Gods need more agents in the world than just clerics and
paladins. A goddess’s chosen
people might wander anywhere across in many lands, but a goddess’s chosen sites
are fixed in place. To guard
these—particularly after a deity’s mortal congregations have long since moved
on—the gods rely on immortal servants: divine guardians.
So it’s a template.
And a pretty neat one. I
like the easy customizability of the creature’s subtype. The various senses, defenses, and
spell-like abilities all make sense for an immortal guardian. Even the Divine Swiftness (Ex) and +5
racial bonuses on Perception and Sense Motive checks are a nice touch—just what
you’d expect from a difficult-to-fool, shockingly fast tomb guardian in an old
Conan story.
With their eternal lives counterbalanced by their fixed
locations, divine guardians are also a great hand-wave for a GM. Got a perfect monster for that final
boss encounter but no logical reason (let alone a logical food supply) to have
it stuck that deep in a dungeon?
Make it a divine guardian—bam, problem solved. It’s also nice to have a firsthand witness to history that’s
not an elf (or an ageless enemy that’s not a lich or outsider). And since the gods sometimes use divine
guardian status as much as a punishment as a reward, it’s a good way to put PCs
into conflict with a monster they might not otherwise have reason to fight (or
be forced to parley with a monster they would ordinarily slay).
One last note: What I especially like about the example
divine guardian hydra is Shreya Shetty’s art. Because it’s not a
hydra; it's this regal crowned multi-headed cobra…thing. Which is fantastic. Because yes, there are going to be some divine guardians who
were once normal creatures invested with power: “To guard the Moon Maiden’s
Promontory, I will make you The Best Werebear Ever.” But in most fantasy stories, especially old pulp stories,
old religious sites are never guarded by a Slightly Better Monster…they're guarded
by strange serpent lords and space elephants. So I like the idea of divine guardians that are unique in
the world. No one ever has to know
your Scion of the Cobra Lord is a variant hydra but you. Better yet, layer on more than one
template. An earth element-infused
(from the Advanced Bestiary) divine
guardian behir for instance, might be completely unrecognizable to players by
the time you’re done tweaking it, and all you have to do is add a couple of
numbers.
The triton sorcerer
Loeb mocked his people and what he deemed their superstitious faith. As a punishment, the Wavelord banished
him somewhere he disdained even more: the surface. Loeb has put his centuries guarding the Wavelord’s grotto of
sacred pools to use, learning fire magic in a petty defiance in the aqueous
power the suffuses him. Now he is
a master of scalding steam and boiling waves as well.
A divine guardian
kitsune left her shrine in order to pursue a tomb robber…and ended up chasing
her quarry through a portal to the other side of the world. She dispatched the thief and reclaimed
the stolen scrolls, but now she is half-mad in her desperation to get home
before her divine status is revoked.
Adventurers encounter her as a magist’s men-at-arms are unceremoniously
hurling her out of their master’s villa.
When she changes form in anger, the men-at-arms ring the bell signaling
for help against a werewolf. With
only four days left to return to her shrine, the mad kitsune seeks first
escape, and then another portal home…and the adventurers are in her way.
Noted divine
guardians of Areth include Five-in-One, a cobra-headed divine guardian
hydra who guards a grove where the blue-skinned avatar of Marda manifested for
the first time; Vagzin, a divine guardian girtablilu who hopes each day that
the blood-splattered calendar she guards will foretell her death; the Maestro,
a divine guardian clockwork mage who plays the carillon atop a chapel that only
rarely exists in this reality; and Stormcloud, an avatar of thunder and
lightning (treat as a divine guardian half-blue dragon roc), sightings of whose
rooster-headed form on Mt. Geirhorn inspired the first weathercock.
—Pathfinder Bestiary 4
60–61
I believe a similar template appears in Green Ronin’s Advanced Bestiary.
Sacred Geographies was one of my favorite classes in
college. So yeah, I like these
guys.
So I still have weeks
of reader comments to get to—for you new readers/commenters out there, I do read
everything, and I respond as best I
can—but David Fanany asked a question that pushed him to the top of the queue:
I came to Dungeons
& Dragons in the late 1990s, after Mystara. What would you recommend
someone in such a position read to learn more about it?
As I started to say last week, there’s an easy answer and a
complicated answer.
First, background: When I
talk about Mystara, for the most part I’m talking about the D&D products
for D&D’s Known World, which was eventually named Mystara. There were very few products actually
labeled “Mystara” on the cover.
