Was Mystara culturally relevant to D&D's history?

[Lago PARANOIA]

These days, Mystara is much more known for being the setting of Capcom's venerable beat-'em-up than as a D&D setting in its own right. And I suppose that's fair. It didn't really get that many adaptations. And unlike, say, Dark Sun while the setting is unusual it's not super-weird enough on its own merits to be memorable beyond that.

I'd almost request an Oldskool Review on the setting, but I also have the feeling that the setting is a bit too boring to do one of those. What do you, the viewer at home think?

[Ancient History]

Mystara is vaguely well known for using some of Clark Ashton Smith's setting material, and the whole Voyage of the Princess Ark thing basically set the stage for Earthdawn, but ultimately it's a very forgettable setting with little lasting impact.

[Blicero]

A lot of adventures old people played (Keep on the Borderlands, Castle Amber, Isle of Dread, etc.) were given official locations in Mystara. People today get massive nostalgia boners for those adventures. So in that sense, Mystara is culturally relevant to D&D. But it's not like people said, "This adventure takes place in Mystara, therefore it has features X, Y, Z." They said "This is a D&D adventure, it happens to take place in Mystara."

[Nebuchadnezzar]

I'd play a Red Steel one-shot, but think Pelucidar is a slightly more interesting Hollow Earth setting than Mystara's version.

[codeGlaze]

[...]and the whole Voyage of the Princess Ark thing basically set the stage for Earthdawn, [...]

I am intrigued by this.
Esplain?

[Ancient History]

The Voyage of the Princess Ark was a series of articles in Dragon Magazine back in the day, about a flying ship that goes exploring the world as a platform for adventurers and to explore Mystara. It was very patently part of the inspiration for Earthdawn, because the name Earthdawn is the name of a flying ship that goes out to explore the post-Scourge world. Frank and I seriously debated at one point whether Earthdawn started out as FASA's homebrew Mystara campaign...we talk about it a little in the Earthdawn OSSR.

[Emerald]

I'd say Mystara was indirectly relevant to setting the playstyle of high-level gameplay, in that it was used as the default setting for the BECMI series and integrated the Immortals into the world fairly well in place of gods, and that set a precedent for the Epic Level Handbook and PF's Mythic rules and all the other "let's play 30th-level characters with special godlike powers" expansions that followed. Before that, gods were either something nebulous and undefined that you never interacted with directly (in Basic/OD&D) or things that mid-high level characters were expected to be able to fight (in 1e), and then BECMI introduced all that level bloat that today leaves high-level characters in a wide gulf between the mid-level "playable characters who care about the world around them at all" range and the post-20th "godlike beings playing with the multiverse" range where the game breaks down.

Or at least, the gaming groups around me when I was playing AD&D were very iffy on the subject of playing gods rather than just slaying them until we looked into the MI part of BECMI; I can't speak for any others. I know my group only looked into the ELH when it came out because of fond memories of our one attempt at a Masters/Immortals campaign (which went fairly well, better than the one very brief 3e epic campaign we tried).

[tussock]

BECMI Mystara has a vast amount of material for it. The AD&D adaptation never really went anywhere, but the books from the late-80's are legion.

Rough count, 50+ books or boxed sets, another 50+ modules.

Most of it is formulaic shovelware as you'd expect with those numbers, but it pokes fun at itself, and it lead a whole bunch of their more famous 2nd edition and later settings in having a fantasy-Arabia, a shadow-elf city, playable humanoid mass-combat setting, lost world locations, playable monsters settings for fantasy horror, faerie world, underwater, and flying-city/magi-tech settings. Every major earth culture from Iron Age to the Renaissance. The major things it's missing would be feudal Japan and any treatment of black people where they aren't primitive (or maybe not missing that, it's pretty huge).

So kitchen sink in detail, same thing they did for the Forgotten Realms in 2nd edition AD&D, only all done years earlier with far more variety and humour, and hex maps of nearly half the planet.


