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TSR settings sales numbers from Ben Riggs, starting with Lankmar, Maztica, Al-Qadim and Planescape!


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R_J_K75

Legend
Lankhmar actually did pretty well, consider.

I wonder how many people just plopped it into Greyhawk and renamed it Dyvers or whatnot...? Or put Greyhawk and Faerun on the same continent...
I played as a PC in Lankhmar once, and the DM dropped it into his own homebrew. It was a terrible, generic experience, so that left a bad taste in my mouth for the setting. I remember two things, the DM somehow forced the Ranger PC into the city who continuously said they didn't want to be there, so he was traumatized by city life and went psycho and started killing civilians with his polearm. We just wanted to get to the adventure, and I can't remember why but the DM kept beating around the bush and leading us around the city for no reason for about 4 hours. I think he was trying to impress us with the new box set he bought. Eventually one player asked the DM, "Is there an NPC somewhere wearing a sandwich bord that says "Adventure this way"? We never played in Lankhmar again. I saw the box sets in game stores used many times after and never bought it because I was so scarred from that one game session.
 

Wow, talk about flatlining. Now I kinda wished I had picked up the Maztica boxed set, but even as a young teen I was put off by the rampant colonialism in it.

As for Lankhmar, in my opinion the DCC Lankhmar boxed set blows all the prior iterations of the setting out of the water. It got the mood right, the mechanics right, and Goodman Games' love of the source materials positively seeps from the pages.
 


jolt

Adventurer
This is completely anecdotal, but in my area if you didn't get things like Maztica and Lankhmar when they first came out, you never did (they were never stocked again). This was the pre-Internet era too; if you didn't see it in your local store, you often gave it no thought even if in the back of your mind you knew it existed.
 

darjr

I crit!
Wow, talk about flatlining. Now I kinda wished I had picked up the Maztica boxed set, but even as a young teen I was put off by the rampant colonialism in it.

As for Lankhmar, in my opinion the DCC Lankhmar boxed set blows all the prior iterations of the setting out of the water. It got the mood right, the mechanics right, and Goodman Games' love of the source materials positively seeps from the pages.
The author of the Goodman Games edition is a Fritz Leiber scholar and visited his personal museum and archives as part of his job to write it.

Note a D&D 5e Kickstarter is coming, mostly a monster book but I’ll bet it’ll have some setting info too. I’m going to back that and use it to support that boxed set in a campaign.
 


G

Guest 7034872

Guest
Wow. At least Al-Qadim did a bit better. These numbers are all terrible though.
Yeah, it looks like the 90s were just a really hard time for TSR, which certainly fits the known history. It is still surprising to see just how bad some of these numbers were, though. I mean, almost anything after 1994 or even 1992--wow.
 

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