WotC Setting Bible
- Thread starter an_idol_mind
- Start date
The three finalists who actually wrote the 125-page bible are all under NDA forever, and WOTC owns their products, lock, stock, and barrel. The ones that got published by other companies were only semi-finalists, and only had to write 10-page descriptions.
I saw Rich Burlew (one of the 3 finalists) get asked about this at a seminar once, and he said that he knew of no plans to ever use his setting for anything, but that some ideas had already been strip mined from it and added into more than one D&D product that was published since then. (Apparently, the idea for necromantic elves was taken from his world after the decision was made and suggested to Keith Baker to add into Eberron, without telling Keith where it came from.)
Rich said he imagined that his Setting Bible was sitting somewhere deep in the giant warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant. Considering that he has the resources to publish it himself now if he could, I think it's safe to say that WOTC is holding on to it forever.
I saw Rich Burlew (one of the 3 finalists) get asked about this at a seminar once, and he said that he knew of no plans to ever use his setting for anything, but that some ideas had already been strip mined from it and added into more than one D&D product that was published since then. (Apparently, the idea for necromantic elves was taken from his world after the decision was made and suggested to Keith Baker to add into Eberron, without telling Keith where it came from.)
Rich said he imagined that his Setting Bible was sitting somewhere deep in the giant warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant. Considering that he has the resources to publish it himself now if he could, I think it's safe to say that WOTC is holding on to it forever.
Xyxox
Hero
SPoD said:
There's a lesson in all of that. Maybe the lesson is, never ever ever enter IP into a WotC contest as the likelihood of ever seeing any gain from it, especially over a large time period, is somewhat similar to winning the lottery. Even if you produce something wonderful, you probably will not receive adequate compensation.
Xyxox said:
Well, considering Rich got paid $20K then and it was the encouragement that prompted him to start Order of the Stick, I'd say he did just fine. He even said in the seminar that he had no regrets about the deal, since he was doing better with OOTS than most roleplaying writers and the IP in question had been invented solely for the WOTC contest (that is, he didn't give up his home campaign setting or anything).
But yeah, he managed to land on his feet. Your point is still valid for most people.
If anyone ever pays you 20,000 to write a 125 page document that they will then own in perpetuity . . . TAKE IT. WotC was incredibly generous with that contest. I thought it was actually more than 20k. You won't find anything like that in roleplaying. Most authors don't make that much money on novels that get published.
Xyxox
Hero
defendi said:
They received thousands upon thousands of submissions from what I remember. Hundreds were probably god enough to get to the level of semi-finalists. So your odds of getting to the $20,000 point were actually pretty slim.
In terms of the game industry, it was still a great chance to break into the industry. In terms of fiction writing, it was pretty similar to actually getting published.
So all in all, not too bad a deal.
defendi said:
It was $100K for Keith Baker. The two other finalists got $20K.
Xyxox said:
WOTC only owned the ones that it paid money for. It has no claim on the thousands of others. That's why Dawnforge could be published by another company; even though it got to the semi-finalist stage (there were only 11 of those), it was still owned by the guy who submitted it, so he could shop it around afterwards. The only people who got "screwed" were the ones who got paid, and they don't seem to be complaining.
I agree that if the idea you submitted was your One True Idea that you had poured your life into, it might be a bad deal. If it was an idea that you thought up specifically to sell to WOTC, then was a great deal.
All of this is moot, though, since its unlikely to ever be repeated.
Hellcow
Adventurer
Nope nope nope.Glyfair said:
First you had the 12,000 1-pages.
Then you had the 11 10-pages. Honestly, I don't remember if they gave us a specific format or just "give us a more concrete overview of the world." Tone and Setting, geography, religion, types of characters, threats people would face, examples of adventures for low, mid, and high level characters.
Then they picked the final three - Nathan Toomey, Rich Burlew, and myself. We each got $20,000 in exchange for the rights to our material. And yes, as a full time freelancer, that's a LOT of money for a 100-page RPG doc. At this point they brought us each in and told us what they liked and what they didn't like about the setting. But this wasn't close collaboration; it was a general "Highlight this, downplay this, we'd love to see you develop more of that." In my case, for example, they wanted more new races; I'd deliberately held back from creating races, and the shifters and warforged both emerged as a result of this direction.
But again, this was very general. They gave us some very basic guidelines and sent us all back. The instructions were also not to worry about crunch at all: explain the ideas behind new races, classes, etc, but don't worry about mechanics. I believe they DID give us a general "here's the structure we want" outline, but at the same time it's been 4 years and my NDA would likely prevent me from sharing it, so perhaps the brand manager can help.
So the setting bible was all me. It was after it was chosen, as it was transformed into the ECS, that it became a close working relationship with WotC. That's when Bill Slaviscek, James Wyatt, Chris Perkins, and a few others spell nearly a week with me exploring specific elements, brainstorming, and ultimately dividing up the work on the final setting. So the shifters were in the setting bible, but the final form of the shfiters - the whole system of shifter traits and stacking feats - was something developed by James and R&D. The warforged went through about seven different designs, as WotC tried to find good mechanics to represent the idea. And so on.
Sort of. When I saw this post, I said "Huh?" and talked to both James and Rich. The culture of Aerenal is something that emerged in that final stage. When we were dividing up the work for the ECS, the elves fell to me. Because of some various other changes, the original elf culture I had developed didn't fit as well. In the discussion of what else we could do with them, someone said "What about something to do with necromancy?" and I ran with that. The person who said that may have been thinking of what Rich had done. But when I created the Undying Court and the ancestor-worshipping culture of the Tairnadal, all I was playing off of was "necromantic elves." As I said, I contacted Rich right away, because I'm personally very pleased with Eberron's elves, and if it somehow turned out that I had stolen them, I wanted to know and to apologize. He's bound by NDA, but said that his elf culture was quite different. So it inspired the sentence "necromantic elves" - but Aerenal and Valenar weren't directly taken from Rich's setting, which AFAIK is still intact.SPoD said:
The semi-finalists could do whatever they wanted with their settings; the finalist's settings are owned by WotC, and even I don't know anything about them.
