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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cthulhudrew" data-source="post: 3975819" data-attributes="member: 4090">From my understanding of how things played out, a lot of the problem with the 2E material came from the way it was decided by TSR to handle the line, and not with the designers themselves. James Mishler has talked in the past about how Jeff Grubb, the designer behind the Kingdom of Karameikos boxed set, had much grander plans than he was allowed to eventually do. He evidently wanted to do a larger world book (not unlike, I'd imagine, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book for 3E) and then have subsequent products expanding things like the Gazetteers did. Unfortunately, he was told that the plan was to release one product per nation at a time (essentially), so he could only do the Kingdom of Karameikos; other products would be the Principalities of Glantri, etc.Further to that, he wasn't even allowed to do much to advance the timeline from the Gazetteers, despite the fact that the Almanacs had already done so. Hence, there had been no civil war from the fractioning of the Church of Karameikos (which, from what I understand, he wanted to do) among other things.Some of his plans I think did make it through- his descriptions of the Immortals and how they differ from Gods, etc. helped to differentiate the setting, but were a pale imitation of what a world book could have accomplished. You can also see some of Grubb's plans for dealing more fully with Karameikos in the two Dragon articles he wrote for the setting, which were pretty good.I haven't ever seen any discussion by Monte Cook about it, but I'd imagine he was probably similarly constrained in his design of Glantri.The end result, basically, was that the 2E products were a rehash of the BECMI products, and thus did not a) appeal to the existing fan base, who had followed the world through all of the Gazzes and the Wrath of the Immortals, and who wanted to see the setting continue to grow and thrive and change, and it also didn't b) appeal as much to new fans, who were only getting piecemeal introductions to the world, with no larger context in which to differentiate them from all the other existing TSR settings; they had no basis for comparison between say, FR or Greyhawk.The products themselves weren't bad, per se: I've come to appreciate and like most of the Joshuan's Almanac (and it is actually not a bad "intro" product itself), and the original parts of the Karameikos and Glantri boxed sets had some really good stuff in them as well.</blockquote>

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