Yes. I remember that it had been
written much earlier, but put on the backburner until just before the revision - Sean Reynolds was pretty forthright about this on his forums when the subject came up.
I'll expand on my point about
Ghostwalk, because I was at work when I wrote that post, and pressed for time.
I think that
Ghostwalk, along with
Oriental Adventures, and even the Dragonlance hardback, represents a product strategy which doesn't exist at Wizards of the Coast anymore: to publish the first book in a series of third-party setting products so as to guarantee sales of your product to everyone who's playing in that setting without having to actually put effort into supporting the product yourself.
Using the Rokugan setting in
Oriental Adventures, and requiring AEG's d20
Legend of the Five Rings line to require use of
Oriental Adventures, makes for guaranteed sales to AEG's customers (even if AEG subsequently rewrote half of the book in
Rokugan). Publishing the Dragonlance core setting book means everyone playing Third Edition Dragonlance buys your book.
These products, however, still split your fanbase. Dragonlance, and to a lesser extent Legend of the Five Rings, have a built-in constituency of fans who will play in the setting, and a number of those fans will choose to game in Krynn or Rokugan exclusively. The more people who are buying
Way of the Samurai and not
Complete Warrior, the worse off you are - and facilitating the production of
Way of the Samurai by licensing out Rokugan is ultimately cutting into sales of D&D books like
Complete Warrior.
Now this is one line of thinking, and one which assumes the people who will play d20 Rokugan to the exclusion of D&D would play D&D. You could write the license so as to prevent the production of direct competitors, but that's a major hassle and you can't always anticipate what might compete.
Now we come to
Ghostwalk. First and foremost, it's an outlier product; a limited number of people are going to be all that interested in playing a campaign set around a setting where the dead appear as ghosts and adventure alongside the living in the first place. Second, its presentation as a campaign city further narrows down those who are interested in it to those who will run a game in its native setting or who will undertake the effort of placing it into an existing setting.
The combination of these factors leads me to believe that it was approved early enough in the Third Edition process that it predates the establishment of a firm policy against licensing out their settings and/or producing setting-specific products that don't reinforce existing setting lines like the Forgotten Realms. For this reason I lump it "chronologically" with
Oriental Adventures and the Dragonlance license; I think the latter was the last license they sold, and I further think the only reason they sold it is because it has a novel-reading customer base of enormous proportions, who would presumably trust a company which is involving one of the setting's originators in the process.
In essence,
Ghostwalk is an anomaly - it's the least Wizards of the Coast-like product they've ever actually published, except maybe the
Hero Builder's Guidebook.
(I actually like it, but it strikes me as something which would work
much better in the current market as an "event/subsystem" supplement like
Magic of Incarnum appears to be - that is, an entirely new subsystem for the game with an easily-inserted campaign event akin to the demiplane the Wizards guys mentioned at GenCon is the "source" of incarnum. Something like the manifest zones of Eberron appearing in the campaign as the cause of this bizarre inversion of death, you know?)
The current Wizards of the Coast design paradigm seems pretty obvious, to me. Anything they publish now is either for one of their supported settings (the Forgotten Realms or Eberron) but written in a way which doesn't preclude its inclusion in other settings for DMs willing to do the work, or it's designed to be useful to
any D&D game that uses the core rules.
Heroes of Battle and, presumably, the rest of the genre series: this is material that can work in any campaign that features warfare.
Magic of Incarnum with its "source" demiplane and, presumably, the
Tome of Magic and any subsequent "magic series" supplements will come with an explanation for why these new subsystems are emerging in any campaign not including them from scratch.
Hell, the Eberron Expanded column Keith Baker is writing for the D&D website is all about adapting generic D&D products to one of their specific settings. Arguably,
Power of Faerun will provide a specific treatment of its topic - the influence of high-level characters on the institutions of their setting - which can be generalised to any game, if you're willing to work at it. I bought
Serpent Kingdoms for the serpentine goodness, even though I'll never run in the Forgotten Realms.
