News: Ravenloft back to WotC - and a FoS message

[Kesh]

My big question on the White Wolf forums was never answered: will the remainder of the Ravenloft line make it to PDF format on DTRPG, or are we stuck with the paltry number of files up right now? I'd love to pick up some PDFs from the line, but...

 

[Klaus]

IMHO, as Ravenloft veteran that bought nearly everything since the Black Box (with the notable exception of the Red Box and the 3.5 Player's Guide), I think the 3e version of Ravenloft did several good things:

- Gone is the assumption that every PC is an outlander, sucked in by the Mists. Wanna play an outlander? Fine, there are several other campaign settings out there your character can come from. Wanna play a native? HERE are the rules.

- Fleshing out the domains. The Gazeteers were an amazing resource. No longer the domains felt like a Hammer-movie background stage, they had customs, languages and moods that differed very much.

The only real criticism I can find are for *some* rules issues from Heroes of Light and Champions of Darkness, and for the inclusion of one Sheriff Von Zarovich.

And even so, HoL and CoD offer a way to play very good characters in a world of darkness they try to battle, or not-so-good characters slowly giving in to the darkness that surrounds them. They're not so different from the BoED and BoVD in that regard, and expanded the options of mood for the setting.

 

[Joël of the FoS]

My big question on the White Wolf forums was never answered: will the remainder of the Ravenloft line make it to PDF format on DTRPG, or are we stuck with the paltry number of files up right now? I'd love to pick up some PDFs from the line, but...

Well if I understand it correctly, WW can continue to sell its RL books until June 2006. After this date, that's it. Given they seem to still have a large backlog of books to sell in their warehouse (judging from the six month ongoing 50% off sale at their online bookstore), I would be surprised for them to make PDF competition to their efforts to get rid of these books in their warehouse. So I don't think they will make more PDFs.

Joël

 

[Orius]

I think people often miss the essential elements of what Charles Ryan and other people have said about "not splitting the fanbase".

It's not "more than one setting is bad". It's "more than one iteration of a given kind of setting is bad".

The reason that Wizards isn't keen to publish Greyhawk - arguments about it being the core rules default and/or left for the RPGA to play with aside - is that it's just like the Forgotten Realms.

(pause for the howls of outrage to die down)

Now, obviously devoted fans of either setting can fill a whole day merely with listing of the ways in which this is not true, but to the market at large - and to the people who are responsible for marketing D&D - the overall similarities of scope, tone, and feel trump the specifics of the differences. They're both pseudo-medieval high fantasy settings; they both feature Tolkienesque races in Tolkienesque style; they're both saturated with late-Seventies early-Eighties fantasy sensibilities.

Exactly. The only real differences between the two settings are geography, personalities, history and some minor differences between various subraces. That's it. People can say all that want about how different they are because FR is dominated by do-gooders while Greyhawk is militantly neutral, but that boils back to the different personalities. People who don't know squat about either setting aren't going to make a big distinction between Mordenkainen and Elminster (for example).

And that's not even counting Mystara, which is a third generic vanilla Tolkienesque setting.

Eberron, on the other hand, suffers none of the handicaps of Greyhawk in such a comparison with the Forgotten Realms. It's the same kind of heroic fantasy as any D&D game "out of the box", but where Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms are heroic high fantasy, Eberron has been called by its fans "heroic wide fantasy". It's a world with all of the fantastic elements presented in the core rules, but at a more restrained scale - lots of "small" magic and very rare instances of "large" magic, for instance. It's a setting designed with the assumptions of Third Edition in mind, not massaged from earlier editions' principles to fit the new ruleset. It draws as much inspiration from fantasy cinema as from fantasy literature. It has a modern fantasy sensibility which says shapechangers and artificial life and psychic beings are as viable as characters as the hoary old Tolkienesque races, and turns the latter on the ears anyway. Even the political structure of the world draws more from modern nation-states than from medieval kingdoms.

Eberron gets slammed a lot by the old timers for being too "video-gamey", and while I'm not overly interested in it, it's got some good ideas:

Psionics is worked into the world in a way that integrates it into the setting, but not in a way that it forces people who hate it to use it. Compare to Greyhawk or FR where psionics gets shoehorned in any old way for those who want to use it, or Dark Sun, where it's central to the setting, which makes the setting unattractive to those who hate psionics.

