Throw in some Spears of the Dawn as well.

I posted this instant classic a year or so ago. Even proposed a collectively written gazetteer for it.

Every time I catch myself about to do that (create a big Mystara/everything fantasy world) I stop;
it means I've either lost focus on what I thought was important about the campaign I was originally trying for OR I remember I don't need to do it anyway, I just use Howard's Hyborian Age (or any one of the countless other similar but more fantasy/D&D themed creations).

I expect I'd hijack it into the weird pulp thirties.

Albion Eternal "Magna Carta" what's this rubbish then?
The United States of Pnumerica where innovation and ambition rule
Eternal Prussia where the Nazis never came to power
The Empire of France ruled by Napoleon the XVI
Russia Inviolate ruled by the Rominov Csars
The Han Asian Empire complete with Dragon Kungful Special Forces
The Mayan and Aztec Empires of central and South America
The Indian Commonwealth who are generally above this sort of thing

So our core theme here is essentially aristocrats verses democrats with poor little Pnumerica all alone against the world.  Sure India is enlightened but they're also rabidly non-interventionist.  Canada is a brutal, untamed wilderness full of kill seals and bears fit only for the bold red-coated mounted police.  With the border a good five hundred miles north of the 49th parallel.

Quote from: Turanil;8394797) Orders and organizations based on Knights of Solamnia and Order of High Sorcery are also included, though the latter is mixed with the oragnization of mages in Ars Magica.

The Ars Magica bit is actually a great idea, though I like my wizards rare enough that would make any Order of Hermes-like overarching organization very loosely knit, with rare few covenants and no Houses to speak of (which would also make perfect sense given the inexistence of a parma magica). If anything, a wide-raging brethren of wizards would probably more closely resemble the Order's antecessor, the Cult of Mercury. I'm always somewhat vexed with how to handle a society's response to arcane magic.

Can't comment on the High Sorcery influence, though, which I find a tad more "high fantasy" (with its color-coded robes) than I usually like my D&D.

Quote from: zarathustra;839599Every time I catch myself about to do that (create a big Mystara/everything fantasy world) I stop;
it means I've either lost focus on what I thought was important about the campaign I was originally trying for OR I remember I don't need to do it anyway, I just use Howard's Hyborian Age (or any one of the countless other similar but more fantasy/D&D themed creations).

The Hyborian Age is, to the best of my knowledge, the original fantasy ersatz-Earth. REH deliberately set it up so he could have Conan adventuring in Ancient Egypt in this issue of Weird Tales, and in Medieval Western Europe the next. I remember reading somewhere that HPL was famously pissed at his "appropriation" of archaic toponyms (e.g. Asshur, Khitai) for his make-believe countries.

Quote from: David Johansen;839602I expect I'd hijack it into the weird pulp thirties.

Albion Eternal "Magna Carta" what's this rubbish then?
The United States of Pnumerica where innovation and ambition rule
Eternal Prussia where the Nazis never came to power
The Empire of France ruled by Napoleon the XVI
Russia Inviolate ruled by the Rominov Csars
The Han Asian Empire complete with Dragon Kungful Special Forces
The Mayan and Aztec Empires of central and South America
The Indian Commonwealth who are generally above this sort of thing

So our core theme here is essentially aristocrats verses democrats with poor little Pnumerica all alone against the world.  Sure India is enlightened but they're also rabidly non-interventionist.  Canada is a brutal, untamed wilderness full of kill seals and bears fit only for the bold red-coated mounted police.  With the border a good five hundred miles north of the 49th parallel.

Sounds like a neat Mystara-meets-Eberron sort of game. How's the tech level overall? With most of your real world analogues at early to mid Industrial Revolution level, I'm thinking flintlocks, ironclads and maybe even the odd airship.

One of the biggest things I would do is put a 1,000 mile crater right in the center and fill it with desert and plop the 'warriors from Mars' supplement down. Imagine a ring of the Himalayas separating both worlds, but littered with passages and Dungeons that connect one to the other. Not enough S&S in most worlds I have seen.

