Faraer said:
John, can you comment on what the people who commissioned WG7 were thinking? It reeks of malice to me.
And how would you do The Moonsea (parts of which I recently reread) differently now?
I recall that the document outlining the proposal for WG7 being a sort of "fun", tongue-in-cheek proposal. We were supposed to read it over, fire off a proposal to Bruce Heard (Acquisitions, TSR) about what we wanted to do, and go from there. It was never presented as nothing more than "Here's a fun project, something a little different", if memory serves me correctly.
Like I said, I made it a point of staying away from the politics of TSR. I kept a low profile and just tried to get as many projects as I could, building up a reputation and a bibliography
Unfortunately, when TSR collapsed and WotC took over, I think I sort of fell through the cracks. Maybe my work wasn't memorable enough or something, or maybe I kept too low a profile. Who knows?
But at one Gen Con I had heard a lot of stuff...though I can't vouch for accuracy. I had heard that there were problems between Gary and the regime in power at TSR. I heard that Lorraine Williams actually hated D&D, and that since she was the grand-daughter of the creator of Buck Rogers, they were obligated to churn out a new edition of the Buck Rogers RPG despite the bad smell that wafted from it each time. Looking back at all of that, and looking at the timing of stuff like WG7, I would SPECULATE that WG7 was meant to be a trashing of Gary's legacy, something that probably came from high, high up, as opposed to from people like Bruce Heard, who I always had a fantastic relationship with and who was every bit the professional and nice guy.
As for the Moonsea. Damn. Well, first of all you have to understand that freelancers write what we're told to. I was told that the Moonsea needed to be two books, one for the DM, and one for the players. Ok fine. That's what I gave them, but it also restricted the amount of space I had to work with.
Things I'd have loved to have gone into detail and/or fleshed out, were instead just touched upon. I also would've loved to have developed Glister, the city on the northeast corner of the Land of Thar, the way I've done in my current campaign. In the absence of any official descriptions of Glister, I've turned it into what amounts to an Evil City. It's a pit. Temples of all of the evil deities of Faerun are everywhere. Slavery is legal. Drug use is rampant. Gladitorial games are all the rage. Corruption is everywhere, and murder is an accepted way of dealing with problems. Think of it as Sanctuary meets Sodom & Gomorrah.
I also would've loved to have done more with Zhentil Keep and Hillsfar. It's regrettable that my chance to tinker with Zhentil Keep happened during the unfortunate period of time where we were stuck with Cyric. Hated that turd. Bane rules.
With D&D 3.5 we have all these nifty prestige classes, and the whole concept of someone having more than one class without all of the rigamarole of multi-class limitations. I would've loved to have fleshed out more NPCs, having the tools of 3.5 at my disposal. I'd have loved to have given Mendrill Belarod's stats (yes, Mendrill is a character of mine, having played him since the days of AD&D's first edition). I'd have loved to actually have included a decent adventure in the book, like the Realms products do these days, as well as come up with one or two new prestige classes suited for the Moonsea.
Who knows? If WotC does decide to redo the Moonsea, maybe I'll get some chance to "do it right." Don't get me wrong, I am happy with what I did, but as you can see, I only was able to tell about half the tale!
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
It's actually my favorite campaign setting (that's where we play nowadays), so it'd be a labor of love.