2nd edition Mystara is just a handful of stuff from a tiny part of a tiny part of the thing, and by the time it was printed they were taking themselves extremely seriously, to the detriment of the setting. The most similar 2e setting feel is probably Spelljammer.

[OgreBattle]

All I know of Mystara is the Capcom game, so how accurate was that arcade brawler to the setting?

[talozin]

Early Mystara (a name that only came about fairly late in its life -- for a while it was just called "The Known World") was sort of a place where developers could play with some of the weirder ideas they had that were slightly too out there for TSR to want to include them in its grown-up settings. Sometimes these things worked out. Sometimes they didn't.

* "The Emirates of Ylaruam" was your typical vaguely racist fantasy version of Saudi Arabia, complete with ancient undead lizard people living at the bottom of a well and a 36th-level wizard living in a giant underground citadel while he patiently pursues his long-term plan for immortality.

* "The Principalities of Glantri" had a Venice-esque capital city smack dab in the middle of a country ruled by wizards, where being a cleric was literally a capital offense and dwarves were routinely captured for use in Nazi experiments to find out why they're so resistant to magic. Also, flamenco elves.

* "The Kingdom of Ierendi" was a tropical vacationland where you got to be king by being a badass adventurer, sort of like Floyd Mayweather getting to be President of the United States, and included a parody of Disneyland where you could experience fingerquotes "adventure" if for some reason you wanted to have your character take up LARPing.

Stuff like that. Occasional jewels but it's like picking through a barn full of hay to find a diamond tennis bracelet.

[MisterDee]

Mystara had a boatload of "firsts". But they were pretty obvious firsts, that would have happened eventually, I think.

The GAZ series gave you the basic non straight-out-of-corebook settings. You had not-Arabia, Elfcity, Dwarfcity, Halflingcity, and probably notChina and such in there. There was also what I believe was the first "play a monster" D&D sourcebook (The Orcs of Thar) which was actually a pretty good supplement. Unbalanced as fuck, of course, but it nailed the flavor really well.

What Mystara did best, unfortunately, is the stuff that was too weird to have an impact.

Glantri deserves a mention for being an attempt at a legitimately workable high-magic setting. It had a (poorly presented, but whatever) suggestion of adventure hooks that woked decently in that setting. Lots of politics, quite a bit of "this isn't the utopia it might seem at first" mindfuckery, and very little in ZebCookian "you'll never be tall enough to ride" bullshit. Unfortunately, the "Society of magic-users" model got swept away in favor of the Realmsian "a few high-level dudes with a propensity for lording it over adventurers."

The Shadow Elves was brilliant - I wish we had those version of "subterannean elves" rather than the drow as a default. That was one of the very few sourcebook who really nailed the "these are effectively alien" vibe instead of humans-in-forehead-prosthetics. So of course we got stuck with the "you can't use our awesome magic weapons and we ignore your magic missiles BWAHAHAHA" cardboard cutouts instead.

[Orion]

I loved the Glantri sourcebook as a kid.

[silva]

About the "firsts" of Mystara, you mean in regard to D&D right ? Because I suspect all of those ("play as the monster", "alien cultures", etc) already existed in other game lines at the time.

[tussock]

@Silva, yes. RuneQuest is from 1978, and other games using the system covered a lot of ground in the early 80's. But even still, each game and associated setting wasn't really suited to jumping around with the same characters, no one did that yet (they probably couldn't get shops to stock a small-press game that needed another, older small-press game to play it, basically).

Even GURPS was pretty vanilla into the early 90's and more an idea that you could play different games with the same rules. RIFTS and Vampire splatbooks worked like the Gaz series, with settings and cultures and rules and new character stuff for the main game, but are also early to mid 90's.

TMNT characters ('85) were weird enough, but used pretty different rules for a bunch of things compared to other Palladium games. AD&D's worlds were all very similar, a bare-bones Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Oriental Adventures, Lanhkmar, and they promoted the Forgotten Realms as breaking the mould in 1987 because the Elves were slightly taller, and characters from different settings weren't supposed to play together.

