Thursday, May 28, 2020

Onyx Path

I was a fan of the Sword And Sorcery Studios' output in the early 2000s, but dropped off when SSS dropped off. 1d4chan has the postmortem.

To summarise: their parent company White Wolf messed up at every level. Fortunately one of WW's earlier messups allowed one subset, Onyx Path, to break off before the rest of the company collapsed. Onyx, having avoided that unpleasantness, got to keep the Scarred Lands setting. As for other SSS clients / offshoots... Malhavoc is off to non-d20 projects and I don't know what Necromancer Games is up to [7/8/2020] Necromancer is now Frog God. In 2017, Onyx started to pick up the pieces in Scarn as a "second edition", for D&D's fifth.

I cannot dispute the 1d4chan review of the original lorebooks: they started off chaotic, got organised a little better, then when it all started to fall down the company dumped the remainder of what it had into one final hardcover. Strange Lands reads for 3.x Scarn what Other Lands was for 2e Krynn.

Now that Scarn is (more) active, it is more difficult for fanbois (or 'stans', whatever) to go wild with suggestions than it is for unsupported settings.

Under the Hasbro umbrella, Taladas, (especially) Blackmoor, and Mystara seem abandoned these days. Outside Hasbro and Onyx, Fantasy-Flight seems about done with the Midnight setting. There was some third-party work around Arcana Evolved but again, not lately. Violet Dawn's Avadnu has been quiet. Obviously, that doesn't mean anyone gets to pirate this stuff. It does mean you'll not be butting into the designer's canon if you supplement it, under fair-use or (if you're adventurous) under contracted permission.

I get the feeling that the Scarred Lands in this iteration might not get around to revising everything they'd done in the 2000s. I get the feeling that the fans will be safe reworking the Strange Lands or even the bulk of Termana.

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