What Would a 4e Mystara Look Like?

[Holy Bovine]

So - Mystara is ANIME!!!!!


(sorry, someone had to do this)

Clearly you have never watched anime if you think this.

Also you say it like its a bad thing or something. Some of the best animation I have seen has come from the anime genre.

 

[dangerous jack]

I'd make Mystara the hopeful, all-ages setting.

Where daring swashbucklers jump from balloon-ships to battle fell dragons and rescue the princess.

Where samurai cat-people live next door to swashbuckling dog-people with the turtle-people just down the block.

[...]
And then I'd make a cartoon out of it.

Yes! This puts into words what I had on the tip of my tongue. In my head, I've always picture its inhabitants as cartoony and exaggerated. And more than a little influenced by hundreds of quarters fed into Tower of Doom & Shadows over Mystara.

I've been thinking for a while that a more whimsical setting was needed.

 

[Lord_Blacksteel]

"Next thing you know, you'll be sitting there with a glass of Mountain Dew in your hand and blubbering about the good old times."

My kids hate it when I do this, but they are enjoying their basic Set D&D...

After this thread I'm actually thinking Mystara could work - the "Age of Exploration" theme would be a new wrinkle, the mass combat/domain system would also be a nice new option, and I've though that 4E epic destinies owed a lot to the old Master rules. Very nice. I might consider breaking out GAZ1 for the next 4E start-up.

 

[pawsplay]

I always thought of Mystara as a sort of "fairy tale" setting, full of earnest knights, starry-eyed farmboys, wizards apprentices, dragons, and pixies, but then overlayed onto a pulpy "strange adventures" setting with mind-controlling amphibian monsters, dinosaur islands, a hollow world, and places where alchemy and enchantment have created a pseudo-technological economy.

 

[Hussar]

I wonder what kind of mass combat system it would look like with 4e rules. IMO, they'd be better off with a pretty high altitude sort of system which puts the mass combat on a more narrative background and focus on mid sized (say 10-30 figures) combat.

Would be interesting.

 

[Danzauker]

Clearly you have never watched anime if you think this.

Also you say it like its a bad thing or something. Some of the best animation I have seen has come from the anime genre.

Actually, I think I've watched mre anime than the vast majority of people around here, since I started 'round 1977 when I was a kid, and I still like it.

I was referring to this:

"Where daring swashbucklers jump from balloon-ships to battle fell dragons and rescue the princess.

Where samurai cat-people live next door to swashbuckling dog-people with the turtle-people just down the block."

More than the artwork. It was just a joke, take it easy. BTW, I know and like Wieringo.

Oh, and do female turtle-people have boobs?

 

[pawsplay]

I wonder what kind of mass combat system it would look like with 4e rules. IMO, they'd be better off with a pretty high altitude sort of system which puts the mass combat on a more narrative background and focus on mid sized (say 10-30 figures) combat.

Would be interesting.

... Skill challenge?

 

[rogueattorney]

At the risk of coming off as pompous by quoting myself, here's what I wrote (edited, because sometimes me no uze werds good) in the "What's Mystara's hook?" thread:

The hook problem with Mystara is that you can't sum it up in a sentence... e.g. "Spelljammer is D&D in space."

Instead, proponents sound like a hyperventilating ten-year-old trying to explain to his bemused grandparents the plot of all the cartoons he's been watching over the last 15 hours...

"...And then the jackal headed people whose pyramids exploded tried to take over the valley of the weird barbarian people, but they were saved by the gnomes in the big flying airplane and taken to the place where the vulture people used to be, but the vulture people got expelled, and some of them now live with the gnomes on the big flying plane, but others live in the desert with the evil desert nomads, not the good desert nomads who fight against the evil fire wizards who are looking for the exploded jackal-headed pyramids..."

...and I mean this in the most positive sense possible.

That's why a new Mystara sourcebook is as fascinating as it is unlikely. I'm just not sure how anyone could adequately capture the essence of it in one hardback. But if it could be done, it'd certainly be something to see.

I'm not a 4e fan, but if WotC put out a relatively crunch-lite/fluff-heavy Known World gazetteer, giving a nice gloss over the main setting area, I'd have an awfully hard time leaving it in the store. The attraction being, even to crusty old grogs like me who have stacks of this stuff, is that unlike pretty much every other setting in WotC's IP catalog, no product like that was ever produced.

I can hand the players' books from the Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms campaign boxes, or the DL Adventures book to any prospective player and say, "This is your world," but I don't really have anything like that for Mystara.

 

[dangerous jack]

I always thought of Mystara as a sort of "fairy tale" setting, full of earnest knights, starry-eyed farmboys, wizards apprentices, dragons, and pixies, but then overlayed onto a pulpy "strange adventures" setting with mind-controlling amphibian monsters, dinosaur islands, a hollow world, and places where alchemy and enchantment have created a pseudo-technological economy.

Yep, there's a lot going on. In my experience, I'd describe Mystara adventuring as episodic. I suppose there was some metaplot later, but we never really got into that. We would fight dinosaurs one day on the Isle of Dread, try our hand at thematically linking that island with Fire Mountain, then we'd be searching for the great pass in the Sind Desert, and then trying to stop Earthshaker. For us, it was never about battling Evil, but battling Bad (or weird and dangerous).

 

[Bluenose]

I wonder what kind of mass combat system it would look like with 4e rules. IMO, they'd be better off with a pretty high altitude sort of system which puts the mass combat on a more narrative background and focus on mid sized (say 10-30 figures) combat.

Would be interesting.

The system I'm working on treats units much like characters. The number of troops in them determines thier size, which is the level-equivalent term. The equivalent to a Class is unit type, like shock troops, skirmishers, etc. Defences and characteristics are named differently, but the system basically works the same way. When interacting with characters, a unit is treated like a swarm; if you're within it's combat radius then it attacks you automatically at the start of your turn and it's turn. I'm not sure it's the way to go, tbh; I've an idea for treating 'domains' a similar way, which might make warfare more abstract.