure reasons might revolve around certain themes far more than others.


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## Hussar (Jul 21, 2022)

wellis said:


> Earlier I guess. What are the big changes for 5e Ravenloft? I've heard itbwasn't considered a great conversion?
> 
> Dark Sun has breakage issues for weapons (and armor I think) and extreme heat. Hence why metal weapons are especially prized for their ability to go through the armors of the setting much better.
> 
> ...




Yeah there’s a danger here in giving too much credence to criticism. Raven loft is an unparalleled success in 5e. Massively popular. So popular that they actually went back to the well for a second book. Nothing in 5e has gotten two books. 

So I’d say that despite some grumbling, 5e rave loft is a smashing success. 

But again sure there are some setting specific mechanics in Dark Sun. Although, again stuff like weapon breakage and whatnot is part of the overall post apocalyptic theme. 

Like was said, it’s the story of a setting that really sets a setting apart.


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## Willie the Duck (Jul 21, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> For now,  but there are plans for Kobra Kai spin offs,  fans are taking about a Mr. Miyagi origin spin off.
> 
> And Manga and Anime have become huge in the west,  with Manga out selling DC and Marvel.



Right, but it is still one property. I mean, I don't want to dismiss the power of one IP (after all, _300_ made hoplites and spear-soldiers cool again for TTRPGs almost solo), but in general it takes a lot more than that to make a fad or trend.

Manga and Anime are completely different things whose relevance to the discussion I don't understand. They happen to be Japanese initiated art forms/movements, but that's not the same thing as the (centered on the) 80s western martial artist/ninja fad. There are sometimes martial artists or ninjas in Manga and Anime, but not consistently or I'd say even most of the time.



Umbran said:


> I don't know.
> 
> Perhaps because they were, in fact, wargamers, and such a game was simply outside their wheelhouse?



I'm not clear on what you mean. It was their wheelhouse -- Gary played _Braunstein_ and other domain-centered play. That's what he expected people to do with their characters* once they hit high level. Once he realized that it wasn't wargamers, but instead mostly high school and college kids new to the scene who were picking up D&D, he could have made similar rules (or even bought/licensed _Braunstein_). 
*if anything, I think this notion that you were supposed to play them as leaders and rulers gets overblown, and oftentimes that was just the explanation of what they did when you retired them.


Reynard said:


> There are indeed a lot of ways to run a dungeon crawl, but we were talking explicitly about Old school, Greyhawk era dungeon crawling -- which, while not monolithic, definitely fits intoa  tighter definition than it does in the modern era. Saying one doesn't need to alter 5E to make it work for that era of dungeon crawling is, IMO, entirely ignoring the procedures and playstyle of that kind of play.



Exactly what the old school sensibilities 5e has are really up to interpretation. IMO, 5e could be hammered into place to do this, but to really make it the same beast as bitd Greyhawk era dungeon crawling, a lot would have to be modified. Stuff like eliminate light cantrips, make treasure obtained the XP metric, makes sessions end when you left the dungeon to rest, and so forth.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 21, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> Right, but it is still one property. I mean, I don't want to dismiss the power of one IP (after all, _300_ made hoplites and spear-soldiers cool again for TTRPGs almost solo), but in general it takes a lot more than that to make a fad or trend.
> 
> Manga and Anime are completely different things whose relevance to the discussion I don't understand. They happen to be Japanese initiated art forms/movements, but that's not the same thing as the (centered on the) 80s western martial artist/ninja fad. There are sometimes martial artists or ninjas in Manga and Anime, but not consistently or I'd say even most of the time.
> 
> ...




 It's shows that there is still a very strong interest in Asian cultures,  especially Japan. 

 There was also Shang Chi movie that is one of the few marvel movies in the last few years that didn't under preform for expectations. It's on my to watch list.


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## Parmandur (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> Nothing in 5e has gotten two books.



Ahcshually, Critical Role has two books. But I think that proves your point.


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## TwoSix (Jul 21, 2022)

wellis said:


> Earlier I guess. What are the big changes for 5e Ravenloft? I've heard itbwasn't considered a great conversion?



Personally, I think 5e Ravenloft is much better, but I was never a big fan of the 2e original, so I'm biased.

5e leans into the fact that the domains are meant to be staged dioramas that turn on when the PCs arrive; there's no real reason for Ravenloft as a whole to be a coherent, holistic world.


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## Umbran (Jul 21, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> I'm not clear on what you mean. It was their wheelhouse -- Gary played _Braunstein_ and other domain-centered play.




