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Originally posted by BEAST

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Originally posted by Firestorm

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Originally posted by Chosen of Asmodeus

I wonder,assuming that the case, if he ever regretted that decision, given the rumors a few years back that he wanted to put down Drizzt and move onto other projects and stayed on only because they told him they'd just have someone else write their cash cow instead.

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I think those rumors sprung up right around the time realms of the underdark came out and Mark Anthony wrote that short story with Zaknafein and a very young Drizzt, along with a character who disappeared. Jalynfein the spider mage, an archmage Drow in menzo.

Not sure if they were true or not, but I doubt it

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I have never heard the rumor that Bob wanted to kill off Drizzt outside here at the 'Keep. What I heard was that he simply wanted to be able to write other characters in addition to Drizzt, but when "The Cleric Quintet"'s sales (without Drizzt) didn't fare well compared to "Legacy of the Drow"'s (with Drizzt), TSR pressured him to keep churning out Drizzt books and short stories at the same or faster rate. He started out writing at a super-fast rate because he was an eager new writer and needed the money if he was going to transition away from his day job. But he didn't want to keep up that crazy pace, forever. TSR sure wanted him to, though. And with their financial troubles, they thought he needed to.

Throw in the desire for him to bring Wulfgar back, and he just was fed up. He tried to negotiate a better contract with them, but they wouldn't budge. Instead, they flexed their muscle and told him they would get others to write Drizzt books, since he wasn't going along with their plans. There was the Mark Anthony short story, and then a chapter in Once Around the Realms, by Brian Thomsen, and then the never-released Mark Anthony novel. Clearly, TSR wasn't bluffing.

So then Bob wrote Passage to Dawn, bringing Wulf back as requested/demanded, and restoring Bruenor's eye (and apparently Regis's missing fingers), and everybody was rewound back to their ready state in Icewind Dale, seemingly unphased by any of the last bit of trauma from "LOTD".

And then Bob stopped writing for TSR.

And TSR went away.

That Bob and Drizzt came back, with WOTC at the helm, would seem to show that he never wanted to kill Drizzt off. He just wanted to be able to write other stuff in addition to Drizzt. And he has been able to write his non-Realms Corona stuff, as well as "The Sellswords", and oversaw the "WOTSQ" project. His Realms novels generally have come out once per year since WOTC took over, instead of every 6-9 months as they were doing with TSR, for a time.

More recently, he has set Corona aside for awhile, and he is back to writing Realms fiction at a blazing pace again. No, he's not Ed-prolific. But he and WOTC are certainly releasing stuff with little downtime, nowadays. And he seems happy with this arrangement.

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Originally posted by Chosen of Asmodeus

Well, to clarify, when I said "put down Drizzt", what I meant was retire him, put him on the shelf for a while, and focus on writing other things, not necessarily kill off the character. I've never heard anything substantial to the effect of Bob wanting to kill Drizzt off, either, but I have heard that at times he would have liked to put the story on hold to explore other things.

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