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My suspicion is that if you do anything with Paizo, you'd be best off having it support/tie into Golarion in some way, to help attract Paizo's established fan base. Best option would be to find an obscure, undeveloped corner of the world (even something not mapped yet) and stake it out as "Necro country".

WRT the three questions gondolin asked, on #1, there was a legal issue as well, though nothing that actually prevented Necro from publishing 4e. You may recall that when 4e was first announced and came out, the release of the GSL was considerably delayed, preventing immediate 3rd party support, and when it did come out, it had some pretty big flaws. One that I remember is that it specified that any products or product lines you released under 4e could never be released under other systems or editions. That means that if Necro had done a 4e Tome of Horrors, and 4e folded, they could not do another version for Pathfinder, or sell further copies of the 3.5 version, or possibly even do a 5e version. Goodman Games was willing to accept this price and support 4e anyway, which is why they exclusively do 4e now.

Keeping in mind that Clark is a lawyer, he'd know better than most the potential pitfalls of signing onto a poorly written contract or licensing agreement, and doubtless felt it was not worth risking Necro's IP on something he felt was open to abuse.

Now that the GSL has been revised, that is no longer an issue. However, from what I gather from his post, distributors seem leery of starting new 4e product lines. My guess is that this is because 4e is probably doing just okay, but not well enough to support much more product (at least, not without it being a gamble). Really, other than isolated products, I bet between WOTC and Goodman, 4e is getting all the support it really needs.


I think Dark Mistress addressed point #2 pretty well. To expand on it slightly, with a print product, not only do you have to pay printing costs for a few thousand units minimum, any you do not sell you end up eating the cost for. There have been products in Necro's past where they lost money or barely broke even because of this, despite the quality of the product itself. On the other hand, with PDFs or print on demand, you don't pay for any printing costs, nor are you ever left with overstock. The trade-off is that your products are only going to be available to people who use the internet a lot and are willing to buy PDF products, so you're cutting out a market of casual gamers who may wander into their local game shop but who have never even been to wizards.com or enworld. And I'm one of the gamers who prefers a hardcopy product over a PDF if I have a choice. (Actually, ideally I'd like to have both.)