Knights & Knaves Alehouse

Uhhh, someone loved her books? Really? Sure. Rose has had a pretty successful writing career. Her prose is clean and direct, and the Mika series appealed to younger readers, particularly the ones who started reading them after TSR's pick-a-path adventure series. That, however, is not the same audie...

Any idea what the attitude to Gary's ongoing line of Greyhawk novels was at the time inside TSR? The book division was certainly aware of them, and we knew that whatever deal Gary had struck on his way from the company allowed him to continue publishing them. No doubt the highest levels of the mgmt...

Not so much because I would have bought and loved those products, but because it was so patently obvious how much Bruce loved and believed in the line. All of the lines had their passionate champions, and there were lots of really interesting proposed products over the years that never saw the ligh...

Not sure if that held true when Jim was there or not. Yes, that was also true for the few years I was there after you left, Mike. It should also be noted that Bruce Heard, who ran the freelance schedule, was very particular about who worked on D&D and Mystara, since those were important to him. So ...

So the idea was just that, since Greyhawk was a brand that TSR owned that had been successful in the past and might be successful again in the future, that it was better to keep it alive on a slow boil with a couple-three products a year, even if it so happened that most/all of those products weren...

To take it a step further, I begin to wonder if in some sense the genrally high quality of his material (even if not necessary in line with my personal tastes) is in some sense a direct consequence of his NOT being an actual employee of TSR (and thus being more insulated from the daily travails of ...

Do you know why TSR decided to end the D&D line altogether around 1994 (iirc)? I don't know all the details. I left TSR as a fulltimer in '92 and broke with them even as a freelancer in '94. But sales was part of it. If the line had been selling really well, they would have kept it going. There was...

By 'insight' I mean any additional information that you might have on how the D&D line was perceived by TSR at the time, including how it was perceived by those who mainly worked on it (as far as I can tell, it seems that both Allston and Heard liked Mystara, etc.). Aaron was a freelancer, but Bruc...

Thanks for the enlightening post, James. It brings a bit of a smile to my face thinking of the TSR employees 'fightin' the man' to give more credit and respect to those that preceded them. In the book department, we lobbied for two years just to get upper mgmt. to allow us to put the authors' names...

Hey: Thought I'd add a couple comments on the topics being covered here and in the Lorraine thread. Like Mike, I was a TSR employee--our tenures overlapped for a year or two in the late 80s--and an almost-New Infinities employee just before that. I can spell out the details if anyone cares. In the l...