I hope Eberron is a flop. Am I evil?

[Sir Elton]

Really? Me, I just loved it when folks said that I'd stolen all my ideas from Dinotopia or Iron Kingdoms. Oh, wait, I didn't.

Robert Doyel explained it to me that nothing is really new, it's how fresh you make it. Something I learned ten years ago, but seemed to forgot it. Everyone will say:

"This is like Dark Sun."
Well, sort of. It does have psionics in it, and the wizard class is in its infancy. (Describes Halflings as savages) OH CRAP! Lets see, lets transpose the roles of the halflings and the drow. Instead of having the halflings being obsessed with spiders, lets make them masters of Biotechnology instead.

With biomodifications, the halflings made it possible for them to survive underground. For instance, all halfling bodies make Vitamin D and all other benificial chemicals the body makes from being exposed to UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C rays differently since they can't be exposed to the sun (anyone who says "Good, they don't have to worry about skin cancer" will get an exasperated -- Whatever from me.)

"This is like Conan."
It's more like Pellucidar and Beastmaster in the sense that the dominate technology is the Neolithic Age. More Pellucidar than Beastmaster and certainly less Conan.

"This is like Tenchi."
Yes, Earth's spaceships use psionic trees as their power source. But the focus isn't on the spaceships as much as it is in Tenchi. The Spaceships are an interesting part of the history of the world; making them a coincidental plot device.

"This is like Eberron."
What? (Looks at the Eberron Teaser.) OH CRAP! They published my best idea first! Now I'm going to think of something different to save me a lot of trouble. I'm beginning to hate the Copyright Act of 1978 and the DMCA now.

See, everytime I say I hate Eberron, it's really a deeper loathing for the Copyright laws, but the U.S. Constitution recognized them from the first. So, in a way, Eberron has really helped me think of a different way to put everything together.

 

[fanboy2000]

"This is like Eberron."
What? (Looks at the Eberron Teaser.) OH CRAP! They published my best idea first! Now I'm going to think of something different to save me a lot of trouble. I'm beginning to hate the Copyright Act of 1978 and the DMCA now.

You know, if I were you, I'd never log on to the internet again.Then you could argue plausable deniablility.

 

[dead]

My original post was very tongue-in-cheek but, as they say, with every jest there's a little bit of truth.

I guess, if I were to express my concerns a little bit more clearly, they would be thus:

TSR released A LOT of campaign settings during 2nd Edition and how long did they last? Not bloody long at all!!!

TSR/WotC is a company, I know that. So they have to make money, money, money. Anyway, when I saw Eberron pop up, I just thought (pessimistically, for sure) that the hype over it would peter out and it would die like all the other short-lived settings from TSR/WotC. Settings like: Spelljammer; Planescape; Darksun; Mystara; Birthright; Al-Qadim; etc.

The only TSR/WotC settings that have stayed around are FR and Greyhawk. And even then, the latter is kind of hanging around in a ghostly sort of way in magazines and the RPGA.

So I really don't wish Eberron such evil. I just predict it dying in two years or so like the other campaign settings I mentioned above. I'm sure Eberron is a fantastic setting -- but, hey, so were the ones I mentioned above that TSR/WotC axed coz they "weren't selling well"!

To me -- and, yes, I may not be evil but I am pessimistic -- Ebberon will flop in a couple of years. Soon the frenzy of product support for a new campaign that TSR/WotC is so famous for, will peter off and dry up. Then Ebberon will be consigned to the great graveyard that TSR/WotC all too flippantly flicks campaign settings into. All that will remain is some "hardcore" Ebberon fans grasping Dragon/Dungeon magazines for little snippets and thirsting for the day of Ebberon's re-release that will never come.

I guess only time will tell, but I just thought that instead of trying for that new "goldmine" of a setting that may never come, WotC should honour the old settings. Surely they'd sell reasably well. They may not buy that Lamborgini or Rolex for 'em, but it'd surely make a bit of a profit? Maybe not.

 

[Desdichado]

Then again, you could say that a lot of those settings failed due to poor business decisions by TSR are much as on their own merits. Eberron seems to be done right, so far anyway.

 

[Mystery Man]

I hope there is a good business plan in place to keep newcomers to WoTC from adding unneccessary and unwanted things (races that don't belong etc.) to it that were not included in the beginning setting book.

I would like to see something much like chapter 9 included in every supplement that is supplement specific.

Don't get to Sharn happy with the thing.

It's going to do fine.

 

[Henry]

I can understand the sentiment, and the prediction, but I suppose only time will tell.