Playing a game doesn't mean _designing_ it is in your wheelhouse. 



Willie the Duck said:


> That's what he expected people to do with their characters* once they hit high level.




I see a bunch of folks asserting this, but no quotes from the man stating that he expected folks to actually_ go to another game_.


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## Micah Sweet (Jul 21, 2022)

TwoSix said:


> Personally, I think 5e Ravenloft is much better, but I was never a big fan of the 2e original, so I'm biased.
> 
> 5e leans into the fact that the domains are meant to be staged dioramas that turn on when the PCs arrive; there's no real reason for Ravenloft as a whole to be a coherent, holistic world.



There's no reason "for you" for Ravenloft ri be coherent. To me, however, the story of the setting was deeply damaged.

My feelings on this issue are on record, though, and I'm not going to clutter this thread with them.


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## Reynard (Jul 21, 2022)

Don't you hate it when someone edits their comment in the time it took you to hit "reply"?


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## Von Ether (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> Yeah there’s a danger here in giving too much credence to criticism. Raven loft is an unparalleled success in 5e. Massively popular. So popular that they actually went back to the well for a second book. Nothing in 5e has gotten two books.
> 
> So I’d say that despite some grumbling, 5e rave loft is a smashing success.
> 
> ...



It seems that the true heart of the discussion is that different people are using the word, "tone," to mean different things.

Like GH, FR, and DL all share similar themes but have different atmospheres or moods. While the other D&D settings have wildly different themes AND different moods. (and if someone wants to come up with even more accurate terms, I'll take them.)

LOL! In that respect, Greyhawk and Eberron are closer cousins where things are more morally gray and the shadow of past wars darken today, along with the threat of forces trying to start a new war on the horizon that will offer more misery than honor.

Intelligent construct soldiers with no country or Intelligent swords fighting a forgotten war makes me think that the only thing stopping more GH players from checking out Eberron is the magi-punk ascetic and nostalgia.  And gaming is high subjective and ascetic so #nobadwrongfun for both GH fans and Eberron fans.  I'm just saying a GH GM could play up a lot of the great Eberron pieces that get lost in the also wonderful pulpy shuffle.


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## TwoSix (Jul 21, 2022)

Micah Sweet said:


> There's no reason "for you" for Ravenloft ri be coherent. To me, however, the story of the setting was deeply damaged.
> 
> My feelings on this issue are on record, though, and I'm not going to clutter this thread with them.



Any statement I make (or really, anyone makes), should be assumed to be my opinion only.  The fact that I don't think Ravenloft needs to be coherent doesn't impact your beliefs otherwise.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 21, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> I'm not clear on what you mean. It was their wheelhouse -- Gary played _Braunstein_ and other domain-centered play. That's what he expected people to do with their characters* once they hit high level. Once he realized that it wasn't wargamers, but instead mostly high school and college kids new to the scene who were picking up D&D, he could have made similar rules (or even bought/licensed _Braunstein_).
> *if anything, I think this notion that you were supposed to play them as leaders and rulers gets overblown, and oftentimes that was just the explanation of what they did when you retired them.



A couple of points of historical clarification.

I don't know whether Gary ever played any of the Braunstein derivatives, but as far as I'm aware he's definitely not recorded as playing the original.  That was Dave Arneson and a bunch of the Twin Cities gamers.

The original Braunstein wasn't a domain management game.  It was a scenario set in a Napoleonic-era Prussian town (named Braunstein) where each of the players was given an individual person as a role- like the mayor, the head of the local cavalry unit, a student agitator, etc.  Very similar to a modern Live Action Roleplaying Game of the sort the Society for  Interactive Literature started running at sci-fi cons in 1983.  Each character Dave Wesely assigned had goals to achieve.  I believe he initially anticipated that the individual characters scenario would inform the setup of an army-scale wargame scenario to follow, based on what the players did, but in practice everyone enjoyed the individual character play so much they didn't even get to the wargame.

Subsequent "Braunsteins" followed, with different settings, the name being kind of generified.  One of the most famous examples being the banana republic game set in a South or Central American country on the brink of revolution, where Dave Arneson (assigned a "peaceful revolutionary" role with a goal of distributing leaflets to other revolutionaries, and more for getting them to other civilians) famously tricked other players into thinking his character was a CIA agent, ended the game flying out of the country on a helicopter with most of the country's treasury, and, reminded that he got points for distributing the leaflets, said something like "Oh yeah, I dump those out the side door, so they rain over the town."









						Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games
					

In 2005 I was standing near the registration booths at GenCon, flipping through the event catalog while the posse debated where to go first. I had already scoured the listings online, but as I glanced across the pages I spotted a word I had somehow missed before: Braunstein.  I knew what Braunstei



					arsludi.lamemage.com
				




To my recollection, Dave Arneson first described his idea for the game that became Blackmoor as "a medieval-style Braunstein game" in his Corner of the Tabletop newsletter, when advertising that he'd be running it and looking for players.

While OD&D is definitely written to support the idea of high-level Fighting Men claiming domains, building castles and clearing the area around them of monsters, and receiving tax income, I'm not sure how much of that Gary actually did that way.  I do believe that such play was characteristic of Dave Arneson's original Blackmoor, where players often controlled factions and larger forces, and a certain amount of oppositional play was common, and probably was adjudicated using Chainmail or other wargame rules for the battles, though I don't have much documentation on that.  I expect there's more detail on that in the doc film _Secrets of Blackmoor_, but I still haven't watched it.

I agree with you, though, that it's a little strange that TSR didn't come up with and publish some more rules for running a domain some time after the 1974 set gave us (pretty bare bones) parameters, given that AD&D continued to imply that this would be common of high level play, and added in all those charts of what kind of followers would be attracted to PCs once they hit name level, and basic details in the PH about what kind of strongholds the different classes could build.  The D&D Companion set more or less covered that base in 1984, but only for the subsidiary product line.  I don't think there was ever anything similar for AD&D.



Willie the Duck said:


> Right, but it is still one property. I mean, I don't want to dismiss the power of one IP (after all, _300_ made hoplites and spear-soldiers cool again for TTRPGs almost solo), but in general it takes a lot more than that to make a fad or trend.
> 
> Manga and Anime are completely different things whose relevance to the discussion I don't understand. They happen to be Japanese initiated art forms/movements, but that's not the same thing as the (centered on the) 80s western martial artist/ninja fad. There are sometimes martial artists or ninjas in Manga and Anime, but not consistently or I'd say even most of the time.
> 
> ...






Willie the Duck said:


> Exactly what the old school sensibilities 5e has are really up to interpretation. IMO, 5e could be hammered into place to do this, but to really make it the same beast as bitd Greyhawk era dungeon crawling, a lot would have to be modified. Stuff like eliminate light cantrips, make treasure obtained the XP metric, makes sessions end when you left the dungeon to rest, and so forth.



Right.  I don't think we'd want WotC to try to make it "the same beast".  But with a few tweaks (like maybe removing light cantrips, and definitely adding a dungeon exploring play procedure) we could fairly easily have a new version which pays homage to the old while leaving behind elements which players quickly abandoned as frustrating and tiresome (like the combination of player mapping based on DM description along with teleporters and similar shenanigans to frustrate mappers).


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## Reynard (Jul 21, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> Braunstein: the Roots of Roleplaying Games
> 
> 
> In 2005 I was standing near the registration booths at GenCon, flipping through the event catalog while the posse debated where to go first. I had already scoured the listings online, but as I glanced across the pages I spotted a word I had somehow missed before: Braunstein.  I knew what Braunstei
> ...



Thanks for that link. It was a fun read.


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## Willie the Duck (Jul 21, 2022)

Umbran said:


> Playing a game doesn't mean _designing_ it is in your wheelhouse.



True, and maybe it was just put off since no one (Gygax, Arneson, Perren, etc.) wanted to build the thing. Still, they were learning _all_ of this as they went along. If they saw this need, they certainly had a road map to making an attempt (they certainly didn't hit it out of the park with all the things they attempted).


Umbran said:


> I see a bunch of folks asserting this, but no quotes from the man stating that he expected folks to actually_ go to another game_.



You're right. This is conjecture people are making based on what he himself was doing*. If he did not intend people to switch games, then the sparseness of rule structure within D&D for that part of the level range all the more of an issue (I guess pointing towards my other speculation above: that this is overblown and you really were just 'supposed' to retire the character and say they were being a ruler and general).  
*playing _Chainmail _battles, _Braunstein _city game, and _proto-D&D_ dungeon crawls in the same world/scenario.

I guess my primary point/thin I am wondering is -- assuming they realized that the buyer base for D&D wasn't all people just like them (something I think all think they realized, as they have talked about the high-schoolers and non-wargaming college kids buying the game), and realized that people were playing into the post-name-level range (certainly the forward to _GD&H_ suggests they realized this), why did it take 10-11 years (whenever C in BECMI came out) for there to be any Followers & Fortifications rules past who you get and the costs of building castles? It just seems like a disconnect (mind you, the whole thread here is highlighting the disconnect TSR had with its' base).


