mmadsen said:
actually, one of the big problems that a lot of people had is that is EXACTLY what tsr did. and they did it very poorly, with a badly-written trilogy of fiction that mirrors cortez, and an even worse set of modules based on the novels. (Ironhealm, Viperhand, The Feathered Dragon, IIRC).
and then they dropped the setting, just writing it off as part of the 'realms and ignoring it.
al-quadim, on the other hand, was gorgeous - one of the reasons it did better than maztica was that TSR did not try to give it a "core story" and just let DMs have fun with it! and they presented it differently - nice boxes for mods/supplements, not many magazine-type publications of any kind. the setting was better thought out, and functionally independant from the 'realms.
(yeah, the rules sucked, but what rules in 2e didn't suck?)
basically, if TSR has really been interested in doing a meso-american setup, they would have done what celebrim has already described - instead they were trying to get some mass appeal by ripping off a historical happening.
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as a side note, if you want some interesting explorer-type adventures, look up Cabeza de Vaca, a spanish explorer. he was marooned on the shores of the gulf of mexico (somewhere in texas, i believe), and over many years, walked through parts of florida, texas, new mexico, chiuhauhau, and further south, and ended up on the pacific ocean... (something like 8 years later).
