"I more or less took on the lead writer role. Among other things, I’m a history buff and I played a lot of historical board games. The Domain Rules were heavily influenced by our office lunchtime games of the old SPI game Empires of the Middle Ages. I also had an unpublished fantasy world (my first attempt at writing a novel) which became the Anuirean Empire in the setting. Colin took point on the other cultures and filled in a lot of the Ruins of Empire book. Many other people pitched in with ideas or helped with playtesting - for example, Jeff Grubb suggested the idea of gods dying and leaving behind divine bloodlines. Tony Szczudlo created that epic cover painting. Editors Anne Brown and Sue Weinlein wrangled the sprawling manuscript. And it all came together. The Birthright Campaign Setting wound up winning an Origins Award in 1995. One of the strange things about Birthright is that the boxed set was stuffed with components … including things that Colin and I struggled to find a use for. We had cardstock reference handouts, a card deck, even a folding box to hold the cards that we didn’t know what to do with. No one seemed worried about the cost of goods, so we shrugged and did our best. I created the Battle Card system (a miniatures game in disguise) to use the cards and give the DM a way to play out big battles. But I wouldn’t have included them in the boxed set if anyone had asked me. We learned later that the lavish components made the boxed set unprofitable. Why our purchasing department didn’t throw up a red flag, I couldn’t say. The Birthright Campaign Setting had a print run of about 45,000 copies (or so I heard), and each one was printed at a small loss. A Dark Sun-sized print run might have reached a better place with the cost per unit, but that didn’t happen. The run sold out, and because it was unprofitable TSR never printed more—we just don’t know how many they could have sold." - Richard Baker (and swiped from @Waynes_Books)

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