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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pramas" data-source="post: 3306425" data-attributes="member: 995">If you can imagine this conversation going on for over a year via e-mail, you'd have a rough approximation of Green Ronin's internal debates about what to do with Freeport. With the original Freeport: The City of Adventure book long sold out and unreprintable because of the 3.0 rules it was attached to, when it came time to contemplate a re-launch of the setting we had to weigh our options carefully.We discussed all sorts of things, from a simple 3.5 update all the way to a full Freeport game. We ultimately decided that we could not just give up on d20 because to date nearly all Freeport fans were D&D players. Doing a new game or switching it over to True20 entirely would almost certainly alienate a bunch of people. On the other hand, going just d20 was not really an option with the current state of the market. To give you an idea of how things have changed since 2002, Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary--a 256 page hardback detailing one of the most famous cities in fantasy fiction--sold about 25% of what Freeport: The City of Adventure did and Freeport did not have 20 years of fiction and famous authors behind it. Despite the name recognition and the pedigree, Shadowspawn's Guide to Sanctuary was viewed as "just another d20 book" by distributors and retailers. Ulitmately this is what led me to come up with a new strategy for the Freeport re-launch. The Pirate's Guide to Freeport is a 256-page hardback detailing the City of Adventure and containing no game stats for any system. We are then publishing a series of companion books that give rules info and stats for many different systems. First on deck are the True20 Freeport Companion and the d20 Freeport Companion, but there will be others as well. This should allow us to broaden Freeport's appeal to fans of fantasy gaming in general, while providing good support for the city's original fanbase as well. FYI, the Pirate's Guide to Freeport includes an optional chapter on the World of Freeport that blows it out to a full campaign setting. This includes a detailed overview of "the Continent", which no coincidentally is where we've been setting our line of Bleeding Edge Adventures. As for Privateer I think the wargame is popular enough that they could do their own RPG if they wanted to. The advantage to this is that its launch would be a much bigger event than any new d20 sourcebook. The disadvantage is that it would take a lot of work and that effort is likely better spent on their minis games.</blockquote>

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