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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 2516021" data-attributes="member: 18832">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.From a marketing point of view, it's death to support them both. Your average gamer in the store, who's not already a big fan of one or the other, doesn't see the difference between them: they're the same kind of setting, in large if not in fine.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.To a certain extent, the point of Eberron is that you can't look at it, as someone new to the setting, and fail to see the differences from the Forgotten Realms.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.Finally . . . Ghostwalk. To put it briefly:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I doubt it would be published today, at least not in that form.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">People forget that it's not a Greyhawk or Planescape-scale setting; it's a city you can plug into your campaign world first, and a self-contained campaign world of its own very much second.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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