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Orcs patrol the caverns in the 1st level of the dungeon. (Clyde Caldwell cover for D&D introductory module B11: King's Festival by Carl Sargent, TSR, 1989) "Karameikos has no king, but this long-held festival honors a great hero of the distant past." The party must search for Aralic the Priest, kidnapped by orcs before dawn on the festival day.
This is a map born of serendipity. When I first came across Dungeon Master Gaz’s Karameikos map in early 2021, I sent him a message asking a
I wrote up a character background for a BECMI Mystara game I'm joining tomorrow. I recently suspended a 7-8 year campaign in Mystara I was running using heavily modified(homebrewed) 2nd Edition AD&D rules. I'm looking forward not only to getting to play in Mystara myself, but getting to play BECMI again, in particular, getting to use my POD R͟u͟l͟e͟s͟ C͟y͟c͟l͟o͟p͟e͟d͟i͟a͟!
The character, Zolfatara, is related to one of my favorite characters in another game, a homebrew system called I͟g͟n͟o͟t͟a. The character in that system in named Kratr. This is the "Red Sonya" to my "Conan," not that either character is modeled on either of those two. The background was only supposed to be a few paragraphs but I got carried away!
Art is not mine and is being used for a personal game only. The oc tag only reflects the story and personality. Art is for reference.
Mystara is an odd, short-lived 2E D&D campaign setting that appeared in 1994. I am fond of it. Why is it odd? Lots of reasons. For starters, Mystara is another name for the Known World, the campaign setting for BECMI and Challenger basic D&D, which TSR cancelled in 1993. In 1994, TSR put out the First Quest box set, yet another introduction to D&D, and the Mystara line was intended to be where those new players wound up. Third: all the Mystara adventures were “Audio CD Games” that incorporated audio tracks on CD in the scenarios (which basically meant everything in the line needed to be a box set and therefore more expensive). But the vibe is odd, too – sort of a classic fairy tale world vibe that seems strange because it feels generic but also unfamiliar, if that makes sense.
Karameikos: Kingdom of Adventure (1994) was the first Mystara box set. Half the contents are devoted to a two adventures – a booklet, a pile of handouts on parchment, some reference cards and the audio CD that I can not work up the nerve to listen to. Each important moment in the adventures is keyed to an audio track, which are like little bits of a radio drama. The scenarios are pretty standard stuff, dealing with a slaving ring and a hag.
The meat of the box is the setting book. It is a primer for campaign settings for new players, a detailed look at Karamiekos and the kingdom’s history in the mode of the earlier Gazetteer series of sourcebooks and also provides an overview of the entire Known World.
It is also full of great art. That cover by Jaquays, for starters. In perhaps the most surprising art inclusion in 90s D&D, there are a ton of color plates by Walter Velez (he had a long fantasy illustration career, but Thieves World and the Myth series are probably his most recognizable). They are totally worth the price of admission, especially the one with the giant wolf man with an axe (which is also a great example of how super weird but also generic Mystara is at the same time).
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A couple years back I talked about Stormfront , the TSR world that I never ended up creating. And in the initial entry I said: " Stormfro...
A couple years back I talked about Stormfront, the TSR world that I never ended up creating. And in the initial entry I said:
" Stormfront was pretty much my swan song at TSR. I was sad about the decision, though this was not what eventually convinced me it was time to leave the company (that would be Mystara ...)."
And I left it there until someone asked about. Well, someone finally did ask about it, I wrote up a response to them, and now I'm putting it in the blog as well. Here's the story of Mystara, why it was the way it was, why it was as good as it was, and why it sent me out the door.
The initial idea was "Bring the Known World of D&D into AD&D Second Edition". D&D had an excellent life apart from the AD&D line, through the BECMI line of boxed set rules (that's Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, Immortals) and the Gazetteer series of source books. But D&D as a competing game system to AD&D was going to be curtailed. The Known World (as it was called at the time) would be converted to AD&D.
I was dubious. The Known World already had a long and successful life over in the D&D (mostly due to the work of Bruce Heard, who was its champion). The Known World had a unique look and feel and should it be made an AD&D world would be in direct competition with FR [Forgotten Realms]. But D&D was going to end as a set of game rules, and it would be AD&D going forward. And because I brought the Realms into TSR, I was a good candidate to help translate the Known World into AD&D.
I've been a fan of the Known World. I loved the maps and I loved the ever-increasing number of character sub-classes that showed up in the Gazetteers. Kits had worked very well in Al-Qadim, and I brought that concept over to revised setting. The initial idea was to do a massive overview on the world laid out by the Gazetteers, with a lot of crunchy bits in transfering all the regional subclasses to kits. Unlike the Realms, which had empty space where Ed hadn't any stories/games in (Sembia, for example), there was a very complete world to start with here I wanted to embrace the complexity.
And I set to work - renaming the world Mystara (Known World felt too close to Forgotten Realms), and poking at all the nooks and crannies. And then everything went to hell over the logo. Yeah, the LOGO.
