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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 9750269" data-attributes="member: 28003">The plan from the start with Dark Sun was for the RPG and fiction content to be related. Mary Kirchoff, then head of the Book Department, was part of the initial Dark Sun team along with Brom, Tim, and Troy, and she was instrumental to that coordinated vision. Mary sometimes gets left out or downplayed in the discussions about the origins of Dark Sun, but the project would not have been possible in the form it took without her. Books was no longer a sub-group of Games by the time Dark Sun got rolling. Books was a separate and hugely profitable division in its own right, and it was assumed with Dark Sun that the fiction would outsell the game material (for a fraction of the cost of creation and production, too), which it did with the Prism Pentad, certainly. Ben Riggs has posted numbers somewhere for the initial sales.As for the coordination between products, Tim Brown and Troy Denning were part of the initial project vision team, and Troy worked as a designer/author on both the boxed set and the Prism Pentad novels, with Tim on the boxed set, as well. The coordination was built in, especially with Troy--though, in retrospect, it would have been better if we had more actively discussed how the initial books and the game content were going to interact. We might have avoided undermining the initial boxed set with the fiction that way.As the design team expanded on the Games side, there was a lot less coordination between departments than might have been useful and less direct coordination between Books and Games. The crazy schedules we were working under were mainly to blame, at least initially. There just wasn't enough time in the day to go over everything. By late 1992, Mary had also left her position in Books, I had moved to satellite employee status, and the entire approach to interaction between the two departments (and the products) had changed with the new head of Books, with far fewer efforts to coordinate.</blockquote>

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