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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hellcow" data-source="post: 3695754" data-attributes="member: 15800">Nope nope nope.First you had the 12,000 1-pages. Then you had the 11 10-pages. Honestly, I don't remember if they gave us a specific format or just "give us a more concrete overview of the world." Tone and Setting, geography, religion, types of characters, threats people would face, examples of adventures for low, mid, and high level characters.Then they picked the final three - Nathan Toomey, Rich Burlew, and myself. We each got $20,000 in exchange for the rights to our material. And yes, as a full time freelancer, that's a LOT of money for a 100-page RPG doc. At this point they brought us each in and told us what they liked and what they didn't like about the setting. But this wasn't close collaboration; it was a general "Highlight this, downplay this, we'd love to see you develop more of that." In my case, for example, they wanted more new races; I'd deliberately held back from creating races, and the shifters and warforged both emerged as a result of this direction. But again, this was very general. They gave us some very basic guidelines and sent us all back. The instructions were also not to worry about crunch at all: explain the ideas behind new races, classes, etc, but don't worry about mechanics. I believe they DID give us a general "here's the structure we want" outline, but at the same time it's been 4 years and my NDA would likely prevent me from sharing it, so perhaps the brand manager can help. So the setting bible was all me. It was after it was chosen, as it was transformed into the ECS, that it became a close working relationship with WotC. That's when Bill Slaviscek, James Wyatt, Chris Perkins, and a few others spell nearly a week with me exploring specific elements, brainstorming, and ultimately dividing up the work on the final setting. So the shifters were in the setting bible, but the final form of the shfiters - the whole system of shifter traits and stacking feats - was something developed by James and R&D. The warforged went through about seven different designs, as WotC tried to find good mechanics to represent the idea. And so on. Sort of. When I saw this post, I said "Huh?" and talked to both James and Rich. The culture of Aerenal is something that emerged in that final stage. When we were dividing up the work for the ECS, the elves fell to me. Because of some various other changes, the original elf culture I had developed didn't fit as well. In the discussion of what else we could do with them, someone said "What about something to do with necromancy?" and I ran with that. The person who said that may have been thinking of what Rich had done. But when I created the Undying Court and the ancestor-worshipping culture of the Tairnadal, all I was playing off of was "necromantic elves." As I said, I contacted Rich right away, because I'm personally very pleased with Eberron's elves, and if it somehow turned out that I had stolen them, I wanted to know and to apologize. He's bound by NDA, but said that his elf culture was quite different. So it inspired the sentence "necromantic elves" - but Aerenal and Valenar weren't directly taken from Rich's setting, which AFAIK is still intact. The semi-finalists could do whatever they wanted with their settings; the finalist's settings are owned by WotC, and even I don't know anything about them.</blockquote>

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