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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9459225">Yeah it wasn't the novels themselves, there was a lot of mismanagement I think and also the landscape was changing too. They were getting serious competition from things like Vampire, and then Magic came along and started siphoning players from groups (I don't know the numbers at a grand scale were but locally I remembering losing tons of active D&D players to magic almost overnight, across multiple groups (many of them may have continued to play D&D occasionally but their money and time was largely going to magic). On the customer side what I also remember is around the mid-90s, the TSR books started to look cheap and bare. So even those of us who stuck it, really began to slow down our purchasing. I was huge into Ravenloft and the line went through a dramatic and ugly facelift midway through the decade (even if the adventures were good, the art, the layout, etc sucked: and that was from a line that had an award winning art-layout design so it wasn't unimportant to its success). Also those awful revisions to the PHB. Put the black PHB and DMG up against the ones released in 1989 and the difference in look and feel is stunning.</blockquote>