Ramblings on Mystara

I have been reading articles on the Vaults of Pandius again.  That's the big hub of Mystara (an early D&D campaign setting) fan content, ranging from half-baked ideas and unfinished notes to some very detailed scenarios, home of Threshold Magazine and links to tons of top-notch maps by Thorfinn and others.  On the odd side, when I did a search for a Mystara map of a specific area, I got a bunch of links to items on Etsy where people took those classic, recognizable maps and slapped them on a bunch or random products -- phone cases and such.  I seriously doubt that any f these "crafters" owned any of these images or cared who did own them.  We're living in a world where people just steal images left and right to try and make a buck for themselves.

Aside from that, Mystara is such a playable world.   It has always struck me as the official D&D game world as far as the tone goes.  It started off as the "Known World" way back in the Isle of Dread days (1981 or so) and there is a fascinating layer of meta-stories about how the world came together and how it changed with various versions, original creators and the shifts in the business, how it eventually fell back onto the fans to keep it alive and keep writing new content for it.

Campaign settings are a unique genre of writing.  The challenge is trying to describe a world in enough detail that hundreds of DMs can map their own stories into it, but not so much detail that there's no room left for our own creations.  Personally, I like the settings with too much detail.  Give me some complete towns and keeps and forest locations to visit, I will always read through villages like Hommlet or send some of my solo PCs there to check them out.  I'm an explorer at heart when it comes to any game, which is probably why I count Minecraft as my all-time favorite video game.  I also enjoy reading campaign settings and adventure modules all by themselves, as a kind of metafiction or broad outline of all the stories that COULD happen.  For the too-much-detail settings, I have about 10 old books of Rifts and Palladium settings; I love those pages of town descriptions of the odd characters you can meet in every shop and back alley.  Thanks to drivethruRPG, I have a big PDF collection including the original Gazeteer series for Mystara and some of those huge settings from the Judges Guild.  There's no end to the things available to read.

I don't have a gaming group where I can run any these modules for real players.  I have always found that to be very labor-intensive with all the added social stresses.  But I do sometimes go back to my own notebooks and folders of PCs and NPCs from over the years and roll my way through an adventure, or just have fun rolling up detailed caravans and wilderness encounters, or organized battallions of ogres ready to roll across some imaginary land.  And for every die I roll for real, I must roll a hundred more as I lay awake playing scenarios in my head at night.  It's good exercise for the inquisitive mind, or a perfect distraction while fighting through a migraine or to blot out the real world while in a dentist chair. 
I keep saying that someday I will collect some of these resources of mine along with an appropriate gaming license and put out some PDFs of my own.  But I don't have art that can match what's already out there, and I don't have the time to deal with hundreds or thousands of feedbacks or complaints just to make some extra pizza money.

But it's always nice to revisit this huge resource of creativity, cruise thru drivethrurpg and see what's new, scour the usual sites for new posts and files.  I don't post on the boards or have any visibility for myself.  I don't really get that modern mentality of always self-promoting.  Sometimes it's just perfect being the consumer, the READER.