Ben Riggs
@BenRiggs_
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D&D historian extraordinaire. Friend of humanity, animal, and werewolf alike. Buy my griddle-hot D&D history here!
Milwaukee, WI
Joined June 2013
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D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy.
“Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men… They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care.”
-Gary Gygax, EUROPA 10/11, 1975
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Hi all! I’m a D&D historian, and I have a book about the sale of TSR to WoTC coming out in July, and I thought now might be a good time to talk a bit about TSR’s copyrights and trademarks. 1/?
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The Golden Age of TTRPGs is Dead
We are watching a bright and special time in the TTRPG industry pass away before our eyes.
Around the start of the 2010s, we saw the dawn of a new golden age of tabletop roleplaying games.
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It was the Friday before Christmas in 1996 when layoffs ripped through the D&D staff at TSR in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and I think of that day today.
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D&D’s digital future seems increasingly likely.
I thought those panicking about an all-digital future for D&D were alarmist. After all, I said to me, WotC makes a lot of money selling books. Why would they stop? Or even de-emphasize them?
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In case you didn't see it, the New York Times editorial page is singing the praises of D&D. If only Gary could see this...
@lukegygax
@Wizards_DnD
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Newly Discovered Letters Reveal D&D's Co-Creator Asked to be put in Charge of D&D in 1997 and it Did Not Go Well
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Know your D&D Icons! Laura Hickman co-wrote what is arguably the greatest D&D adventure of all-time, Ravenloft, but she has not received nearly the credit she deserves. First, it’s worth mentioning that she introduced her husband, Tracy, to D&D.
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Part 2: D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax was Sexist. Talking About it is Key to Preserving his Legacy.
...it is also directly harming the legacies of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.
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D&D historian here! Yesterday, I put together an estimate of how many AD&D players there were by 1998. This chart compares that number to the people
@Wizards_DnD
said played as of last year!
@WinningerR
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I was looking for the original map of the Forgotten Realms from the TSR offices for years and failed to find it.
Then, this last summer, it waltzed across my feed!
It is now above a pub! And I found that so fascinating I wrote an article about it.
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Behold the cumulative sales for every AD&D setting from 1979 to 1999!
Earlier settings did not just sell better. They sold EXPONENTIALLY better.
@Wizards_DnD
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In sum, WoTC acted fast in the 90s to obtain en masse all TSR copyrights and paid handsomely for the privilege. We, the nerds of the world, have benefitted from this handsomely via 3rd, 4th, & 5th ed D&D. Because of it, Hasbro/WoTC has an iron lock on D&D copyright. 12/?
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Trademarks seem irrelevant, but I'm a historian, not a lawyer. Still, I would beware anyone asking for money to achieve the impossible. 14/?
@Wizards_DnD
@docetist
@Appelcline
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Because WoTC owns the copyright to everything TSR published, it seems highly doubtful any legal legerdemain could compel WoTC to alter marketing copy on products, such as the legacy content disclaimer. 13/?
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Furthermore, Adkison cleaned up the D&D copyrights at the same time WoTC purchased TSR. He wrote checks to D&D co-creators Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and even Gary’s ex-wife Mary, in exchange for which they surrendered all claim to D&D IP. 10/?
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Dave Thaumavore asked me, "What is the deal with TSR currently?"
I replied, "Which TSR do you mean?
"If by TSR you mean by the fraternity of alumni who once worked at the old factory on Sheridan Springs Road within walking distance of the holy waters of Geneva Lake...
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I wanna start running a
#ttrpg
again, but with a book to market and a 15-month-old boy to keep from eating ladybugs, I have zero prep time.
What is the best zero prep TTRPG in your opinion?
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Sources inside Wizards of the Coast tell me that CEO Chris Cocks himself was behind the drive to end the OGL.
Without last year's revolt against the attempt to end the OGL, the 2024 rules would almost certainly be Hasbro IP, and taboo to outsiders except for a fee.
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Hi! I’m a D&D historian, and given some of the issues around worker pay in the
#TTRPG
industry raised by
@PaizoWorkers
and others, I thought I’d tweet a little bit about pay at TSR in 1997, a time for which I have a ton of primary source documents. 1/?
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Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said:
“I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth."
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More actual D&D sales numbers!
Below you will find the sales numbers of Basic D&D, and then two charts comparing those to the sales of AD&D 1st edition.
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WoTC’s board of directors considered waiting to buy TSR after it went bankrupt. (It would have been cheaper.) CEO Peter Adkison talked them out of it, arguing, “We want to buy TSR now before we lose momentum, [and] before intellectual property starts walking out the door.” 8/?
