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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 4871269" data-attributes="member: 2174">It depends on what you mean by obscure. Salvatore rules the roost of the game fiction tie-in world, which is a very reliable world complete with the potential for sales that even the "big boys" like TOR would be impressed with. A huge-selling D&D novel is a huge-selling fantasy novel, period. The more popular books Salvatore FR novels do occasionally hit the best-seller lists, and he was also very successful with a Star Wars novel as well. In both cases the built-in audience value of the associated brands _underscored_ and propped up whatever audience an "R.A. Salvatore" book would have in its own right. Salvatore (and Greenwood, and Weis and Hickman, and others) have published books in their own universes, with other publishers hoping to cash in on their success elsewhere, and in the main these books do NOT sell as well as books they wrote for their D&D (or Star Wars) brands. Salvatore is hugely influential with the D&D crowd (perhaps moreso than any author save Tolkien and probably eventually Rawling). But if you ask your parents about him, or non-science fiction fans, and they won't know who you are talking about. All of them know Tolkien, and I'll bet they've probably heard of Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov. I don't know how many have heard of Salvatore. I realize that that's a difficult standard for any author to achieve, but I felt that was the benchmark being laid earlier in this thread regarding Jack Vance. If Salvatore is known primarily to readers of gaming tie-ins, his audience would seem to be still relatively obscure, insofar as sci-fi fandom and culture in general is concerned.But really it's counting angels on the head of a pin stuff, and subjective as hell. I am starting to lose interest in the semantics part of this conversation, and will soon be drawn back to VH1 reruns.I don't think Howard is obscure at all among fans of sword and sorcery, but I think your average reader of fantasy like A Game of Thrones or The Wheel of Time or Dragonlance didn't know who he was or was only dimly aware that he had created Conan didn't know much about Howard until the recent Del Rey re-issues.That's because Conan, even in its mangled, L. Sprague de Camp Lin Carter perversions, was starting to fall out of print around the same time the Red Box came out and brought many of us, as little kids, into the hobby. I think Robert E. Howard and Conan and (for that matter) Jack Vance and Edgar Rice Burroughs were more influential to the D&D gamers who are in their 40s or older at this point (a lot of the OSR crowd) than in my own age cohort or younger (I'm 34) because those books were not as reliably in print and available to us during the time we came into the game as adolescents and even into high school. Anyway, I know that a huge handful of game designers currently working at both Wizards of the Coast and Paizo had not read Robert E. Howard until the Del Rey collections came out, because most of them have come up to me and told me how awesome it was, as I've long been an advocate of the books.Furthermore, I think the kind of nerd who dedicates his career to fantasy gaming or who spends a large portion of his leisure time talking on page 9 of EN World threads is a subset even of total D&D players worldwide. Every campaign I've ever been in has featured only a couple of "uber" players, and a lot of casual fans who enjoy the game but don't live or die on its every nuance. A lot of those guys might read The Wheel of Time, but their connection to fantasy isn't strong enough that they know the difference between Robert E. Howard and Jack Vance or how to correctly spell Fafhrd. I happen to suspect that that more casual fan is actually the majority of D&D _players_ (not active customers, mind you), and that most "D&D Players" don't care about things like edition wars, authors of products, or really much of anything best described as "minutia" related to the game. So we are talking semantics here and we're talking subsets of subsets of subsets of customer cohorts, and I see some lovely ladies in bikinis on my television so I am out.--Erik</blockquote>

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