World Replacements: Mystara, Golarion

This is something I have always felt. The best replacement for Mystara, an ultimate theme park world, is the best theme park world, Pathfinder's Golarion.

Not the new Golarion, mind you, classic Golarion minus all the steampunk. If I wanted a steampunk game, I would have bought one, and I do not want guns in my fantasy unless this is pirates. No robots, automation, robot companions, android characters, walking cars, trains, airships, no, I am sorry, no steampunk in Golarion. Save it for Starfinder. Sometimes I can't tell Pathfinder 2E and Starfinder apart, which feels wrong.

Fantasy is fantasy - no guns, no cowboys, and no robots.

There are times I feel Pathfinder 2e leans too heavily into steampunk and gonzo sci-fi, and the world suffers as a result. I do not want androids walking around my fantasy world, nor do I want robot companions. I do not walk mecha-cars, trains, motorized thrones, or airships. The original Golarion world is very cool, a really strong fantasy setting with just a touch of sci-fi - but this can ultimately be ignored or replaced by "alien magic "if you wish. The 2e world has so many crazy species and ancestries running around it feels like Mos Eisley at times or some anime TV show where every living thing has to talk and have stereotypical human emotions.

On the other side, as the D&D Gazetteer line went on, the setting books got more humorous and way out there. The Thar supplement leans into the humor and really does a good job. And they started breaking immersion and introducing flying ships and all sorts of crazy technology by the last few additions to the line. At times I felt the designers were either bored, unsupervised, or TSR did not really care much about the world by the end and told them, "anything goes, do what you want."

Both worlds have a few huge problems, but Golarion 1e has the fewest, Golarion 2e has the most, and Mystara sits in the middle.

With Savage Pathfinder, I get all of it back in style, though I have to admit, Castles & Crusades is ruling my fantasy needs at the moment. I am waiting for the second Savage Pathfinder set to come, and then I will dive in with the Advanced Player's Guide. I love the classic world feel of the Pathfinder 1e world, and it is much more mature and confident, sort of like a fantasy book written for mature readers and older audiences. The new 2e world is incredible, but it feels more like a "for all audiences" game that includes kids; the tone has changed substantially, and I do not feel the world is written for me anymore.

But I always felt the Pathfinder world was a better Mystara, and it hits many of the excellent theme park notes with dedicated areas with flavor and fun. You have a Norse area, Ravenloft area, undead kingdom, lost continent, pirate place, your typical demon kingdom, demon invasion area, Kingmaker sandbox, the adventure kingdom, and many other classics. Anything you want is here.

I have to admit, finding these exact theme park locations in Swords & Wizardry with Lost Lands was surprising, and they are done a touch better here with full campaign support. They are not as integrated into the larger world as well, however, but that is a good thing and a bad thing. In Lost Lands, the theme park areas are almost standalone campaigns, and if I wanted to run them that way, it is an option. With Pathfinder, if I wanted to run one of the areas as a standalone, it would be very hard to pull the rest of the world out.

Mystara has a few issues, like a lack of an evil kingdom and a few tone-deaf areas, which seemed okay at the time but, in hindsight, made me raise an eyebrow. A kingdom that bans religion and gives clerics the death penalty? An Arabian Knights area that sounds fun but is way too small and shoved in there. A lack of an evil kingdom. The continent felt too settled and divided, like a Renaissance Europe, with little room for exploration and discovery. And some of the later iconic areas, like a spooky Ravenloft-style area, missing. The continent also feels small when I would love it expansive and with room for evil to lurk and heroes to settle unexplored lands.

Golarion is similarly divided up, but the scale feels much larger, and most areas in a kingdom's border feel all dangerous outside settled areas. Golarion has decades of hindsight on what is fun and what gamers want. It can deliver areas that support iconic experiences, and it does.

This was an easy one since it just fits so well. Plus Golarion has the adventure paths in style and those more than make up for the loss of the Mystara gazetteers.

The only problem is the rules. The Pathfinder rules are very different than OGL, so I am playing this with non-OGL or B/X systems, such as Pathfinder 1e, 2e, or Savage Worlds. The latter will likely be my pick since it is easier to manage than the other two.