The Sales VP (perhaps it was the Marketing VP - TSR seemed to always have one but not the other) wanted to be deeply involved in creating the logo. And since fantasy meant knights, dragons, castles, and wizards, he wanted all of these things. On the logo. It was a dog's breakfast of a design. A couple of the artists threw up their hands trying to put it together, and no one in design liked the proposal much. Any attempt to minimize any one element was rejected. Finally there was a come-to-Jesus moment where a multi-discipline group confronted the Sales/Marketing guy and said this was a bad idea. (We eventually ended up with the logo shown here).
And he backed down. That was Thursday.
And by next Monday the entire nature of the project had changed, by order of management (including the Sales/Marketing guy). Instead of doing all of Mystara, the project would concentrate on Karameikos only. Oh, and since it would now tie in with our First Quest line, we would put Audio CDs into it. And the deadlines would not change.
All the material I had put together was pretty much wiped off the board (I found a manuscript of part of it the other day, while looking for other things). Fellow creatives came to my aid -- Thomas Reid took up the adventure and the CD. Andria Hayday did a championship job with the editing and influenced the graphic presentation (as she had previously done on Al-Qadim). We got good artists. Jennell Jacquays did a triptic art piece we chopped up for three different covers. Walter Velez did some interiors. The fact that Karameikos had a indigenous population and a group of conquerors made it an interesting setting, and reflected in such things as we did the art as if it were in the world -- so we had the same event drawn with different styles.
One of the challenges to Karameikos, though, was that Aaron Alston did a great job in creating a complete fantasy kingdom, but as a result, it was very difficult to add the Player Characters to the mix. What would they do in a kingdom where all the political forces were so evenly balanced? I referred to this as "trying to bite a billiard ball" and was pleased to have come up with some things for the PCs to do. I managed to do that without destabilizing the kingdom too much. I liked that.
And I renamed the Known Worlds as Mystara (or at least I'll take the blame for it). I also take the blame for renaming Specularum to Mirros -- at the request of several co-workers who were squidged out by the similarity of the original name to "speculum" -- explanations that both words came from the same core availed me nothing, so I changed it.
I stayed away from the CD side of the project for this and for Mark of Amber -- I let Thomas carry that forward, and any stories on that I leave for him to tell. The books were also problematic -- DJ Hienrich and Thorrin Gunnarsson were both pen names, and I had little influence on their efforts. I completed my part of the revision, wished Monte the best of luck on Glantri and walked away (well, there were Poor Wizards/Joshuan's Almanacs but I was pretty much done with the world).
Looking back through the 'net, most of the response to Karameikos, Kingdom of Adventure was very positive, which is nice. What we ended up with worked well. Whatever challenges we faced getting it across the finish line didn't reflect on the quality of the final project. However, getting there involved some scrambling to account for managerial decisions, and kinda burned me out. I was pretty much done.
After Karameikos, I just sort of moved on. Mark of Amber was a smooth design, but there was little to do beyond adapting Aaron's work to the new CD-based reality (I actually growled at my boss about my getting billing on that). Neither Man nor Beast for Ravenloft would be my last original project. But by that time I was disappointed with the atmosphere at the company. I would love to say that I was prescient about the bad financial times to come, but actually I had no real clue, and just felt it was time to go. Most of my cadre of designers and editors had moved on. When Margaret Weis offered me the chance to join Mag Force 7 in 1994, I took it, and left the operation. I loaded up all my personal stuff in a couple boxes, and everyone came down to wish me well as I left the building.
Then they went back up and looted all the stuff I left back in my cube.
Fascinating.
(Also: yes, one of the articles linked above does point out how the “Stormfront” name has since been picked up by a right-wing hate group and thus Grubb could/would never use it again.)
"This painting is a replica of a classic tapestry hanging in the main hall of Baron Vorloi's home. This scene of elf warriors battling a green dragon sums up much of what early settlers thought of the lands of Karameikos: a forested home of many monsters." (Eric Hotz, Mystara Campaign boxed set Karameikos, Kingdom of Adventure, TSR, 1994) Hotz's art style here references early medieval culture, similar to his work for the Harn series by Columbia Games.
Mystara was the AD&D 2e version of the Known World campaign setting originally created by Moldvay and Schick at Kent State. The Known World became an official D&D setting in the 1981 B/X Expert rules and in module X1: Isle of Dread, then was expanded upon in the 1987 Gazetteers.
Karameikos, a major power in the Known World (Clyde Caldwell art for The Grand Duchy of Karameikos by Aaron Allston, TSR, 1987, first of the Gazetteers for BECMI D&D). The top figure most resembles the description of Aleena Halaran, a 12th level cleric of the Order of the Griffon in the Church of Karameikos. She usually is seen in brightly decorated armor, but wears Thyatian gowns to society events she attends as the niece of the Baron of Threshold.
Aleena Halaran is based on the cleric Aleena that Frank Mentzer fridged in the opening pages of his version of the Basic D&D rules (1983). Allston's Gazetteer suggests changing her name to Anielle if you consider her death in the rulebook to be canonical.
