What Would a 4e Mystara Look Like?

[Holy Bovine]

I don't have to imagine it, because my 4E campaign that has been running for about a year now is set in Karameikos.

The gazeteer series is still full of great flavor and I don't see a need for an official 4E treatment to run great games there.

Whoa - you too? I have been hunting down the last of the gazeteers for about 9 months now. Haven't got all the ones I want (GAZ1 being the hardest to come by for a reasonable price) but enough to run a pretty great campaign for the last 2 years. Add in a lot of B & X series modules and you have enough material to run a Mystara campaign.

JustKim's links to the Piazza boards is gold - got a lot of monsters from there (Manscorpions are still awesome btw ).

 

[Holy Bovine]

This, right here, is what you concentrate on.

Think of it in terms of "ages."

Forgotten Realms is just PoL land with different names. An age of darkness, lots of loss, things are just rolling downhill.

Eberron is between WWI and WWII. Two fisted pulp action, political intrigue - an age of chance.

Dark Sun is an age of ruin. Everything is terrible, you're on Deathplanet, what few civilizations remain are ruled by tyrannical despots.

So what would Mystara concentrate on? Being an age of discovery. I admittingly know little about Mystara as a setting, but concentrating on swashbuckling, expanding civilization, a very 1600's-1700's feel could help set it apart. Instead of the points of light idea of 4e geography, change the idea of geography to that of an empty map. A previous age ended long ago, and civilization has finished picking itself up off the ground. It's not a world of darkness with points of light, it's a vast and sprawling "Unknown territories" that's just begging to be found, explored, and perhaps even looted. It's time to go into the unknown and uncharted lands. Heroic campaign, you belong to a country, perhaps a quazi-legal guild of adventurers. Paragon campaign, you've obtained your own land, building your own colony, gaining independence. And then epic campaign would be all about the Immortals and, well, becoming one.

Would this scare away previous Mystara fans? Hell, I dunno. I made up half of that. Would it give the setting something that stands out? I think so. I am admittingly, to some degree, just utilizing my own homebrew setting for ideas here

These are excellent ideas. It seems way too many settings over the years have such a feeling of hopelessness to them - everything has been explored (Scarred Lands comes to mind as does Kingdoms of Kalamar) and civilization has collapsed (Dragonlance, FR, Ravenloft even Eberron to a certain degree). How refreshing would it be to be adventurers who are exploring a new world? Civilization is expanding into areas they have never been and fighting each other for the right. That sounds like a Mystara campaign if I ever heard one.

As an old school Mystara fan it would absolutely appeal to me!

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I can see that. A more *ahem* primordial setting. Most settings have this hugely long history that trails back for thousands of years. Why not set Mystara as the setting that is just starting out. Everything is new. The Immortals walk the land, setting off all sorts of weirdness. The walls of the world are still very thin and other stuff leaks in all the time. The tieflings could be repurposed as Diaboli quite easily. Dragonborn aren't exactly hard to port into any setting and given the huge number of furries in Mystara, no one will even notice them.

I like this idea.

 

[Orius]

Mystara has two additional continents, Skothar and Davania, which were never really detailed. The Princess Ark flew over parts of Davania, and it was implied that it was populated by fallen civilizations and evil dragons. If you need a special place for dragonborn to arrive from, I'd say Davania is at least as good as Eberron's attempt.

That sounds like a good enough explanation for dargonborn. It's not like they'd be terribly out of place anyway, since Mystara already has tons of races like the standard Tolkien races, goblinoids and other standard humanoids, lupins, rakastas, and several other furries, and stuff like araneas and tortles.

A few people have had the idea to link tieflings to the Nightmare Dimension, and the previously described diabolus that hail from there. I think this works very well if, again, you need a special place for them to arrive from.

The only serious problem tieflings is the connection they have do demons and devils. The classic Mystara didn't have fiends and celestials, probably because of TSR's family-friendly policies and the fact that the Basic D&D line was marketed towards kids more. I suppose they could be stuck somewhere on that southern continent as well, or something.

JustKim - reading over the thread you linked. Great stuff. Love the "thousand 36th level wizards" bit.

I would love to see Mystara mug Birthright and steal its stuff. Why not? Birthright's been dead for what, fifteen years? That's long enough to wait before picking over the corpse.

