Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JLowder" data-source="post: 9785230" data-attributes="member: 28003">[USER=9849]@Echohawk[/USER] lots of great information here! Thanks for quantifying all the numbers, too. Great stuff.I'll read through again when I get some time, but a couple side notes:* There's a 2006 sequel to Quag Keep, Return to Quag Keep, by Norton and TSR stalwart Jean Rabe. It gets as close to the Greyhawk content as possible without infringing. The editor for the project was the one-time head of the TSR book program Brian Thomsen, who was not hired by WotC after the buyout. Thomsen also published a short story in the anthology Gamer Fantastic (DAW, 2009) that takes some very thinly veiled shots at specific people at Wizards, so it wasn't a coincidence he was behind the potentially provoking sequel to a book for which permission was granted before the company walled off their IP so vociferously.* For Greyhawk completists, I reprinted a Greyhawk story from Gary, "Twistbuck's Game," in the anthology Worlds of Their Own, published by Paizo. (<a href="https://paizo.com/products/btpy8xaa?Worlds-of-Their-Own" target="_blank">paizo.com - Worlds of Their Own (Trade Paperback)</a>)* TSR was publishing other fiction, too, including the Buck Rogers line, Amazing Stories reprint anthologies, stories in Dragon, and the (mostly) creator-copyrighted TSR Books line, the successor to the Windwaker line. From Dragon and Dragontales on, even the creator-owned fiction was a gateway for authors into the shared worlds. (Mary Herbert wrote the successful creator-owned Dark Horse novels published as TSR Books before moving to Dragonlance.)* I wrote a short piece on the ways in which fiction shaped the initial D&D rules and the D&D fiction forced the game rules to change and expand (a process continuing to this day) for an upcoming issue of New Edge Sword & Sorcery. Fans of S&S might want to give the magazine a look; they have a free zero issue available. (<a href="https://newedgeswordandsorcery.com/" target="_blank">New Edge Sword & Sorcery – Made with love for the classics, and an inclusive, boundary-pushing approach to storytelling!</a>) Not sure which issue my article will run in yet, but I've enjoyed all the issues so far. Jon Peterson covers the impact of fiction on early D&D in a lot of detail in the essential Playing at the World, recently re-released in two volumes from MIT Press. The connection between the game and prose fiction is quite important.* The TSR fiction program, especially from 1984 to about 93, provided a gateway to D&D and TTRPGs like the ones that Stranger Things and Critical Role/actual play have provided over the past decade. A lot of people--hundreds of thousands--who were not gamers read the fiction, and some of them tried the game as a result or were at least introduced to the brands and the types of stories D&D platformed. Also, the fiction did not require you to have an active game group to stay involved with the worlds. The novels did not have nearly the reach of a successful streaming show and were not as good an intro to the game as actual play is now, but their success on an international scale helped introduce D&D to people who might not otherwise have encountered the game.Thanks again. Drop me a note if you have any questions about the DC or Devil's Due comics, as you put together the next installment!</blockquote>

Verification