Quote from: Opaopajr;869129Meh, it'd only suck in the aggregate. Far too many of the worlds would be destroyed by such intermingling, even worse than what happened to poor Maztica in contact with Faerûn. And others, it would just make zero cosmological sense.

(...)

No, it can be done, dumping everything into FR (anything can be done). But the results would be shit. There is something to be said for discrete spheres, not everything benefits from "elegance."

Pretty much in agreement witn the whole post. Besides, the settings are already loosely interconnected, as others have pointed out, by way of Spelljammer and Planescape. I'd say this is the best of both worlds; you can shunt PCs (and NPCs, monsters, items, etc.) between settings but they all retain their respectve identities.

Arminius is awesome for he remembers Lopango, a.k.a. Llamaworld, south of Maztica proper.

He also makes a good question about the point. Being mashed in only to be ignored, next cosmologically shat on by proximity, then collected onto the heap by fanboi hoarders... does not sound like the hotness solution. Very "design by committee" destruction through "shared inclusivity of IPs" and then promptly forgotten as a big business mistake.

Better to lay fallow than to have young pups poop in its shoes.

Quote from: tenbones;869177Yeah. I kinda get that too. My "problem" is I'm lazy. I don't wanna re-write all the stuff I want right now (like trying to recreate my nation ruled by Psionic overlords) in 5e. Or if I wanna run Darksun 5e - I'll have to reinvent the wheel etc. Sue me, I want them to put out a nice book/boxset with the new rules and I'll give them my MONEYSSSS!!!! Alas, the world is not a fair place.



This, married to my laziness factor above, is why I've slowly stepped away from 5e. I do like the game. I like the system very much. But between my day job, my freelance gigs, my fiction writing, my kids, etc. re-doing everything I want in 5e is... well... onerous. I'd rather just hand over the money - or Mike could call me up and hire me (if you're watching Mike, I'm serious, heh).

On the flip side you will probably run into the same feeling if the product line has a zillion sourcebooks. Wizards has definite balancing act. I think what they are betting on is if they make their adventure/campaigns compelling enough to play that will be good enough for the time pressed. While you may not get to run a Dark Sun campaign without some work, here is this really awesome campaign that involves X.

Or

They rely on the availability of PDFs to make the money off fans of the various niches of the TSR/WoTC product. Figure that you will just pick up anything you are missing and use the 2e PDF to run a Dark Sun campaign. That in the absence of an otherwise cool idea for a campaign that would make as much profit as a dedicated sourcebook.

Quote from: tenbones;869177Come to think of it - they could always come up with an SRD that grows by posting up the rules everytime a supplement comes out. Doubt that'll happen...

While it not quite the same they do have a growing library of free PDFs. The Adventurer's Guide was the product with extra bits that you actually had to pay for. And it seems more of an enhancement rather than a requirement for any the current or planned adventures.

Quote from: tenbones;869177I'm not convinced that there won't be blowback if they do this with say, Psionics, and attach it to a Dark Sun module. There are a lot of players that detest Dark Sun (I have no idea why) - but will feel they're being armtwisted into purchasing a supplement they don't want.

I feel the current team is quite savvy in a lot of areas when it comes to managing the fans of D&D. If they do do a Dark Sun release they will probably focusing on the cool idea of the campaign and make it obvious why it had to be a Dark Sun release.

Quote from: tenbones;869177So that brings up another question - do you think they would allow these settings to be parceled out for other systems? I can't imagine they'd allow OSR versions of these settings (that would be cool tho).

The magic 8-ball says "The future is cloudy". I think amount of Internet savvy is rising in big corporations including Hasbro. However it depends on the personalities involved. I think the current third party situation is a result of a inside conflict between those who hate third parties and open content and those who advocate it.

Hasbro does license out unused IP. Various wargames from their SPI and Avalon HIll are licensed by third parties that operate on the scale of a 2nd tier RPG publisher. However they are not really pushing "Avalon Hill" as a multi-media brand. They are with D&D so I would guess they will be possessive about any D&D IP. But I think in the fullness of time the desire to monetize their collection of IP will result in sanity prevailing for a third party license scheme.

Seriously thanks to T$R under Williams and later Hasbro acquisition, like Avalon Hill, they own a large proportion of the major games of the late 70s and early 80s.

Quote from: tenbones;869177I'd rather just hand over the money - or Mike could call me up and hire me (if you're watching Mike, I'm serious, heh).

If you dedicated enough to your favorite setting to want to write for it. You could just spend that time rolling your own that hits the same tropes. I know you are internet savvy so I bet you can rope in other like-minded enthusiasts and get something that has more than one person contributing.

Yes it is not Dark Sun however it is fan controlled.

I will say it not a 100% path to reviving something like Dark Sun. But at least you are doing something about it and there a concrete result you can take pride in. And the only thing you are wasting if it doesn't have any traction is time.

While not every revival project results in the success of OSRIC, OSRIC shows that it is possible to bring a dead product back to life.

They don't need to release whole settings. They could publish a book about Glantri. You want to keep it in Mystara? Ok. You want to use it in the Realms or your homebrew campaign? Ok too.