EDIT: And only the strongest Dragons guard the passages.

Quote from: The Butcher;839669Sounds like a neat Mystara-meets-Eberron sort of game. How's the tech level overall? With most of your real world analogues at early to mid Industrial Revolution level, I'm thinking flintlocks, ironclads and maybe even the odd airship.

Oh it's a solid TL 5 with tommy guns, automobiles, and biplanes.  I actually ran it as a world where the Illuminati had transplanted their ideal cultures in a GURPS Space campaign.

The statue of liberty has a pair of 45 automatics pointed towards Europe.

Quote from: danbuter;839536Romans
Hoplite Greeks
Persians
Middle Ages Generic English Kingdom
Late Middle Ages Germany
Poland (when it was the bad-ass conqueror of eastern Europe)
Vikings
Goblin Empire
Elf Forest
Dwarf Mountains
Egypt
Arabs in the desert
Samurai Japan
Wuxia China
Old School India (Arrows of Indra maybe just dropped right in)
American Indians (Iroquois, Cheyenne, Apache)

That sounds a lot like the stuff in the Forgotten Realms.

So my question is thus:  What DID Mystara bring to the 'settings' table that all the other published settings to date did not?  Personally, I can't think of a thing unique to Mystara that makes it 'stand out'.

Don't know yet, but I do know I'll be making space for Hollow World's Blacklore Elves. They live in skyscrapers, fly around in floating cars, have robot servants, fight with laser guns, be very fashion conscious, and tend to find nature icky. I'm going to have tween mall-rats with valley girl accents go on adventures with the likes of Conan the Barbarian.

Hmmmmm:
-Powered up circumpolar polities in the cold lands, I love Vikings as much as the next guy but something new would be good the I can't believe it's not Scandinavia can be Golden Age Sweden (so much awesome that gets ignored in gaming) with post-Viking Age hardscrabble feud-ridden insular Iceland in the rural areas.
-Koreans with Chinese influence ripped out and bits of Mongol and circumpolar culture stuck into the gaping holes.
-Quechua up in the mountains with bits of Tibet glommed on for the creepy necromancer dudes, their history is so much better suited to "necromancers everywhere!" than the standard Egypt.
-Polynesians in the oceans.
-Medieval Ethiopia with bits of Mansa Musa, Prester John legends, Book of Enoch and Byzantium glommed on.
-Gothed up Arthurian England.
-From that blog with the cannibal birds that Zak S linked, PNW guys need to be in somewhere.

Hmm.. now that I think about it, Imperial China is one of the big cultural references missing from Mystara.  There's the Khanates but that's Mongols rather than China, and there's a couple of Indian-type places, and even the cat-person Samurai Japanese place, but I can't remember there being a China...

Quote from: RPGPundit;840078Hmm.. now that I think about it, Imperial China is one of the big cultural references missing from Mystara.  There's the Khanates but that's Mongols rather than China, and there's a couple of Indian-type places, and even the cat-person Samurai Japanese place, but I can't remember there being a China...

I'd have to find the Princess Ark article to be sure, but I think a China culture was part of the same invisible moon that the Japanese cat culture was from.

Edit: you're right. The invisible moon is split between Myoshima, Rajahstan, and some some SE Asia types. Why they needed Rajahstan when they already have Sind in the Western Known World is beyond me.

Quote from: Paraguybrarian;840313I'd have to find the Princess Ark article to be sure, but I think a China culture was part of the same invisible moon that the Japanese cat culture was from.

Edit: you're right. The invisible moon is split between Myoshima, Rajahstan, and some some SE Asia types. Why they needed Rajahstan when they already have Sind in the Western Known World is beyond me.

Yeah, there's no (detailed) Imperial Chinese culture on Mystara.  Which is kind of crazy given how much potential there is there.  But I guess in the 80s everyone was more into Japan.