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In the 80s and 90s there were other companies where you could work full time--West End, GDW, Chaosium, eventually White Wolf, and so on. Those houses were nowhere near as large as TSR, but there were other full-time gigs designing TTRPGs to be had. As the 90s wore on, a lot of those other...

One of the constants at TSR, no matter who owned and ran the company, was the inability to deal fairly or constructively with creators, both staff and freelance. With the book/fiction program, the company was handed staggering international successes three times over the course of a decade and...

Pretty much everyone in TSR's Game Department played not only TSR's games but hobby games from other companies. If you mentioned in the Games Library, where many of us ate lunch, you had not played some classic title other folks considered an essential, someone would promptly bring a copy from...

Most folks don't remember or maybe just don't know how stunning the growth of TSR's fiction program was in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Book Department started in 1982 with the Endless Quests books (championed by Rose Estes), the fiction program in earnest in 1984 with the first...

The fiction line suffered some bloat in the mid-1990s, to be sure, like all the company lines, and TSR would have done better with fiction by having fewer hardcovers and not trying to support so many game settings with novels. Some people inside the company saw this, even as the fiction program...

Rose and the Endless Quest books she wrote and championed as a concept kept TSR profitable as the Satanic Panic took a toll on D&D sales. The fiction program that grew out of the EQ line would help keep the company going for a decade, covering for a lot of terrible business decisions the games...

That rumor circulated in-house at TSR in 1996 or so: upper management was supposedly mulling over closing down much of the RPG program and shifting the design and editing staff to fiction, as writers and editors, because novels cost less to produce and had a higher profit margin than the games...

TSR's problem with "stars" and creative credit--and this was common with upper management and even some of the others in the company--runs through the entire history of the company, in both games and fiction. The problem was more pronounced with the fiction releases because they are commonly...

There were licensing and brand people laid off recently at WotC, but the Book Department withered starting in the early 2000s and disappeared years ago. They are still publishing some Magic-related fiction, but they no longer have dedicated fiction editors, no dedicated people for fiction sales...

The interrelationship of the original DL novels and the game material is complicated. From some point in the middle of the first two DL trilogies through the remainder of TSR's history, the company would struggle to figure out how to align fiction and RPG continuity and content, with serious...

The core problem with DL as a game setting it required whoever is publishing it to convince players the most interesting stories possible to tell had not been covered by the first six novels or the most successful novels in the line after that. TSR never managed to do that. The shadow of the...

That's correct. DoSF has strong pre-sales and sales, and the setting's supporters on the staff thought this was a good time to pitch a relaunch. Upper management was getting desperate for a new hit by 1995, so they gave the Fifth Age a shot in 1996. A lot of the RPG material was great, but the...

When they worked well, the novels and short stories and comics were models for the types of tales GMs and players could create on their own. As you say, inspiration. They were a great way to get a glimpse of a setting you might want to use for a game. They were also an accessible and familiar...

The novels were not returned with covers ripped off. They were trade paperbacks and fully returnable, but intact. As were all the game products from the book trade.

The hardcover novel explosion was indeed a mistake and was a cash grab, but no different from a lot of cash grabs the company was making through games at the time. All the lines after 1995 were overproduced. The company was in a desperate spiral caused by debt to Random House, as described in...

As noted above, the returns you describe were caused by TSR ending the distribution deal with Random House. RH returned everything in the sale pipeline, because they were returnable for credit. It did not mean the novels would not have sold. In fact, Random House ordered novels based on what...

Indeed. The Book Department at its height was a managing editor, three or four full-time editors, one part-time editor, and an editorial assistant. This is tiny compared to the Game Department. Even the novels that were written by TSR staffers were written as freelance, off the clock. Fiction...

TSR did not shift resources away from RPGs for the novels. The Book Department remained stable in size and tiny compared to Games from the mid- to late 80s through 1997, and novels were added to the schedule based on sales and demand, with very limited resources inside the company going toward...

The novels did not "kill" TSR. The narrative that talks about all the book trade returns in the TSR warehouse at the time WotC bought the company fails to mention that the returns were caused not by lack of sales, but by TSR ending the distribution deal with Random House, one of a series of bad...

That was the intent, on both fronts. Soth was used to rolling over everyone and everything and found Strahd was both powerful and tied to his domain in ways that made him more than a standard vampire lord. (In the novel, that material is an attempt to translate the game mechanics into fiction...