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## Reynard (Jul 21, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> why did it take 10-11 years (whenever C in BECMI came out) for there to be any Followers & Fortifications rules past who you get and the costs of building castles? It just seems like a disconnect (mind you, the whole thread here is highlighting the disconnect TSR had with its' base).



Followers are in the 1978 AD&D PHB at least and I _think_ in the OD&D rules as well. It did not take until Companion. Companion just formalized the domain managements and mass battle rules that has been bouncing around half written.


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## Willie the Duck (Jul 21, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> A couple of points of historical clarification.
> 
> I don't know whether Gary ever played any of the Braunstein derivatives, but as far as I'm aware he's definitely not recorded as playing the original.  That was Dave Arneson and a bunch of the Twin Cities gamers.
> 
> ...



Right. Thank you for the clarification. I was being fast and lose with the individuals and the terminology. Some of it could have been Braunstein (or "Braunsteins"), and it wasn't all Gary (I was mostly focusing on him because he was in charge of the direction of the published game in this era). Some of it could have been Chainmail (your followers were largely troops after all). Some of it could be who knows what that wasn't consistent or hasn't made it into the larger narrative. Or it could be nothing (and what they really did at name level was retire, that's my second conjecture point). 



Mannahnin said:


> I agree with you, though, that it's a little strange that TSR didn't come up with and publish some more rules for running a domain some time after the 1974 set gave us (pretty bare bones) parameters, given that AD&D continued to imply that this would be common of high level play, and added in all those charts of what kind of followers would be attracted to PCs once they hit name level, and basic details in the PH about what kind of strongholds the different classes could build.



Yes, this is the meat of my point -- regardless of what the actual 'it' consisted of (domain management or wars or whatever), followers and a vague suggestion that you should do something with them is what fighters got while magic users kept getting spells. This survived past the point where TSR learned the demographics of who was buying the game, and that they were playing their characters past name level.


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## Willie the Duck (Jul 21, 2022)

Reynard said:


> Followers are in the 1978 AD&D PHB at least and I _think_ in the OD&D rules as well. It did not take until Companion. Companion just formalized the domain managements and mass battle rules that has been bouncing around half written.



That's _"who you get and the costs of building castles."_


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## Jer (Jul 21, 2022)

Mannahnin said:


> While OD&D is definitely written to support the idea of high-level Fighting Men claiming domans, building castles and clearing the area around them of monsters, and receiving tax income, I'm not sure how much of that Gary actually did that way.



I think those rules were meant to be aspirational.  As in "some day your character will have enough money and power to stop mucking around in holes in the ground grubbing for gold and be a king".  The Conan arc. I also suspect that they were aspirational for Gygax in the sense that he probably had every intention at one point of writing those rules eventually, but then the "mucking around in holes in the ground grubbing for gold" game got to be so popular and lucrative that he focused on expanding that until the brand got so lucrative that he ran off to California to do the TSR Entertainment thing.

Like another project that Gygax abandoned and wasn't able to complete (_cough_ Temple of Elemental Evil) Frank Mentzer came in and provided the rules that had been promised and he put them into the Companion Set.  But by that point AD&D and D&D had divided into separate game lines, the Companion rules were tied to the "perceived as for kids (at least in the US)" D&D side of the game, and so AD&D players mostly just didn't know that they existed - and those who did know they existed thought of them more as the endgame of a game they didn't play.


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## Reynard (Jul 21, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> That's _"who you get and the costs of building castles."_



Fair enough. The domain management rules and mass combat rules did not appear out of the ether, though. People are doing it in various ways before (and after!) it was formalized.


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## Mannahnin (Jul 21, 2022)

Willie the Duck said:


> Right. Thank you for the clarification. I was being fast and lose with the individuals and the terminology. Some of it could have been Braunstein (or "Braunsteins"), and it wasn't all Gary (I was mostly focusing on him because he was in charge of the direction of the published game in this era). Some of it could have been Chainmail (your followers were largely troops after all). Some of it could be who knows what that wasn't consistent or hasn't made it into the larger narrative. Or it could be nothing (and what they really did at name level was retire, that's my second conjecture point).