Spelljammer in '89 is the first 2e book to shake things up even slightly, and you're still shooting fireballs at sailing ships (IN SPAAACE!) it's just that you can play hippopotamus-men too, and that's new. Ravenloft went a little further in '90, and Darksun much more in '91 because the Elves were bad and hated trees and animals, rather than just taller (Moon Elves) or stupider (Gully Dwarves). Mystara did that the year before too, with the Hollow World elves.


So firsts for a comparatively stolid and pretentious D&D. Traveller had the character-option splatbooks, Glorantha had the cultural kitchen sink, Gamma World had the crazy, all a decade earlier, Mystara (The Known World) just got to put it all in one place for the same characters in exactly the same game system, and often poke fun at it.

Not that it was balanced, but it was miles closer than the RIFTS books ever got, or GURPS, or Hero, or Champs, or anything from that time. Fucking 2nd edition AD&D. Nothing was balanced before 3e D&D, really, I think that was part of the sales pitch.

[hyzmarca]

All I know of Mystara is the Capcom game, so how accurate was that arcade brawler to the setting?

The capcom game was acurate to the Basic version of the setting, and even used the Basic rules (Elf and Dwarf are character classes) for the most part, though simplified and modified to make a good arcade game.

But Early on Mystara was not well defined as a setting. It was just where all your adventures happened. So something like Tower of Doom or Shadow over Mystara could happen no problem.

Thieves don't get unlimited sling ammo, though. The Thief in Shadow over Mystara was really OP because of that.

[OgreBattle]

What makes the shadow elves different than forgotten realms drow

[talozin]

What makes the shadow elves different than forgotten realms drow

1) Rather than being darkskinned, they're very pale.

2) They aren't particularly matriarchal (they have a King, for instance, but a female-dominated religious hierarchy).

3) They aren't "evil" in the way the Drow are evil. They don't backstab each other for fun and chew the scenery about how cool they are for sacrificing babies to demon lords. While yeah, they're pissed off at surface elves, and yeah, some of the reasons they're mad are of dubious historicity, they're not entirely unjustified in being pissed either.

[silva]

So firsts for a comparatively stolid and pretentious D&D. Traveller had the character-option splatbooks, Glorantha had the cultural kitchen sink, Gamma World had the crazy, all a decade earlier, Mystara (The Known World) just got to put it all in one place for the same characters in exactly the same game system, and often poke fun at it.

Cool. Didnt know that.

Does Mystara also have those sci-fyish elements that Blackmoor had ?

[K]

So firsts for a comparatively stolid and pretentious D&D. Traveller had the character-option splatbooks, Glorantha had the cultural kitchen sink, Gamma World had the crazy, all a decade earlier, Mystara (The Known World) just got to put it all in one place for the same characters in exactly the same game system, and often poke fun at it.

Cool. Didnt know that.

Does Mystara also have those sci-fyish elements that Blackmoor had ?

Sort of? For example, in Glantri there is a nuclear reactor that you use spells on. It's weird.

My personal favorite of the books is the Darokin book. Merchant-adventurers and swashbuckling just made a lot of sense to me when I was 12.

[silva]

The nuclear reactor needs spells to work ? Like, heat sinking spells or something ?

[talozin]

Blackmoor is actually the prehistory of Mystara. Its obliteration ~4000 years before the "current" date of the setting is one of the major causes of a group of regular elves eventually becoming shadow elves.

My Glantri book is at home so I can't look it up right now, but my memory of what the nuclear reactor thing looked like is roughly:

* Some thousand years ago there was an alien nuclear reactor that may or may not have come from a spaceship originally.

* Immortals (the Mystara way of saying "gods") from one particular faction turned it into an artifact that would allow people to reach immortality for their faction by manipulating magic.

