Mystara

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

The very first campaign setting map if you don't count Palace of the Silver Princess'

Mystara is the original default published campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons. The actual original settings were "the lands around Castle Greyhawk," but Gary couldn't get his shit together in time for TSR going to press, and Dave's Blackmoor wasn't much more than a city and a map, so David Cook and Tom Moldvay expanded on the examples they used in the wilderness rules for D&D Expert Set and the starter module X1: The Isle of Dread. The working name for the setting was just "Known World," which you still might see on old maps.

TSR did the right thing with this world, by sketching out a variety of nations and cultures with a very broad brush (hippie elves over here, Corsican pirates over there, Arabs in here and some Cossack/Mongol horsemen up there...), and gave each nation to a writer to flesh it out into a sub-setting product. These products became the Known World Gazetteers, which even today are pure goddamn gold. Do not hesitate to buy it if you see it in an old bookshop, and download the fuck out of them if you catch 'em on rapidshare Mediafire or Mega.

Arneson's Blackmoor was retconned into Mystara as an Atlantis-style mythic past, and the legendary source of lost magics, efreeti bottles, secrets man wasn't meant to know, &c. Gygax was already pooh-poohing Basic D&D in favor of his "Advanced" version with mary-sue elves and strength penalties for women, so his "World of Greyhawk" was for AD&D only.

TSR's authorial staff at first hoped You Know Who would let them do a 2E AD&D "Known World". Jeff Grubb cobbled together a draft, but the Bitch had it all stripped down to Karameikos only. Then nu-TSR put out some half-assed stuff to do with Castle Amber, and then some half-assed boxset which had more to do with The Voyage of the Princess Ark than Mystara proper. Since only the old-school players even knew what this shit was about, none of the nooblets cared and it became just another episode in TSR's long, flailing death.

A dude in Scotland made the titanic effort to record and correlate all the maps from splatbooks and Dragon magazine articles. There's also a conversion project to 5e written by Mr. Welch, of "Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG" fame. He spent a long time actively trying to make enough noise to get official notice and open the setting on DM's Guild, but ultimately was forced to concede that WotC deserves only a "fuck it" and he released it online through his own website. Meanwhile, Grubb plans to release all his 2E work on Vaults of Pandius, however belatedly.

Mystara was also the setting for the pure fucking awesome Capcom produced Dungeons and Dragons side-scroller beat 'em up games: Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara.

Nations

This is a list of nations that were described in the Gazetteer series. They're all on a single continent of Mystara called "Brun," which is only 1/4 of the planet's total land area - and put together they only cover like 1/10 of Brun anyway.

The Grand Duchy of Karameikos

This is your default middle-ages northeast Europe setting that you kinda expect with Dungeons & Dragons. Big coastline, crossroads for a few other nations, multiracial.

The Emirates of Ylaruam

Arabian Nights all up in this bitch. A desert basin east of Karameikos, with a people simultaneously snooty with high culture and savage with scarce resources. Magic use is forbidden here, and wizards are hunted down and executed. Clerics are okay in their book, though.

The Principalities of Glantri

Nation of magic-users, alchemists and militant atheists. Includes some variant magic rules to mary-sue-size your mage NPCs. Did I mention that being a cleric is punishable by death?

The Kingdom of Ierendi

Fuck yeah pirates. They try to look like "respectable businessmen", so you get some mafia vibe here too. Includes some board-game kinda rules for ship-to-ship combat. Actually, if you have to pass on any of the Gazetteer series, you can pass on this one: Minrothad Guilds does a much better job.

The Elves of Alfheim

You know the stereotype of elves being tree-worshipping hippies and a bunch of fucking snobs? Totally what's going on here. If it makes you feel better, they get buttraped by infighting and civil war in the canon history.

The Dwarves of Rockhome

STRIKE THE EARTH! Included rules for characters that were both dwarves and clerics, and some AD&D conversion rules, 'cause AD&D is Gary's baby.

The Northern Reaches

Fuck yeah Vikings. Included cardboard models of a Viking village for your minis, and rules for clerics to use rune magic.

The Five Shires

It's hobbits halflings Hin. You can be homebody big-bellied halflings, or the gypsy under-foot nuisance type.

The Minrothad Guilds

Merchant of Venice time. Merchants on the high seas, including privateers for the cut-throat businessman.

