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As you have seen over the last few weeks, the Living Forgotten Realms campaign is changing. We have had our first battle interactive, the Global Administrators have been much more active on the Community site, and we have seen changes to retraining and making new characters. These changes have only been the beginning, those few things the Globals could work on with the authority we had. Now that an even greater level of the campaign’s control has been turned over to the Globals, more changes will quickly follow. I am going to do my best to fill you in on some of the HUGE changes happening over the next few months, but I want to stress that this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Change of Power: WotC is turning the campaign over to the community, but in a structured fashion. LFR will still have contractors (the Globals) supervising the campaign by shepherding the plot, setting release dates and approving adventures. WoTC will still offer guidance or be involved as needed. For example, Chris Tulach is still the Organized Play Content Developer, but he will no longer have any day to day management of LFR. Everything else is now a community/volunteer effort, including adventure creation. If this works, there is hope is that this new LFR model can serve as a template for any future community-driven campaigns, whatever they might be. The Globals are now in charge of almost 100% of the campaign in almost every way. Most of these changes will be behind the scenes and the player base will likely not notice them. One particular change is of note: WOTC is 100% removing itself from approving adventures. This means that LFR will no longer be canon with the exception of certain special events that we work out with them, if any. While this may initially seem unfortunate, it is really for the best as well will no longer have to work on their timeline. We should be able to make things move much faster now.

Adventure Changes: These structural changes will affect adventures and their distribution. The campaign is now entirely driven by the community as guided by the Globals. This means we no longer have a budget and so that means we cannot afford to pay for adventures. Authors will be paid for adventures up to and including Q3 2010. Starting in Q4 2010 and beyond, authors will not be paid for adventures. Instead, the new content distribution model revolves around the Community site. In the future we hope adventures will be posted there for anyone to download. Home play will no longer be tracked/reported at all and convention/public play ordering/reporting will be greatly simplified. Certain content (such as Battle Interactives) will still only be available to conventions. This makes it especially important to be a member of this community group. In the coming weeks we will be telling you more about how this will work.
After Q3, adventure questions will no longer be used. We are looking at other methods such as polls on the Community site or critical events submissions from convention/game days during certain weeks of the adventures release. More information on this will be coming in the future.

Future Organizational Structure: Next year we will be changing a lot of things and I would like to preview a few of these with you. First, we will be drastically scaling back the number of adventures next year. This will allow us to focus more on putting out an even better product than we have in the past, and to be able to put out the adventures on time; something we have been struggling with for various reasons. LFR will have a much heavier focus on story, character investment, and player driven events in the plotline. Convention content could come from anywhere and will likely be themed/linked short series, much as it is today (ADCP, SPEC, QUES, MINI). b. An example of our total releases MIGHT look like 24 adventures for 2011 + start of Epic play + DDXP content (including a BI) + Origins content (Quest) + Gen Con Indy content (including a mini-campaign) + possible other content TBD (such as adaptations from Dungeon). This is not guaranteed… just a possible example.
Further, at the end of this year, we will be retiring all of the current regions. As of 2011 we will have "Story areas" instead of regions (their actual name remains TBD at this time), including a home base area where the PCs will start off, and many later adventures will return to as the PCs drive the story. In some ways, these Story Areas/regions will be similar to meta-regions from LG. The will include large areas enclosed by a single story theme, such as the fight against Netheril or the danger of the Abolithic Sovereignty (These are just examples, and are not meant to be thought of as two of the new regions). The home base region might have roughly 8 adventures with there being 4 other areas with approximately 4 adventures each. Story areas MAY vary from year to year depending on what we are interested in and how the story matures. Some of the most popular story lines and NPCs that you have met and interacted with in your current regional plots will likely appear in these the new story areas, as appropriate. We hope all of the quest lines currently in progress will finish by the end of Q4 of this year (with the exception of the epic plotline that is teased at Gen Con and truly begins in Q1 of 2011). Our goal is to have each area involve a detailed story over one or possibly two level bands, but we will also be tying these story areas to other community content as we develop them further. We want to really involve and invest the players much more then we have been.
To met our new needs, the organizational structure of the campaign will be changing as of next year. Please note, some of the titles for these volunteer positions I am using might change. We will retain three of the four current Global Administrator positions. There will be six Writing Directors (two for the home base and one for each of the regions). Each Writing Director will be responsible for 4 adventures per year. We will also have three Community Managers who will be responsible for maintaining parts of the community site, acting as PoCs and working as playtest leads for new adventures. I encourage all of the players to thank all of the Regional Administrators for their hard work getting LFR up and running. We couldn't have done it without them. With these changes, we are currently assessing which of the Regional Admins are interested in staying on in one of these new positions. After we determine which of the Regionals are interested in staying on, we MAY consider applicants from outside the current Regional Admin pool to fill some positions with people who are not on the current staff. We will announce to the players if, and when, this opportunity opens up and how you might take advantage of it.

This is just the beginning and we have many more details coming. You can discuss these new directions in the forums here: community.wizards.com/lfr/go/thread/view...

Again, I want to thank everyone for all the terrific help and support over these last two years. I hope you are as excited as we are about the changes coming to improve LFR.

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