If I want an OGL hit, I will stick to Lost Lands (Greyhawk) or Aihrde (Realms) and the C&C rules.

When I want that pulp Mystara adventure with a Pathfinder flair, I will dive into Savage Pathfinder.

Nostalgia

There are times I think nostalgia is cool, and other times I feel nostalgia is killing the hobby.

I go back to my old games and old campaigns, and I love those moments. I want to relive them. I restarted my old Mystara campaign with Castles & Crusades, and it feels great. I love all the classic monsters and settings. I go to a superhero movie and I feel the same feelings, how cool is it to see comic book heroes on the big screen?

And then it hits me.

What I am seeing is playing upon my original feelings, and those feelings are not new. Why I remember the original so fondly because it was something new for me.

This nostalgia?

Not new and never will be new again.

It will never create the same feeling in me, only attempt to bring it back in a weaker, diluted form.

One of the worst things big companies do to creative forces them to work on nostalgia IP. They often mess it up. And worse, those creatives are being robbed of the opportunity to create something new, that would give fans these original feelings again of "not seeing this before" and letting those creatives make history. The fans are robbed too because the copy will never live up to the original.

Criticize Strixhaven and Radiant Citadel from Wizards all you want, but these are new settings. Well, Strixhaven feels like a note-for-note Harry Porter bucket list adventure, but at least it isn't another classic adventure reboot. They are something new within the D&D pantheon - a new experience through the lens of D&D. They are not for me, but I applaud the company for taking a risk. This is far better than another Tomb of Horrors reboot, another Temple of the Elemental Evil, with more beholders, mind flayers, more drow, more displacer beasts, the D&D pantheon, Vecna again, and the same old product identity regurgitated to infinity and beyond.

But were mind flayers cool? Yes, when we first saw them. Now, 40 years down the road, they have been rehashed and rebooted so many times they are nothing special. No matter how many new artists you throw at them or tweak their combat stats, they will be nothing special. When you see them again, you are not surprised, you know what they do, they are nothing to fear but a mathematical challenge, and that moment where the players do not know what they are facing is taken away from them for a cheap nostalgia hit.

Tomb of Horrors was cool the first time through. Keep rebooting it and all you are doing is rob the creative people who work for you of the chance to create this generation's "Tomb of Horrors" and show people something entirely new and terrifying for the first time. What scares this generation of creative adventure designers? What monsters in their imaginations are terrifying to them? Let them show us.

Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Mystara are cool, but those feelings come from being the first to travel there. Could they be made cool again? I would have to tear things up and change them dramatically. At that point, the effort is probably better spent creating a new campaign world, rather than fighting an old one and changing what I loved about it.

If I take the classic Threshold city out of the Mystara world, one of the classic starting towns, and change it to make it interesting - let us say it is now ruled by an evil cult! Okay. Part of me hates the change because it feels petty like this is a "heel move" in wrestling purposefully done to make me angry. So right off, minus points for trying to manipulate my emotions. Second, I know what to expect here. I know the general layout, who the important NPCs were, and the history if I knew it.

Contrast that with creating a new evil town called Darkhaven, and putting it up north in the valley. Oh! We have never been there! What is it about? Why did it get built? What is it like? Who runs this place? The new town itself is far more interesting and intriguing than the old one changed.

The same logic can be applied to the region, the kingdom, and eventually the entire world. It is far more compelling to just make something from scratch than it is to try and reboot something familiar.

And I find myself gravitating back towards the never seen and unknown again.

I picked up the Sullenlands Adventure Omnibus, and DCC is a great game if you tire of nostalgia and want to always experience something new. From what I see, DCC modules do not reuse the tired old tropes, and they constantly invent new monsters, magic items, traps, locations, and crazy situations you feel you have never been in before. You don't know how to fight a monster because this is the first time you ever encountered it. There are no "we know what to expect" orcs, goblins, trolls, and other creatures here. Most everything is new and you are experiencing it for the first time.

