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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7670252" data-attributes="member: 37579">You're asking for campaign support super quickly. The game hasn't been out for a year yet.For comparison:This is the first "campaign setting" product. [ATTACH]68243[/ATTACH]It was a few poster maps and a 32-page folio. Each nation received a short paragraph. And it was released in 1980, two years after the 1e Player's Handbook and six years after the game launched.This is the update for the FR campaign setting for 2e.[ATTACH]68244[/ATTACH]It was released in 1993, four years after the release of the 2e core rulebooks. Dragonlance was released the year before and Dark Sun premiered in 1991, a full two years after the core rulebooks.During 3e, the Realms was doing very well and had become the key setting. [ATTACH]68245[/ATTACH]This book was released in 2001, the year after the 3e core rulebooks dropped. Why does WotC need support right now when it took them longer almost every other edition? Just because they were able to rush things out the door during 4e doesn't mean we should expect that now when they have a third of the staff. It's not like they were able to write a giant 320-page campaign book while also working on the core rulebooks. There's two realistic options. Either they outsource the book to a different publisher or they take their time to do a campaign setting in-between other projects. I don't see them effectively giving the Realms to someone else. Writing a campaign setting is a long, long process and they wouldn't have started prior to December. Even if they rushed the job and fired it out in six months they'd *just* be finishing now for a potential GenCon release."Updating" through DnDclassics.com and Unearthed Arcana articles seems to be pretty darn cheap. We already have Eberron and the key unique race from Dragonlance. Maps are pricey to make. You have to pay a skilled cartographer to spend weeks drawing a region while referencing dozens of source documents. That is super hard, even for settings like the Realms or Dragonlance where most of the work has been done and recently. All for a product only a fraction of your audience will buy. Again, if you're a fan of Dark Sun, you likely already have the campaign setting and thus have the maps. There's almost zero appeal to existing fans. For new fans, it's easier to introduce them to a single setting and focus on that. That does require a Realms book, but - as mentioned above - that takes time.</blockquote>

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