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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 1732775" data-attributes="member: 2171">At the risk of tooting our own horn, you might be interested in <a href="http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3207.html" target="_blank">En Route</a>, <a href="http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3222.html" target="_blank">En Route II: By Land or By Sea</a>, and <a href="http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3228.html" target="_blank">En Route III: The Road Less Traveled</a>.Having said that...the adventures market is especially challenging, as others have observed, since you're aiming a product at a subset of a niche (especially if you have tie-ins to other products beyond the core d20 rules set).It's fair to say that adventures are part of what teaches people to run a game; it tells you what, as a player, you DO.  Very important.  But when it comes to d20, the independent publisher faces a crucial dilemma: If you're doing the adventure to plus something of your own (say, <a href="http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3701.html" target="_blank">Dire Spirits</a>, an adventure designed for our <a href="http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG3700.html" target="_blank">Nyambe: African Adventures</a> sourcebook), then you're limiting your sales to a subset of people who have already bought that product, in most cases.  (Dire Spirits is designed so that you don't need Nyambe to play it...and it even has 3.0 and 3.5 stats, if memory serves...but the odds are that not a lot of people not already sold on Nyambe are likely to pick it up.)  On the other hand, if you've made an adventure generic enought to appeal to a pretty broad swath of gamers, whose product are you promoting?  Well, WotC's.  And you're probably still selling fewer copies than you would of a sourcebook.  So essentially you're paying an "opportunity cost" (the difference in profit from what you might have made on the same investment in a different product) to market WotC's game for them.When the d20 market was young, and adventures were selling thousands of copies and making decent profits, this wasn't a big deal.  It was fun to publish adventures, and not that big a concern that one might have been making even more money publishing something else.  But when many projects are really marginal, in a marketplace loaded with four years of an incredible volume of output (adventures and otherwise), it's pretty hard for publishers to give up any edge that might help a product turn a profit or, as the case may be, lose less money.</blockquote>

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