I'm bored by the continous talking about possible hidden reasons why the line was stopped (the movie, the PC game, etc..) and the mixing of subjective and objective thinking...
Just let us stay to the facts!
OBJECTIVES REASONS:
From what I can remember from past posts/announcements by both Conan Properties and Matt the main reasons are two:
1) the idea of adding more systems (RQ e SW) IN THE LAST YEAR OF LICENSE (Conan properties do not care whether Conan is d20 or RQ, they just said it is dumb to switch systems at the end of the contract);
2) Series of Atlases. They would have been great (and by a great author: Vincent) but they are far beyond the limits of the contract.
As far as we know Conan Properties did not say Mongoose to stop publishing Conan books this year, but they simply said that their plans cannot be accepted.
So it was a Mongoose decision to stop publishing Conan books this year and deleting Empires & Thieves's C. (and give us just small bits of them in the S&P series).
Now, let me do some SUBJECTIVE thinking:
1) What a dumb moment to make such choices! If these decisions were taken couple of years ago (instead of giving us low-level books as Cities and KhitaI) their effect would not have been so devastating!
2) Multi-systems are proved to be failures (e.g. Alderac Rokugan d20). You must choose a system and believe in it.....if you chosed RQ I would be upset, but that was your choice, although we all know that d20 is not exactly dead...
3) The way they treated us customers last summer was, simply said, stupid. Deleting 2 products (which were ready to be published) without being sure of what they were doing, telling us to wait 4 months...and then the bad news!
I’m sorry for Mongoose but I will never buy any other of their products.
Conan was my game. I bought Mongoose products because of Conan, not the opposite.
I think that Mongoose people have both merits and faults.
They created the best Conan game ever....just to destroy it.
I completely dislike RQ (whose combat mechanincs are not adapt to the fast pacing of Sword & Sorcery). Without mentioning how they destroyed Empires (a product which was ready to be published…) and that we will possibly never see in its wholeness in the S&P issues.
