the Jester
Legend
How so?and WotC made it worse.
How so?and WotC made it worse.
It would have been nice if someone had suggested he put in that he gets a cut when he sold it to TSR. But if they had I'm guessing if it was a meaningful percent that TSR would have had someone make an in house world to use instead and given it the space in Dragon magazine.I think the biggest screw job of it is that he should have gotten royalties on every FR product TSR produced and I don't think he did. He did, as @Parmandur says get royalties on his own books, which is great, but he should have gotten a cut of the stuff that wasn't written by him but was set in his world as well IMO.
I mean, I know that Peter Adkinson made the rounds with a checkbook righting any grudges over D&D IP when he bought it...so I don't know thst he didn't make it right then, because Greenwood has never talked about it to my knowledge.I think the biggest screw job of it is that he should have gotten royalties on every FR product TSR produced and I don't think he did. He did, as @Parmandur says get royalties on his own books, which is great, but he should have gotten a cut of the stuff that wasn't written by him but was set in his world as well IMO.
That's a good point - and I'd forgotten about Adkinson doing that.I mean, I know that Peter Adkinson made the rounds with a checkbook righting any grudges over D&D IP when he bought it...so I don't know thst he didn't, because Greenwood has never talked about it to my knowledge.
I believe a lot of opinions about Ed Greenwood's deal have been colored by hindsight. In 1987, buying the rights to the Forgotten Realms from an outsider instead of having an employee write something was a pretty risky move. If FR had flopped for TSR, today we would be saying how Ed got a sweet deal. I don't think anyone at that time could have imagined how popular, successful, and influential FR (and by extension, D&D) would become.and WotC made it worse.
One thing to keep in mind is that hoopla is a relatively expensive service for libraries; on top of the base annual fee, there is a fee charged to the library for each item downloaded. The library I worked at had it for a while, and it was popular, but its popularity made it too expensive to continue.I love Hoopla! it has a surprisingly large number of good movies. And while you can only get them for 2-3 days you can easily get them again. I've never even approached the 10 item limit they impose.
Yeah, that's what I've heard Greenwood say: he is to a large extent happy thst he got stories from other people in his world, so that it van surprise him. FR would have been a cool personal project at any rate, but now he can get any convention appearance he wants, too.We also have to consider that TSR and WotC are a huge part of why FR is so popular. Maybe if Greenwood asked for more money, or a heavy royalty contract they would not buy it, and we would have another setting be the main thing...
Yeah, it was Greenwoods fanfiction crossover playground as a kid. It would be cool if it kept more of that: fun fact, the Gulthmere Forest is straight-up Narnia, and "Noba ion" is simply Aslan.Apropos of nothing, reading up on FR, I was interested to see that it originally had connections with Earth (and other worlds). I'm not sure I ever knew that. Going through Appendix N, its interesting how many of the books on it are portal fiction.
which is wonderful, but it doesn't really address the fact that Ed Greenwood getting a raw deal from WotC.