More Campaign Setting Books!?

[topple]

Where are all the campaign setting books? I mean WOTC puts out 3 books per setting a year. What happened to the days when a setting (Eberron in 3.5) got numerous books devoted to the setting? Anyone else thinking the same thing?

 

[ggroy]

Where are all the campaign setting books? I mean WOTC puts out 3 books per setting a year. What happened to the days when a setting (Eberron in 3.5) got numerous books devoted to the setting? Anyone else thinking the same thing?

Outside of WotC insiders, nobody knows for sure.

One guess is that the Forgotten Realms and Eberron supplement books didn't sell as well, compared to the generic D&D supplement books. The 3 books per setting a year strategy, may very well be a consequence of this.

 

[Aulirophile]

There is a Dark Sun book coming out, Penny Arcade got a preview and is doing/has done a Podcast demo campaign.

 

[kaomera]

Where are all the campaign setting books? I mean WOTC puts out 3 books per setting a year. What happened to the days when a setting (Eberron in 3.5) got numerous books devoted to the setting? Anyone else thinking the same thing?

Actually, WotC is just putting out three books per setting (not per setting per year). And, yes, they've been doing one setting per year. Personally I like this, one of the main reasons I was never very interested in previous versions of FR was that there was just too much stuff to keep up with, and it didn't feel to me like there was enough room to cram my own game into it.

But I understand where you're coming from. The fact that I didn't dig 2e / 3e FR was pretty much eclipsed by the very large number of players who did. And at least some of them must have appreciated the large amount of support for the setting... But you can't have it both ways, and WotC had to make a decision on how to proceed with the product. They may even have been influenced by an expectation that gamers who loved the old Realms might not be too thrilled with their changes, no matter which way they went...

 

[Mouseferatu]

One guess is that the Forgotten Realms and Eberron supplement books didn't sell as well, compared to the generic D&D supplement books. The 3 books per setting a year strategy, may very well be a consequence of this.

It's not a guess, and it's not a big secret. I don't know numbers, but yeah, setting books don't sell as well as "generic" RPG books. More importantly, every setting book after the first sells incrementally fewer copies.

Consider:

For a book like Player's Handbook 3, the potential target market is the entire D&D-buying public. Sure, not all of them are going to buy it, but they're the potential market.

But for (just to pick a setting out of a hat) the Eberron core books, the potential market is much smaller: It's the subset of the D&D-buying public who are interested in Eberron.

Then, for every subsequent Eberron book, the potential market is even smaller. For (again, just picking an example out of a hat) a book on Sarolona, it's the subset of the Eberron market who are interested in Sarlona.

And so on, and so forth. It very quickly reaches a point where the resources being pumped into a setting book could instead be pumped into a "generic" D&D book that's almost guaranteed to sell better--sometimes by an order of magnitude.

 

[bganon]

Yes, exactly. I think WotC would much rather develop bite-size chunks of content that all D&D fans can use, even if it sometimes has strong "setting-flavor" (which appears to be exactly what they're doing in the online magazines), than go to the effort of printing a big book whose title would pretty much guarantee that a huge chunk of their market won't even look at it.

Big books are great for big organized gobs of content. But the main FR and Eberron books are out... little add-on tidbits fit in more nicely as magazine articles. I really like Eberron, but some of the later 3.5 books were a little extraneous. And even some of the better ones (I remember liking Secrets of Xen'drik a lot) could have been done as a series of magazine articles. And once you do that, with a slight bit of extra work you can make chunks of it less setting-specific, which is a win for everybody.

 

[Ebylon]

A lot of the extra books beyond the Campaign Settings and Players' Guides were heavy on extra lore and such. All of that lore still applies for Eberron, as far as I know, and I'm sure the extra FR books still fit with the setting. Stat-wise, it's not that hard to look at a stat block from 3.5 and extrapolate relatively accurate 4e statistics.

 

[Derulbaskul]

I run FR4E and, while I would like more "stuff", the reality is I have more than enough because of my back-to-the-Grey-Box collection. I think Eberron is probably in the same boat.

(What FR4E really needs is good maps. The ones done for the FRCG/FRPG are, without exaggeration, possibly the worst RPG maps ever produced by WotC/TSR.)

I know the plan is much the same for Dark Sun and I cannot see it being done any differently particularly as Dark Sun is not exactly generic; I think Dark Sun fans will be an even smaller subsection of the D&D fanbase than is the case for FR or Eberron. (I know I will be buying it and I am looking forward to running my first Dark Sun game.)

 

[Jhaelen]

A lot of the extra books beyond the Campaign Settings and Players' Guides were heavy on extra lore and such. All of that lore still applies for Eberron, as far as I know, and I'm sure the extra FR books still fit with the setting. Stat-wise, it's not that hard to look at a stat block from 3.5 and extrapolate relatively accurate 4e statistics.

Indeed. As soon as our group decided we wanted to use Eberron as our 4e campaign setting I bought all of the 3e Eberron books. Luckily fluff is mostly edition-proof.

Apart from that, Dragon/Dungeon articles are supposed to provide continual support for the 4e settings. It's not as many articles as I'd like, but what Mouseferatu said about books is true for online articles, too.

 

[Kralin Thornberry]

There is a Dark Sun book coming out, Penny Arcade got a preview and is doing/has done a Podcast demo campaign.

I heard about this on the Penny Arcade page, but does anyone know if the podcast has been released yet, either through Penny Arcade or WotC (and if it is WotC, it hasn't)?