My theory as to why Greyhawk and FR are the two settings everyone remembers:

1) Greyhawk is an unfulfilled promise, a dream that is so many things to so many different people; were it actually complete, and in the hands of Gary Gygax as people wanted (and you'd have to alter Gary to MAKE him want it again!) then the question begs, WOULD it be as fondly remembered?

2) Forgotten Realms has had supplements added to it to cover almost every type of historical adventure gaming in existance, and enough detail added to make the world truly come alive with a minimum of effort. It really didn't hit its true popularity until after everything and the Kitchen Sink went on Abeir-Toril...Want to play Lord of the Rings style adventure? There's Faerun Proper. Want romanticized Ancient Egypt and the "Biblical lands"? There's Mulhorand, Unther, etc. Want Mongol Hordes? There's the Tuigan Hordelands. Want a Thousand and one Arabian nights? There's Zhakara or Calimshan. Want Post-Moorish Spain? There's Amn. Want Conquistador Action? There's Maztica. Want Oriental Adventures? There's the "Lung Lands"...

Eberron is riding a Lightning Rail; after the Exit from Sharn, the conductor stones get a little sparse, and it's up to the fans to build more track... If they do, then Eberron will keep on coasting.

 

[buzz]

Then Ebberon will be consigned to the great graveyard that TSR/WotC all too flippantly flicks campaign settings into.

This reiterates Joshua's comment above and the many reccomendations for you to learn more about the science of business:

Campaign settings don't get "flippantly flicked" onto the dungheap. Campaign settings get supported when they are profitable, something that's as true for WotC as it is for Joe PDF. TSR's ownership *did not know how to run a business*. While it's unfortunate that many of the wonderful campaign settings they did create aren't heavily supported anymore, this eventuality was inevitable becasue TSR set themselves up to fail.

WotC, however, has a clue about how to run a profitable business. They have focused their primary efforts on settings that have a large fanbase and are profitable (FR, Greyhawk), and ones that they feel have the *potential* for such (Eberron).

They've even been nice enough to produce 3e versions, in one form or another, of many of the settings that haven't survive the profitability test. Dragon and Dungeon have featured conversions of Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and a host of settings in the "all setting" issue of Dragon; Planescape has been incorporated into the core planar material, not to mention MotP and the new Planar Handbook; Ravenloft, Masque of the Red Death, and Dragonlance have been licensed out to third-party companies and enjoy a lot of support. Heck, all that really leaves is fairly obscure stuff like Birthright (which has a serious online fan community), Mystara, Red Steel, and Council of Wyrms, all of which got touched upon in the aformentioned Dragon issue. It's quite possible there will be more material to come.

Flippant? BS.

And this all ignores the fact that there is *so* much 1e and 2e material for many of these settings that you could spend the rest of your life converting and playing through it all.

Eberron is the right step forward. Releasing yet another generic fantasy setting like FR or Mystara would have been a disaster, as would investing a lot of money in an older setting that wasn't profitable to begin with. Far from being a cold marketing move, Eberron was chosen becasue the R&D team really liked it. WotC has mapped out a very sensible and conservative release schedule. If Eberron fails, it will certainly not be becasue WotC didn't know what they were doing.

(And notice that I don't say TSR/WotC, as they are not the same.)

 

[Sir Elton]

Eberron is the right step forward. Releasing yet another generic fantasy setting like FR or Mystara would have been a disaster, as would investing a lot of money in an older setting that wasn't profitable to begin with. Far from being a cold marketing move, Eberron was chosen becasue the R&D team really liked it. WotC has mapped out a very sensible and conservative release schedule. If Eberron fails, it will certainly not be becasue WotC didn't know what they were doing.

(And notice that I don't say TSR/WotC, as they are not the same.)

If Eberron fails, I would put forth that the RPG Community isn't ready for something like it. Which would mystify me to the extreme, since TORG was so successful. People want their fantasy "pure" in the United States. That's why settings like Final Fantasy XII are never thought of.

For me, pure fantasy is anything you really can imagine. It becomes Science Fiction when you start getting heavily into the science behind it. Like I did with the Savage Lands, but soon I was trying to explain things the way a neolithic cave man would see things --- Soon I was using the typical fantasy tropes to explain the Ice Age and the recent Global Warming.

 

[D+1]

I'm sure Eberron is a great campaign and folks are having loads of fun with it but dead wishes nothing but evil for the setting.

The unsaid correlation being that you think that the number of people that should be allowed to have fun with Eberron has reached it's limit. No more fun for ANYONE.

dead wants the money-making machine called WotC-MegaCorp to really make a loss on this one.