* Immortals from the other factions got pissed off by this and declared that as a result, whenever someone used the artifact, a little magic would drain out of the world, and eventually magic would become extinct.

* The reactor/artifact is now sealed in a cave somewhere under Glantri with no way in or out and surrounded by lethal radiation, but a few people in the area have figured out how use its magical emanations (called "The Radiance") and there's a small group of people experimenting with it in secret.

The book has some wacky adventure ideas about traveling back in time to destroy the reactor before it's turned into an artifact, to keep magic from becoming extinct, and then returning to the present to find that Glantri is a wasteland because mages only came there in the first place because of the artifact. So you can leave it destroyed and have no Glantri, or stop yourselves from destroying it and eventually run out of magic.

[OgreBattle]

3) They aren't "evil" in the way the Drow are evil. They don't backstab each other for fun and chew the scenery about how cool they are for sacrificing babies to demon lords. While yeah, they're pissed off at surface elves, and yeah, some of the reasons they're mad are of dubious historicity, they're not entirely unjustified in being pissed either.

So what exactly makes them evil, or puts them in a position for lawful good PC's to go underground to kill them for stuff?

[tussock]

A lot of Gaz13, the Shadow Elves, deals with playing as them. Their main thing is extreme and murderous isolationism in a radioactive zone that gives them better casters. They live under Gaz10, the Orcs of Thar, so if you take shelter in a cave to get away from a troll horde or something, the Shadow elves will quite likely try to

1: follow you for while, invisibly and walking through walls and shit.
2: decide you're dangerous and set up a massive ambush including dinosaurs.
3: reconfigure the tunnels to stop you escaping and make it all-or-nothing.
4: and they do it just in case you're some sort of Orc, because Orcs are ...

Well, Shadow Elves collect yellow crystals and hold them near their unborn children, because that's where their souls come from. Some of the young come out a bit funny looking and knowing powerful Shaman magic, and others come out a little more, wrinkly still, and get exposed in the higher tunnels, where the humanoids adopt the ones who look about right, as an abandoned Orc or Troll or whatever. Who all breed true, in very large numbers, up closer to the surface.

The King has a massive spy network to "keep an eye on the surface types", but really it just monitors the Elves and manipulates everything to the advantage of the King and the Shamans.

Hilariously, old Elves are loaded up with treasure and likewise exposed, which is what draws down most attacks in the first place. The place is a total clusterfuck of conspiracy against itself that needs to be under attack all the time to justify it's policies. Disloyal Elves get pushed to mundane patrol duties near the surface, to make the defences look weak.

So ... you will enter in search of grand treasures or trade, they will attack you, and you will stay down there for quite some time even if you keep winning. Or you can play down there as an Elf and try to figure out the plot between attacks by the surface-dwellers and dangerous duties you keep getting into.

[talozin]

Also, the elfland Gazetteer goes on at considerable length about how the Shadow Elves want to take over Alfheim and presumably establish International Communism, and are sending spies and infiltrators as part of their attempt to do so.

But they aren't "evil"; they're just the opposition. You could draw a pretty meaningful comparison between Alfheim's attitude toward the Shadow Elves and the United States attitude toward the Soviet Union in the 1950s, since both involve varying levels of paranoia about the elimination of their way of life at the hands of foreigners who live in a tightly controlled society about which they know very little.

One of the sort of nice things about Mystara is that there aren't a whole lot of countries that are portrayed as unapologetically evil just because. From the Alfheim viewpoint, the Shadow Elves are the bad guys, but the Shadow Elf Gazetteer presents the opposing viewpoint as being a valid campaign option in its own right. Their culture is crazy and fucked up in ways that give any modern reader pause, but there are reasons why that's the case, and it's not impossible to sympathize with them any more than it's impossible to sympathize with some real-world ideologies that have produced horrifying outbreaks of violence.

[malak]

This blog post explains some of the cooler features of Mystara pretty well:


http://www.rpgmusings.com/2014/12/the-c ... -in-5e-dd/