Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dire Bare" data-source="post: 8023568" data-attributes="member: 18182">Regarding Mystara specifically . . . I agree with other posters that Mystara is a kitchen-sink setting that makes adding in the newer races pretty easy without breaking the setting. Other campaign settings I think do require a bit more fidelity to the original concept, but not so much Mystara! Besides, the setting changed and evolved rapidly as "basic" D&D evolved itself through the boxed sets (Expert, Companion, Masters, and Immortal) and even beyond the core 5 boxed sets. It ended up as crazy, perhaps even moreso, than the Realms and Greyhawk.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Half-elves: It is a part of Mystara "lore" that half-elves don't exist . . . but later they were introduced! It's been a while so my memory is faulty, but the race that lives in Thanegia, the Serpent Peninsula, among those seashell looking buildings, were described as a race of half-elves! And a half-elven race with a pseudo-African theme, rather than pseudo-Celtic! I got a kick out of that back in the day! In my personal campaign, I'd decided that children from elf-human parents were rare, when children did occur they were usually sterile (not able to have kids themselves) and usually took strongly after one of their parents in appearance (and game stats), and super rarely would we get an actual AD&D style half-elf . . . and in some corners of the world, we got enough to form an entire culture! But if you asked most elves, they'd deny that "half-elves" were possible . . .</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Tieflings: I like giving the Diaboli story to the Tiefling racial stats. I also like making the "nightmare magic" of the realm Diaboli come from essentially psionics. In fact, that's how I worked psionics into my Mystara game, as the domain of the diaboli who had a settlement way up north in Norwold.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Drow: The Shadow Elves fit into the drow niche in Mystara, but yet we have a drow depicted on the cover of the Alfheim Gazetteer! In my personal campaign, drow weren't evil elves living underground, but were like reverse albinos. Elves are naturally pasty pale, but every once in a while an elf is randomly born with jet black skin and snow white hair . . . these children are even more magically gifted than the average elf, and destined for great things . . . .</li> </ul>Essentially, whenever D&D added something new that I thought was cool, I came up with a loose story about how it fit into my Mystara campaign. Sometimes players would pick up those options, more often they wouldn't, but I always had fun world-building. And I never felt that any of the additions broke the setting in any way.Now, if I were to run a Dark Sun game, I'd probably stick to the player options presented in the initial boxed set. When WotC updated the setting for 3rd and then 4th edition, they tried too hard to make a place for racial and class options that weren't in the original game, and it did dilute the setting, IMO.How and when to add things is of course up to the individual DM and whether it's "right" or not depends on the campaign tone and style the DM is going for. Some campaigns easily take in wacky additions, others not so much. I do agree with some other posters that a good DM crafts his campaign, and it's restrictions, with their players in mind. I've played in more than a few games where the only person having fun was the DM!</blockquote>

Verification