D&D 5E Give Me Three Reasons to Play Mystara/Known World

[Matrix Sorcica]

If you don't mind me asking, which PDF did you order? I love Mystara and have a fair amount of both the D&D Known World and AD&D Mystara products, but I always thought one of the big weaknesses of the setting was that there was no main setting book like Greyhawk Adventures, the World of Greyhawk folio, or the Forgotten Realms Adventures. The world information was spread across the various gazetteers for D&D or the few nation specific box sets from AD&D.

The Calidar book, I presume.

And totally agere om the setting book.

 

[chriton227]

The Calidar book, I presume.

And totally agere om the setting book.

Aha. I missed that the comment about buying the PDF was in reply to a post about Calidar. I hadn't heard of Calidar, and looking at the Kickstarter I wish I would have known about it in time to get in on it. I was really hoping [MENTION=261]Doc_Klueless[/MENTION] has stumbled into a Mystara Campaign Setting product I hadn't heard of before.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

If you don't mind me asking, which PDF did you order?

The Calidar PDF

The Calidar book, I presume.

Correct!

I was really hoping [MENTION=261]Doc_Klueless[/MENTION] has stumbled into a Mystara Campaign Setting product I hadn't heard of before.

I'm deep into making this for myself and my (admittedly) small group of players. It's basically a compiled version of ALL the Gazetteers. Just finished adding in Ylaruam and am on to the next Gaz: Glantri.

 

[Phoenix8008]

So many good reasons that others have posted for using Mystara, I don't know if I can think of 3 more! I love that world as it was the first D&D I ever got to play (taught myself with the Basic red box set in the back of the suburban on the road trip from Texas to family reunion in Idaho!).

1) If you can get the Gazetteers, each one has enough info that you could easily run an entire campaign just from that country alone!

2) Great potential for actually becoming knights, nobles, and moving up in the political realms or 'homesteading' and being assigned a fief or barony to build up and run in the name of your liege-lord.

3) So many great adventures that could be converted to 5E (or whatever I suppose) and used again.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

It would be a great way to finish off a campaign since, unlike other campaigns with limited gods, anyone is able to become immortal by following a path to immortality in one of the 5 spheres (although, really, only 4 spheres since entropy was for the bad guys).

If you think one of your PCs will take the Time route, you really have to have them visited early by a future version of themselves.

 

[Sadras]

If you had to boil down the reasons to play Mystara/Known World instead of any other D&D setting and present it to someone fairly new to the game (say, a few months' experience) and present it in a list of 3 things, what would you say these are?

What makes Mystara different than other settings? What does it offer that you can't get in other official settings in the D&D pantheon? What can you do with it? What makes it better at those things? What are the "selling points" of Mystara?

1. Mystara provides an extremely rich and beautiful tapestry of a setting including its geography, history, races, people, languages, religions, cultures and personalities which when applied within a campaign makes it fairly distinct from other D&D settings.

2. Besides becoming a knight/noble and/or landowner, Mystara allows one to explore setting-specific goals: (1) Becoming a GrandMaster of one of the Secret Schools of Magic in Glantri (2) Attaining Immortality with the assistance of an Immortal willing to sponsor you (3) Rising to the caste of Merchant Prince of Minrothad (4) Realising the Dream of Al-Kalim for Ylari (5) Finding the Blue Knife and uniting the Humanoid Tribes of the Known World (6+) so many more...

3. The F.S.S. Beagle, The Nucleus of Spheres, The Radiance, Old Ones, The Immortals, Radiance Receptacles, Black Flame, Wrath of the Immortals, the War Machine, Merchant/Bargaining Rules, Rules for Naval Battles, Humanoid Campaign, Lycanthopic Characters (Night Howlers)...etc

4. Expansions of the Known World - Undersea (the life beneath the Sea of Dread), Red Steel/Savage Coast, Serraine (a flying Gnomish City), Hollow World and even the fan based project for Mystara 2300 BC

And the support structure is still there even after it was dropped as a setting around 20 years ago (the below are all free):
Vaults of Pandius - an online website which is updated regularly and maintained by fans across the world
Threshold Magazine - an ongoing collection of articles expanding on the mythos of Mystara
thePiazza.org.uk - a forum such as Enworld where fans of Mystara congregate and can share ideas
GazF series - 10 fan-made gazetteers with maps on additional areas in the World of Mystara, and these then do not include fan-made gazetteers on smaller areas like the Mini Gaz1 The Central Altan Tepes
Codex Immortalis I & II - Fan-made gazetteers on everything you would need to know of the religions & cults and the Immortals of Mystara.
Maps - thanks to the efforts of Thofinn Tait one can have top quality maps of the Known World and beyond.
Newbie Guide to Mystara - fan-made summary of all the Gazetteers.

 

[Lanefan]

Best thing about Known World/Mystara is it's a wonderful setting that (unlike Greyhawk, FR, Eberron, and many others) doesn't usually come with a bunch of canon lawyers attached. It just is what it is, and a DM can use as much or as little of the information given as she wants while making up the rest to suit. And one can, if one wants, ignore Hollow World and not lose anything.

Lan-"most of my adventuring was done on this world, though I know it by a different name"-efan

 

[Winterthorn]

I cut my DMing teeth on The Known World. It was my first exposure to an RPG setting, and it's super-rich details published in the 1980s were pure entertainment of themselves. I own a copy of the full BECMI series, and all official Gazetteers + Dawn of the Immortals + both Trail Maps + a few extra items.

Recently, in the 4E era, I tried DMing a game in Mystara, but it just didn't gel. Tore a small hole in one of my Trail Maps too :-(

I am thinking 5E offers a great rules set for adventuring in The Known World/Mystara. (Have all fighter elves follow the Eldritch Knight archetype by default.) But I disgress...

1) Mystara, aka The Known World, offers a gloriously rich and detailed world to play in. It has all the pulp flavour of mished realms next to each other without any guilt or shame. All PC races have their homelands, or could be added by a creative DM since there is plenty of room to add your own material. The lore is not complicated by if-then-else connections between NPCs, monsters, or kingdoms. One cannot really break the settling immersion since almost anything is viable whether fiddling with PC concepts all the way up to crafting campaign plots.

2) Aside from one big shift in the setting with the Wrath of the Immortals, the setting is very static whether pre- or post- WotI. There are very few expectations out there as to how things "should be" and one can indulge your creativity in building an epic campaign with the material as published. It's a very creative setting offering a plethora of options for DMs. Vampiric wizard nobles, secretive Shadow Elves, buried sci-fi relics, bumbling Orc hordes, airship battles, lost civilizations... Everything ready to use and abuse, lol.

3) Even if you wish a simpler campaign, just pluck a region, like the Fives Shires, or Karameikos, or Minrothad, and just campaign there. Lots of details to be found in just one Gazetter!

May this link inspire you to try 5E in The Known World: http://www.pandius.com/5e_class.html

 

[Strahd_Von_Zarovich]

I'm a big Mystara and Greyhawk fan, These days I began to run an homemade conversion of X4 - master of the desert nomads to D&D 5E to my tabletop friends.