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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8694808" data-attributes="member: 5948">The thing is, I think TSR actually was aware of the problems they’d caused themselves with the tension between the novel and game lines in Dragonlance. You can kinda see what appears to be their attempts to find solutions to the dilemma in later lines, though it’s not a problem they ever really solved.The big complaint about the dragonlance novels was that they duplicated (spoiled?) the story, so anyone playing through the modules knew what was going to happen, and it was weird having your dwarf rogue pc or whatever playing through an iconic scene that Sturm or someone did in the novels.You can sorta see the solutions they tried.In Dark Sun the setting was released first and then the novels - but the novels turned the setting upside down and invalidated the actual boxed set within months of release, and the modules basically had the PCs running around doing second-string b-plot stuff while novel characters were the heroes. Which everyone hated, of course. Troy Denning came out later and claimed that the intention was that the novels wouldn’t be canon within the game line and were just intended to be an example of a Dark Sun story that COULD be told in the setting. But to be honest, I don’t believe a word of that. The modules and the novels were being written at the same time, and if this claim were true, the modules wouldnt have been tied as tightly to the novels as they were. In Maztica, the events of the novels happened and became canon in the game line, and PCs were assumed to be adventuring in the aftermath. So at least the boxed set wasn’t instantly invalidated, though this was of course unsatisfactory because once again, the PCs were understudies for novel characters and everything that made the setting interesting had been thoroughly blown up by the time the PCs actually got there.Probably the most successful solution they came up with was in FR, with novels like the earlier Drizzt books, or the Arilyn/Danilo books by Elaine Cunningham (I think the Brimstone Angels books followed this template too, though I haven’t read them) Books in which the stakes were smaller and more personal, so they could act as examples of the sort of story that could be told in a setting, and which could be canonical without actually damaging or radically changing the setting itself. But TSR never managed (or bothered) to make this philosophy policy, so this sort of FR novel was greatly outnumbered by the sort (the Avatar books, the Horde, Rage of Dragons, Threat from the Sea, Shadow of the Avatar, Spellfire, Cormyr/Putple Dragon etc etc etc) where some apocalyptic threat arose and was put down and left the game line floundering in the wake of the metaplot. Again. And over time, this led to a huge overpopulation of powerful novel heroes running around in the setting, and a steadily diminishing number of unresolved plot hooks from the sourcebooks as authors mined them and had novel characters solve all the problems.And of course there were lines like Planescape and Al-Qadim which had minimal or nonexistent novel lines, but given TSR was losing money on game material and only kept afloat by novel sales at this point, this strategy (while artistically satisfying) wasn’t exactly commercially viable.</blockquote>

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