Sharn. I like the concept for the city. While there's nothing wrong with Greyhawk or Waterdeep, they're both fairly typical medievalesque cities. A city of huge interconnected towers is fairly unusual, but not totally "out there", and it's definitely an idea I want to rip — err, borrow for my game.

A more "modern" setting. D&D has always had the medieval veneer (probably an influence from Chainmail and fantasy fiction like Howard's Hyborian Age), but how often does D&D reallyreflect medieval society? I've said it before: D&D is a Renaissance fair on crack. If Eberron reflects the way D&D is really played rather than trying to sqeeze it into medieval tropes which don't fit, then fine by me.

Xen'drik. From what I understand, here's a whole continent with dungeons to explore and which can logically support some degree of epic adventuring, which is another example of the setting taking the rules into account rather than trying to shoehorn in rules that don't fit.

I like airships.

Difference and distinction can go too far, though. Much as I like Planescape, or Spelljammer, or any of the other distinctive settings from earlier editions, they're disconnected from the premises of the core ruleset. Planescape proposes a setting completely divorced from an Earthlike planet with nations and normal geography; Spelljammer has magical ships flying through space. Much as I like weird fantasy of this kind, it's a whole different order of business.

Exactly. Some people don't go in for weird fantasy. Some people like a world that looks like someone ate a bunch of Tolkien, Howard, Leiber, Vance, Moorcock, and traditional mythology and folklore and then puked it all up into a big mess.

 

[Ranger REG]

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.

You assume that the Rokugan fans are greater than the D&D community that buy core products. They are not. The same goes for FR fans (like me), the DL fans (also like me), and GH fans. (I'm also a OA fan who lobbied for a new version since it was absent during 2e Era, but did not nor will embrace Rokugan d20.)

Nor can you herd D&D gamers to one official setting, not after what TSR have already done: offering many settings that already have a following of fans.

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.

I don't understand. What does Ghostwalk have to do with the other licenses?

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.

It is. I don't think it has anything to do with money but more of a personal favor to SKR. It happened before, when WotC foot the bill to publish a limited number of DUNE Core Rulebook (the only non-d20 RPG product ever published by WotC during the 3e Era.)

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.

Well, I've yet to consider any one of Eberron labeled products for use in my FR game. I doubt majority of Eberron fans are willing to reciprocate.

IOW, if you want to publish a book that would be usable in any setting, publish it in the Core line.

 

[Vocenoctum]

Well, I've yet to consider any one of Eberron labeled products for use in my FR game. I doubt majority of Eberron fans are willing to reciprocate.

IOW, if you want to publish a book that would be usable in any setting, publish it in the Core line.

If you like any of the four Eb races, I'd suggest Races of Eberron. The case can be made that it's Core Line, of course, but it's an exceptional book IMO.

I've used stuff from FR in other games, but mostly just rules/feats/PrC's. Serpent Kingdom's is quite portable I think.

 

[Vocenoctum]

What part do you really dislike?

Joël

As someone who also disliked the vast majority of RL from WW, I'll try to recall why I stopped buying the line.
First off, I found production standards to be generally "amateurish" in art and writing style. The books were badly laid out in most cases.

Secondly, Denizen's of Darkness was decent enough, but the stats were all cobbled and CR's were randomly assigned. I was running the adventure with the Carrionette's, and started using the 3e stats from the book, before realizing how totally wrong they were. I'm not a big nitpicker, but the monsters are written from imagination, rather than any grounding in 3e Stats.

Thirdly, well, more like Second Part B, all the rules material was badly done, there's no sense of balance. PrC's were often just random in feel. Same with rules, like in Arsenal, he weapon additions didn't seem bad, but frankly they were written oddly.

Fourth, I didn't care for the "everything's Evil" outlook, with regard to familiars and such. I don't recall that from 2e, but may have just ignored it at the time.

Fifth, no support online that I noticed. Sure there was erratta for the Core in the Screen, but I didn't see anything else to help the later books.

Sixth, when 3.5 came out, one of the big fears from folks I talk to was that companies would simply republish old books with a couple tweaks. Ravenloft was the ONLY one to do such a thing, and frankly I thought it was a horrible idea, and they even renamed it so folks would buy it thinking it was something different.


I did like the domain descriptions in the Core, never bought the Gaz's or the book of evil, I was considering the bloodline's one, but by then the revised Core had driven me away. I liked the general feel of Van Richten's Arsenal and Heroes of Light, but both proved pretty useless over all because of the random nature of their stats.