Which is kind of a funny thing, because we do have some documented snippets of Gary and Rob Kuntz' campaign, and we know that characters did get up to the teens of levels but continue adventuring.  There is also documentation showing things like, e.g., Rob's character Robilar built his own castle and had (IIRC) two green dragons he mastered as followers/mounts.  Robilar also had an army of orcish followers he used to help him in the Tomb of Horrors.  So clearly they were doing both in their own games- continuing to adventure at high level (instead of retiring) and doing some domain play, but not publishing a system for the latter.



Willie the Duck said:


> Yes, this is the meat of my point -- regardless of what the actual 'it' consisted of (domain management or wars or whatever), followers and a vague suggestion that you should do something with them is what fighters got while magic users kept getting spells. This survived past the point where TSR learned the demographics of who was buying the game, and that they were playing their characters past name level.






Jer said:


> I think those rules were meant to be aspirational.  As in "some day your character will have enough money and power to stop mucking around in holes in the ground grubbing for gold and be a king".  The Conan arc. I also suspect that they were aspirational for Gygax in the sense that he probably had every intention at one point of writing those rules eventually, but then the "mucking around in holes in the ground grubbing for gold" game got to be so popular and lucrative that he focused on expanding that until the brand got so lucrative that he ran off to California to do the TSR Entertainment thing.
> 
> Like another project that Gygax abandoned and wasn't able to complete (_cough_ Temple of Elemental Evil) Frank Mentzer came in and provided the rules that had been promised and he put them into the Companion Set.  But by that point AD&D and D&D had divided into separate game lines, the Companion rules were tied to the "perceived as for kids (at least in the US)" D&D side of the game, and so AD&D players mostly just didn't know that they existed - and those who did know they existed thought of them more as the endgame of a game they didn't play.



I suspect Jer is right.  That they intended domain rulership to be part of what high level PCs did, but they had all these younger and non-wargamer players coming in (the sci-fi folks, like Lee Gold's crew in CA, were into it as of the first year) and making up more of the player base than veteran wargamers, and focused more on support for adventuring. 

I would guess that they did all the domain management & wargame play more ad hoc, informed by their prior experience with the Castle & Crusade Society, where they were accustomed to running factions with a titular lord as head to occasionally RP as.

Still a little odd that they never fleshed out the domain management stuff into actual published rules until Mentzer got to it, but then, OTOH, maybe no one else in the company saw it as a real marketable thing.  We know Gary published/wrote very little D&D material after 1980; mostly just a few modules in the years after.






						Gary Gygax bibliography - Wikipedia
					






					en.wikipedia.org


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## Maxperson (Jul 21, 2022)

CleverNickName said:


> Yeah, I'm going to echo one of your earlier posts.  I strongly disagree, but I'm not gonna argue about it.



You would need to change 5e, but it would be a minor change.  You'd have to ditch passive skills, especially perception.  That way players would have to direct you to exactly where they are searching for secret doors and traps, rather than just noticing them as they walk.  Unless you're an elf!


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## Mannahnin (Jul 21, 2022)

Maxperson said:


> You would need to change 5e, but it would be a minor change.  You'd have to ditch passive skills, especially perception.  That way players would have to direct you to exactly where they are searching for secret doors and traps, rather than just noticing them as they walk.  Unless you're an elf!



You don't even have to do that, as @iserith 's procedures show.


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## Willie the Duck (Jul 21, 2022)

Reynard said:


> Fair enough. The domain management rules and mass combat rules did not appear out of the ether, though. People are doing it in various ways before (and after!) it was formalized.



I must not be making myself clear, cause that was at least partly my point. 


Mannahnin said:


> Which is kind of a funny thing, because we do have some documented snippets of Gary and Rob Kuntz' campaign, and we know that characters did get up to the teens of levels but continue adventuring.  There is also documentation showing things like, e.g., Rob's character Robilar built his own castle and had (IIRC) two green dragons he mastered as followers/mounts.  Robilar also had an army of orcish followers he used to help him in the Tomb of Horrors.  So clearly they were doing both in their own games- continuing to adventure at high level (instead of retiring) and doing some domain play, but not publishing a system for the latter.



That does sidle things away from the 'actually you just retired and said you led armies' theory. I would have been surprised if there was perfect consistency on any of this bitd (any more than there is now, I suppose). After a while of wanting to run armies, you want to clear dungeons; after a while of that, running armies sounds like fun. Interesting how my initial games as a kid, where eventually you ended up with castles and pet dragons (minus the eventual princess girlfriends, but I imagine Kuntz wasn't 8-12 at the time) was not far off how they ended up playing. 


