What's Mystara's Hook?

[Cam Banks]

I had a long reply but my youngest hit some buttons on my laptop and I lost it. Swell.

Long story short: Mystara IS the 4E core world, or at least it very well could have been. The 4E play experience seems so heavily influenced, whether by design or chance, on the Basic/Expert/etc experience that I would be hard-pressed to think of a campaign setting that is MORE suited to 4E than Mystara.

Mystara isn't "about" skyships and rakasta and Red Steel and Thyatis. Those are developments that came later, for the most part, in an effort to tell new stories or spin off the core. I'm talking Bargle at Mirrormere, the small town of Threshold, the great city of Specularum, the Black Eagle Barony, and then on and upwards into the wilderness, the ruling of kingdoms, and eventually the quest for immortality. It's heroic, paragon, and epic right there.

The only thing wrong with all of this is that WotC already provided this kind of world in the core books. They could easily have gone with Karameikos instead of Nentir Vale et al, but they didn't. Lost opportunity? I'm not sure. I do think it's really, really close though.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Weregrognard]

Mystara (when presented as a setting in AD&D 2E) did have a hook: a D&D world for beginners. Kind of a disservice to it, IMHO.

The Known World also had a hook: it was the D&D World (as presented by that edition). "Welcome to the D&D World!"

As a whole, the setting is more of a conglomeration of several mini settings, each with their own hook. Glantri was a D&D setting ruled completely by magic users, Ylaruam was D&D with Arabian flavor (long before Al Qadim), and so on.

 

[JeffB]

I had a long reply but my youngest hit some buttons on my laptop and I lost it. Swell.

Long story short: Mystara IS the 4E core world, or at least it very well could have been. The 4E play experience seems so heavily influenced, whether by design or chance, on the Basic/Expert/etc experience that I would be hard-pressed to think of a campaign setting that is MORE suited to 4E than Mystara.

Mystara isn't "about" skyships and rakasta and Red Steel and Thyatis. Those are developments that came later, for the most part, in an effort to tell new stories or spin off the core. I'm talking Bargle at Mirrormere, the small town of Threshold, the great city of Specularum, the Black Eagle Barony, and then on and upwards into the wilderness, the ruling of kingdoms, and eventually the quest for immortality. It's heroic, paragon, and epic right there.

The only thing wrong with all of this is that WotC already provided this kind of world in the core books. They could easily have gone with Karameikos instead of Nentir Vale et al, but they didn't. Lost opportunity? I'm not sure. I do think it's really, really close though.

Cheers,
Cam

Agreed. I think The Known World & 4E have much in common and thats how I read The Nentir Vale as well- this is B/X and the original modules written with these sets in mind - X1+, B3+, etc.

Mystara -as the overdone to death campaign setting from TSR with 40 books & boxed sets written by 100 authors without regard for continuity/versimilitude or TCC* (and then decided to ruin it even further with a re-start under AD&D with Play along CDs and butcherings of original content disguised as "homage" to original classics-i.e. Mark of Amber) is a totally different thing than TKW.

Sorry for that horrible run-on sentence. But TSR really butchered up that setting- far worse than anything that ever happened to DL, GH, or FR.



*TCC= Total Cheese Content

 

[jdrakeh]

Calling Mystara "vanilla" is pretty strange. I can't imagine a more GONZO setting this side of Arduin.

Two gigantic warring empires, one with the "thousand 36th level wizards," giant air-ships, and mummies, the other with mounted air brigade, gladiators, and massive legions. Weirdo Teutonic crusaders, vikings, aztec orcs living in a hidden city surrounded by molten lava, elvish and dwarvish civil wars, hobbit pirates, eccentric immortal French wizards, dog people, spider people, an invisible moon inhabited by cat samurai, the Hollow world, an immortal from Earth's future obsessively reconstructing a nuclear reactor...

Mystara is a lot of things, but vanilla isn't one of them.

