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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3003679" data-attributes="member: 11760">I want more support for a Harry Potter style game. I'm going to finally run a Redhurst game later this year (as opposed to it being part of a larger setting) and want more than splatbooks and one adventure in Dungeon to help with the tone. There's a wee bit of enthusiasm for the franchise, and I'm constantly amazed that D20 publishers haven't tried to tap into that. Where are the Wizard School settings (other than Redhurst) and the Wizard School adventures (I'm going to adapt Dungeon Interludes from Goodman Games) and the Wizard School sourcebooks?Likewise, where are products that support games similar to all the major popular fantasy works? Other than some support for pirate games, there's been almost none. The only "real world in a fantasy universe" support (Second World) more closely resembles Stargate than Narnia (as does the Atlas Games D20 product that I'm not sure if it ever got off the ground) and it requires D20 Modern. What happens if I just want to run players through a Narnia-like experience, with modern day people moving back and forth through magical portals? The Narnia movie did better than the Stargate film and has a history stretching back decades, yet no one was stepping up with even a modest product -- not even a PDF -- for when the Narnia film was released. Talking animals, heroes from Earth, magic that can change the weather of a nation, gods that walk among mortals as animals; surely at least one of those could have gotten the treatment from publishers. (And hey, it would also be mostly applicable to Alice in Wonderland, Thomas Covenant and a host of other popular franchises.)I'd like to see some stuff supporting 19th century British fantasy, complete with fairies, flying to the moon and so on. What steampunk products exist for D20 have almost entirely focused on the hardware, when the point of steampunk fiction is how societies change when the technological preconceptions change. (Which makes it kind of a head-scratcher as to what the people writing the D20 steampunk stuff were reading for inspiration.)Northern Crown is great for what it is (American mythology in the approximate pre-Revolutionary era), but what about a D20 supplement about the Age of Exploration, an immensely portable trope that showed up a lot in WotC's setting search but which didn't really translate into products for the marketplace (although we did get two competing "golden age" settings instead, which I do applaud for rethinking the D&D heir-to-ancient-empires standard setting)?What about a D20 book statting up all of Grimm's Fairy Tales -- including the ones not touched by Walt Disney and thus bowdlerized and immensely familiar to everyone. Forget hobbits, that's the best-known fantasy in the world.Likewise, much of the Oz books have fallen out of copyright. These things were the Harry Potter of the turn of the 20th century and go far beyond what the movies nibbled at. There's a setting and sourcebook and monster book just sitting there, waiting for someone to do it.WotC will still mine that nostalgia vein just fine. But just because something was originally created in 1979 doesn't make it somehow superior to what can be created today, unless you've got a whole weird Bee Gees fetish we need to talk about.And yes, risk-taking can be a dangerous thing to do in any market, especially one as precarious as the D20 market. But everyone turning out safe works on the same subjects just means the best implementation of that safe work wins and everyone else loses. That's just as big of a risk. The folks in a position to should continue to push at the boundaries before staying on the safe path or retreating from D20 altogether, which seems to be the two main courses taken presently.</blockquote>

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