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Adkison said of this move, “We wanted to get a clean title on everything and take care of those guys. We wanted to heal wounds and put us in a position to go forward without controversy.” 11/?
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First, you have to know that in 1996, TSR was dying. The company’s gross sales fell 15% to $32.6 million. At the same time, the company owed millions of dollars to freelancers, vendors, its printer, and Random House. 2/?
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So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.
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What happens if the PHB and DMG are purchased by different people? Who owns D&D? It would fall to lawyers and judges to sort out. It would have been a nightmare for us nerds. IMAGINE A DECADE PASSING WITH NO NEW D&D PRODUCTS. 6/?
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The Forgotten Realms were acquired by D&D for $5,000. A universe changed hands for the price of a car.
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The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain cases... [More in the following thread]
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Have you heard the true story of how TSR, the first company to make D&D, failed?
My book is the product of hundreds of hours of interviews, endless research, and never-before-seen documents!
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In April of 1996, TSR was sued by Random for failing to meet its obligations in paying back those loans. What to do? What to do? How do you pay back loans when your sales are crashing? 3/?
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They also repeated Wizard’s disclaimer for legacy content which states:
"These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."
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This decision prevented the D&D debacle that might have resulted if TSR’s collateral copyrights were put up for sale. 9/?
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@DnD_Shorts
D&D historian here! I have contacts at WoTC, but it would be really weird for one contact to have all the info your source has. Detailed knowledge of the OGL, surveys, D&D Beyond plans would all likely be in separate departments.
Have you considered you may be getting used?
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Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit points.
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It was at this perilous moment that WoTC stepped in to purchase TSR. But it might not have... 7/?
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But TSR had just bought time by risking the entire future of D&D. Imagine TSR went bankrupt in 96 or 97, a not unlikely event, and those copyrights went up on the auction block. Titles such as the PHB, the DMG, Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, and Dark Sun were all collateral. 5/?
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June 1996 filings from the US Copyright Office show that TSR had used the copyrights of dozens and dozens of works as collateral guaranteeing promissory notes to Random and State Street Bank. The lawsuit was duly called off. 4/?
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DO TTRPG HISTORIANS LIE?
The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of Original D&D 1970-1977.
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(I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online. Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.)
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The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s lib may make whatever they wish from the foregoing.”
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My sold-out seminar at Gen Con on why TSR failed, summarizing dozens of hours of interviews on the subject.
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Single copy of Mistborn read by 15 junior high students in 5 years! It's showing the love!
@BrandSanderson
http://t.co/0VJ09OoTKC
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Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials.
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In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent David Kelly called it “disparagement.”
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I am pleased to announce that I have sold my book on the crisis of TSR in the 1990s to St. Martin's Press! Thanks to all who took the time to talk to me for this.
@PlotPointsPod
@susannprogress
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"They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”
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"I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’..."
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D&D co-creator Gary Gygax was the most influential Wisconsinite to ever live.
Yesterday on Wisconsin Public Radio I called on Gov. Evers to make Gary Gygax Day an official holiday in the state of Wisconsin. Tell him you agree by tweeting him here:
@GovEvers
#dnd
@Wizards_DnD
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Behold! Sales of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia!
The Rules Cyclopedia may be the best single volume ever produced for the game. Consolidating the rules from the D&D boxed sets, it contains all the rules needed to play the game, character creation, monsters, and magic items!
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It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good, and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for another example.)
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Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any other interpretation.
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The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact of D&D at the time. And he left us his response.
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Cont'd: "and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room."
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Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character class.
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Instead of countless companies working to make your 5E game better, they are now asking you to become MCDM, or Darrington Press, or Paizo, or D&D 6E players.
We are entering an era of division, faction, and balkanization.
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Cynthia Williams is out at WotC, which begs the question: If you were hired as the new CEO, what would you do to right the ship of game and sail us all to safer waters?
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The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen.
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Since then, huge numbers of new players have found the hobby thanks to Stranger Things and actual plays like Critical Role. These new fans discovered a vibrant and thrumming TTRPG industry.
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These critics are accusing Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on it.
So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and early D&D?
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Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first supplement ever produced for D&D.
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Because of the increasing number of gamers, even strange, freaky, or weird TTRPG ideas could find an audience. Have you heard of Apollo 47 Technical Manual the RPG?
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Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading politics into D&D.
Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D.
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Behold! Some actual
#DnD
sales numbers!