 

[wingsandsword]

Planescape, much like Ghostwalk, it was something that could be "plugged in" to. In essence, it was also just a City and some new mechanics.

WotC has no problem supporting Planar source material, we had Manual of the Planes, and later the Planar Handbook. The only thing that makes Planescape truly unique from "generic" planar adventuring is the city of Sigil and the politics and people of that city (factions, sects, guilds, factols ect.). They've mentioned Sigil in passing in the DMG, and just given it a briefest of mentions in other planar products.

Much like they made a Planar Handbook, they could make DM's book of "Planar Locations" with the City of Sigil thoroughly detailed, the Gate Towns, and writeups of the various factions/sects/guilds and major NPC's and it's Planescape without the Planescape name. (Yes, PS had a distinctive art style and the cant and all, but that is something I don't really expect them to bring back, even though I would like them to).

Planescape was already a "setting" that could just be a plug-in to existing settings if you wanted to, something you could have side-adventures in then go back to the comfort and safety of your Prime World. Core D&D already presumes that Planes are out there, Planescape just fleshed out who lives there, and the idea that you didn't have to be super-high-level to go there. It would be easy to present Planescape in the same "plug in" model of something to add to a Core D&D campaign.

When WotC was supporting Greyhawk, Birthright, Forgotten Realms and Mystara as all pseudo-Tolkienesque traditional medieval European fantasy worlds simultaneously, with two very-high-fantasy crossover settings (Spelljammer and Planescape), and then nonstandard fantasy settings (Ravenloft and Dark Sun), with one-shot sub-settings and core products all on top of that, with all those settings receiving support, plus Basic/Rules Cyclopedia D&D getting supported for all that time, then you're splitting up the market.

In the same vein, Spelljammer could just as easily be a plug-in one-shot book. A way to incorporate airships into other settings besides Eberron and let DM's run inter-world crossovers if they choose. Frankly, it's no more "nonstandard D&D" than Eberron is, with wacky PC races, flying ships, common magic items and a weird cosmology.

But no, WotC has made enough things that are far enough away from core D&D, and enough things that split the D&D fan base that the "we don't want to split things up by creating a new product line" story doesn't hold water. If they didn't want to split things up, then why create a whole new campaign setting that will be fully supported? The original D&D 3e business model was to make everything generic & core, with the DM presumed to add setting material themselves, and the next summer Forgotten Realms was more re-released as a more fleshed-out setting for DM's who wanted detail. Then they decide to create a whole new setting, as fully supported as the Realms, and "dividing the fanbase" by creating another camp for fans to prefer over all others.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

You assume that the Rokugan fans are greater than the D&D community that buy core products. They are not.

No, I assume that if people who play in a licensed setting exclusively are given the choice between a warrior-class supplement for that setting or a generic warrior-class supplement, that they'll choose the former, and that Wizards of the Coast would like to avoid that.

Obviously, Wizards can't stop third-party companies from publishing their own setting, or their own warrior-class supplements; but they can avoid giving a third-party run setting the appearance of semi-officiality (increasing its status in the eyes of the market) by licensing out the setting.

AEG's d20 Rokugan line would have had less adherents if it had not depended upon the official Wizards of the Coast Oriental Adventures product, in other words.

I don't understand. What does Ghostwalk have to do with the other licenses?

I think they're part of the same early-days-of-Third-Edition policy with regard to campaign settings which Wizards of the Coast no longer adheres to. They're following a policy of concentration upon "generic" D&D, the Forgotten Realms, and Eberron, to the exclusion even of one-shot setting books.

Well, I've yet to consider any one of Eberron labeled products for use in my FR game. I doubt majority of Eberron fans are willing to reciprocate.

IOW, if you want to publish a book that would be usable in any setting, publish it in the Core line.

There's a reason Races of Eberron had a brown "generic" cover - sure, its contents are Eberron-specific, but it was also intended to appeal to any DM or player who makes use of generic books, whatever setting they play.

Meanwhile, my point is what I said above: Wizards of the Coast focuses on "generic", the Forgotten Realms, and Eberron, to the exclusion of all else. Why publish a Greyhawk Campaign Setting that only Greyhawk fans will buy when you could publish Magic of Incarnum and potentially appeal to any homebrew, Forgotten Realms or Eberron DM?

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I've used stuff from FR in other games, but mostly just rules/feats/PrC's. Serpent Kingdom's is quite portable I think.

I own Serpent Kingdoms for its portability my own self.