Darksun TSR sales! From Benjamin Riggs.

[Reynard]

“For those of you keeping score at home, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms are the only settings to sell more than 200,000 copies over their lifetimes.”

And Mystara. Which outsold them all.

Are you just saying that because of 8 or whatever pages in the Expert Set? Because that's not really a fair comparison.

 

[Voadam]

“For those of you keeping score at home, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms are the only settings to sell more than 200,000 copies over their lifetimes.”

And Mystara. Which outsold them all.

Mystara had tons of regional sourcebooks but no overall campaign setting book or boxed set. Hollow World was probably the biggest area one and the closest to a setting sourcebook. The almanacs kind of come close too, but they are a light update of each area in the setting to account for an in-world time advancement.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

All these stats in the various threads on this have confirmed one thing for me: Our hobby has long been even more niche than I already imagined it was.

Right?

It's actually amazing how much influence a lot of these settings had, and how well-known they are generally among nerds, gamers, game designers, etc. given the tiny sales. D&D's influence is completely outsize to its sales. It's like, I guess D&D accidentally targeted so many creative people who spread so many of the ideas, when then continued to spread that it had this wild influence.

 

[Mannahnin]

Mystara had tons of regional sourcebooks but no overall campaign setting book or boxed set. Hollow World was probably the biggest area one and the closest to a setting sourcebook. The almanacs kind of come close too, but they are a light update of each area in the setting to account for an in-world time advancement.

Champions of Mystara is definitely a "real" setting book, as is the Savage Coast Campaign Book. The Karameikos: Kingdom of Adventure, Glantri: Kingdom of Magic, and Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia boxed sets should definitely count for Mystara, as well as the fourteen Gazetteers.

That being said, I think Dungeonosophy is premising their statement on counting all the B/X and BECMI sets as Mystara, as well as the Rules Cyclopedia, which I don't think is reasonable.

The Expert sets had a couple of pages (map of The Known World, a page or so on Threshold) and the Isle of Dread module, but that's not much (and we're not including modules in any of these totals). There's basically zero setting info in the Basic sets, very little in Companion, and nothing that I recall in Masters or Immortals. The RC has a whole chapter on Mystara, apparently, which I think makes it a more reasonable inclusion if you're doing a Mystara total. I don't know whether the 1991 or 1994 Basic revisions had any significant setting info, but I would presume probably not, as the prior Basic sets were all generic in that regard- intended for use with any setting or homebrew.

 

[Voadam]

Champions of Mystara is definitely a "real" setting book, as is the Savage Coast Campaign Book. The Karameikos: Kingdom of Adventure, Glantri: Kingdom of Magic, and Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia boxed sets should definitely count for Mystara, as well as the fourteen Gazetteers.

Those all seem more analogous to Forgotten Realms regional sourcebooks or boxed sets than the Forgotten Realms campaign setting boxed sets and books. Spellbound for instance is huge with 232 pages of content covering three kingdoms, but I would call it a regional sourcebook with a smaller focus than the full FR campaign setting books, even the ones with smaller page counts.

 

[Mannahnin]

Those all seem more analogous to Forgotten Realms regional sourcebooks or boxed sets than the Forgotten Realms campaign setting boxed sets and books. Spellbound for instance is huge with 232 pages of content covering three kingdoms, but I would call it a regional sourcebook with a smaller focus than the full FR campaign setting books, even the ones with smaller page counts.

Yeah, you have a point. If we're counting all of those, then FR regional books would certainly count toward the Realms too.

I might suggest that perhaps the Karameikos, Glantri, and Dawn boxed sets might be more closely analogous to a "core" setting book/expansion like the FR boxed set, or Greyhawk folio. The closest thing Mystara had to a single setting book is Champions of Mystara. The design focus was deliberately on a smaller area with the boxed sets it got.

 

[Reynard]

Yeah, you have a point. If we're counting all of those, then FR regional books would certainly count toward the Realms too.

I might suggest that perhaps the Karameikos, Glantri, and Dawn boxed sets might be more closely analogous to a "core" setting book/expansion like the FR boxed set, or Greyhawk folio. The closest thing Mystara had to a single setting book is Champions of Mystara. The design focus was deliberately on a smaller area with the boxes sets it got.

Mystara just had a very different publication method than the other major settings -- up to and including never having a "Mystara" campaign setting supplement or boxed set.

 

[Mannahnin]

Mystara just had a very different publication method than the other major settings -- up to and including never having a "Mystara" campaign setting supplement or boxed set.

Honestly, in retrospect I kind of like that. When I was a kid I had Dragonlance Adventures, and the 1e FR boxed set, and then the 2nd ed Forgotten Realms Adventures hardcover, but they were always kind of intimidating in scale. Nowadays OSR products for hexcrawls and such seem to always focus on a smaller, more manageable area, rather than a whole world.

 

[Reynard]

Honestly, in retrospect I kind of like that. When I was a kid I had Dragonlance Adventures, and the 1e FR boxed set, and then the 2nd ed Forgotten Realms Adventures hardcover, but they were always kind of intimidating in scale. Nowadays OSR products for hexcrawls and such seem to always focus on a smaller, more manageable area, rather than a whole world.

Those Gazetteers were pure fire.

 

[CleverNickName]

The D&D hobby as a whole was suffering as a whole in the 1990s. All sales for all products take a massive hit in the 1990s because the company itself was failing, and dragging everything down with it. If TS&R could have held the line and managed this loss better, maybe all of these graphs for all campaign settings would be higher, and some might look more successful than others. But that's not what happened.

I know that a lot of people want to hate Wizards of the Coast for various reasons, but for better or worse, WotC saved D&D. It was in very real danger of fading away into obscurity in the late 90s, and they brought it back to the fore. I understand that this research is focused primarily on TSR, but someday I'd love to see the sales graph stretched out to year 2020. I'd wager that 3E outsold all of these, combined.