1) The title of the setting seemed cool, especially with the font it's typically written in (like globs of gold hidden among ancient rocks).
2) The first book in the Maztica trilogy seemed like an interesting idea, I assumed the rest of the setting had a similar flavor.
Unfortunately after reading a few more books it seemed that Toril was basically a dumping ground for every monster, race, spell, locale, plot, or other trope that hadn't found a home in some other setting already, as well as some that did have other homes. So I assumed that Forgotten Realms was intended as just that: a place for authors to jam random stuff without any worries that it would mess up the already established norms of the setting too much.
Also the transition from old-D&D to AD&D 1st. Ed. wasn't without it's detractors. IIRC there were at least a few letters written to Dragon back in the day by folks who really liked that old system and didn't want to see their beloved gameline replaced. I think the divergence between Mystaria and other settings might have in part been a bone thrown to those old-schoolers so at least the setting they'd grown to love wouldn't get re-statted.
Question though: Didn't Greyhawk pre-date Forgotten Realms?
I tihnk the thing about Forogtten Realms was development. I could be way off on this, but it seems that those other settings were created "artificially", ie just for the game. They didn't grow and emerge naturally, but rather as part of a product line. If I'm not mistaken, Forgotten Realms was a world created by a gamer (and his group) and played in for a long time, with tons of development, history, backstory, culture, etc. COmpared to the other settings of the time, in my memory at least, it just seemed to have a vitality and richness the others lacked. There wasn't any one thing about Forgotten Realms that made me think "Oh cool, I gotta play in that setting," it was just the overall depth of the setting that got me interested.
It's sort of like reading Tolkein vs some random one-off fantasy book. It may be a good book, but there's a certain sense of history, depth and life to Tolkein that sets it apart.
(Not that I'm equating Forgotten Relams with Middle Earth, or comparing their creators, etc, just using that as an analogy).
PigLick
COmpared to the other settings of the time, in my memory at least, it just seemed to have a vitality and richness the others lacked. There wasn't any one thing about Forgotten Realms that made me think "Oh cool, I gotta play in that setting," it was just the overall depth of the setting that got me interested.
This may in fact be the reason so many people like it, but in a way this always seemed like a detriment to me. Don't get me wrong: I like having a well fleshed out history, richness and vitality and all that. It's just that with Forgotten Realms I feel like it was overwhelming. There's just so much to it.
In a way (and I know saying this will get me pitted against an Id Fiend in the arena but) it makes me glad that Dark Sun is no longer being sold in dead tree format. Dark Sun has quite a bit sketched out in general with enough detail here and there to provide a relatively coherent picture, and to get it all I just have to read umpteen PDFs.
With Forgotten Realms I felt like they hit the "coherent picture" point awhile back but just kept cramming more and more stuff into the cracks. With the result that if I wanted to run a canonical game I don't think I could every get a good enough grasp on the setting to do so.
'course that's just the opinion of someone who's read a few novels and only played a few sessions in FR. I'm sure Toril-ophiles see things in a different light.
Why didn't they just stick to the original D&D world of Mystaria (sic)?
A full, detailed answer to this would take far too long. But the short and sweet reason is because Mystara/The Known World used different rules, BECMI/RC D&D, while The Forgotten Realms used AD&D.
Except that Greyhawk was the first AD&D setting and while AD&D was getting going there wasn't really an established setting for BECMI D&D adventures. Eventually the folks putting out the BECMI D&D line decided an implied setting would be helpful for BECMI adventures and they came up with The Known World. AD&D was happily moving along a separate track with its adventures either in Greyhawk or generica. Gygax was pushed out and TSR decided it would be safest that Gygax's baby (Greyhawk) was also kept at a distance. They felt it made more sense to buy someone's setting that already used AD&D (Ed's Forgotten Realms) rather than convert a setting that used different rules. Besides, if TSR took the Known World from the BECMI line and gave it to the AD&D line then the BECMI team would just have needed to create a new setting for the BECMI line.