Mannahnin said:


> I suspect Jer is right.  That they intended domain rulership to be part of what high level PCs did, but they had all these younger and non-wargamer players coming in (the sci-fi folks, like Lee Gold's crew in CA, were into it as of the first year) and making up more of the player base than veteran wargamers, and focused more on support for adventuring.



Which is part of the two-pronged confusion -- on one hand, even if rulership wasn't what everyone wanted, they could have made something between '74 and '84 (and anything for AD&D before _Birthright_), even as an optional supplement (they certainly put out niche material). On the other, if they were instead focusing on these other players, why did they not put out more stuff for post-name levels? Sure some 9-14 modules, but like some supplemental rules for people who didn't want to do the followers bit.


Mannahnin said:


> I would guess that they did all the domain management & wargame play more ad hoc, informed by their prior experience with the Castle & Crusade Society, where they were accustomed to running factions with a titular lord as head to occasionally RP as.



That is what I meant earlier, perhaps mis-attributing it to Braunstein.


Mannahnin said:


> Still a little odd that they never fleshed out the domain management stuff into actual published rules until Mentzer got to it, but then, OTOH, maybe no one else in the company saw it as a real marketable thing. We know Gary published/wrote very little D&D material after 1980; mostly just a few modules in the years after.



Given the early... frustration they had with people trying to take the game in directions they didn't like, it really seems like something like this would have made it into the oD&D supplement line. Like, instead of _Gods, Demigods and Heroes_. That's the timeframe where I really think it is missing from the logical timeline. Of course, yes, the logical actual explanation is: they didn't release it instead of _GD&H_, they released _GD&H._ Why didn't they release it next? No one got around to it until its' time had already passed.


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## Micah Sweet (Jul 21, 2022)

TwoSix said:


> Any statement I make (or really, anyone makes), should be assumed to be my opinion only.  The fact that I don't think Ravenloft needs to be coherent doesn't impact your beliefs otherwise.



I wanted to make it clear to folks new to the issue that your opinion was not the only one on the subject.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 21, 2022)

Hussar said:


> Yeah there’s a danger here in giving too much credence to criticism. Raven loft is an unparalleled success in 5e. Massively popular. So popular that they actually went back to the well for a second book. Nothing in 5e has gotten two books.
> 
> So I’d say that despite some grumbling, 5e rave loft is a smashing success.
> 
> ...




 We know FR is getting revisit in 2024.


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## Hussar (Jul 22, 2022)

Von Ether said:


> It seems that the true heart of the discussion is that different people are using the word, "tone," to mean different things.
> 
> Like GH, FR, and DL all share similar themes but have different atmospheres or moods. While the other D&D settings have wildly different themes AND different moods. (and if someone wants to come up with even more accurate terms, I'll take them.)
> 
> ...



Yeah, I'd pretty much completely agree with everything say here.  GH and Eberron do share a lot of DNA.  I'd say that the difference is mostly asthetic really.  Eberron tends to lend itself to a more latter era style - large nation states, established countries, that sort of thing.  Makes sense given the inspiration.  Whereas I'd say Greyhawk is a bit earlier in approach - more 12th, 13th century (with a smattering of anachronisms in there) - more city states and small kingdoms all over the place.  Less steampunk in GH and more Mid-20th century fantasy.

But, yes, I think you absolutely could port adventures between GH and Eberron fairly easily given the tones and themes.


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## teitan (Jul 22, 2022)

People keep comparing Dark Sun sales and Planescape or Spelljammer and Planescape. So something to consider here. When Spelljammer was release it was early in 2e so when the new edition was still “hot” and it still failed within 15 months. It’s lifetime sold better than Planescape very true. The core boxed set. 

Dark Sun was also somewhat early and was designed to help sell copies of the new Psionics Handbook. Still a “hot product” with a new edition, not quite brick walling yet. When Dark Sun came out Spelljammer and Dragonlance were in the case of SJ, dead, and in the case of DL, in a long twilight. That’s to give perspective. 

By the time Planescape came out though 2e had hit the brick wall and I don’t know if anyone remembers how the advertising campaign for Planescape was tied to the BoA but the two coincided with each other and the Manual of the Planes in the BoA as the common reference point. 

The sales in 94-95 though are in a rapidly changed AD&D2e market and not long before the bankruptcy which was preambled with a long period of drought in product availability as TSR got hit with a bill for returned novels, misfires in other game lines like the dice game, Spellfire, and really insane business decisions. 

Planescape was one of those settings though where when you were done reading it you were like this is sooooo cool,  now what do I do with it? I don’t think we ever really got a good answer until March of the Modrons and Dead Gods. 