While working on my book
#SlayingtheDragon
I got a ton of primary source documents containing sales data for D&D. With the book coming out, I've been looking for a way to get that data out into the wide world.
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It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.)
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Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness.
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The problem is, 5E was not just a game. It was a massive community of players. Countless companies could thrive making products for that community.
These new games are a shattering of that community.
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Gygax and Kuntz were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny.
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How? Let me show you.
The D&D player base is getting more diverse in every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen Z, and 39% are women.
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There were other mainstream publishers with storied brands, such as Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands, and Shadowrun. Lastly, there was a flourishing indie TTRPG scene that revolutionized what a TTRPG was, such as Apocalypse World.
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The Doom of Our Time Approaches
In the wake of the Open Gaming License scandal of this past winter, a number of companies have successfully launched new TTRPGs intended to move them past the possibility of Wizards of the Coast ever threatening their businesses ever again.
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Rather, the increasing diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for exploring the human condition.
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And after last month’s blood sacrifices upon the altar of profitability, who is even left at Wizards with the power and experience to advocate for such a thing?
It has been a grand era to be a gamer, one which we have been fortunate to live through.
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Critical Role has dropped 5E like a dead cockroach and is playtesting its own new fantasy game, Daggerheart, which uses 2D12s, and a horror game named Candela Obscura.
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Behold! Dark Sun sales numbers for 1994!
Two observations. First, the volume of work produced for this setting in the first four years of its existence is simply wild. 12 adventures, 10 supplements, and 9 novels, all for a setting which, while brilliant, was but a modest hit.
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There was the D20 fantasy family of games, dominated by D&D 5E, but rich with other games published under the OGL and the fertile depths of the Old School Renaissance.
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Did you know TSR grossed just over $56,000 in 1975?
More from the court case Michael Calleia recently brought to light.
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...the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human vegetable garden ...
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Behold! Sales of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in all its various iterations!
One thing to note on this graph is that from 1984 through 1990, TSR lumped all Basic sales together in their books, so there is only a combined number for those years.
Next up, the Expert Set!
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And while TTRPGs are a game, they are also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis men of middle European descent...
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Soft launch week 2!
In December, Wizards fired numerous key members of the D&D team. Ben, of course, has been interviewing them.
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This influx of gamers created a rising tide that lifted all boats. Novice gamers started out playing D&D 5E, yes, but went on to discover other great games. Because of the OGL, countless companies and designers could make money creating for D&D 5E.
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find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization forward, even if only by a few feet.
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Sixth edition will not do as well as 5th edition. Even more firings will follow. Wizards, which struggled to know what to do with D&D when it was a success (No Honor Among Thieves Starter Set? Really?) will be flummoxed by what to do with it when it is perceived as a failure.
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Do you like thieves? Like RPGs that are easy to play and suck you in? You need to check out Blades in the Dark.
@EvilHatOfficial
@GeekandSundry
#21stcenturygame
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And of course, there is the rising Godzilla that is 6th edition D&D, which scientists say will attack our shores in the spring of 2024. So far, there is no hint of an OGL for whatever that game will be.
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But recent developments make clear that this radiant golden age is ending, as surely as the steam engine ended the age of sail, or hobbits bearing a ring ended the Third Age of Middle-earth.
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All This Has Happened Before
In the 1990s, TSR, the first company to publish Dungeons & Dragons, embarked on publishing setting after setting after setting for the game. By 1997, over a dozen settings were sold by the company.
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This diversity is incredible, and not because the diversity is some blessed goal unto itself.
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We could pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no shit and there is no stink, and anyone who says there is shit on your sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you.
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The companies are now asking fans to choose sides. It also means that it is going to become more difficult for them to share customers. How interested will a Pathfinder fan be in an MCDM product? Or 6th edition? History suggests these sorts of barriers depress sales.
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Oh, and they have not announced a Starter Set to go with the revised 5th (R5) rules, a mistake so big that it really deserves its own post.
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Actual. Forgotten Realms. Sales numbers.
Below is a chart examining the sales of 1st and 2nd ed Forgotten Realms Setting Releases.
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There were other mainstream publishers with storied brands, such as Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands, and Shadowrun. Lastly, there was a flourishing indie TTRPG scene that revolutionized what a TTRPG was, such as Apocalypse World.ts bearing a ring ended the Third Age of Middle-earth
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Behold! Sales of the Dungeons & Dragons Expert Set in all its various iterations!
One thing to note on this graph is that from 1984 through 1989, TSR lumped all Expert sales together in their books, so there is only a combined number for those years.
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along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time.
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