In any case, the 1993 product is a simultaneously terrific and frustrating product. At the time of its release, I was just beginning a campaign set in the Realms – the last AD&D campaign I would run before more or less abandoning the game for other RPGs – so its appearance was a godsend. Though I already owned (and loved) the 1987 set, it was several years out of date, both with the current AD&D rules and with events in the setting itself, so a more substantial update than the Forgotten Realms Adventures hardback was long overdue.
Say what you will about TSR in the 1990s, but one thing the company did very well was produce boxed RPG products and this one is no different. Coming in a sturdy, deep box, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set was positively stuffed with material: a 128-page A Grand Tour of the Realms, 64-page Guide to Running the Realms, a 96-page Shadowdale book (not to be confused with the terrible adventure module of the same name), several Monstrous Compendium pages and cart-apart sheets of cards, and, of course, four large, full-color maps of the Realms. It's a truly impressive collection of softcover books and other accessories.
A Grand Tour of the Realms is the heart of the boxed set, providing an overview of the setting and its locations. It's packed with information – probably too much, to be honest – and that's both a blessing and a curse, as I'll eventually explain. When I was refereeing a Realms campaign, it was probably the book I consulted the most often. By contrast, the Guide to Running the Realms, though seemingly intended as the Dungeon Master's companion book to the setting, is much less useful. More than half of its pages are spent detailing NPCs, large and small, as well as the various deities of the setting. It's not a useless book by any means, but I rarely looked at it.
Shadowdale is better. It's a deep dive into the most famous of the Dalelands, making it a suitable starting point for a new Forgotten Realms campaign, as well as a "home base" for adventurers who want to roam the region between the Moonsea and the Sea of Fallen Stars. The Dale is described in exhaustive detail – a recurring pattern in this boxed set – with almost every location given at least a short paragraph, often more. Several of these locales even have interior maps. Finally, there's a lengthy adventure, "Beneath the Twisted Tower," for beginning characters that not only makes good use of the material already presented but could easily serve as the kick-off to an entire campaign in and around the Dales.
Combined with all the other extras included inside the box, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting is a terrific product, one that really does give the Dungeon Master nearly everything he could possibly want for starting a new campaign in Ed Greenwood's storied setting. I know I found it invaluable when I was refereeing my campaign decades ago, especially as I hadn't been keeping up with all the changes TSR wrought on the Realms during the years since the release of the original 1987 boxed set. In terms of simple utility, this is a good candidate for the best setting material TSR produced during the company's existence (though there's an embarrassment of riches to choose from).
At the same time, if you're familiar with both the original boxed set and/or Greenwood's articles about the Realms in the pages of Dragon, it's hard not to be a little frustrated by the 1993 set. I've already noted several times now how much material is found within the three included books – so much that it could be overwhelming. I understand that not everyone is put off by lots of detail and, as a longtime fan of Tékumel, I feel vaguely hypocritical for grousing about the much more modest information found in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. Still, I feel as if the nature of the Realms started to change in this era, moving away from a more open-ended, almost sandbox-y setting into something more defined and therefore less flexible, at least when compared to its roots.
A big part of that probably has to do with not merely the Time of Troubles but how many products TSR had already produced for the setting. TSR turned the Forgotten Realms into the default, baseline setting of Second Edition, which meant that it shoehorned all manner of stuff into the setting that didn't really fit with Greenwood's original depictions of it. For example, several regions were made less fantastical and more like analogs of real world cultures and historical periods. This genericized the Realms and bled it of its original flavor. That disappointed me even at the time and does so even more now.
For all that, I still have a lot of affection for this boxed set. I not only made good use of it, but it's a fine example of a style of RPG product that no one really makes anymore – a largely complete description of a setting in a single box. I know there are all sorts of reasons why such a product is no longer as feasible as it was in the early 1990s, but that doesn't change my nostalgia for it. At the end of the day, I feel the only true judge of a gaming product is how much fun it engendered in play. By that standard, I consider the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting a winner.
I had the '87 boxed set and thought that was enough. Never bothered with the '93 version. I think I might have thought "What more do I really need?" Plus, '93 was a weird time for me: got out of the Navy, I was unemployed, and some other things one does when they're young and dumb. Maybe I give it a look.
ReplyDeleteIf you were not new to FR, The 2E gold/Grey box is a good supplement to the 1E OGB (just like FRA is) on the occasions you want some more detail on a particular person, place, or thing. It's not a good replacement for the OGB, though.
ReplyDeleteBut if you were just getting into FR the Gold/Grey box is pretty damned good (though, as mentioned, the DM book *is* weak)
"Say what you will about TSR in the 1990s, but one thing the company did very well was produce boxed RPG products and this one is no different."
ReplyDelete100% agree. I think there is a misconception that TSR post-purge became a junk factory under incompetent leadership. While the leadership did do some incompetent things (the purge itself instead of a major course correction probably being one of them), their motives were correct (TSR needed to reign in both their financial and creative focus). Moreover, the underlying quality of products both in content and publication were generally good ideas with sound principles.
Most of the financial or popular failures of TSR were either well-conceived but hastily executed or hastily conceived but competently executed. I can only think of one or two ill-conceived, poorly executed TSR products post-purge (WG7 comes to mind, and the initially successful Spellfire, both of which should have been big artistic, gameplay, and business hits, but missed at the first two levels and were only marginally profitable at best.)
TSR 2e's end of life isn't because they lacked talent or care for The Game, but because they were so doubleminded about everything. The best example I can think of is that they nearly simultaneously produced a beautiful run of original, virtually useless D&D trading cards with D&D stats on the back AND Spellfire, the playable but repurposed tacked-on art from old Dragon magazines, with rules and stats completely alien to D&D. TSR went in two directions at once, failing to stay true-to-purpose on either pathway. The missed opportunity was to cash in on CCG by producing one compatible subsystem, high quality finish CCG designed to function within 2nd edition D&D roleplaying, but playable as a standalone. They would have owned all the markets, probably eventually buying out WotC's first-to-market holdings.
