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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6765221" data-attributes="member: 22424">I think FR probably gained an unassailable position because of three key advantages it had in the mid/late-eighties:- It was given a big push by TSR as their 'main' setting because at about the same time they were looking to de-emphasise Greyhawk (because Gary had left, but retained at least some IP rights in the setting). At that time, the choice was between FR and Dragonlance, but DL always had that one big story overshadowing everything else, while FR was more open - and so a better candidate for the main setting going forward.- FR also benefited from Ed's absurdly-prolific imagination - any time TSR wanted to publish something, Ed could just open his files and there it was. By contrast, another setting needed material generated for it, which meant that FR felt more organic rather than manufactured.- And then FR had the massive breakout hit "The Crystal Shard", and the Legacy of Drizzt that that spawned. (And Drizzt became even bigger in the nineties.)Having attained that dominant position, FR simply retained it. New settings came and went, but none supplanted it - despite Dark Sun getting a big push back in 2nd Ed and Eberron in 3e.(That said, that's possibly inevitable - FR is much closer to generic fantasy, and so more suitable for idea-harvesting by homebrew DMs. The others are much more idiosyncratic, which is actually a good thing for the settings, but probably makes it inevitable that they're lesser lights.)At least, that's my thinking. I could, of course, be wrong. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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