The Orcs of Thar

Need a place to lump together all the dirty smelly humanoid "monsters", so let's put them in and under this volcanic mountain range. Has rules for playing monster humanoids as player characters, has a hilarious booklet for what every orc infantry needs to know, and (!) includes a board game by Tom Wham.

The Republic of Darokin

Fuck yeah musketeers. Includes rules for a new player class "Merchant", and retrofits trade routes into the previous gazetteers and Companion- & Master-level rules for commodity trading between nations.

The Golden Khan of Ethengar

Fuck yeah Mongol hordes invading your shit. Adds a shaman player class.

The Shadow Elves

Covers the less popular underground inhabiting Elves, the famed Shadow Elves of Mystara. Shaman player class here too if you missed the Mongol splatbook.

The Athruaghin Clans

Here we have Amerindian-like clans, living mostly on an isolated plateau. Another shaman player class is given too, the totemic kind.

Thyatis and Alphatia

As if all the stuff described before wasn't enough, there was also a boxed set for a couple of empires that covered more territory than all the above combined. Thyatis was built like Ancient Rome, and Alphatia is another magocracy but more industrial and bureaucratic than the cultish rulers of Glantri. Includes Norwold from CM1 just north of Known World.

The Hollow World

Oh shit, and then there was the entire OTHER campaign setting that was all Aztec/Inca-y that was supposed to be set inside the hollow planet of Mystara (just like our Earth where Hitler said the UFOs were coming from). It had dinosaurs, so it couldn't be all bad.

No-Gaz. Nations

Several adventure modules expanded the description of Brun continent:

• X4&X5 added Sind (okay, just the desert, and Pramayama but deserted) and Hule to the west of "The Known World" map
• X6 added The Serpent Peninsula
• X9 went further west with "The Savage Coast" (later it even became the AD&D setting Red Steel)
• X11 added Wendar and Denagoth (north of Glantri)

Other products like Wrath Of The Immortals and Champions of Mystara, as The Poor Wizard's Almanacs gave a deeper insight on those lands or, in Sind's case, any information at all about them.

Mr. Welch's 5e Mystara PHB

Shortly after Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition launched, Mr. Welch launched his Youtube career creating lore videos to introduce the newfags 5e brought in to Mystara, his favorite D&D setting. After Wizards announced DM's Guild as a way for fans to further enrich Hasbro and give the D&D team an out from doing their jobs publish their homebrews, he spent years working on a full conversion of Mystara to 5e, blowing through hundreds of dollars to commission interior art, hammering the clusterfuck that is Mystara continuity into a coherent whole, and generally getting shit done.

...And then WotC screwed him over by revealing that DM's Guild would only be available for settings that had already been published officially, which for most of 5e's life was just Forgotten Realms. Despite this Mr. Welch pressed on, hoping to attract enough social media attention for Wizards to grant him an exception, until they published Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. It sucked. Finally realizing that nobody in charge of D&D cared about the old school and WotC-senpai noticing him would only lead to a similar level of canon rape, he published the Player's Handbook he had already completed for free and opened a Patreon, flipping Wizards the bird on the way out and asking for donations to fund a future DMG and Monster Manual.

Mr. Welch being a fan of Old School Roleplaying, the Mystara PHB breaks 5e's ideology in some interesting ways:

• Racial restrictions on classes are back. Dwarves get Resistance to Magic but can't use arcane magic at all, and only races with "natural talent" like elves can take the gish-y subclasses.
• "Half-" races don't exist in Mystara; you take a "mixed-race" background instead. Ironically, this is what Wizards would do a couple years later for D&D One, albiet for impure reasons.
• The standard portfolio-based cleric domains have been replaced with the classic Spheres of the Immortals.
• The magical snowflake races (Dragonborn and the Planetouched) don't exist. If you want to play them the DM has to Rule Zero them in.
• The magic item economy explicitly exists and comes with a big table for what's available where, as opposed to the 5e standard where the DM has free license to fuck you over by not giving you the magic gear you need to be effective.

Links

• http://pandius.com - The "official" Mystara webpages
• http://mystara.thorf.co.uk - all of the maps of Mystara. ALL OF THEM
• https://rpgmp3.com/mystara-players-guide/ - Official home of Mr. Welch's Mystara Player's Handbook.