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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9570779" data-attributes="member: 907">I think the main reason individual small adventures don't work commercially is that each of them has a limited audience. When I see something like Storm King's Thunder, or Curse of Strahd, or Eye of Vecna, I am theoretically in the market for them if I am considering starting a new campaign which I would then build around that book. But if I instead see something like the 3e adventure Speaker in Dreams, I'm only really interested in it if I'm already running a campaign and that campaign is coming up on level 5. Even worse, if I'm looking at something like Whispers of the Vampire's Blade, it expects me to both run an Eberron campaign, for that campaign to be coming up on level 4, and and ideally for me to have run Shadows of the Last War first. Those are much bigger asks than "Might want to run this as a campaign some day."And since the potential audience for the adventure is small, you need to split the development costs over a lot fewer copies. That will in turn make the audience even smaller, and that cycle isn't going anywhere fast. Wizards' solution to this have been adventure anthologies, and often using shortcuts like having all the adventures being converted adventures from older editions (which helps both because, I assume, converting an adventure is less work than making one from scratch and because it might grab some customers out of nostalgia).That said, it's good to have short adventures around, either as part of anthologies or as stand-alones. The problem is that they're not super commercially viable. To make them make business sense, you pretty much need not to treat them as stand-alone products, but as marketing for your core rules. I believe that was a big part of the impetus for the OGL and d20STL in the first place – I remember reading Ryan Dancey saying that you could basically view the whole AD&D product line as more-or-less self-sustaining marketing for the PHB, and if you could get third-party companies (who likely have lower overhead and lower profit targets) to do that it could be a win-win situation.</blockquote>

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