Mystara

that the Forgotten Realms are not.

And when you talk about the known world slash Mystara, because that is also a world that grew out of some very bland original products.

Keep on the Borderlands, for example, is where we get the very beginnings of the known world.

But anyway.

Yeah, it would be difficult.

Um, we did also, and I did want to bring up, we did talk about in, I think the original Castle Amber episode, um, Jeff Grubb, who has worked on this, who, whose credit is working on this, um, um he made a blog post on his blog i'll link it in our description if you want to read it it's actually a really interesting read um but it's his blog about it it's basically why i quit tsr and he goes over the story of like what what made him quit and it was about the time that this was made and came out where basically he made the idea was to release a box set of um what they called the known world which was later called that they started calling Mystara the setting and the known world that started in the Isle of Dread module that we like that's been the known world has been part of D&D since like the very very beginning so he came up with the name Mystara and they were going to do a box set that like compiled everything and there was some like corporate drama that made that get cancelled and that got rolled into these other books and he basically like helped to make from what I'm understanding of the blog post he like finished the project for not for like these books and then quit.

So there was a lot of turmoil happening at TSR at this time.

Uh, and he was, it did not seem from the blog post.

For sure.

So we know that like there was a lot of turmoil that was happening.

And this there was like other Mystara products that were supposed to come out and kind of ended up being this collection of of different books instead of a box set.

It was supposed to be there's supposed to be a Mystara box set that was kind of like the, you know, Forgotten Realms box set or the I think the Ravenloft or like Spelljammer box set.

Yep.

Yeah, for this one we're going back into the divine spotlight, and thankfully for me, people did not read what I typed because I definitely typed way too many times the old-school setting of Mystara.

And I'm really pleased that no one did any research into that because instead we're gonna be talking about Mystra.

Yeah, it's funny, I definitely read it as Mystar- or as Mystra and then, until you pointed it out I hadn't realized, so funny what the brain will do.

They, they would just wanna have, uh, nice meals and, and, and relaxing in their cozy little hobbit holes.

But I, I like the way particularly, uh, I particularly like the way that they sort of addressed halflings in, um, Mystara as they really started to expand, uh, BX and then BECMI with the, with the Five Shires and then the way, the way hobbits work or halflings work in, or the Hin, as they called them, in, uh...

Uh, if you, if you-- That's a tremendous source book.

You can get it on DriveThruRPG or on DMsGuild, the, the, The Five Shires set in the, it's in the Gazetteer of the Known World, written by Ed Greenwood, who is, you know, primarily a developer of Forgotten Realms, but he wrote this.

And, and, and if they, you know, survive, they come home, they settle down.

They get the urge to settle down and go back to that kind of pastoral lifestyle.

But the consequence is [laughs] particularly as they talk about in, uh, in Mystara is the, the Shire is one of the, the, the Five Shire is one of the safest places to go because it is entirely peopled by retired adventurers for the most part.

So anyone who's ever gone in there looking for trouble has pretty much, it's pretty much been a disaster every time a horde of orcs or braiders or whatever tries to, uh, stir up trouble because they think, "Oh, here are these little halflings, easy, you know, ripe for the picking." And it never turns out well for, for the invaders because, uh, because of, you know, the, the looks can be deceiving w- with halflings, so.

And then, as you guys may or may not remember, the whole thing with...

Realms of Mystara the Saturn game and how we got sued by TSR because it sounds like Mystaria yeah so it's funny how that kind of came back so my connection to D&D at Sega was accidentally almost naming our game after a setting in D&D and getting sued for it so yeah that's where I

was

yeah that game is great though that it was working on for sure super cool