Something I've noticed on the Yahoo forum is that a lot of people are 'concerned' about the completely different feel of the campaign from standard AD&D. Money is more or less irrelevant (things run on a barter system for the most part), only three classes from standard AD&D make it through untouched and two others become prestige classes with some major differences. Magic is rare in general, and clerical magic is non-existent (for the player characters unless they play an evil character). This means that healing is harder, and resurrection impossible for the average group. The biggest issue is, of course, the fact that the characters are persecuted simply for fighting the evil in the world, often times by common folk who are motivated not from evil, but by fear of what will happen if these heroes are found in their town. Therefore characters can expect to do a lot of running, and skulking with consistency of a 'main base' lacking in many cases (unless they work from within a Dwarven stronghold or an Elven area - many possibilities there of course).
One of the things I thought about in reading these concerns, and especially how people planned to deal with them (increasing spell point pools to make wizards more equivalent to AD&D, allowing other base classes into the campaign, or simply using elements in their campaign) is that the real problem comes in because the world is superficially so similar to standard AD&D. More correctly, you have a Campaign World with a majorly different style of play grafted onto AD&D (not D20) and players or DMs who are used to AD&D will naturally try to find ways around the campaign restrictions to make the campaign more like a normal AD&D game. It's too bad in some ways that this campaign setting was a D20 graft rather than a whole new game (or at least, an OGL game like Mutants and Masterminds for instance) because it needs to be considered its own, unique world without the preconceptions of AD&D. Unfortunately, the implementation makes that difficult. It's not really a complaint, but rather an observation of why some people are trying to morph it into something a bit more AD&D like.
By way of comparison for instance, the most unusual campaign settings that I currently own that are D20 campaigns are:
1. Oriental Adventures
2. Nyambe
3. Scarred Lands
1 and 2 are different enough because of setting, culture, mythology, terrain.. basically everything.. that players and DMs realize right from the start that it's different.
The Scarred Lands is one of the less generic campaigns for AD&D but is nevertheless recognizeable as AD&D. Same kinds of missions, a chance to foil the affairs of gods and men alike. Yeah, it's darker than some other settings, yeah the Titans' influence makes the feeling a bit different, but characters can walk around more or less freely, do good things, without being more paranoid than the usual state of affairs for PCs.
Midnight's situation is it looks even _more_ like standard AD&D than Scarred Lands does. You don't need the equivalent of the Creature Collections and the Relics and Rituals books to get the proper feel for the campaign world, all you need is one book and the core rules. So a new group dives in and says "Great! We can play in a world where Saur... errr.. Izrador, won! We'll hunt through dungeons to find artifacts to defeat him, and get gold to buy better stuff to help us out, and the villagers will give us safe places to live in.. and... Wait.. *flipflipflip* No cleric spells? *flip* Where're all the magic items? *flip* Where're the stats for the ultimate bad guy so we can kill him and save the world? *flippityflipflip* The villagers will do what now? *flip* Whaddya mean I can't carry weapons into a town?!?!
