All these ingredients tossed into the cauldron came to a simmer last night and this is the potion that came out:. From the standpoint of a table top gamer, Harry Potter represents the greatest missed opportunity of the past generation.
Many people of my generation remember when D&D was everywhere. Not only on shelves everywhere and widely played, but in commercials, movies, conversation, sermons, talk shows, and eventually with a cartoon series, and secondary lines of books, toys, a board game, and an electronic game. It had a moment of culture-wide saturation. It was perhaps the second closest thing we had to the of Pottermania today, surpassed only by Star Wars. Gamers (and perhaps some executive at Hasbro) look back on this and in their nostalgia (or money lust) wonder why we couldn't have that same level of appeal today. (Everyone could get together a game any time they wanted! No gamer left behind!) Here was a world and a story that appealed so much to so many, that it's credited with reinvigorating the book industry on a supra-Oprah level, whose fans play dress up and play a variety of games and with lots of toys, but no official HP RPG was made in the great merchandising explosion that followed.
First, I would like to know why this didn't happen. Second, I propose that, if it had been made and promoted decently, it would have been the Second Coming of the table-top role-playing game. Third, I have a proposal about how it should have been done.
The only options I can think of for this failure are it was a failure of imagination and no one thought of it or someone did think of it and by a failure of imagination, another blocked it. Failures of the latter kind could have taken place if a person in power said no because TTRPGs don't make the kind of money they used to or because they didn't want it competing with another of their lines (is it a coincidence that of the two licensees, this is in Hasbro's line, not Mattel's?)
Finally, what shape should such an RPG, targeted at a new audience for RPGs that is so ready-made, focus on? Hogwarts, of course. The magical place that young new players would have wanted to go so they too could be wizards and witches, wide-eyed in the world that Rowling painted for them, doing things they dreamed of. I can clearly see with my retrospective eye, each year after a new book or movie, another boxed set coming out. Hogwarts: The Role-Playing Game, Year 1. Mortellan of Greyhawkery is not so crazy, after all. Did Mike McArtor have this in mind when he created the wizardly Acadamae of Korvosa (students pictured below) in Pathfinder's Golarion? Well, I certainly ran a game set there that took his work and developed it in an explicitly Hogwartsian direction, and it seemed to appeal. I think it would have made a lot of money for the world-wide Harry Potter franchise, and I think it would have brought a lot of new players into table-top role-playing that would have eventually tried out D&D, Pathfinder, the Harry Dresden RPG, and so on, bringing more customers to the industry and increasing the circle of players. For the people who need more players or more customers, it's a shame the snitch was missed.