Mystara might be the one classic D&D setting that can handle epic campaigns well. Epic doesn't work as well for Dragonlance, and to some extent Greyhawk. Epic FR gives us stuff like Elminster, which some people like and others hate. But a setting that was built around the existance of 36-th level characters might handle it well (though Basic level 36 isn't quite the same as AD&D level 36).

Birthright really should be more than just about ruling domains. It's not just the domains, but the blood abilities as well. It's the blood abilities that are the major Birthright hook. Really, 2e should have had something in the DMG about ruling domains instead of just assuming players would carry up rules from Basic.

 

[Dragonhelm]

I would suspect that a 4e conversion would associate Rakasta and Lupin with the shifter race. While they don't look quite like shifters, they hold some of the same "real estate" (as half-giants did with goliaths in Dark Sun).

Perhaps some feats or paragon paths would allow shifters to take on more of the traditional forms.

Personally, I would prefer new 4e races, but judging by how WotC has done things in the past, that's the way I think they'll go.

 

[Hussar]

Dragonhelm - I can see why WOTC does that too. "Here, have a setting where you have to throw out half your PHB races, oh, and those books that you bought about those races? They're not good here either." isn't going to go over terribly well anymore. I think we're long past the days when you'll see WOTC start banging out very niche products that invalidate large numbers of other products if you want to use them.

Smart for business, perhaps bad for creativity. :/

Well, since we can't simply stuff tieflings in with Diaboli, and, likely, a 4e Mystara would also need a place for demons and devils, I don't see a huge problem with plopping tieflings in at the same time. Add in a demonic invasion sometime in the backstory and poof, you've got all three.

But, I do like the idea of Mystara being the Epic setting. Very cool idea. High level D&D play has long languished in the backwaters of gaming because, quite frankly, high level D&D play sucked. We've got an edition that is supposed to handle high level play, let's use it.

 

[Markn]

But, I do like the idea of Mystara being the Epic setting. Very cool idea. High level D&D play has long languished in the backwaters of gaming because, quite frankly, high level D&D play sucked. We've got an edition that is supposed to handle high level play, let's use it.

I think every edition has laid the claim that it is high level playable - and every edition falls flat on this promise to some degree.

My current 4e campaign is about to wrap up in two weeks (we are 30th level) and while it certainly is playable, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to make it more fun.

I think WotC's latest claim that few people are playing in the Epic Tier, particularly after releasing an AP that should have plenty of people in the Epic Tier, is evidence that they need to work out a few bugs at lower levels before really focusing on the epic nature of the game.

 

[JohnBiles]

I think my question at this point would be how do you fit in Dragonborn and Tiefling without ruining what is Mystara already?

The Dragonborn, as mentioned earlier, would fit well into Davania.

As for the Tieflings, one thought is to tie them into Thonian history and put them on Skothar. They could easily fit into Alphatian society; why not make Blackheart ruled by a Tiefling prince, in fact?


Casting Mystara as a more optimistic setting makes sense to me. And I like the idea of using Exploration as a major theme. Especially since a lot of the setting is a blank slate for DMs to write on.

 

[JohnBiles]

Well, since we can't simply stuff tieflings in with Diaboli, and, likely, a 4e Mystara would also need a place for demons and devils, I don't see a huge problem with plopping tieflings in at the same time. Add in a demonic invasion sometime in the backstory and poof, you've got all three.

Immortals can create sentient races; the demons and devils would become servitor races of the Entropic Immortals.

 

[pawsplay]

In the Immortals set, the demons are titans of the Entropic Immortals, with Demogorgon and maybe Orcus actually being demigods.

If Asmodeus is an immortal, it's simple enough to make the devils his servitors, much as the Archons serve whatsis and the other Energy immortals of Law.

I know from my tinkering on a Mystara conversion for Fantasy Craft, the Mystara situation is very interesting in that a lot was unfinished/undecided. There are also differences in presentation between the original version, the gazeteers, and the AD&D version (particularly wrt to Planescape). For instance, did you know the tanaari and baatezu are mentioned as living on the planets in Mystara's star system?

I'm pretty sure a 4e Mystara would slightly annoy me. Insofar as it is likely to add to canon, I fear more that it would add elements I do not like that might migrate backwards to the Mystara community more than I would hope it added something new and interesting.