A coterie of Mystara enthusiasts comes together with the purpose of developing the WORLD OF MYSTARA campaign setting and the OD&D rules-set to highest creative level. Those of us who can, even move to the same town -- the town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where the Mystaran books were written -- so as to make our own Mystaran mecca and creative community. We all get jobs there, and plan to save and pool our money so that we eventually have the means to either 1) purchase the Mystara and OD&D properties from WotC, including related DRAGON, DUNGEON, IMAGINE, and POLYHEDRON articles, and including the right to incorporate elements of non-Mystara-branded products that tie into Mystara (e.g. the more detailed maps from The Little Keep on the Borderland), or barring that, 2) purchase a license to them. In the meantime, we do several things:
- We train in the skills necessary to do professional-quality work. (Thorfinn Tait's got the hex-maps down though). Everything from desktop publishing classes at the local community college to art classes so maybe one or more of us could draw (somewhat) like Elmore or other M-/OD&D artists.
- We gather a complete library of Mystara, Blackmoor, and OD&D materials, and any other material related to Mystara (e.g. CAS works), plus the latest 4e books.
- We study the canon, so that our mind is clear as to what is canon and what is fan-made (not that we wouldn't use fan-conceptions, but it's important to have a clear, common foundation to start with). We'd aim to become Mystara loremasters.
- Most of us become fluent in 4e in addition to OD&D, since likely most of our customers would be using 4e.
- We produce some major Mystara reference works, such as indexing the entire Mystara corpus. For example, the index would list every book and page number where a certain NPC or creature species appeared. Another work would be an entirely canonical timeline of Mystara, like the Grand History of the Realms, which was compiled by a FR fan and then purchased and published by WotC.
- We start a modest MystaraCon in Lake Geneva, and even stage LARPing events, so that Mystara can be recreated in costumes, artifacts, and activities.
- We make our own coterie website, ideally associated with Shawn's Vaults. It includes an enhanced product guide explaining how each fits into Mystara, with links to the PDFs for sale at Paizo.
- If we have several copies of books, we might consider starting a Mystara/OD&D Lending Library, where Mystaraphiles all over the world can subscribe, and then study and play through the various books and modules. The more people who are in the network of Mystara-lovers, the better.
- We might (or might not) consider even becoming a Mystara/OD&D product clearinghouse. Making one room of a house a mini-warehouse. Buying cheapish copies of Mystara/OD&D books and selling them for a small profit.
- As a kind of warm-up, we practice and hone our game-publishing skills through making a line of RPG books for the Labyrinth Lord and/or Basic Fantasy RPG clones like our own Geoff Gander has done at Dragonsfoot. These books would not be explicitly set in Mystara, but they'd be designed to be implicitly compatible. Someone would post a conversion document that gave a suggested placement in Mystara, and Mystaran proper names, like Mishler did with the Kalamar adventure(s) he wrote for KenzerCo. If print products weren't yet feasible, we'd sell them as PDFs.
Once we have the Mystara and OD&D licenses, or own them outright, we publish a 4e Mystara Campaign Setting. Everything we publish would be available in both 4e (or whatever the current iteration is by that time) and OD&D versions, though the OD&D might be only PDF and print-on-demand. After that, we aim to publish all the things we'd hoped TSR would've done: Return of Night's Dark Terror, 4e Creature Catalogue, additional Gazetteers (Hule, Sind, Heldann, Ochalea, various Alphatian dominions, etc), new Creature Crucibles, Patera setting for Oriental Adventures, Sharon Dornhoff's Blue Moon setting, Frank Mentzer's and Francois Froideval's WORLD OF URT (an alternate Mystara), inventing new regions/subsettings of Mystara, Trail Maps covering the rest of Mystara, and so on. We also produce 4e conversion sheets for all the old OD&D and 2e Mystara products.
We recognize all of the fan versions of Mystara (including the Net Almanac continuity) as official alternate Mystaras. Mystaraphiles could register their campaign(s) for free by filling out an online form, and give it their own personal designation and numeric code to distinguish it from other Mystaras, e.g. "So-and-So's WORLD OF MYSTARA" (Mystara-23). All of these alternate Mystaras would be listed on our website, with links to the homepage for those campaigns. Perhaps eventually the Vaults could be notated by which alternate World of Mystara each article depicts. TSR/WotC's Mystara would be merely one of many slightly different "alternate primes" (though of course, it'd be the baseline). Our coterie Mystara would have its own designation separate from the TSR Mystara for these reasons: 1) To deflect criticism from other fans that we were meddling with canon, so that 2) the TSR Mystara can continue to serve as the baseline for worldwide Mystaraphilia regardless of what our coterie does (though we'd aim to do it at least as well as TSR) and 3) Because our Mystara would synthesize and meld any continuity snags found in the TSR materials, so in that regard it'd be a slightly different (and more congruent) world.
Possibly even write and publish new Mystaran short stories and novels, if only as e-books.
Being stewards of the OD&D game too, we might eventually produce some OD&D rules expansions or settings that aren't tied to Mystara, like TSR UK did with Pelinore. If it were inexpensive, we might even try to acquire the rights to do OD&D conversions of the Blackmoor RPG materials and other Mystara-related materials such as Desert of Desolation (set in Ylaruam). These would likely only be in PDF format though, given their small market.
Much (not all, but much) of our free time would involve gaming in Mystara, likely with various DMs, both OD&D and 4e. It'd be like we were young again, with our first Red Box and dice crayon. We'd eat, drink, and sleep Mystara. I can truthfully say I love Mystara, and I suspect there are others like me.
I can dream...
Travis
Well, ok, not professionally, and not in Lake Geneva, but I'd say a lot of our work is of (almost) professional quality -- Thorf's maps, for example, or OldDawg's fan GAZ series, or some of the GPD work on Glantri.
And in some cases, we also have professional layout -- like those done by Axel Boucher (for example, my Ochalea GAZ: http://www.pandius.com/Ochalea-rev.pdf).
We are a bit lacking in the art department, though.
GP
Imagining? Is it not what we're already doing? ;)
:D
I agree with Agathokles. The quality of some of the Mystara works that fans have produced over the years rivals the professionally produced stuff. Beyond that, I usually favour the ideas that fans produce more so than the companies.
I agree that many elements of various fan-works have been top notch. However, often the ideas are as good or better than TSR's, but their presentation is not quite as spiffy. Or part of the presentation may be polished, but a few of the ideas or other elements are rough. This is not meant to be a criticism...it's not like I've done any great fan-works. I admire the work of my M-fellows, but I imagine it could be even better.
Travis
I agree that many elements of various fan-works have been top notch. However, often the ideas are as good or better than TSR's, but their presentation is not quite as spiffy. Or part of the presentation may be polished, but a few of the ideas or other elements are rough.
Eh eh, you can't have everything. Also, in order to produce some great ideas, you do need a number of less than optimal ideas as well ;)
GP
Havard