It all started when I got really curious about the Heldann Freeholds. Unlike most nations, there wasn't a single source I could go to as the main reference point. I thought it would be really useful to have a single doc that lists all the "sources" for ambiguous countries like this. Then I thought - why not take it a step further and list all the modules set in that country too?
Well, as I was going through the Gazeteers, I noticed a bunch of themes running through them - most notably the Nithian Empire. Until the Hollow World set, information about Nithia was dribbled through a lot of the Gazeteers - it would be really nice to have a list of what you need to track down get all the info about Nithia!
So I started making a nice chart. And here it is. It's got the world broken down into regions and countries, and for each, a list of products that describes or contributes to that country... and also a bunch of "themes" that are important to that country. (For instance, anywhere with substantial Nithian connections has "Ancient Nithia" as a theme, and anywhere with large demihuman clans has "Dwarven Clans" as a theme.) Elsewhere in the doc is a list of products for each theme, so that you can know where to find all the information on Dwarves to flesh out your Dwarven Clan.
This isn't complete, since I don't have all the products, but I've tried to make suitable guesses (mainly thanks to http://www.mystaranet.jamm.com/vaults/html/prodlist.html, which lists the setting of each module). I was sitting on it because I wasn't sure how best to format it and explain it, but I've changed my mind and decided I should get it out there with all its flaws. Its flaws are mainly that this is a horrible format for this information, since (for instance) I have to keep all the themes up to date by hand, and it's hard to go from a product to a country instead of the other way around.
So instead of doing any more work on this doc, I've moved on to Stage 2, which is to put all this information into a MySQL database. Ideally, docs like this could be generated from the db, and I'd put a read-only version online for browsing. So far I've put info from modules X1 through X5 into the db, but I'm running into problems because my schemas really suck. Tomorrow I'll post a more full description of them and ask for help in getting the db working.
Here's that link to Stage 1 again in case you missed it: http://notcharles.ca:8080/~jnc/Mystara%20Products.rtf
I'll see if I can make some more comments when I've had more time to read it more in detail.
Cheers!
Håvard
I'd hardly call this smaller scale, though. And it seems you have a great deal of the work done already! Very nice, and very useful.
By the way, my compiled timeline also started out as a text document but was changed to a database. I agree wholeheartedly that databases are better for this sort of thing, even if they can be a bit fiddly to get set up and working. (My timeline eventually got converted back to a text document, though...)
I've actually considered making something very similar to this, but for maps. It would help very much to have a list like yours which shows which products have which maps (I think I already have this list), and of course which countries are shown on which maps (this one would take more work).
I know I've been pretty silent on this since I posted it, after promising to get down to the nitty gritty of database design, but things are still moving - I've gotten a contract job working with Ruby on Rails, which I think will be perfect for this application, so once the contract is over I'll be coming back and redesigning the database from scratch based on that.
Congrats on the job Joe! Be looking forward to hearing more from you when you have time!
Håvard