Editing Wizards of the Coast (section)

==[[Conan the Barbarian|And so, my lord became a king by his own hand...]]==
[[File:WOTClogo.gif|300px|thumb|right|The old yellow logo.]]
As a cash-strapped and [[Lorraine Williams|internal-politics-crippled]] [[TSR]] was folding and dying, Wizards bought them and all their stuff, including the famous and venerable ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' property, for a paltry $25 million. They gave all the old TSR guys jobs, called off the lawyers and openly allowed fans to release stuff for [[Dark Sun|poorly-selling]] [[Ravenloft|but much-beloved]] [[Spelljammer|campaign settings]], and put various designers from TSR to work building the [[Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition|most popular and successful edition of D&D ever]].  [[Derp|Then paid to do it again when it needed a shitload of patching,]] leading to the silliest ''D&D'' edition name of all time (3.5).  They also held a contest to design a setting that was weird and new for the new edition, ultimately settling on [[Keith Baker]]'s ''[[Eberron]]''.

Along with that edition, they put out the [[Open Gaming License]], offering free reign for other companies to use their rules and produce supplements.  While this had the unfortunate side effect of sometimes putting their tacit approval on complete [[fail]], it is generally held to be one of their smartest and most fan-friendly moves ever, generating huge amounts of content for their game without paying a dime for it.  Whether you want [[Microlite20|uber-minimalism]], [[Diaspora|hard sci-fi]], or [[Book of Erotic Fantasy|erotically-charged sexventures]], you can generally find it somewhere in the library of OGL content, in varying degrees of quality.

As the decade wound down, they also got the license to make a CCG for ''[[Pokémon]]'', and while we scoff now, it was a pretty good game that wasn't a complete ''Magic'' rip-off, and it probably made them about as much money as ''Magic'' for a while there.  The ''Pokémon'' craze was at its height, and children everywhere begged money off their parents, worked menial lemonade-stand jobs, and, in some truly [[fail]]-tastic cases, murdered each other in cold blood for the next sweet, sweet hit of booster pack fever.