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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 2257611" data-attributes="member: 8461">Along with quite a few others. I'm not sure of which ones, except that Al-Qadim was only planned to be a three-year run. It was actually so successful that it ran for four, and was then terminated.From what I understand, this isn't quite accurate. The way I heard it was that initially into 3E, WotC was tentatively willing to make licenses. Sword & Sorcery Studios (under White Wolf) was the first to do so, with Ravenloft and Gamma World. Needless to say, these were successful. At this point, there was something of a fervor among the third-party community about licensing old worlds. WotC, however, (in a move I find somewhat sleazy) saw how successful those other licenses were, and changed their policy. They now insisted on having publishing rights for the campaign setting book, leaving all of the other books of the line to the third-party company. Now, everyone knows that the campaign setting book is always the best seller of a campaign line; so WotC was basically demanding virtually all of the income (beyond the fee paid to the actual authors) for publishing a book that they didn't write, at the behest of another company. So far, only Sovereign Press has chosen to eat that financial hit with the Dragonlance line.Some people say that there's no problem with this arrangement; that WotC deserves this since it's their IP. In all honesty, while I feel that WotC does deserve either a one-time payment for use of their IP, or some small continuing residual for the books sold, demanding the publishing rights for the best book is the series is far and away too much. WotC doesn't need the money as badly as the smaller companies do, and their new attitude has prevented the fan community from having the new incarnations of the settings we all miss. WotC's stance on this is something that I find to just be awful.</blockquote>

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