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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7667290" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've deliberately talked about Greyhawk because it's a setting I know. Whether or not FR is accessible I can't easily judge, except that all the current crop of adventure seem to be set in it, so it's hardly inaccessible. And whenever I have a FR query (generally triggered by reading a post that talks about FR lore), Google tends to send me to what looks like a fairly comprehensive FR wiki.As far as GH is concerned, a newbie could buy the original boxed set, or From the Ashes, or The Adventure Begins, and do fine. Which one? Doesn't matter. All of them? That would be good for WotC's revenue stream!A good catalogue/index of this old material would help - I haven't Googled for such pages but I assume they exist, and that newbies who care will track them down.This is what I had in mind when I said, upthread, that a decent catalogue or index would help. But I also think, at the prices for a lot of this stuff, that new players might just take a punt!And it's not as if anything is actually going to go wrong if you download From the Ashes rather than the original GH boxed set.When I stick Forgotten Realms into the DriveThru search box, the top 5 entries are FR Adventures (2e), Book of Lairs (2e), FRCS (3e), Player's Guide to FR (4e) and the FR Atlas (2e). I think it's not optimal that the first two entries aren't very good starter products, but in the top 5 there are 2 that clearly are (the 3E and 4e ones), and I would have thought the Atlas would be fine as well (I don't know it but assume it lives up to its title and hence has maps and some description). The prices are between $9.99 and $15.99.If you download one of them and are dissatisfied, you move on. How often does this happen? I honestly don't know. If you download one and are interested or find it useful (which I think is probably more likely), then before moving on to your next purchase you are probably engaged enough to go to a wiki, or Wikipedia, or search some threads at ENworld or elsewhere.I think that WotC could obviously sell many more FR handbooks if it published a new one rather than relied on downloads of PDFs - presumably by a factor of ten at least, I'm less confident in raising that factor to 100 - but would it make better returns?Maybe the surprising thing that Chris Perkins will reveal in due course will also, somehow, leverage the PDF catalogue. Maybe the conversion guides, when they come out, will be intended to do so.The thing is, from WotC's point of view I don't think it matters. As long as no one who buys the 4e books feels actively ripped off - and I don't see why they would, it has maps and gods and calendars and history and racial backgrounds and all the usual sort of stuff - then from WotC's point of view they have another satisfied D&D group playing their own Realms campaign.(This is also why I think it's a bit unfortunate that FR Adventures and Book of Lairs come up so prominently on a Forgotten Realms search - I think they would create the potential to feel ripped off.)</blockquote>

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