And there is this in the Sullenlands forward:

But while the game was still fun (4th edition), something about it had changed from what I had remembered. The art had become slick and commercial. The game was more tactical now. Yes, the powers were cool, but the reliance on minis and maps pushed the theatre of the mind to the back burner. The game I remembered from long ago was just a little subversive and dangerous. We had felt like we were on the frontier of some strange country. I was still enjoying playing the game again, but it just wasn’t what it was before.

The game I had remembered from before had been looked upon with skepticism from adults, as if we kids were trifling with powers best left alone. There was something about it that had felt very underground, like an undiscovered secret. It captivated my thoughts and imagination. The game we had played back in the day made us feel like we were on the edge of a new, untamed frontier. Now, I just wondered if that same feeling was still out there… somewhere.

It took a few more years of playing before I discovered the Dungeon Crawl Classics rulebook. Before I’d finished the first chapter, that long-lost feeling had somehow found me again. It was everything that I had remembered about our first game in 1979. The art sometimes seemed crude and unrefined, but I kept coming back to the images and their elemental power: they inspired me in ways more polished or safe art never could. The ruleset was old-school, and packed with cool features, but the experience was easily accessible to my new players who by this point were familiar with the d20 system. We played it as written, and we never looked back.

Others feel this feeling.

That reboots and nostalgia aren't everything they are sold to be. These are not the experiences we are looking for. Our minds will never create new feelings or memories if we keep bringing back the past.

We crave the new and unseen.

And it was true back then. I get the feeling the best modules from the AD&D era were the ones that did not leverage the well-worn tropes. The Tomb of Horrors was not a combat slog, it forced you to think. The Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was a deadly romp through a destroyed sci-fi ship, and nobody knew what was around the next corner or what the next insane robot was going to do.

It seems at times even the original players and designers of D&D were sick of the tired old tropes.

And what do we do today?

Endlessly celebrate and reboot the tired old tropes they were trying to create to break free from that trap. We have to have our beholders, even though, yes, everyone knows what they do, their weaknesses, and how to fight them, and they are not scary or special anymore. At this point, I would leave them out of the next monster manual but please yes, oh yes, sell them as plushies.

I would retire them to a Hall of Fame.

Let a new generation make the next scary epic monsters. It is time. Keep the game young and on that edge. Let it be cool again.

Because product identity has become a prison mentality.

The Mystara Campaign, Part 1

So I started my Mystara campaign last night and generated characters. The inspiration for this was pure nostalgia, going back to the world and characters I played with my brother as kids. We played in Mystara pre-gazetteer days, so having these come out later was a tremendous gift to our game, though by that time, roleplaying GI JOE (Aftermath rules) and Car Wars (Traveller rules) was the central focus of our gaming. At this time, Star Frontiers has fallen off with us as well, we got into that game early and modded it heavily, and there was not too much left to do in the Frontier.

Since Mystara was so well developed, we did not need much more than the first map to figure things out. This was the northerner area like the Norse, this was the desert Arabian Knights' place, this was the good kingdom, those were the elves, that place was orcs, and so on. The world has this strange "first campaign" feeling like it was designed by and for adults, and then eventually, TSR relegated it to the starting world for younger players.

Our world had demons and devils, straight from the AD&D Monster Manual. The official Mystara world had no real mention of them. Our Mystara world also had all the classic Greyhawk modules, like the GDQ series, Tomb of Horrors, and many more. This was the sort of world and game that Labyrinth Lord does so well, the mix of AD&D and D&D with the best of both mashed together in one crazy mess of rules hacks that works anyways. For us, this was also pre-Greyhawk, since we never picked up that boxed set until 1984, even though, yes, the Greyhawk setting existed far before that.

When TSR switched hands, they went full-bore Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms, and Mystara was the forgotten world.

Forgotten Realms in the 1990s

This was also pre-Forgotten Realms, which was 1987. We were poor, so we never had access to the original Greyhawk books, so Mystara was our world. We did play pretty heavily in the Realms later with AD&D 2e around 1995, and those were more character and story-focused games than dungeon adventures. There was a shift away from monsters and gold as XP in AD&D 2e, and the concept of story XP was introduced. This massive change got us back into fantasy gaming as something more than hack and slash, grab the loot. This world died for us when D&D 3 came out, Greyhawk became the official campaign world, and the game went back to hack and slash, grab the loot.