FWIW, towards the end of the BECMI line in the early 1990s, Bruce Heard, head of that team decided to finally give the world a name, Mystara. For Mystery Star. Previously the setting was concerned with a small portion of the planet called The Known World, and that is what the setting was generally known as. The setting material slowly began to detail more and more of the planet, going so far as to even develop The Hollow World. Suddenly the world itself needed a name because calling the whole thing "The Known World" made little sense when every continent was mapped and the Hollow World was opened up. Thus, Mystara as a name was born.
This may in fact be the reason so many people like it, but in a way this always seemed like a detriment to me. Don't get me wrong: I like having a well fleshed out history, richness and vitality and all that. It's just that with Forgotten Realms I feel like it was overwhelming. There's just so much to it.
In a way (and I know saying this will get me pitted against an Id Fiend in the arena but) it makes me glad that Dark Sun is no longer being sold in dead tree format. Dark Sun has quite a bit sketched out in general with enough detail here and there to provide a relatively coherent picture, and to get it all I just have to read umpteen PDFs.
With Forgotten Realms I felt like they hit the "coherent picture" point awhile back but just kept cramming more and more stuff into the cracks. With the result that if I wanted to run a canonical game I don't think I could every get a good enough grasp on the setting to do so.
'course that's just the opinion of someone who's read a few novels and only played a few sessions in FR. I'm sure Toril-ophiles see things in a different light.
Yah, I hear ya. It can definitely be overwhelming, and I agree that, especially with a setting like Dark Sun, all the unknown/mysterious is a draw all of its own.
Plus, while I don't know that I'd say I'm glad Dark Sun isn't being commercially published anymore, setting growth/drift is definitely always a problem as well. I'm not fully up on revised Dark Sun stuff, but even with it I've heard people on here say they didn't like the direction they started going. That's often what happens with a setting. It's got a certain "feel" to it that draws people to it, so the company starts publishing more stuff for it. Eventually, however, they have to advance the "metaplot" so they can make more books, which brings about changes to the setting, and inevitably those changes are going to move away from what attracted some people to the setting in the first place. Of course you can always just ignore stuff you don't like, but it gets harder and less desirable to do as time goes on and things drift further and further afield from the original version.
PigLick
That's often what happens with a setting. It's got a certain "feel" to it that draws people to it, so the company starts publishing more stuff for it. Eventually, however, they have to advance the "metaplot" so they can make more books, which brings about changes to the setting, and inevitably those changes are going to move away from what attracted some people to the setting in the first place.
This happened early in Dark Sun. It was called the Prism Pentad.
...
I am a fan of the Forgotten Realms because of the detail and variety in the setting. The realms are *huge* with still lots of unexplored places, and the material written has a lot of detail put into it (especially the material written by Ed Greenwood himself) without getting repetitive.
This happened early in Dark Sun. It was called the Prism Pentad.
I sort of agree.
My discontents with the pentad were on two fronts. One was the setting shift from a relatively static, largely repressive sorcerer-king dominated world to a more dynamic setting with big things happening all over the place. Not that the new setting elements that got ushered in are all bad (Cerulian storm, rift and lands beyond, etc.), but I guess I just liked the idea that Athas was a world so harsh and set in it's ways that the workings of a few characters weren't going to be able to shift the entire balance of power in a short period of time.
The second (and weirder) thing is that my introduction to Dark Sun was "The Verdant Passage", which set the mood for me. It seemed relatively grim for the "good" guys and had an interesting sort of pragmatism to it. But I felt like in spite of their flaws the characters were folks you could know and whose situations you could empathize with.
Then for the next few years I read over the 1st ed. boxed set. Many years later I read the rest of the pentad, but it was never the same as my nostalgic memories of the first book. I don't know why but I actually found Sadira's rapid rise to power boring. And as the series went on, although the characters did change and grow, they seemed somehow flat.
I guess it just goes to prove that you can never go home again.
Dark Sun purists here would probably be horrified at the amount of feats and PrCs I allow from FR in Darksun. The Militia Feat from example becomes a regional feat for Draj and Urik or the Shadow Adept PrC draws on the black for its power and Rajaat replaces Shar.
