" 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. 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.
Then they went back up and looted all the stuff I left back in my cube.
More later,