The tragedy of TSR is not that it failed, but why it failed. It had the talent, dedication and content to go as big as Hasbro if it wanted to.
Consider this: in the 3rd quarter of 1985, TSR's revenue was better than 25% of what Best Buy's was at the time: about $5 million. To put it into perspective, in the 4th quarter of that year, Nintendo entered the US Market, with splash earnings estimated at...about $5 million.
The paper industry (both in Wisconsin and nationally - no idea who TSR was working with) was in flux, and so were both print costs and deluxe printing options and the publication of premium consumer boxed sets were going up.
I guess my point is that TSR's pathway was fraught with a lot of business risks, but there were lots of options. In 1985, they were on better financial footing than Nintendo U.S. and definitely way better than the entire video game industry (TSR alone was worth more than 25% of the entire video game industry in 1983-1985). They diversified, they took risks but also focused on their core business. They did a lot of right things, often for the right reasons, but ultimately kept their options too open.
This is how any one of their products could be both "good" and "frustrating," how they were able to limp through publishing cost slaughterhouses while at the same time would use debt to float debt, paying publishers for the last thing that didn't sell well in order to print the next thing that wouldn't sell well.
Perhaps had TSR committed to early digital (frankly, in retrospect, 1985 would have been the time to invest heavily in the video game (console/arcade) market that had collapsed from $10B to $100M overnight - A $5M targeted investment could have become $50M, or more, in annualized revenue by '95), or folded in-house the means of publication, or boldly committed to a path, things would be very different.
Frankly, I actually think had Gary still been with the company, he would have become aware of, and likely an early adopter of TeX, which launched (free to use!) in 85. Even though it was not widely known to consumers, statisticians, mathematicians, and economists adopted it quickly because it could make publication-ready formulae and tables with a photo-ready document. The average consumer didn't have thousands of dollars to invest in framemaker and the other software that, combined would be the equivalent of today's MS Office, but TSR did. Gary would have delighted in being able to directly manage table publication, and TSR would have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Avalon Hill basically did this 20 years earlier without desktop publishing, when their investor J.E. Smith personally began printing and assembling the boxes, and they strategically limited the production of new box set titles to two/year.
ReplyDeleteThere were strategies available to TSR, but their problem wasn't that they picked the wrong strategy, but that tried to pick them all, ultimately picking none.
Worst. Box art. Ever. Who decided to put the figure against a blank gold background - everything is overwhelmed, the type, the art, the... so, so bad.
ReplyDeleteWho decided? Likely in 1993, no one.
DeleteTSR - to my knowledge - never updated their publication process with third parties, and so often cut production costs in odd places without consistency. They would go from printing in cheap cyan to "add color", re-purposing low-res art (rejected and accepted) from past publications, occasionally reverting to low-quality decals on plain boxes, etc. It wasn't systematic cost management, it was "oh crap! we need to skip that step or we won't get it printed!" publishing.
Even when they were systematic about it, like for the 2nd edition "Green Books", it was off-brand. Instead of the Hickman-esque High Fantasy, Mod-Arcane Tome vibe that had been established in the pre-purge Unearthed Arcana/DragonLancey sense, the green books were cheaply printed, no-frills affairs that were thematically united and directly messaged.
Had Gary simply bought the Blumes out when they asked him to, I think TSR would have minimized its publishing inconsistencies...or at least (as they had throughout the first decade) maintained their distinctly TSR branded system of inconsistencies!
Yes there probably would have been more Unearthed Arcana-style "Best of Recent Dragon Issues" (although I wonder to this day if the bad/fast production of '84-85 was the one-off result of Gary saving the company he'd lost sight of while in California, because the Marvel box, which sold like crazy, was perfect.) poorly bound knockoffs, but at least the trade dress and presentation would have been evocative!
Heh. I always laugh when people suggest that things would have been fine if Gary had just remained in charge of things, ignoring the many terrible business decisions he also made, or the double-dealing he engaged in to enrich himself, or some of the terrible gaming products he produced afterwards. Might he have done better than the Blumes? Sure, but that's a low bar to clear. Remember, Gary was the one who brought Lorraine Williams into TSR in the first place...
DeleteRegarding the box art: yeah, not great, but probably influenced by some of what you saw in comic book publishing at the time as well, where foil covers and holograms, and other gimmicky printing tricks were still all the rage.
That cover is disappointing. I can see what they were going for, evoking the original but with a difference, but the end result looks cheap. I'd even go as far as to say it looks like a joke, a bad Photoshop a few years early.
ReplyDeleteAnything would have been better, even just reprinting the original cover with that "New Edition!" starburst on it.
TSR hated this cover too. They put out a new edition of the seting that only changed the cover to the better (but in my opinion, not great...but at least it is a full painting, not clip art!) Red Wizard on a Rock at Earthset in Mountains and Ocean With Genie and Generic Fantasy Ghost Goddess.
DeleteI don't think that is actually title, but I bet you remember which one I'm talking about.
But that speaks to doublemindedness of TSR. The ugly box sold really well, and they probably reasonably scheduled a new box design to correct the embarrassment of the original print materials...but...It probably would have been much cheaper to just stick with the original ugly box print specs. It is a little thing, but indicative of how old TSR's iterative habit of selling quickly- printed material to early adopters, then selling them the same thing with better production values a year later, as well as expanding the market, became an albatross. The return on young company half-assery profiteering stops working when you become a mature company. The market grew up, but TSR's publication workflow did not.
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