Quote from: Armchair Gamer;833036I've heard persistent rumors that Ravenloft was second only to the Forgotten Realms at some points (and at others nearly dipped to cancellation levels), but the only solid numbers I've ever seen come from the early 90s TSR catalogs, and even those require some parsing and have been disputed. Unfortunately, my copies are half a continent away at this point.

One of my first campaigns, when I was like 13 or something, was set in Ravenloft and run by an older (20s) guy from the local after-school activities center/club. He ran it out of the old AD&D box for Ravenloft. It was a blast, gothic horror vampires and sword-fighting and what have you. We players fucked up the campaign of course, we were young and stupid and had an idiot in the group whose response to everything was "my CE wizard attacks him". Still we had a good time, fondly remember that setting.

I found the D20 edition in a bookshop some years later and got all excited. Then I briefly looked through it. They had rules for halflings. And all the art was the same generic mid-fantasy shit you'd see in the worst of the early 2000s third-party D20 drivel that flooded the market at the time. Halflings in fucking Ravenloft? Guys in scale-mail(e)? Wizards throwing magic missiles? Fuck that shit, lame as all hell. Ravenloft was good becauseit had a very clear tone, gothig horror, and they fucked it up by trying to make it adhere to the worst of the blandness and streamlining that came with the 3rd ed. A terrible shame.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;833090And here's something, if Greyhawk is doing so well, why is it in 4 and 5e, they've more or less ditched it for FR?  Right now, they're porting Temple of Elemental Evil, the original adventure which was in Greyhawk over to Forgotten Realms, renamed it Princes of The Apocalypse.  And didn't they do the same for Keep on The Borderlands?  Although, I could be wrong on that one.

And I'm still trying to remember a world sourcebook for Greyhawk, where as I know of several for Forgotten Realms.

With Forgotten Realms, I think it has more to do with the novel tie-ins. Adventures and novels in the same setting have more of a sales impact than material that does not have similar multimedia tie-ins. WotC is after the larger market share in this case.

Quote from: Old One Eye;833112My pet theory is that Holian and Mona ruined the Greyhawk brand when they decided that the Living Greyhawk Guide should be a droll historical text offering nothing for a party of PCs to actually do.  If the book had instead offered new exciting adventure locales and nefarious NPCs rather than blathering on about whatever dates various cities were founded, it could have potentially captured the imaginations of a new generation of DMs.

But alas, both Holian and Mona had apparently spent too many years discussing and debating the minutia of Greyhawkian lore on the old Greyhawk listserves whereby their Greyhawk magnum opus was focused upon answering the listserve minutia rather than opening up new mysteries and vistas to explore.

With the world's primary primer buried in tedium and dullery with the wide-eyed wonder long since closed, no punk teenage DM of the early 2000s would have any other position than to see it as a crusty old dodger.  Without inspiration for new DMs, WotC had little option but to shelve it.

I am convinced, though, that were WotC to greenlight a reboot with an author that cared about producing a worldbook that a DM could use to run tabletop adventures, it could arise as a pheonix from the ashes.  Greyhawk is, after all, the ADnD brand and lore in world form.  And the ADnD brand and lore clearly holds such resonance on the gaming community that 5e felt it had little option but to follow such branding and lore as closely as modernly possible.

I'm not sure anyone can do a reboot.

The 4e Magical Items book, Mordenkeinan's was a cute start, but it didn't do enough.

In fact, most people who regularly play D&D from the mid 80's know more about Forgotten Realm than I ever wanted to know.  In fact, a player who had a 20 year campaign had no idea that Tasha, Otiluke, Mordenkeinan or Melf were actually Greyhawk Wizards who designed their various spells.  Bigby, he didn't even know that Bigby was from there too.

Part of the problem with the Forgotten Realms originally, was that everything had already been 'done' due to the novels.  Turning it into a theme park because too much information had been given.

But Greyhawk barely ever got touched.  If they had given more than just a few adventures, maybe even just a city book/box set, there might have been more.

Again, I believe that Greyhawk is the least popular setting simply because TSR/WoTC never expanded on it past some basics, creating new worlds like Al Qadim, Forgotten Realms, Matzica (Or however it was spelt), they even tied Kara-Tur into the Realms, Mystara and all them, simply because no one over there knew what to do with Greyhawk.

And although I am not a fan of it (I'm not of the Realms either, effin' Elminster and The Drizzle...) I still think what both companies have done to it is kinda criminal in their negligence.