Mystara wasn't really that popular and when AD&D replaced DnD it died. The 2nd ed Mystara boxed sets also failed and probably suffered from not enough suppost as in 95 IIRC TSR was producing.
Birthright
Darksun
Forgotten Realms
Mystara
Planescape
Ravenloft
Not to mention Dragonlance Greyhawk, Maztica, Spelljammer, Al Qadim, etc. Birthright shouldn't have been made, Planescape, Mazitica, Al Qadim should have been an add on for FR/Greyhawk. Birthright and Ravenloft shouldn't have been made. Spelljammer while fun shouldn't have been made while Dragonlance to me was a fun series of books to read but never really made a decent transition to a viable playing world IMHO as both the 1st and 2nd ed DL campaign setting sucked IMHO. There wasn't really a drastic difference between Birthright, FR, Dragonlance, Greyhawk and Mystara to justify printing 5 settings that are very similar (high fantasy genre). TSR went bankrupt and ended up owing 30+ million dollars.
Mystara wasn't really that popular and when AD&D replaced DnD it died. The 2nd ed Mystara boxed sets also failed and probably suffered from not enough suppost as in 95 IIRC TSR was producing.
AD&D never replaced D&D. They continued side-by-side from the late 70s until the mid 90s. The Known World was popular enough to garner thirteen Known World Gazetteer setting expansions, three Hollow World setting expansions, six boxed set expansions to the setting (not including the two boxes of AD&D rebrand/reset of pre-existing Gazetteer products), four monster-as-PC expansions, four yearly almanacs, well over 50 published adventures. The old Princess Arc series in Dragon Magazine is regularly cited as among the most popular features the magazine had ever done.
When it was cancelled, The Known World/Mystara was the longest continually supported setting in the TSR stable.
The failure of the AD&D-ization of Mystara has many reasons. Among them was that it took the existing setting and re-presented it for a new-to-AD&D audience. Production values were huge making the prices for new hobbyists out of their reach. Plus, substantial changes to the setting were made that ditched, or seemed to at least, acknowledgement of the larger world that the Gazetteers established. Many fans of the setting were made angry about this, especially since little new material was added, down to substantial precise copying of text from earlier Gazetteers. What killed Mystara was TSR trying to convert it to AD&D 2nd edition, chopping out massive amounts of what established fans loved, and adding it to the already bloated stable of AD&D 2nd ed. settings.
Needless to say, Mystara/The Known World would have never survived WotC's takeover anyway... so its really just water under the bridge.
I have looked at Forgotten Realms, and I just can't seem to figure out why this world is so popular, okay there is some sort of conflict going on - every world has conflict. Why didn't they just stick to the original D&D world of Mystaria?
Greyhawk was the original world. Forgotten Realms, I believe, was the second, with I want to say Dragonlance shortly after. WotC stuck with Greyhawk & Forgotten Realms, ditching the others. Mysteria actually was a rather young setting for AD&D when TSR died...
I remember the D&D rules cyclopedia coming out around 91 but no one really played it and there was virtually no support for it from TSR.
The RC was little more than repackaging of the rules that had already been in print for 10 years. Compared to TSR's support for AD&D, which went through AD&D, AD&D 2nd edition, and Player's Option, dozens of settings and novels lines attached to them... yeah, not nearly on the same level.
However, there was a lot of support from TSR for D&D even after the Rules Cyclopedia was released, that you never saw it doesn't mean it wasn't there. There was the Champions of Mystara setting expansion. Wrath of the Immortals boxed mega-adventure. Three Poor Wizard's Almanacs. Four adventures in the DDA series. A monster supplement, Creature Catalog. A monster-as-PC supplement, Night Howlers. The Tunder Rift campaign setting, which had its own series of adventures including three adventure boxes and six regular modules.
Hence my comment about AD&D replacing D&D even though it was still "in print" so to speak.