I don't see how Spelljammer or Planescape or any such "bridge" product line changes the basic problem, which is that with a finite budget and personal preferences not everyone is going to buy a ton of Forgotten Realms stuff along with a ton of Greyhawk stuff and a ton of Known World stuff and a ton of Dark Sun stuff  and a ton of Dragonlance stuff and a ton of Birthright stuff and a ton of Red Steel stuff and a ton of Eberron stuff.

Is the OP's goal here an elimination along the lines of DC Comics' "Crisis on Infinite Earths," a mashing together of bits and pieces to make a singular new world? I'm pretty sure all that would do in this case is lose ALL the fans instead of just most.

Either you publish scenarios that DMs can adjust to fit into whatever world they're running, or else you publish more specific stuff and decide what to do more of based on demand reflected in actual sales.

... and Phillip struts his ass in here and gets all reasonable and shit.

Edit: I'm just tossing shit at the wall. The idea is the reality, it seems, that many of the settings of D&D will be overlooked or go unused in official products based on their business plan. My rumination is about how would these other settings best be served?

So yeah - you're spot on.

Well, it's not really a big problem if the guy buying Z wasn't going to buy X or Y anyhow so you're getting a profit you wouldn't have got.

Apparently the Avalon Hill (Hasbro) Diplomacy is still being sold. Some number of people want it, and you don't get the sale by not having the product for sale.

That is, it's not a big problem except for nuts who can't be satisfied without total profit-optimizing market control. Of course, if they had total control then they could just crank out any old thing and take your money.

Writing sourcebooks for the old campaign settings is not necessarily as difficult as it seems. There's already a huge library of TSR/D&D books on digital vendors nowadays. Wizards could save on costs by reprinting text from those books.

Quote from: Opaopajr;869205Arminius is awesome for he remembers Lopango, a.k.a. Llamaworld, south of Maztica proper.

Oh, yeah,  Lopango, that's the ticket.

The only settings outside of Greyhawk (which doesn't count because we all know damn well Greyhawk could support it's own book) - that I'd want to see in 5e for a good treatment is:

Kara-Tur - because I love the setting and the corresponding material would be a great addition to the 5e game imo (new backgrounds, new archetypes, new spells etc.)

Al-Qadim - IMO the best setting ever to come out in 2e. Such insane high-quality throughout its entire line. I was privileged to be asked to do the 3e treatment for it in Dragon.

Dark Sun - I needs my grimdark. I needs my Psionics. Again - for much of the same reasons I want Kara-Tur. I think it could add a lot of interesting stuff that could be lifted for general use, while contributing new subsystems.

I'd love to take a crack at any of them in an official capacity. I guess it would only happen if they were trying to leverage Psionics.

I think this is my problem - I think marrying adventure-paths (or whatever you want to call them) to the addition of new mechanics and/or settings half-steps both the mechanics and the setting. How are you going to give Psionics the full treatment AND give the setting or even a region of the setting a good treatment when they're essentially competing for the same space?

On top of an adventure path? I don't see it. What WotC has done with FR has been relatively easy and portable. Sub-systems and niche-settings - like Darksun don't really work well with this idea.

The solution is with Planescape with the city of doors.  If you don't want that go with Spelljammer for a fantasy space game.

Quote from: Snowman0147;869311The solution is with Planescape with the city of doors.

This.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;869285Writing sourcebooks for the old campaign settings is not necessarily as difficult as it seems. There's already a huge library of TSR/D&D books on digital vendors nowadays. Wizards could save on costs by reprinting text from those books.

Cost of producing the individual books might not be the stumbling block. WotC may have decided that the only people who would buy these other settings is people who would otherwise buy their FR adventure path books. So they're stealing their own customers from themselves from their centerpiece campaign setting and pulling them into a smaller, less profitable setting that they now have to support, and the only benefits to them are 1-2 low volume books per customer and the occasional gamer brought to 5e because their favorite setting is now supported.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;869347Cost of producing the individual books might not be the stumbling block. WotC may have decided that the only people who would buy these other settings is people who would otherwise buy their FR adventure path books. So they're stealing their own customers from themselves from their centerpiece campaign setting and pulling them into a smaller, less profitable setting that they now have to support, and the only benefits to them are 1-2 low volume books per customer and the occasional gamer brought to 5e because their favorite setting is now supported.

Campaign settings that don't take place on specific planets could be slotted as unexplored regions of Toril (e.g. Council of Wyrm's Blood Isles, Dragon Fist's Tianguo, Ghostwalk's Manifest, Jakandor, Mahasarpa, Nentir Vale, Pelinore, and Thunder Rift). These places could be explored in adventure paths and/or gazetteers without taking focus away from Forgotten Realms.

The setting that take place on their own planes/planets are probably unlikely to ever be supported. I'm sad there will never be an Eberron/Spelljammer setting with steampunk spaceships and stuff.

Of course, if Wizards is worried about other campaign settings taking attention away from FR they could bother to integrate the worlds politically. Buyers wouldn't have a choice of dropping FR because every campaign setting would have FR influence forcibly shoehorned into it. Sigil? Torilans have immigrated and opened trading routes. Spelljammer? Toril has fleets of them. Eberron? Toril is their biggest market for steampunk exports. Every time another setting is mentioned it is viewed from an FR perspective.