A Tale of Three Worlds: Mystara, Mystoerth, and Mystaerth

Over the years I've used campaign material from the Known World and Mystara in various ways, adapting and adopting material here and there.

Twice I've made major adaptations, dropping the Known World and other elements of Mystara into other worlds wholesale, and vice-versa.

One of these efforts was Mystoerth, which combines Mystara and Greyhawk by dropping the Flanaess into the world of Mystara. Here is my Mystoerth map:

It is really great to see that others took and ran with the idea of Mystoerth, such as Tim Brannan on The Other Side Blog and his development of Mystoerth. Chatdemon's version of the map, which you can find at Tim's site, re-centered the map and added the parchment effect.

Another such effort was Mystaerth, which combined Mystara with the world of Aerth, the campaign setting from Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys: Mythus setting. Here is the map from that effort:

I really feel the need to return to Mystara soon. Just which Mystara, I'm not quite sure yet...

This post was inspired by Trey's posts on From the Sorcerer's Scroll about placing Karameikos and the other locations from Mystara in the Real World.

I should also note, inspired by Trey's post, I went and finally dug up a huge treasure trove of old Mystara files, some of them dating to 1994! Now to go through everything and see what passes the sniff test...

[Random Bloggery] Pseudo-Historical Campaign Settings

Quick post to keep the mind going... I've run a number of pseudo-historical campaigns over the years, with some good results. Here are two of the campaign settings I've used:

Outremer
I used the old AD&D Historical Reference Guide for The Crusades to develop the core of this campaign, which I ran using D&D 3E. Major historical deviation was that it was set in a D&D version of Aerth rather than Earth, so there were elves, dwarves, old gods, etc. Developed quite a bit of background, drew up a bunch of maps, had some fun. The primary goal of the campaign was for the adventurers to find an ancient aegyptian treasure that had been stolen by local bandits long ago and hidden away, tied in with an ancient tomb where several of Alexander the Great's loyal followers had been buried. The group found the tomb, which was based on an old tomb from the Valley of the Kings, but we never finished that campaign, and they were left still exploring the tomb...

Brythonian Knights
Another Aerth campaign, this time actually using Dangerous Journeys, set in the time of King Richard the Lionhearted in a very alternate Angland where the island was broken up into many petty kingdoms and London was a Free City. The adventurers were tied into the latest battle between the cultures and gods over the island; they eventually recovered the scabbard of Excalibur, though it was left open-ended at the end of the campaign where the scabbard would end up. It was presumed, of course, that it would go to the young Prince of Logres, from which the Brythokelltic Renaissance would start and eventually re-conquer the isle (and flow back onto the Continent to conquer the Low Countries).

As you can probably tell, I really like Gary's Aerth setting. It is my "go-to" setting for pseudo-historical campaigns.