Every once in a blue moon, I have the urge to doomscroll The Vaults of Pandius .  A bit like with Greyhawk and its online community , the Vaults of Pandius were at one point the primary way for me to explore the world of  Mystara  at a time when what I had of published materials were Mentzer's  Expert Set , the In Search of Adventure module anthology, loaning the  The Grand Duchy of Karameikos  Gazetteer when I could from the library and prodigious access to Dragon Magazine at the local library, where I was seemingly the only loaner ever interested in the older issues. The original adventure path. I have an irrational amount of love for this book. I will need to review it at one point. When I discovered the Vaults, it was like a world opening up to me, of a swathe of gamer archeologists who have studied the setting in depth and extracted a bunch of nuggets for me to take in, in the absence of a cohesive setting book to help make sense of it all. I sp...

I've been anticipating reviewing "Mystara" as perhaps the most difficult of the setting reviews.  Unlike most settings, it never really had a dedicated setting book. As the default setting for the "non-advanced" Classic D&D line, it grew from a couple of pages in the Expert Set published in 1981 up and ended as an AD&D in 1995. It is, perhaps moreso than any other setting, a product of organic development which grew and changed radically over the course of its different release cycles.  Unlike the ham-fisted attempts at development and expansion in other settings (Forgotten Realms with its Time of Troubles, Maztika and Kara-Tur getting tacked on to the edges with cheap glue and then destroyed for 4e altogether stand out), this somehow worked out well for Mystara. Perhaps because it is so non-premeditated and basically a collection of different authors having good ideas they wanted to throw at a setting and a setting that is very receptive to such tre...