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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faraer" data-source="post: 4840442" data-attributes="member: 6318">Krynn and Oerth, say, are more different in substance -- mid-20th-century swords and sorcery, wargaming and medievalism against sweeping sagas and Tolkienesque high fantasy and Mormonism -- than most of the settings that are superficially, gimmickily different are from them. Thus they have largely distinct player bases. If you want to sell multiple setting lines at the same time, gimmicks will help initial publicity, but in the longer term you need to emphasize their substantial differences in world-building sensibility, feel, influences, play style and look, giving them distinct art direction.Wizards, instead, as part of its moves to counter the diminishing sales returns of extended product lines, is aiming to sell setting books in series, not parallel, with simplified mini-settings designed for relatively short campaigns, stressing interchangeability of rules and setting elements and making them subsidiary to the ruleset and 'core brand' of D&D.With the Realms -- sometimes by design, often by accident -- TSR and Wizards have meandered between playing to its distinct qualities and making it conform to D&D and to marketing whims. Thus in the 1990s it was sometimes sold as a universal setting (and used as a dumping ground), sometimes not; in the 2000s it kept its own logo but its sensibility started to be submerged in the 'crunch'-peddling racket and it was never given a distinct art style as Eberron was (leading to the odd situation of hundreds of pieces of expensive colour art but only a handful you can accurately point to and say 'this place or character looks just like this').I'd love if Wizards was to do all its settings justice as secondary worlds in their own right, but they're conscious of the market-splitting that happened under 2E. Smaller companies would be in much better positions to do that than a Hasbro subsidiary.I don't think the 'vanilla'/'chocolate' thing makes much sense: these worlds all have definite tastes, have already suffered (the Realms, especially) from a succession of brand managers' inconsistent short-term 'bright ideas' ('sauce') that have only obscured and muddied those tastes. (And vanilla is obviously not actually bland and indistinct as this odd language makes it out to be, anyway.) For all the good reasons people may have had at the time -- for the latest revisioning of the Realms, too -- I don't doubt that future generations will see this as poor caretakership.We'll likely never know whether the Realms' ongoing novel timeline and escalation of Avatar-modelled upheavals was essential to its continuing financial success, which helped keep TSR afloat for a while, or whether another course would have been as or more profitable, but it's fair to say that readers were to an extent trained to expect and demand those kinds of garish, gradually erosive events.</blockquote>

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