Do you think Eberron will go the way of Ghostwalk?

[~Johnny~]

Actually, my recent exposure to such goofy spoofs is through Drew Carey's improv show, Whose Line is it Anyway?

But I can see how it can help players to be creative and encourage roleplaying participation, through their own character's internal narration.

Ha, I know exactly the skit you're talking about. But that's a real exagerration of film noir movies; usually you'd only hear narration for the protagonist. I wouldn't encourage doing "external internal narration" in a gaming session... beyond the normal, "My character has a bad feeling about this" stuff.

 

[seankreynolds]

I was under the impression that Ghostwalk was a manuscript that was just lying about at Wizard's. Then when they decided to go 3.5 they decided to publish something in the vacuum created by the step to a new edition. They decided on Ghostwalk for this job but likely they had a bunch of other interesting manuscripts lying about too.
Sort of like when they published a some Diablo stuff just before 3E.

Ghostwalk was conceived of by Monte and I in 2001, before he left to start Malhavoc Press ... we were tasked with thinking up a one-shot campaign option book. That summer I wrote it while an employee and he as a freelancer. It was orginally scheduled for release in 2002. It was delayed and then canceled, mainly because Hasbro felt they couldn't make a movie or TV show out of it (at the time that was the litmus test for all stuff from WotC ... "Can you make a movie or TV show out of it?").
Several parties tried to buy the rights to publish Ghostwalk. WotC mumbled for a while about the offers and finally decided to publish it themselves, placing it right before the 3.5 release so they wouldn't have to make the effort to update the finished book to 3.5 (though I later did so as a web enhancement on the WotC site).
Ghostwalk was always intended to be a one-shot product with no support products, like the Odyssey line (compare to Council of Wyrms). It could be used as a stand-alone campaign or an add-on to an existing campaign. I believe Eberron is supposed to be a supported campaign line like FR.

And FYI, that Diablo stuff wasn't "just lying around" waiting to be published. It's very rare that WotC has anything "Just lying around waiting to fill a hole in the schedule." Remember that in theory they plan their books 2-5 years in advance (though turnover in management and brand team usually means those 2-5 year plans only last about a year before being changed).

{Notice how the ELH has tons of Epic-level NPCs for FR, but only a couple for Greyhawk. And that's after they were upgraded from the 3E launch, where most of them were 16-19th level...while characters in the FRCS were epic at day one (albeit before the ELH ruleset).}

You should know that when we were writing the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, we weren't allowed to give characters levels above 20 because there weren't rules for it yet and they didn't want to confuse people (?). So even if a character like Mord was 25th level in previous material, we had to list him as "level 20+." So that's why the existing characters were less than 20.

And as for why there were more FR characters in the ELH than Greyhawk characters, FR is a WotC-supported campaign setting, Greyhawk is not. When the choice is to provide additional campaign material in a sourcebook, they're going to err on the side of the supported campaign setting (how supported? Consider that the FRCS has been to reprint at least once, maybe even twice, and the LGG hasn't even though it's been out longer and out of print for a while).

 

[francisca]

It was delayed and then canceled, mainly because Hasbro felt they couldn't make a movie or TV show out of it (at the time that was the litmus test for all stuff from WotC ... "Can you make a movie or TV show out of it?").

That is so very telling.

Thanks for all the little tidbits. That was a very informative post.