I have some issues with this description from the DrivethruRPG page for the Time of the Dragon boxed set.Shannon Applecline wrote:What the designers didn't realize at the time is that they were creating the first major fraction in the Dragonlance line, as players might now be interested in the traditional continent of Ansalon or the new continent of Taladas, but probably not both. Dragonlance would become even more fractured in future years, as the timeline was moved forward in Dragons of Summer Flame (1995), Dragonlance: Fifth Age (1996), and the War of Souls trilogy (2000-2002).
This fracturing created support issues for TSR and threatened to divide the fanbase, but TSR probably wasn't considering any of these problems in 1988 and 1989 because the whole idea of so dramatically expanding and changing a setting was almost unknown at the time. The closest that TSR had come was their introduction of the east to the Forgotten Realms in Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms (1988), but that was the grafting of an old setting as opposed to the creation of a new one. The publication of the Horde Barbarian Campaign Setting (1990) and the Maztica Campaign Set (1991) would be more in line with what TSR was doing with Time of the Dragon … and ultimately TSR wouldn't be able to support any of these large-scale extensions to their settings.
First of all, did Time of the Dragon or even the Fifth Age even come close to splitting the Dragonlance fan base?
Also, why would such campaign expansions need to be supported? Am I reading too much into this or is this a regurgitation of the Number of Settings Killed TSR myth?
-Havard