Difference between Known World and Mystara

[The Sigil]

Just because there's no annual supplements telling me that these wars are happening doesn't mean they aren't. The setting sets up the conditions at the beginning of the campaign, and the DM just goes from there. I doubt there's a Kalamar game out there where the world is static.

Dragonlance is good to read, but it's no fun to play. And trying to run the Realms would drive me nuts. "What the hell do you mean Tilverton got turned into a crater? I burned Tilverton down in the war with Sembia three years ago!"

You hit the nail on the head, AgPal - this is EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

Give me a setting that lays out the conflicts and problems and potential for disaster... then back away and let me run it. The reason I don't want the timeline to move once a setting is published is simple - by and large, for every individual campaign, the timeline IS moving - and the events in MY campaign are almost 100% likely to NOT be exactly the same as the "official" stuff.

Essentially, it means we begin running in parallel universes - with the same "start point" of course, but after that point, we begin to diverge. The farther down the "road" each of us gets, the farther apart we are. The example given by AgPal - "What the hell do you mean Tilverton got turned into a crater? I burned Tilverton down in the war with Sembia three years ago!" - is exactly what I'm talking about... your players do one thing while the "official world" does another.

You start out "in step" but the farther along you go, the more out of step you get with one another. What this means is that the assumptions built into the "newer" products "farther down the timeline" do not fit with the events in your world. It starts by requiring minor tweakage to fit... but the farther you go, the more tweaking, revising, and other stuff you have to do to keep it relevant to YOUR campaign - until the supplements for "that setting" are worth no more to you than the supplements for any other setting.

Even Mystara/The Known World engaged in some serious revisionist history to try to accomodate changing assumptions. Originally, X4, X5, and X10 (the Desert Nomads series) were to take place at the same time as all of the other modules - i.e., the year 1000. However, because X10 is SO disruptive to a campaign, reshuffling the military balance of power and having wars raging across the continent, the Gazetteers engaged in "revisionist history" and explicitly tell you to bump the events ahead 200 years. Well, that's great, but what if I played the Desert Nomads series as is when they were first released? Every assumption in the Gazetteer series has to be thrown out the window, that's what. The amount of "handwaving" that went on in Mystara (well, this module never happened and this here really didn't do what it said it did and this other was much worse than we originally said) to get everything to fit together was stupid - and UNNECESSARY provided you simply say, "this is the way it was at the beginning - your campaign's events will necessarily alter things."

But at least you can pick up a book published three years later without the need to have purchased all of the "intervening material" (another pet peeve of mine as it is clearly a ploy to keep selling you stuff - "gotta catch 'em all" or you won't be up-to-date and nothing will make sense).

IOW, give me a world, describe all the ways it CAN go and then STOP! Let me as a DM and my players decide where it DOES go. This is perhaps the one case where I want potential over results.

Other examples:

RIFTS - IMC, the Coalition had been crushed by Atlantis years before the "official" war with Tolkeen... so all the stuff Palladium has been publishing over the past 3-4 years is WORTHLESS to me except as a source of "crunch."

Faerun - In the campaign I played in, there was no Time of Troubles (as it was seen as horribly stupid). Everything "creamy" published now? You guessed it, worthless. We can only use the crunch.

Now, there are those out there who like "moving" time points. That's wonderful. But for me, lay the story arcs out there and let ME move them. When I play the game with my friends, regardless of who wrote the books we play out of in the first instance, it ceases to be the publisher's game and world and in very fact becomes my players' and my game and world - the publisher no longer has a say, nor should he.

IOW, I'll respect your views if you dissent, just understand where I'm coming from and why I am so disenchanted with "evolving worlds."

--The Sigil