It may have replaced it for you but that's not really how it happened in the market. Which is all I was trying to provide clarity on.
Mysteria actually was a rather young setting for AD&D when TSR died...
Mystara under the AD&D rules didn't last long, but as I already mentioned above, the setting had been supported under the BECMI D&D rules since 1981 explicitly.
Mystara under the AD&D rules didn't last long, but as I already mentioned above, the setting had been supported under the BECMI D&D rules since 1981 explicitly.
Which was why I said AD&D Mystaria...
The RC was little more than repackaging of the rules that had already been in print for 10 years. Compared to TSR's support for AD&D, which went through AD&D, AD&D 2nd edition, and Player's Option, dozens of settings and novels lines attached to them... yeah, not nearly on the same level.
However, there was a lot of support from TSR for D&D even after the Rules Cyclopedia was released, that you never saw it doesn't mean it wasn't there. There was the Champions of Mystara setting expansion. Wrath of the Immortals boxed mega-adventure. Three Poor Wizard's Almanacs. Four adventures in the DDA series. A monster supplement, Creature Catalog. A monster-as-PC supplement, Night Howlers. The Tunder Rift campaign setting, which had its own series of adventures including three adventure boxes and six regular modules.
It may have replaced it for you but that's not really how it happened in the market. Which is all I was trying to provide clarity on.
Thats still not alot of support though. There was very little support in Dragon/Dungeon adventures at the time IIRC and Dungeon very rarely published D&D adventures. I loved D&D and we had most of the boxed sets a few adventures, the rules cyclopedia and a couple of the Gazettes but it was hard getting the material for it compared to AD&D. The FLGS didn't stock that much of it due to lack of demand. Might have been different in the 80's when I didn't play but locally D&D was dead (93-96) and it seemed dead due to lack of support from TSR/Dungeon magazine. D&D however is about the only RPG I've ever played in as a campaign as I've never really played and have more or less constantly DM'ed since 95 as our DM left and I was the only one willing to do it.
Which was why I said AD&D Mystaria...
It was called MYSTARA
It was a very rich and well though-out world, probably much more so then the co-existing Greyhawk world. Don't get me wrong, I loved both, but Mystara seemed so much richer and more detailed.
The reason why they ditched Mystara then? At the time, 98% of the products released for it were OD&D, whereas Greyhawk was 1e. It was MUCH easier to make the transitions from 1e to 2e then to try to convert the monumental amount of info available for the Known World (Mystara). By the time 3e came around, the info was SO incredibly dated that they might as well create an entire new setting - Eberron. Greyhawk survived as the default setting simply because it was the easiest to incorporate into the core rules (in otherwise, the least detailed), and the company was making moves to bring Gary Gygax back into the fold.
Athas was probably my 5th favorite TSR/WotC setting, but only because of the heavy psionics in the system. They just weren't done very well back in 2e, and by the time the fixed them (rather well, I might add) it was too little too late.
If they were to do an Athas Sourcebook/setting now, it would have the potential that the original line couldn't achieve (feats, PrCs, better psionic rules). With Eberron's psionics firmly in place I unfortunately don't see this ever happening.
My favorite world is Dark Sun, because it's Science Fiction rather than Germanic Fantasy. I also liked Hollow World, because it was based on historical cultures rather than some made up cultures, which are still interesting, but they are always based off of an other.
It's sort of like reading Tolkein vs some random one-off fantasy book. It may be a good book, but there's a certain sense of history, depth and life to Tolkein that sets it apart.
(Not that I'm equating Forgotten Relams with Middle Earth, or comparing their creators, etc, just using that as an analogy).
Most fantasy books seem to be based of off Tolken's work, who seems to be the creator of Germanic fantasy novels.
... Mystria...
:headexplo
I'm beginning to think that a minor reasons Mystara didn't catch gamers' attention was an inability to spell it correctly. :P Heh...
:headexplo
I'm beginning to think that a minor reasons Mystara didn't catch gamers' attention was an inability to spell it correctly. :P Heh...
It certainly is a mystary, that's for sure.... ;)