The ones that do exist were AD&D reboots of the D&D
material. I never read any of them
(except the Mystara Monstrous Compendium
Appendix), so I can’t vouch for their quality; I believe their big hook was
that the box sets came with audio CDs.
The 2e Red Steel/Savage Coast products were set on a distant coastline
in the same world. I skimmed those
and wasn’t impressed; unless you’re a diehard 2e player, stick with the Dragon Magazine Savage Coast material
instead (more on that later).
Okay, enough vocab.
Let’s get on with it.
The easy answer is that Mystara fans are amazingly loyal and
dedicated and have collaborated to create Vaults of Pandius: The Official Mystara Homepage. If you’re into fan communities, this is the place to
start. It’s got an FAQ. It’s got those gorgeous maps I pointed
you to the other day. It’s got a
complete list of Known World/Mystara products for your eBay/online shopping
needs. Want to know more about
Mystara’s little-described southern continent? They put out an entire fanzine on PDF describing it. When it comes to starting points for your
exploration and for new fan-produced content, Vaults of Pandius is perfect.
But…what if David is like me?
I prefer published books. I don't do well with reading online. (The irony of that statement appearing
on a weekdaily blog is not lost on
me.) So while VoP is amazing—and it is amazing; I don’t want to knock their
hard work in the slightest, and would love to talk to some of those creators—I
can't take their PDFs with me into the bathtub.
So if you’re like me…that’s where my answer gets complicated.
Like Greyhawk’s Oerth, Mystara grew organically in bits and
pieces scattered throughout modules and sourcebooks. It’s not the polished setting we’re used to these days. The core of the Mystara setting,
D&D’s Known World, was a dozen or so lands that basically only existed so
the creators of the Expert Rules
could show off as many different kinds of governments and cultures as possible. Logic went out the window in favor of
playability and convenience, which explains why three Norse-like countries
border a khanate and a fantasy Arabia with only a few miles of mountains
between them. (This kind of thing
continues elsewhere. The Isle of
Dawn has Egyptian pyramids in the south, and Welsh/Cornish place names in the
north. Granted, it’s a big island.)
Worse yet, there was no one overarching book. Instead, from that initial map the
world got sketched out piecemeal: first in modules, then in the Gazetteer
series, and finally in some box sets and “The Voyage of the Princess Ark” and “The Known World Grimoire”
series in Dragon Magazine. For a reader/player at the time, it
meant the world slowly unfolded for you in a series of exciting
installments. But for someone
going back like David is, there’s no easy starting point or reference
book. There are a few pages and
cramped maps crammed in the back of the Dungeons
& Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, but you’d get just as much information in Vaults of Pandius. And the Gazetteer series, which would
seem to be the logical beginning, is 14(!) books, often of varying interest
level depending on your tastes in races/cultures/freelance authors (and often
rather expensive, too).
In other words, if you’re a fan of carefully curated online
material and fan contact, Mystara has a whole community waiting for you. If you’re a fan of physically published
content and canon, there is seriously probably no worse setting to begin
exploring in the entire D&D/AD&D/Pathfinder continuum.
So why do Mystara fans love it so? And why should David persevere despite everything I’ve just
said?
Because it was a labor of love. Bruce Heard, Aaron Allston, and a legion of freelancers put
their hearts and souls into the setting.
They found ways to make a fantasy Arabia stuck between fantasy Scandinavia
and fantasy Rome make sense. They
took the limitations/peculiarities of the D&D rules sets (nonhuman races
are the same as classes, all elves are essentially fighter/wizards, clerics can
become druids halfway through their careers, PCs can go past level 36 and
become immortal, etc., etc., etc.) and worked with them or around them, like
poets working first in the sonnet form, then outside it once the rules had been
properly respected. When 2e
AD&D players were getting the Forgotten Realms, then Dark Sun and
Spelljammer and Ravenloft and Al-Qadim (seriously, they were so spoiled for
choice they got two desert settings)
and Planescape and Birthright, the writers in the D&D line said, “Your game
system and your world are just as good, just as worthy, just as serious—and we
will prove it to you.” And prove
it they did, turning out excellent supplements and the single best column Dragon Magazine ever ran. They did so well that the Known World
even got promoted into two AD&D
lines, Mystara and Red Steel.
(That those brand extensions withered and died there has more to do with
the glut of settings and the RPG market at the time than the world’s own
merits.) The Known World/Mystara
was the underdog that made it—and that made us feel good about sticking with
our world and our old-fashioned rules system. (Come to think of it, that underdog appeal could be part of
why I bonded with Pathfinder, eh…?)