One of the best things the Forgotten Realms did for us was focus on characters and stories. Our NPCs never became god characters like many lamented; they were played by the rules with no "writer fiat" and could suffer the same fates as characters. This "stories plus characters" combo drove many of our roleplaying post-Realms, and this is one thing this world did right. I don't think we really went into dungeons in this world at all, and our world was much more cinematic and pulp-action driven than our dungeon-crawling Mystara game.

We never had traditional dungeons in our Forgotten Realms world, not one of them. We never found a great module with a classic Forgotten Realms dungeon crawl, and a lot of the modules of this era were the novel-inspired railroaded ones, so we skipped dungeon crawling and instead did character-focused stories. If we had an "evil temple," it was not about exploration; it was a backdrop for a fight, more like a movie set.

If I ever revisited the Forgotten Realms, it would likely be with the Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion. Our world was centered around characters and wasn't as rigidly structured as Savage Worlds Pathfinder. A ranger could pick up druid magic, and characters evolved naturally through their stories. Our game was not as focused on dungeons and monsters, so just a solid set of rules for characters - plus rare creatures - will do very nicely. We didn't even focus on leveling and powering up; the characters played at similar power levels through our games and only went from level 8 to 14 or so, so even the range of power felt identical among all of the characters we played.

Plus, with a cinematic game, some characters should feel like the Wild Cards, while others are the extras. With this world being so character-focused, that heroic feeling works perfectly. Fewer characters, more courageous, and stories that resemble dramatic arcs in novels.

Mystara Today is Castles & Crusades

I picked Castles & Crusades (C&C) for the rules for my Mystara game over a B/X such as Old School Essentials or even the cinematic Savage Worlds Fantasy or Pathfinder. C&C does away with every chart reference in an AD&D-style match, and you can play the game just from a character card. There are no saving throw charts, thief skill charts, class ability percentage calculations, massive skill systems, or anything you need to open the book for during play. My character's class abilities are listed on my character cards, and the chance of success is based on the SIEGE Engine and ability scores.

While Old School Essentials is my B/X game of choice just because of clarity and organization, C&C does not need that much ease of reference because there is not much to look up in the books. Looking up a chart or replicating it on a character sheet takes time, and multiply that by the hundreds of times you need to do it during a campaign, and that time adds up. I would rather have a universal save, skill, class feature, and ability score check system handling all of the game's inner workings than have everything work dozens of different ways based on class or what you are trying to do.

I can run dozens of characters in Castles & Crusades efficiently. I can't do that in many other games just because of the amount of legacy cruft they choose to maintain and support. Plus, I want every character to be on the same power level and footing; everyone is that AD&D iconic character, and there is no concept of a Wild Card with an extra "second chance" die to roll and more hits. And I want the characters to be compatible with the classic AD&D modules and monsters.

And that is my latest character card. Some saves are abbreviated, but you are good as long as you know ED is Energy Drain and P&P is Polymorph & Petrification (poly-petri). This hits all my wants, such as a primary column, a base to hit (BTH) space, and the top reading like a character bio "John, NG, Human (Male), Bard." Plus, whitespace makes the entire card easier to read. GAC is grapple AC, and TAC is touch AC.

I guess why I want C&C is for the easier-to-manage characters. I like that robust single-player heroic experience for some games, and I like a lot of detail in my sole character. For others, I almost want a wargame with a few dozen units at my command, which means a system that simplifies and reduces complexity. I could run 9-12 characters in C&C and never feel like I am bogged down in the details, ignoring a class, or missing the point due to my inability to dive into the needed level of complexity a class requires to play it correctly.

I need to open the book for very little. This is much like Index Card RPG, where you can mostly play without referencing the rules. But this game is very AD&D-like, which is just so cool.

Honestly, I am happy to be playing and trying to think of a plot to carry me through the campaign. I have a start, but not a story or theme.

More soon.