Quote from: Gabriel2;833074I guess Hollow World is another one.  I had honestly forgotten it existed.  I think back in the day I just thought it was another name for the BECMI Known World (I don't know why, I just did).

I'd also say Council of Wyrms is not too popular.  Everyone I knew who got it had no interest in the setting, just in the idea of playing Dragons.

1: Dont feel bad. I thought the exact same thing. That it was a new BX/BECMI setting. Which it essentially was. Just not in the way I thought. When I finally got it it was so damn "MEH" it felt like walls and walls of text and the totally forced stagnation/stasis setting just didnt grab me. It felt too locked down.

2: I DMed Council of Wyrms till two dragon obsessed players put me off the whole deal. Neet setting though and well presented unlike some of the others. Really needed a good DM to run it though as it could get out of hand fairly easily.

Quote from: Gabriel2;833075Is the BECMI Known World called Mystara?  Or do I have some settings confused?  There were an awful lot of them through the late 80s and 90s.

Yep. BX has the "Known World/Karemeikos" setting which was fairly blank overall. Isle of Dread devoted a sentence or two to each kingdom and the rest was all for you to embellish. Mystara and the rest came after. Mystara, Hollow World, Thunder Rift, and I think Red Steel. And of course all the Gazeteers.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;833090And here's something, if Greyhawk is doing so well, why is it in 4 and 5e, they've more or less ditched it for FR?  

Realms has a ton more books and is where WOTCs current literary cash cow of Drizzt resides. He's on the cover of the new Dungeon! Board game, hes in the D&D adventures board game, he was in the first series 5e minis box. Hes slated to be in the new Underdark+Demons module even!

There may be some minor legal issues too depending on where the rights to the setting are. Same as with Dragonlance. For a long time that was a huge cash cow until they killed it with too much meddling and one too many cataclysms. Talks before 5e was done were starting to look like 5e would be set in Krynn. But for whatever reasons they went back to Realms.

As for Next playtest Borderlands. No. It was not set anywhere that I saw. it was a blank that could be dropped anywhere. And all it was was just the caves.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;833130But Greyhawk barely ever got touched.  If they had given more than just a few adventures, maybe even just a city book/box set, there might have been more.

Again, I believe that Greyhawk is the least popular setting simply because TSR/WoTC never expanded on it past some basics, creating new worlds like Al Qadim, Forgotten Realms, Matzica (Or however it was spelt), they even tied Kara-Tur into the Realms, Mystara and all them, simply because no one over there knew what to do with Greyhawk.

Um...

Greyhawk got at least two boxed sets and at least one hardback. A fair chunk of the most classic of the early modules were all nominally or directly set in Greyhawk.

It got alot of support untill about the changeover to the Loraine era I think.

Quote from: Battle Mad Ronin;833120I found the D20 edition in a bookshop some years later and got all excited. Then I briefly looked through it. They had rules for halflings. And all the art was the same generic mid-fantasy shit you'd see in the worst of the early 2000s third-party D20 drivel that flooded the market at the time. Halflings in fucking Ravenloft? Guys in scale-mail(e)? Wizards throwing magic missiles? Fuck that shit, lame as all hell. Ravenloft was good becauseit had a very clear tone, gothig horror, and they fucked it up by trying to make it adhere to the worst of the blandness and streamlining that came with the 3rd ed. A terrible shame.

Err, I've got my AD&D Ravenloft black box right here and I'm looking at it right now to make sure I'm not misremembering anything. Halflings are rare but they have always been in the setting. The rules allow their presence and there is a country in the core where a citizen population of them exists (Darkon). There is no rule restricting armor, and NPCs are listed wearing scale mail. Although many spells are significantly altered, Magic Missile is untouched and perfectly legal.

Now maybe your GM ran things very differently and you never realized it, but you can't say the 3rd edition version of Ravenloft "fucked" the setting up by using things that were always there.

I will agree the art in the black box was better, but overall I personally thought the 3rd edition line was very useful and mostly well thought out. Turning half-orcs into calibans was genius for instance, and the domain gazetteers were great time-savers.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;833149I will agree the art in the black box was better, but overall I personally thought the 3rd edition line was very useful and mostly well thought out. Turning half-orcs into calibans was genius for instance, and the domain gazetteers were great time-savers.

  I have to wonder if BMR was looking at the original 3.0 version or the 3.5 "Player's Handbook". I never spent money on the latter, but IIRC based on flipping through it myself, one of its many missteps was including artwork that did feel more 'generic fantasy'.