So…that was my “O Captain! My Captain!” speech. Now that I’m up on this desk…well, I
better come up with some options for David, huh?
One good place to start might be the Poor Wizard’s Almanac & Book of Facts by Aaron Allston. Most of the Mystara books were set in
the year AC 1000, but a big new set of immortals-related rules and adventures
called Wrath of the Immortals bumped
the timeline up to AC 1010. The PWA&BoF explored the next few years
in three installments, each one serving as part-guidebook/part-calendar of the
year’s events. Best of all for
your purposes, they're super-cheap (starting less than $5 used!) and unless
you’re a diehard collector, you only need one, since only that year’s
events/calamities change, not most of the details on the countries and
personalities involved. In other
words, it’s a great starting point to just browse and see if you like spending
time in this world.
(Note there was a 2e Mystara-branded follow-up called Joshuan’s Almanac, but I can’t vouch for
it because I’ve never even seen a copy).
The other good place to start is to simply dig up old
installments of “The Voyage of the Princess
Ark” and “The Known World Grimoire” series. Start with Dragon
Magazine #153; the series runs in almost every issue through #188 (with a
bonus flashback in #344), to be followed more intermittently by “TKWG” through
issue #200. You can easily find
PDFs of these issues online, and plenty of physical copies will be sitting in
your gaming store’s bargain bins as well.
In fact, I just saw some of the best issues in this run selling in my
local shop for a dollar. (Confidential to anyone in Baltimore: I
will seriously go to Collectors Corner with you and physically point at the issues you should get. I’m that crazy about this series.)
(Note that you can also find most of the “VotPA” stories (but not the companion
articles about the lands) replicated in the box set Champions of Mystara.
It’s gorgeous and has new lands and maps and ship layouts to show
off…but you won’t like the price tag.)
After that your next target should probably be the box set Dawn of the Emperors: Thyatis and Alphatia,
also by Aaron Allston. With two
player books, a hefty GM book, and huge maps, there’s plenty here to keep you
busy, and since these empires are so large, you’ll get a decent sense of the
world…if from the arrogant perspective of two continent-conquering military and
magical powers.
After that, look for the Hollow
World Campaign Set by…you guessed it…Aaron Allston. (This is no accident. Aaron Allston was pretty much the only
person who could match Bruce Heard’s ability to deliver a world’s worth of
cultures and locations, and his breezy style that hid lots of information in
easy-to-read prose was pretty much the template for entire D&D line.) This box set covers the hollow inside
of Mystara, created by the immortals to preserve cultures (and dinosaurs) that
would otherwise have been lost to time. Again it’s two gorgeous maps and three outstanding books—one
with more player races/classes than you can shake a stick at, one with
monsters, and one GM book that manages to be a treatise on the Known World’s
entire history and divine pantheon and
describe the entire Hollow World and
is still a joy to read. So you get
a whole lush interior world to explore that also tells you much of what you
wished you knew about the surface world—all in one amazing box! (In fact, maybe even get this before DotE:TaA.)
Finally, you can look for the Gazetteer series. You will pay a mint for ones in good
condition, but if you’ve come this far it might be worth it. Age of Ravens has an outstanding rundown on his blog—I’ve only skimmed the
entries and can’t vouch for every word/opinion, but they're pretty solid and should
be the first place you go before spending the money and energy tracking these
books down. I’d say Bruce Heard’s GAZ3
The Principalities of Glantri is an
absolute must-buy, the apex of the series, followed by Ed Greenwood’s GAZ8 The Five Shires (because of the classic
Greenwood dramatis personæ and
adventure seeds) and Carl Sargent and Gary Thomas’s GAZ13 The Shadow Elves. (I’m also a fan of Heard’s GAZ10 and how Ken
Rolston really dives deep into single adventure locations in GAZ2 and GAZ7.)
By then, you should be good to explore on your own. From there, the rest of the Gazetteers,
Creature Crucible books (hell yeah Tall
Tales of the Wee Folk), modules, and accessories are up to you.
(And if anyone has an extra Five Shires map, my copy didn’t
come with one, and I want it… Just sayin’.)
That was awesome.
ReplyDeleteNo, seriously. Your knowledge and passion about this topic really show, and I really appreciate your taking the time to make such an extensive post (especially based on a two-line comment on one of your blog posts). Thank you.
And as it happens, I do also prefer printed books (for all my hobbies, in fact - in addition to Pathfinder and 3.5 books, I also go to The Batman Files and the DC Comics Encyclopedia first and the fan wikis not at all), so thank you also for the extensive recommendations!