You wish misfortune and harbor ill will to the company that has done you not a whit of harm, and the setting you want to die affects you not at all if you simply disregard it.

dead wants them to realise that they've got enough great settings up their Armani shirt sleeves without having to churn out new material.

You therefore insist that there be nothing new under the sun, certainly it seems nothing that you personally do not approve of.

Am I evil?

I'd say yes. Not MAJOR evil, but it is evil to truly want what you say you want because it is effectively a desire for petty injury out of sheer spite.

Spelljammer -- just as a one-off book; a "campaign-option" if you like.

See, now this one I'd really be keen on. But I don't wish financial disaster upon those who would ostensibly be the ones who would PROVIDE it for me in order to coerce them to do so.

Greyhawk -- if GH is gonna be the *default* setting, then I think it should get support just like FR -- otherwise make FR the default setting! A recent poll on EN World showed us the GH is just as popular as FR. I don't know, maybe there's just a lot of old-school folk on EN World.

This is something I've said occasionally since 3E was released. It is truly sad to see a good (even great) setting like Greyhawk fade and die due to being utterly absent from store shelves. This setting could make MONEY, but it merely languishes in anonymity in the hands of the RPGA. Greyhawk - not the Realms - deserves to be the true flagship setting, not just the setting that is POINTLESSLY referenced in the core books.

WotC's punishment for improper handling of the Greyhawk property is the fact that they earn nothing from it as a result. While ENworld polls are often not representative of the gaming public at large [ask a typical 13-year old buying a new D&D book at his FLGS what Greyhawk is and the large majority of responses will be blank stares; ask about FR and they can tell you because they SEE it on shelves] just think what the popularity of Greyhawk would be if it were actually cleaned up for 3E and SOLD IN STORES! It's currently UNPUBLISHED and still as popular as FR. It flabbergasts me that WotC cannot or will not see what they're missing - and what they're depriving us of.

But I don't wish them financial HARM because of it.

 

[D+1]

TSR/WotC is a company, I know that.

WotC is a company. TSR effectively ceased to exist shortly after they ceased publishing in 1997 (may have been late 1996, I can't remember precisely) because they were so deep in arrears with their printers. More techinically they ceased to exist shortly after the shattered remnants were bought by Wizards of the Coast 6 months or so after it all came crashing down. I think for a few years "TSR" may have masqueraded as a seperate division of WotC but without the demonic TSR management in existence anymore, it was for all practical purposes NOT the TSR you're referring to. Eventually WotC officially pronounced TSR as non-existent and everything was brought _directly_ under the auspices of the WotC banner. That was well before 3E was even announced.

Your knowledge is 7 years out of date.

So I really don't wish Eberron such evil. I just predict it dying in two years or so like the other campaign settings I mentioned above. I'm sure Eberron is a fantastic setting -- but, hey, so were the ones I mentioned above that TSR/WotC axed coz they "weren't selling well"!

You just need to do more research. The reasons that those settings were axed are actually quite well-known and they are not what you suggest.

No, they were not selling well, but that was not necessarily because they weren't popular. It was because each new setting _TSR_ published competed only with OTHER TSR settings. I.e., every time they published a new setting it got a smaller share of the sales pie and that was largely stolen from other existing setting sales. TSR sank ITSELF by taking pieces of their own hull to try to build new ships. Each new ship was smaller and the old ones got more holes.

I don't remember when the "Official" websites were alloted for fan-only support of the out-of-print settings like Spelljammer and Ravenloft, whether that was under TSR or WotC. I believe it was under WotC though a few of those websites had been in existence for some time - just not as an "official" source.

Then Ebberon will be consigned to the great graveyard that TSR/WotC all too flippantly flicks campaign settings into.

The fact that you continue to refer to TSR cannot be ignored here because you have absolutely no basis to lump WotC into that pile. Name ONE - just ONE - setting that WotC introduced that is even remotely akin to FR, Greyhawk, Planescape, Spelljammer, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, et. al., and then flicked into the graveyard.

WotC has released FR under 3E rules, left Greyhawk to the RPGA, allowed Ravenloft to be revised and published by White Wolf, and declared no official support to be forthcoming for everything else. They've done a some one-offs in Polyhedron - but they were strictly intended as such. Your argument here is utterly bankrupt.

I guess only time will tell, but I just thought that instead of trying for that new "goldmine" of a setting that may never come, WotC should honour the old settings.

So all that this boils down to is that your Not So Humble Opinion is that the only settings that will ever, and should ever, earn a new profit for WotC is a previously published setting from the days of TSR. An interesting position. It's nonsense, but nonetheless interesting.