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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 5442498" data-attributes="member: 8461">I can think of a few, though they were all relatively minor. To my mind, Erik is at his best when he's working on a setting he personally enjoys (for that matter, who isn't?) such as Greyhawk or Golarion. When it comes to other settings though...not so much.For example, back when he was in charge of Polyhedron, he published the ill-received Spelljammer (mini-)setting "Shadow of the Spider Moon" (Polyhedron #151/Dungeon #92). In fact, the troubles with that began in the preceding issue, where his editorial dissed the "silly" nature of the original Spelljammer setting (I believe he called the giff "goofy hippo-men").Now, before everyone jumps in to point out how the setting was silly and the giff are goofy, that's not the point. The point is that, when you're making a niche product to appeal to a certain set of fans - in this case fans of Spelljammer - you don't start out by telling them how stupid the previous iteration of the product was and how yours makes it better now. That just insults and upsets the very people you're trying to market to. It was shades of the same thing that WotC did to 3.X players when they began marketing 4E years later.Then there was an editorial in Dragon where he talked about how the arrangement of the planes didn't make sense (I can't find the specific issue number, apologies). It wasn't anything such as the alignment-based structure of the Great Wheel - rather, he talked about how the planes were largely wasted space (e.g. "can you fly into the sky in an Outer Plane for an infinite distance?"), how being able to go to Heaven made adventuring superfluous (a variant of the old "why not just stay at home instead of adventuring?" argument), and other pokes at the setting.I posted a response here on EN World, and to be fair I remember receiving a very nice reply from Erik himself. My basic point was that none of the issues he raised were specific to the planes themselves - the universe around a given campaign world is also wasted space, but nobody worried about that too much (except for those silly fans of SJ <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ).But the big one was the debacle with Dark Sun in Dragon #319 and Polyhedron #169/Dungeon #110. Now, I certainly didn't agree with a lot of the complaints people had (mostly those regarding the setting and timeline), but many of the mechanical issues were rightly disliked - paladins just don't belong on Athas, and sorcerers are a very ill-fit. It got to the point where Dave Noonan publicly outlined how his manuscript had been different, and that the changes in the final product were due to editing.From what I remember, Erik was rather bitter about that one, saying something to the effect of "some fans just can't be pleased." Again, he's not entirely wrong - some fans of that setting really seem to hate everything after the first boxed set - but his editor's pen clearly took him in the wrong direction where Dark Sun was concerned.Now, to be fair, all of these are minor problems over the course of what's been a truly distinguished career with D&D/Pathfinder. Erik is one of the modern-day giants in the industry, and deservedly so. But nobody does everything perfect all the time, especially where the varied nature of campaign settings are concerned. It's an object lesson, I think, that settings are best written and published by the people who love them the most; anything less than that has a very hard time living up to the fans' expectations.</blockquote>

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