Turjan said:
However, given the grating reviews of the late SL products combined with the fact that d20 has seen its heydays, I would not be too surprised if the rumours turned out to be true.
I'll take a smidge of umbrage at this statement. Totally ignoring the whole SL issue, I really don't feel the d20 heyday is past. I think we're right in the middle or on the front side of it still. Is the d20 Gold Rush over? Yes indeed. Gold Rush is the first stage tho. We're not sitting in the midst of the Shake Out, which is probably near the middle somewhere. It's not the completely easy "what your product is d20!? Order 15 of em!" thing it once was. Now that it's a bit more matured, we're seeing a consolidation of the companies working on d20, the ones who were just sticking their toe in removing and returning to previous systems (Chaosium), and some just calling it quits period.
Last year we saw the beginnings of both Arcana Unearthed and Mutants and Masterminds. This year we continue to see new books coming out at a pretty fast pace still, and we have so many systems covered. Mecha, anime, future, high fantasy, low fantasy, grim n gritty (Ken Hood's latest ruleset is still quite interesting), etc.
Companies are realizing that you don't have to stick so close to the PHB and you can do different (more interesting?) things like M&M and AU do.
Didn't mean to highjack there, but it's a common statement I see and I just completely disagree with it.
Scarred Lands I was never really able to get into for some reason. I do agree with Hollowfaust being a very cool book tho and I've paged thru it several times. Actually, Hollowfaust would be interesting to stick into AU. I mean, undead in AU are supposed to be more individual and every 2 bit necro mage doesn't have undead everywhere. A whole city populated by undead, all free thinking etc, just sounds perfect. Of course, without turning, it's even NASTIER to visit heh.
Hagen