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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8694051" data-attributes="member: 5948">As someone who had basically no knowledge of mesoamerican cultures at the time and just liked cool new settings inspired by interesting bits of the world, the Maztica line drove me up the wall because it blew the whole setting up in a distinctly mediocre novel trilogy before the boxed set even came out, and lost all the uniqueness and interest to the place straight off the bat. ‘Hey, here’s a d&d setting completely different to anything you’ve seen before, boom haha no now there’s orcs and stuff here and it’s the same as everything else, sucker’. I wanted to play as a Maztican in Maztica going through a maztican adventure fighting maztican monsters, but TSR only let me run around cleaning up after their NPCs.I became more aware of the unpleasant colonialist smell of the whole business later on as I got older, but aside from that purely as a playable setting, Maztica really suffered from being released in TSRs ‘we are a game company but we only actually make money from novels’ era. And I was very far from the only one to make the observation at the time. I expect this botched start had a large impact on the failure of the line, though as long as the Maztica Trilogy novels sold enough to keep the lights on for a while, I suspect TSR didn’t care very much.</blockquote>