The planes were thought of as high level adventure locations, not easily accessible and by then TSR products had become incestuous in nature, referring to each other this rendering them difficult to use unless you had a large library. By the time Planescape was released, for example, it made unnecessary references to Legends & Lore, but it was no longer commonly available and TSR didn’t have the resources available for a reprint. They would be common in the products early lifetime cycle and throughout products developed in the preWOTC but out such as when they released the new GH setting in 1998 that referred readers to From the Ashes for some material rather than including it in those books (why not just reprint From the Ashes then or at least reprint the material from FtA in the books?). 

Planescape was a setting that developed its reputation and status as a result of time, it’s lore and word of mouth. Especially the late life cycle when Cook and Baur worked on it going into 3e development and the consolidation of 2e settings under the AD&D. The 3e developers were strongly influenced by their own work in crafting 3e by nature and so Planescape was a massive influence on subsequent settings.

So I don’t think with Planescape it’s so much that sales were so gonzo amazing. It came out at the beginning of a bad time and the DS revised box was a poor seller as well, SJ was canned pretty quickly early in the edition. I think it was shorted sales for sure due to the mid edition financial shortfalls for TSR going into the bankruptcy but Planescape was a bridge between pre3e into 3e lore. 

Planescape was developed by Zeb Cook and then a lot of the best elements later developed by Monte Cook and Skip Williams. Developers on 3e with Jonathan Tweet from WOTC. Their work on monsters and lore in Planescape would be a huge influence on 3e without directly referencing PS itself. 

The video game itself in 1999, right before they launched 3e, also helped to build the brand for Planescape. It was a different video game and concept and expressed the ideas of Planescape very well. 

So the low sales on Planescape do not surprise me because 1: it wasn’t clear what to DO with it and 2: TSR and their financial issues making even the key D&D products unavailable for a long stretch of time such that what was on the shelf was what you could get so good luck and 3: it was definitely a niche setting.


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## teitan (Jul 22, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> We know FR is getting revisit in 2024.



We do not.


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## teitan (Jul 22, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> That's exactly why it is such a popular Setting, same as Forgotten Realms and Exandria. Gimmicks are not as useful for game proposal as generic material is.



The argument it’s a generic setting like FR is bunk anyway! I think we agree though. It’s like saying Lankhmar is generic fantasy. No… Lankhmar is a lot dingier, a lot greyer. FR is very much Dragon Prince and Greyhawk is a lot more Goblin Slayer.


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## teitan (Jul 22, 2022)

Blue Orange said:


> They
> 
> If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I was kind of wondering why Torment was so popular but they never resurrected the setting after 3e. Thanks for clarifying on 2.



The argument why they didn’t resurrect Planescape was that settings fracture the market and drain resources from the main game because they require support so it was rolled into the generic D&D supplements in the late 2e era with A Guide to Hell and A Paladin in Hell. Then in 3e was just part of the lore. The Faction War was written out of the Planes in late 2e PS to wrap up the metaplot. 

They decided to support 1 setting, Forgotten Realms, because historically, it was the most consistent seller across supplements and setting materials by a wide margin and the novels were the most consistent money makers. Greyhawk was supported by the RPGA and used as examples in the core rulebooks as the “generic” references as the iconic D&D setting with the Great Wheel (Planescape) as the iconic example of a D&D cosmology. 

Eberron was rolled out in 3.5 to highlight the new edition and new design philosophy that had become the norm with Dragonlance getting a new book and supplements licensed out to Margaret Weis and Ravenloft being licensed to White Wolf for the Sword & Sorcery imprint. The other settings were supported by officially approved fan sites that got the WOTC deal of approval rather than dedicated financial resources. 

In 4e they cut back setting support entirely to two core books, a player and a DM’s book plus an adventure that spun out of the DM’s book. Dark Sun got its own monster book and FR eventually got a couple more adventure books and a setting supplement to go with the Neverwinter game while being supported by Adventurer’s League. Sigil existed in the 4e cosmology.


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## Hussar (Jul 22, 2022)

@teitan - I think you really hit it on the head for me.

Planescape is a fantastic setting to read.  But, once you're done reading, it's not an easy setting to use.  I know that describes, almost exactly, what my feelings on the setting were.  It was just something that was there, but, I could never figure out what to do with it.


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## jedijon (Jul 22, 2022)

Is anybody just plain confused by the hash marks (each one year apart) vs the updates (each 6 months)?

So if the first point on the line graph is at 300k and that’s the back half of a year, the next two points on the line are 90k and 100k—then sales in the first [PARTIAL] year were 300k, and 190k in the following [FULL] year. Right?