  Ravenloft 3E was a very swingy line--you had stuff like Van Richten's Arsenal and the Gazetteers which were among the best stuff ever done for the setting, and then you had things like Champions of Darkness. A lot of this can be traced to the fact that you essentially had two different sets of freelancers for most of the line's run, and developer oversight was minimal at the best of times.

The utterly unknown Ghostwalk.

An official wotc released campaign setting few seem to be aware of and absolutely no one seems to care for.

Quote from: Gold Roger;833169The utterly unknown Ghostwalk.

An official wotc released campaign setting few seem to be aware of and absolutely no one seems to care for.

    If you want to bury a setting, release it immediately--as in a month or two--before an edition changeover or revision.

Quote from: Gold Roger;833169The utterly unknown Ghostwalk.

An official wotc released campaign setting few seem to be aware of and absolutely no one seems to care for.

I think I remember seeing that.  I thought it was a megadungeon style adventure module.

Quote from: Omega;833145There may be some minor legal issues too depending on where the rights to the setting are. Same as with Dragonlance. For a long time that was a huge cash cow until they killed it with too much meddling and one too many cataclysms. Talks before 5e was done were starting to look like 5e would be set in Krynn. But for whatever reasons they went back to Realms.

  Novels-wise, Krynn was a huge cash cow. Gaming wise, it's been sputtering since about midway through the original modules, based on my observations.

 After the first 14--of which I could find most of the second half still in shrinkwrap in a Fargo FLGS c. 2000--it got 2 adventure anthologies and a hardcover, and that was it under 1st Edition. Then 2nd Edition launched with good support for Taladas ... and that faded out by the end of 1990. After some elf adventures in 1991, they made a big relaunch with the Tales of the Lance boxed set, introductory adventures, and a repackaging of the original modules in 1992 ... and that died at the end of 1993 (or mid-1994, if you want to count the final volume of the repackaged original modules).
 
  After Dragons of Summer Flame, which was a story conceived and executed by Weis & Hickman--although they would have preferred a trilogy with adventure support to the single volume that wound up being published--TSR gave the Dragonlance fans in the gaming department the go-ahead to do a new DL game with certain restrictions--card-based, not based on AD&D, set after DoSF, featuring 'big, mean dragons'. The Fifth Age game launched to mixed reactions, just in time for TSR to collapse, but it managed to stagger through to February 2000.

  At that point, WotC had pretty much handed over the setting to Weis & Hickman again to do their War of Souls trilogy (which went through numerous revisions so that what we got was very different from what had been proposed, from what I hear). And WotC spent the entire three years of that publication dithering on whether or not to support DL as a game line until just around the publication of the last volume, at which point they settled on licensing it out to Margaret Weis Productions (fka Sovereign Press) for the rest of 3E's run. They withdrew the license when they pulled all their licenses in-house for 4E, and while they'll drop names and talk up Dragonlance, there's been no sign of anything happening. The novels ended back in 2009 or so, IIRC, and aside from reprints of the core Weis & Hickman stuff, nothing's been done.

  With one exception--apparently WotC approached Jim Butcher, of the Dresden Files, about doing a reboot of Chronicles. He was interested, but dropped out when he couldn't get assurances that Weis & Hickman were okay with the idea.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;833130But Greyhawk barely ever got touched.  If they had given more than just a few adventures, maybe even just a city book/box set, there might have been more.

Por Que?  Greyhawk has shit tons of material.  

Multiple campaign guides as the timeline advances detailing the three main eras.  There is both a city boxed set and a later update on Greyhawk City.  Regional sourcebooks cover most of the Flaneass.  Of course lots and lots of adventures.  Somewhere north of a dozen novels (or more if you count Rose Estes, though none of the Greyhawk fans do).  A popular video game and a shitty board game.  Not to mention being the living campaign for years and years.

The problem with Greyhawk is it only ever got two good authors who produced material with an eye toward mystery and gameability (Gygax and Sergeant).  Then the tAB reboot and LGG magnum opus were given to boring as shit authors who wrote out the mystery and artists who did nothing to help bring it.  Making Greyhawk boring is what killed it, not lack of material.

Quote from: Gold Roger;833169The utterly unknown Ghostwalk.

An official wotc released campaign setting few seem to be aware of and absolutely no one seems to care for.

For whatever reason, ghosts just don't seem that popular lately.We've been wading through a shit flood of zombies for what feels like a decade and a half now, and vampires and werewolves are still a creepy pop culture staple (not the good kind of creepy), but ghost-based material is thin on the ground.