Player's Guide to Oathbound - free download

Wisdom Penalty · Apr 3, 2008

Reveille said:
Its a shame that Oathbound has been abandoned. It is one of my Top 10 favorite third party campaigns. Many thanks for the free PDF though.

Jeez. How many "third party campaign settings" are there? Can't be more than 15.

Oathbound ain't supported because Oathbound ain't sellin'. If it sold, it'd have more support.

Brilliant, I know.

W.P.

Darrin Drader · Apr 3, 2008

Wisdom Penalty said:
Jeez. How many "third party campaign settings" are there? Can't be more than 15.

Oathbound ain't supported because Oathbound ain't sellin'. If it sold, it'd have more support.

Brilliant, I know.

W.P.

Actually that isn't true, at least not entirely. Compared to most third party campaign settings, Oathbound sold like gangbusters. Unfortunately Bastion's business plan was built around a high volume of sales like a publisher would expect to see right after the release of 3E. There were a number of successful publishers after 2003, but they worked from a completely different business model which didn't involve printing up thousands of copies of every book. Most successful third party publishers that managed to survive the glut learned to run lean, print short, and then reprint as necessary, often taking orders and then fulfilling through print on demand or other printers that specialized in printing short runs. There were other business decisions that contributed to Bastion's demise, like having some people on as full time employees when they realistically should have farmed out all of their design work. The bottom line, though, is that there are a lot of publishers out there today who would do just about anything to have half the sales Oathbound products had. Unfortunately the market reality is that unless you're WotC and one or two others publishing d20, that just isn't happening.

Angel Tarragon · Apr 3, 2008

Wisdom Penalty said:
Jeez. How many "third party campaign settings" are there? Can't be more than 15.

Oh really? You might want to have a look at this thread.

Wisdom Penalty · Apr 3, 2008

Whisperfoot said:
Actually that isn't true, at least not entirely.<snip>

Reveille said:
Oh really? You might want to have a look at this thread.

Not only was a wrong, but I was wrong twice. That elevates me from ignorance to idiocy.

Dangit.

W.P.

Ghostwind · Apr 3, 2008

Wisdom Penalty said:
Oathbound ain't supported because Oathbound ain't sellin'. If it sold, it'd have more support.

W.P.

Actually Oathbound sold very well and had a good support structure in place. What hurt Oathbound was same thing that hurt all d20 publishers - the bursting of the bubble. When the d20 bubble burst it affected the development schedule of the company in a dramatic way. In short, like Darrin has said, Bastion did not make the necessary adjustments it needed to as a company to keep Oathbound in the minds of consumers.

Neil Bishop · Apr 3, 2008

Thanks for posting this. I ran a couple of successful Oathbound campaigns a few years ago and wouldn't mind revisiting them at some point.

Treebore · Apr 3, 2008

Reveille said:
Oh really? You might want to have a look at this thread.

The bad thing is I own 23 of those.

The good thing is I don't own all of them.

Treebore · Apr 3, 2008

Ghostwind said:
After a discussion with Tom Knauss and given the fact that nothing is being done with the Oathbound campaign setting world by its current owners, he has agreed to release the Player's Guide to Oathbound as a free download. It is a relatively raw document, but does address the need for a 3.5 edition update to Oathbound: The Domains of the Forge.

You may freely distribute this document and have it photocopied or printed for personal use. It may be downloaded from http://ghostwind.net/PGO.zip (just right click and select Save As...)

Enjoy.

Thanks for doing this. Very cool of you guys.