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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 2042831" data-attributes="member: 1300">I heard about this from the WotC folks before it was announced. I may have been working there at the time, I don't remember exactly when they announced the search.They had two goals;1) Engineer a success on the scale of the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. These were their two smash hits, setting wise, far outstripping all the other settings. FR and DL had spawned comics and books and games and made them a ton of money and WotC was certain they'd be able to leverage the popularity of the Realms into a TV show and movie. Though they had people dedicated to hanging out in L.A. trying to make deals happen, nothing materialized.Of course, this seemed pretty stupid to me, but then I think all such marketing/PR driven creative endeavors are stupid. Neither the Realms nor DL were engineered to be the successes they became, and no comittee could produce something that would capture the same popularity.2) Use the idea of the search and its reward to generate the initial hype for the new setting.They didn't care what the setting was, they just wanted something that fulfilled their criteria. They found something, awarded the money, and got started on the Bible for the world. People forget now, but the core book came out something like a year after it was supposed to because, after the bible was done, the different divisions at WotC, the guys in charge of the RPG, the guys in charge of Novels, all had a say in what the setting 'had to be,' and a torturous process by which the original submission was twised and mangled until it resembles the setting we have now.So far, I don't see Realms/Dragonlance levels of success. However, to be fair, the people behind this master plan are probably all gone. They told Turbine the D&D MMO had to be Eberron and this is a pretty big dissapointment to D&D fans who almost universally think of the Realms or Greyhawk or Generic Fantasy Setting.</blockquote>

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