They were referencing the fact that the other properties of wotc - the ones that they had creative control over - were mismanaged to the point of public outcry for both internal operations and things like the vistani racism in curse of strahd. They removed the word exotic from tomb of annihilation because it is indicative of euro centric colonialism. With a crisis across multiple products, Weiss et al were claiming that due to their other racist, sexist, colonialist, etc... products that they nixed the deal in case their books might cause more trouble. You can't control authors, so you cancel the deal. You can approve or deny changes to a product that you are licensing out to a third party. Larian, picking up a book from 4 months ago, would have alignment in the game. This is a creative control issue that needs to be addressed as it was part of the reason they had an issue in the first place with "evil"/dark skin drow and "dumb" orcs.
So there's definitely an element of it in there. To what extent, who knows, but so far I've seen all the damage control things wotc did recently in the game DNA.
I don't really care, I just decided to add information for some reason lol.
Thanks for the reply. I've seen some of these issues WotC is dancing with. However, from what I can tell, WotC gave Weiss and Hickman 70 pages worth of changes, which they made and were approved. There were also extra changes after that they made that were approved though not required. It sounds like WotC had all the creative control they wanted on these novels.
This sounds more like a case where WotC thought for some reason that being associated with the authors would cause them more problems, so they backed out of the deal. They were scared of doing business with them (not having a creative dispute).
And I do think WotC has heavily approved the story Larian is employing (both creative and brand presentation) and discussed rules with them extensively. They probably gave them a document of guidelines to follow on rule changes. However, I don't think WotC wants Larian calling them every other day with a laundry list of rules changes they are experimenting with. Then calling back again on Wednesday for more changes. Then calling for the third time this week to get more approvals. That wouldn't make any sense. Larian has more freedom than that (which I think is obvious from the extensive and sweeping alterations to 5e).
