[3.X] What is Official/1st Party 3E D&D Material

[Saintheart]

In the case of Kingdoms of Kalamar, the primary reason it is asserted as being first party springs out of its books invariably carrying a seal that says 'Official D&D' or similar, from around 2001 - 2007. Officially licensed = first party, in most people's minds.

It's a bit more complex than that, mainly because WOTC was -- arguably -- arm-twisted into putting that seal onto those books. Kenzer & Company owned the rights to Knights of the Dinner Table, a comic strip which ran in Dragon magazine, about a gaming group that played a (then fictional) parody of AD&D called Hackmaster. Wizards of the Coast republished the magazines in their Dragon Magazine Archive CD ... and in doing so, either deliberately or inadvertently (but in any event, allegedly) breached the publishing contract for the strip with Kenzer, which had some forward-thinking provisions about their products reappearing in an electronic format.

A lawsuit from Kenzer ensued. The case was settled out of court, and part of the settlement included (a) a license for Kenzer to produce derivative products from Dungeons & Dragons until 2007; and (b) Kenzer & Company having the right to use the official D&D logo for their D&D-compatible products, unlike most third-party publishers who could only use the D20 logo or OGL.

I don't think there's much comment or material around from the designers or anyone involved at the time about whether any of Kenzer's books were actually balanced with WOTC's products or whether WOTC had much of a hand in it at all. Given the way the seal turned up on the books I'd guess they were probably completely separate, but honestly there's no way to tell on that score.


For Oriental Adventures and Dragonlance, it's a bit different: in each case, the 'flagship' campaign setting book was directly published by WOTC and seems to have been playtested by them, but all of the subsequent books were produced by the third party publisher who was collaborating with WOTC at the time and therefore is third party. Oriental Adventures was basically a joint venture between WOTC and Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG) to promote AEG's Legends of the Five Rings system, and in all of the AEG L5R books, dual stats appeared for both 3rd ed and the L5R system. But, bar Oriental Adventures, none were written by WOTC.


That being said, I'm finding it a very interesting exercise to Google the names of the writers or designers credited in third party books, simply because (based on my limited sample of 20+ third party books over in my review thread, which covers around the 2000 - 2005 time period) there seems to have been a lot of staff going between third party publishers and WOTC itself. WOTC ditched a large number of designers in 2001 which led to a number of them going freelance, or opening their own publishing houses. Bruce Cordell would go on to write for Malhavoc Press. Indeed Monte Cook himself ejected from WOTC and set up Malhavoc Press early in 3rd edition's run anyway. Jonathan Tweet lasted until 2008, but was laid off and started on 13th Age. Skip Williams was ditched in 2002 and did freelance work, including Races of the Wild for WOTC. It was also not that uncommon for designers to go in the other direction: Mike Mearls worked for AEG before WOTC hired him - and he was the lead designer for fourth and fifth edition until he quit last year.

Indeed some authors worked both sides simultaneously as freelancers or similar: Matthew Sernett was the editor-in-chief for Dragon magazine right in 3.5's run from 316-326, and went across to Paizo with the magazines. He has design credits on Fiend Folio, MM 3, Spell Compendium, and even Tome of Battle. He also wrote the Advanced Bestiary for the entirely third party publisher Green Ronin Publishing with a publication date of 2004, meaning he'd possibly been writing it while still at WOTC.

The only caution I'd have on that is not to judge guys whose names are storied now on their achievements back in 2001-2005 or so. Most of the third party authors I've seen had only just started their careers when the splatbook storm broke around 2001 or so, and in some cases it shows. Hell, guys who'd literally designed the 'E' in BECMI tried their hand at third party publishing (Green Ronin, The Assassin's Handbook) and (in my view) whiffed it.

(It's funny to occasionally come across shade being thrown between publishers even back then. Monte Cook seemed not to like Mongoose Publishing under Matthew Sprange, maybe because Sprange seems to have been a publishing machine and/or was bringing out splatbooks at laxative speed: Mongoose demanded authors pump out 128 pages of text per month, and Sprange smashed out any number of Slayers' Guides, let alone the Quintessential series of books, in the space of months when third edition was first released.)