Estlor said:
Mystara has two moons, known to Mystarans proper as Patera and Matera. Patera is like our own moon; a desert-like wasteland save for the pocket plane anchored to it that contains Pandius, the city of the Immortals. Matera cannot be seen by the naked eye outside its atmosphere, rendering it invisible. The inhabitants of the moon - oriental rakasata - call it Myoshima. And yes, unlike the poster above said, Patera is visible, Matera is not. You can't see Pandius, however, because its in a different planar space.
I'm 99.99% certain you've got these backwards (I'd be 100% if I could dig out my copy of the
Poor Wizard's Almanac). Matera is the visible moon that's like ours, and Patera is the one called Myoshima by the natives, and has the city of Pandius.
What IS known, however, is in 2e sense Mystara was part of a different dimension separate from all other AD&D worlds because 1) it had Immortals instead of gods and 2) it did not support the Great Wheel planar cosmology of the multiverse.
There are multiple points of evidence that contradict this, and say that Mystara was part of the 2E Great Wheel cosmology and had deities.
The Planewalker's Handbook, a
Planescape supplement, talks about Mystara when it mentions notable worlds of the Prime Material Plane, right there in the same context as Toril, Oerth, Athas, and others.
The Mystara Monstrous Compendium Appendix, the 2E incarnation, listed multiple monsters (such as the diaboli) as being from the "Demiplane of Nightmares", which is clearly them moving the old Mystara cosmology into the Great Wheel.
In
Warriors of Heaven, Table 11 at the back of the book has a listing of good and neutral deities that celestials can serve. It lists their divine rank (demigod, lesser, etc.), and their home plane and realm on the Great Wheel. Right in beside the various other AD&D deities are the Immortals from Mystara - except they aren't Immortals there; they're gods, listed in terms of being deities (Rad, for instance, is an Intermediate deity who lives on the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance).
Before 2E reached its end, Mystara was quite clearly part of the Great Wheel cosmology, and had gods, not Immortals.
3(.5)E remains in keeping with the 2E version of Mystara. For example, both Atzenteotl and Ka are listed as being greater deities (in
Dragon issues #315 and #318, respectively). Likewise, the diaboli are (in
Dragon #327) said to still be from the "Demiplane of Nightmares", which is now listed as being coterminous with the Region of Dreams and the Ethereal Plane, and a relative closeness to the Far Realm.
Admittedly, the 3(.5)E cosmology doesn't have the Region of Dreams (and the article on the diaboli doesn't seem to indicate if it was referring to the Border Ethereal for the Prime, or the Deep Ethereal, which isn't part of the core cosmology any longer), but the Color Curtain separating the Deep and Border Ethereal in 2E was effectively the same thing. Likewise, the Far Realm was part of the 2E planar structure (albeit outside of it, but it was there), since it was introduced in the 2E module
The Gates of Firestorm Peak.
).
