Reply To: D&D officially turning Forgotten Realms sights away from Euro inspired campaigns

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Kara-Tur probably wasn’t published for the same reason Al Qadim went away – sales.  Al Qadim wasn’t a source book it was a full on campaign setting with a fair number of books.  It wasn’t quite on the the same scale as Forgotten Realms but it was treated like a stand alone product even though it was the same world as Forgotten Realms.  But I don’t think D&D was popular enough to really support all the campaign settings TSR were producing at the time; Forgotten Realms, Dragon Lance, Ravenloft, Planescape, Dark Sun, Greyhawk and Al Qadim that I can recall, maybe Spelljammer?  Anyway you can see my point, I think it was buckling under its own weight and something had to give.  I think Al Qadim went out of print before the introduction of D&D 3.0 but by the time 3rd Ed came along WotC rationalised most of that stuff away and went down to only a few settings and although Forgotten Realms survived the cull, it shrank back to what you might consider the core world. D&D 3 probably did quite a lot to save the RPG industry by going open source and I think RPGs have been on the increase in terms of popularity for the last 15 years or so. Maybe now is a good time to expand the boundaries of what WotC can support and also instead if making it a full campaign setting, a source book will probably suffice because most of the game won’t be too dissimilar to any other d&d game. The classes will be broadly similar, magic in terms of spell casting isn’t going to be noticeably different, weapons and armour will work the same. All you really need is a good description of the places, notable characters, a few unique monsters, maybe some interesting new magic items and some pre-packed adventures. The same applies equally to Kara-Tur, Shaar and Zakhara. Al Qadim as a setting probably won’t make a come back, I suspect there will simply be a source book or two for each of the locations under the Forgotten Realms brand and possibly a Tomb of Annihilation style campaign.

I don’t really see any issues with tropes, like stereotypes they exist for a reason and they exist in all forms of entertainment. You don’t have to use them in your games if you don’t want.

Kara-Tur probably wasn’t published for the same reason Al Qadim went away – sales.  Al Qadim wasn’t a source book it was a full on campaign setting with a fair number of books.  It wasn’t quite on the the same scale as Forgotten Realms but it was treated like a stand alone product even though it was the same world as Forgotten Realms.  But I don’t think D&D was popular enough to really support all the campaign settings TSR were producing at the time; Forgotten Realms, Dragon Lance, Ravenloft, Planescape, Dark Sun, Greyhawk and Al Qadim that I can recall, maybe Spelljammer?  Anyway you can see my point, I think it was buckling under its own weight and something had to give. It made more sense to print less books but sell more of them than to print more books but sell less of each. I think Al Qadim went out of print before the introduction of D&D 3.0 but by the time 3rd Ed came along WotC rationalised most of that stuff away and went down to only a few settings and although Forgotten Realms survived the cull, it shrank back to what you might consider the core world. D&D 3 probably did quite a lot to save the RPG industry by going open source and I think RPGs have been on the increase in terms of popularity for the last 15 years or so. Maybe now is a good time to expand the boundaries of what WotC can support and also instead if making it a full campaign setting, a source book will probably suffice because most of the game won’t be too dissimilar to any other d&d game. The classes will be broadly similar, magic in terms of spell casting isn’t going to be noticeably different, weapons and armour will work the same. All you really need is a good description of the places, notable characters, a few unique monsters, maybe some interesting new magic items and some pre-packed adventures. The same applies equally to Kara-Tur, Shaar and Zakhara. Al Qadim as a setting probably won’t make a come back, I suspect there will simply be a source book or two for each of the locations under the Forgotten Realms brand and possibly a Tomb of Annihilation style campaign.

I don’t really see any issues with tropes, like stereotypes they exist for a reason and they exist in all forms of entertainment. You don’t have to use them in your games if you don’t want.