Surely these dots/points are sales velocity…the current actual sale # but annualized for what the sales WOULD BE across a whole year??? Without legend it’s not easy to conclude with certainty.

Whatever the correct reading — wow does it ever seem like a bad idea to support a product for more than a year. Two for exceptionally well selling products…but you’d made 80% of your sales or more even then. And core materials, even that crawls to a halt after 5. Heck the whole hobby appears to hibernate by the mid 90s.


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## Parmandur (Jul 22, 2022)

teitan said:


> The argument it’s a generic setting like FR is bunk anyway! I think we agree though. It’s like saying Lankhmar is generic fantasy. No… Lankhmar is a lot dingier, a lot greyer. FR is very much Dragon Prince and Greyhawk is a lot more Goblin Slayer.



Generic is no insult from me, I assure you: particular in RPGs where giving people solid tropes to hold onto is so important.


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## Henadic Theologian (Jul 22, 2022)

Parmandur said:


> Generic is no insult from me, I assure you: particular in RPGs where giving people solid tropes to hold onto is so important.




 A lot of people equate generic with boring. Personally I don't think generic is a particularly accurate term anyways. 

 Below is the defination of generic,  FR is not generic. 

ge·ner·ic

/jəˈnerik/

adjective

adjective: generic

1.

characteristic of or relating to a class or group of things; not specific.

"chèvre is a generic term for all goat's milk cheese"

Similar:

general

common

collective

nonspecific

inclusive

all-inclusive

all-encompassing

broad

comprehensive

blanket

umbrella

sweeping

universal

cross-disciplinary

interdisciplinary

multidisciplinary

Opposite:

specific

(of goods, especially medicinal drugs) having no brand name; not protected by a registered trademark.

"generic aspirin"

Similar:

unbranded

untrademarked

nonproprietary

Opposite:

branded

DEROGATORY

lacking imagination or individuality; predictable and unoriginal.

"generic dance-floor fillers"

2.

BIOLOGY

relating to a genus.

noun

noun: generic; plural noun: generics

a consumer product having no brand name or registered trademark.

"substituting generics for brand-name drugs"


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## teitan (Jul 22, 2022)

jedijon said:


> Is anybody just plain confused by the hash marks (each one year apart) vs the updates (each 6 months)?
> 
> So if the first point on the line graph is at 300k and that’s the back half of a year, the next two points on the line are 90k and 100k—then sales in the first [PARTIAL] year were 300k, and 190k in the following [FULL] year. Right?
> 
> ...



The mid 90s is when TSR’s debts came home to roost and Random House returned a ton of product to them and they couldn’t pay the bills so yeah D&D tanked over night.


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## Parmandur (Jul 22, 2022)

Henadic Theologian said:


> A lot of people equate generic with boring. Personally I don't think generic is a particularly accurate term anyways.



They also equate Vanilla with boring, when literal wars have been fought over how desirable Vanilla is. When I say the Forgotten Realms is "generic," I mean it is archetypal of the tropes of the Fantasy genre: when Joe or Jane Bloe off the street is asked what constitutes "Fantasy fiction," odds are that the Forgotten Realms has them covered.


Henadic Theologian said:


> characteristic of or relating to a class or group of things



Namely, Heroic Fantasy tropes, or really any Fantasy tropes: you can deal with Pharohs and Aslan, and every kind of Fantasy has a corner in the Realms. See also all the below which I feel readily apply to the Forgotten Realms 


Henadic Theologian said:


> collective





Henadic Theologian said:


> inclusive
> 
> all-inclusive
> 
> ...





Henadic Theologian said:


> sweeping
> 
> universal
> 
> ...


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## GreyLord (Jul 22, 2022)

BenRiggs said:


> Ben Riggs here!
> These numbers are taken from internal company documents I've been given. As such, they are apparently what the company considered settings. Your points are well taken. But I'm a historian at the mercy of what data has trickled down to us from the past. There's tons of data I don't have. Everything in your post for example. Also, I have no data on the vast majority of novels, and the vast majority of adventures.




Late to reply here, and perhaps you already were able to do this and have that data.  Contact Random House.  They probably still have the data...somewhere.  

You'll need to contact the main offices most likely, if you haven't already.  Get an appointment with the CFO or at least have them enable you to get a contact within the main archives for their financial records.  They should have some records on the books sales and returns (so not complete information, but a good deal of information).  

A LOT of money came from novels in the 90s from what I understand.


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