This is what I was thinking as I read the thread. I was going to say that 'pulp' is what Mystara's "hook" is — it has some obvious Jules Verne influence visible in the Hollow World and things like tinker gnome submarines, as well 'lost world' adventure in the Isle of Dread. But you're right — the setting is so much more than "pulp." The tales of the Princess Ark, the areana, and so forth. Mystara is just this side of Arduin.

 

[Estlor]

What Cam Banks said x 1000.

Mystara is the original PoL setting, before PoL was hip and trendy.

What was Mystara's metaplot? Law vs. Chaos, natch. It was about ragtag, outnumbered forces for civilization and order fighting against a wild frontier full of goblins, werewolves, and the restless dead. And even in lands where it seems civilization thrived - Glantri, Thyatis, and Alphatia - chaos, decadence, and decay was always at the fringes, tearing away at the cloth of civilization. Basically, Mystara is what the PoL setting looks like at 11:59 PM, 4E core is what the PoL setting looks like at 12:01 AM. The main difference is where in 4E core you're fighting to survive after the fall, in Mystara you're trying desparately to prevent the fall you know is imminent.

Beyond that, the hook of the setting is anything goes. If it's in literature or history, it's in Mystara. It's a very "'70s" feeling fantasy. Not vanilla high fantasy like Forgotten Realms, but pulpy, sword & sorcery goodness that only looks like high fantasy at a glance. But you're not saving the world (unless you're in the Master Rules), you're saving the Empire from itself.

4E is the new BD&D.

 

[Mikaze]

I don't get the "no hook" statement either. "Anything goes" is one hell of a hook for a lot of people, and I know that's what set it apart from the other campaign settings for me.

Trivia: It was also the only D&D setting to get two arcade games.

 

[Dragonhelm]

I don't get the "no hook" statement either. "Anything goes" is one hell of a hook for a lot of people, and I know that's what set it apart from the other campaign settings for me.

"Anything goes" can also be equated to the Realms or to Eberron, in their own ways. I'm sorry to say, I don't see this as unique to Mystara.

 

[Mikaze]

"Anything goes" can also be equated to the Realms or to Eberron, in their own ways. I'm sorry to say, I don't see this as unique to Mystara.

Those settings allowed for a great number of things, but they still had more internal logic than Mystara, Eberron even moreso.

Mystara took it Beyond The Impossible. You had Spanish elves, an albino werewolf king who wears his sunglasses at night, Jello warforged, magocracy Venice, Hollow Earth, pirates, vikings, and mongols and all of them living next door to each other. Forgotten Realms and Eberron at least attempt to maintain a sort of believable consistancy. Mystara runs full-tilt in the other direction, laughing all the way. And that appeals to some folks.

 

[jdrakeh]

Mystara took it Beyond The Impossible. You had Spanish elves, an albino werewolf king who wears his sunglasses at night, Jello warforged, magocracy Venice, Hollow Earth, pirates, vikings, and mongols and all of them living next door to each other. Forgotten Realms and Eberron at least attempt to maintain a sort of believable consistancy. Mystara runs full-tilt in the other direction, laughing all the way. And that appeals to some folks.

This. I was trying to think of a good way to say these same things and failed. As I mention earlier, in the history of published campaign settings, I think only Arduin surpasses Mystara in terms of pure Wahoo (and even then, just barely).

 

[Doug McCrae]

"Anything goes" is one hell of a hook for a lot of people, and I know that's what set it apart from the other campaign settings for me.

It's not specific enough. Like Ravenloft is horror D&D, Eberron is 1920s/30s D&D, Birthright is about being a ruler, Planescape is extraplanar, Spelljammer is D&D in space, Al-Qadim is Arabian Nights D&D. What's Mystara?

Gonzo D&D doesn't cut it. Gonzo is the default setting. Making D&D not gonzo, as Dark Sun and Al-Qadim do, is worth remarking upon. Keeping it gonzo isn't.