Posted by Benoist on Facebook.

Fantastic article by TSR alumnus (and now Elder Scrolls lore pope) Lawrence Schick over at Black Gate, on how he and Tom Moldvay collaborated to create the Known World (a.k.a. Mystara) for their home D&D campaigns, and took it with them when they went off to work for TSR.

Link.

Gotta say, I'm shocked at how little interest this has garnered.

Interesting to learn some of the mystara histroy

I've seen it hinted at here and there before but it's nice to see how much of it existed before they used it for D&D.

Not a big fan of Mystara though.  Of course, others are allowed to be but it was always a bit too planet of the hats for my tastes.

I love Mystara, but have always been daunted by the voluminous amount of stuff I'd need to know to run it properly.

Quote from: cranebump;814737I love Mystara, but have always been daunted by the voluminous amount of stuff I'd need to know to run it properly.

I think the key is to focus on a section, like the Emirates of Ylaruam or the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. Tons of things to do with out leaving the area. If you need to you could also branch out very slowly.

I've run Mystara since before it was mystara. All I know are Thyatis, Alphatia, Karameikos, rock home, Wendar, and some of the jarldoms. There's more than a lifetime of material in mystara.

Like any other setting, start with one town and one dungeon and work your way out.

a pleasant read. Thanx!

Quote from: David Johansen;814736it was always a bit too planet of the hats for my tastes.

What do you mean Plant of the Hats?

I'm not familiar with the term.

Quote from: Spinachcat;814827What do you mean Plant of the Hats?

I'm not familiar with the term.

hthttp://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHatstp://

Link is really broken.

Here it is

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats

Essentially its the idea of a nation or planet all being one thing. One idea or moral or trope.

Which I never felt was true for the Known World. Mystarra on the other hand from what little seen so far seems to have drifted that way.

Quote from: cranebump;814737I love Mystara, but have always been daunted by the voluminous amount of stuff I'd need to know to run it properly.

Forget all the canon that has been published. I ran games in the Known World with just The B/X books and X1 The Isle of Dread as source material.

Same here. I skipped BECMI and somehow never heard of the Gazeteers or just did not make the connection. And never knew Mystarra was supposedly set there.

Having evaded the IP-building, novel-publishing madness of 1990s TSR, The Known World/Mystara is as canon-light as they come.

There was a wee bit of metaplot: Wrath of the Immortals and the Poor Wizards' Almanacs. But easily ignored.

For those of you who don't have a "moral" objection to the place, there's an epic 1300+ post thread here on RPG.net where we go through the entire publication history of the Known World/Mystara from the OD&D Blackmoor supplement onwards in chronological order.

The big take away from that thread is that there is no such thing as The Mystara setting. The setting was re-written repeatedly and huge swathes of it were ret-conned away in the later incarnations. In fact even the name of the setting changed from incarnation to incarnation.

The basic eras are:

1975-1981 - Pre-setting Era. Schick and Moldvay have their "Known World" shared setting, and Arneson has his "Blackmoor" setting, but - other than the Temple of the Frog in OD&D's Blackmoor supplement these aren't official TSR settings.

1981-1983 - B/X Era "Sample Wilderness". Moldvay and Cook present a world (in the rulebooks and adventures) with a unique feel. It's heavily based on the Schick and Moldvay home campaign, but isn't actually called the "Known World" - just a "Sample Wilderness". The feel of the world is rather pulp: very wild and wooly with a vague past and large swathes of untamed wilderness to explore, and it has alternate dimensions rather than planes; and entities out of Clark Ashton Smith and Lovecraft rather than demons and devils.

1983-1985 - Early BECMI Era "Sample Wilderness". Mentzer, who is a protege of Gygax, re-does the rules. The unique feel of the world is rather watered down as Mentzer pretty much ditches the weird elements and portrays the world as a more typical "Gygaxian" cosmology with inner and outer planes and the like.

1985-1987 - Late BECMI Era "Urt". With TSR in disarray and Mentzer on his way out, he goes hog wild with the later bits of the BECMI line. The setting is now both defined as being planet Earth 150,000,000 years ago and also a giant Earth Elemental called "Urt". Mentzer comes up with a convoluted cosmology to hold both his earlier planar material and the dimensional material that came before it, and he introduces Immortals as cosmic superheroes who are nothing like gods. These Immortals and the adventures defined for them give the setting a very different feel to the earlier eras. It's also much larger, with Urt being merely one small unimportant planet in the universe.

1987-1990 - Gazetteer Era "Known World". After Mentzer leaves TSR, Heard takes over as de-facto editor of the setting with little management oversight other than that he has to merge Arneson's Blackmoor setting into it somehow. His response is to change the setting rather drastically. The rather vague past alluded to in earlier products is now pinned down with an ever more detailed timeline with actual dates for events. The Gazetteers give lots of details about various regions, ret-conning both the history and geography of much of what has gone before. The wilder elements of Mentzer's cosmology are dropped, and there is a deliberate move to change Immortals from being detached cosmic superheroes in a setting without gods to being more like the interventionist gods of other settings.

1990-1992 - Hollow World Era "Mystara". Heard adds the Hollow World to the setting, and ret-cons the cosmology to be much smaller. Instead of the planet being simple one among countless others in an ancient universe, the the planet is now central to the cosmology and its creation is synonymous with the creation of the universe. Immortals are now basically gods in all but name, and the number of them has accordingly shrunk drastically. The timeline of the world is now all about the authors' favourite Immortals and their actions rather than being about the actions of populations and civilisations.

1992-1994 - Metaplot Era "Mystara". Following the '90s trend, Heard introduces metaplot to the setting - with the usual big powerful NPCs (most of whom are Immortals) doing all the fun stuff and the PCs tagging a long to witness the actions of the Mary Sue characters, of course. The metaplot includes world-changing events like the sinking of a continent and even wipes out or irrevocably changes some of the areas that had been previously given Gazetteers, thus continuing the ongoing pattern of invalidating past adventures and supplements.

1994-1996 - AD&D Era "MYSTARA™" After the cancellation of the D&D line, there are a few AD&D products released for the setting. There weren't really enough of these to give the setting any particular feel before TSR gave up on the setting completely as it fell apart.