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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 7670832" data-attributes="member: 5100">You have a really good point about the year starting in July. However you want to slice it, I'm assuming two APs per year with one of them being not FR. Even though I said "autumn", it was semi-arbitrary because I was counting the alternate setting as being the marquee with the Realms support as less important to the discussion. I'm also not too partial to whether the setting guide comes first or last in a cycle; I can see an argument both ways.The first paragraph you cut has an acknowledgement that they could be doing what I was suggesting, just more slowly. If that's two years of the Realms, then Eberron gets marquee treatment for a couple years, and so on, it wouldn't be bad -- assuming Eberron really does get half the attention or better. The point of FR getting the "autumn" release, though was that it would get one support AP for each cycle, while everything else (the other AP, a setting book) would be focused on something else. That means that Eberron would get 3 out of the 4 APs for that cycle. The next cycle, Greyhawk would get 3 APs and a setting book, while FR got 1.If, as so many folks have asserted in this thread, those three settings are all reasonably "generic" and anything written for one is easy to port, there should be no objection to that. Eberron gets one AP that really hits things like the Dragonmarked houses and/or the Mournland hard. It gets released between two APs that are set in the Realms. The next year, two generally vanilla APs are set in Eberron, but they have conversion guides akin to PotA. The next release is a full Greyhawk AP, then a Realms AP, then 2 more, vanilla APs set in Greyhawk.One of the big reason why there's heartburn among fans of other settings (or foes of the Realms, if you prefer) is that what's been said about other settings has been somewhere between "yeah, someday" and "don't hold your breath". Having some idea on scope would be nice. While the Eberron doc that Mearls put together was a nice bone, I sure hope that's not all we get for support. Even "We expect to stay with Forgotten Realms for 5 years," would have been better than "foreseeable future", or whatever the wording was. A three-year cycle would please me less, but it'd be something, especially if there was overlap. Assuming Eberron is second, I think five to six years is a long time to ask fans of the #3 setting to wait to get any real love. And 7-9 years for #4? Ouch. Based on history, that's practically the same thing as saying "not this edition". Realistically, I get that some settings just don't have the existing fan base to justify publishing much, if anything, and don't look like they have anything that would cause a new fan base to develop. I just have a hard time believing the Realms is the only thing that does have the fan base. If that's the case, then I'd still like to see several "settingless" adventures published so that it's clear D&D and Forgotten Realms aren't synonymous. If the Realms are a bigger brand than even D&D, then either find a way to extract the FR brand from D&D and sell D&D or let third parties give them a try. Keith Baker has said (IIRC) that he'd be up for taking a shot at a 5E conversion of Eberron.I'd be fine, even well-disposed, towards an overlapping schedule, especially if it allowed for settings beyond FR to receive ongoing support. I like the annual cycle is because I know there are some settings that don't have enough interest to support more than one book. One of the things that excited me about the annual cycle was that I realized that I'd play almost any setting for a single AP, but anything more than that feels too "locked in"; that's one of the reasons why I didn't buy most of the 2E settings. If we could get a third AP each year, it would make overlapping grand, as you'd be able to have two APs dedicated to money makers, with one of those being tightly coupled and flavorful. The third could be for one-off products. I wouldn't think you'd need the third slot for a couple years, though, unless people are really going through two APs in a year.</blockquote>

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