Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Original 'Known World' Documents Released
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8523391" data-attributes="member: 50987"><p>In Goodman Games's "<a href="https://goodman-games.com/store/product/original-adventures-reincarnated-2-the-isle-of-dread/" target="_blank"><strong>Original Adventures Reincarnated: The Isle of Dread</strong></a>," there are some pretty good interviews in the prologue. Two of them, with Cook and Schick, pertain to the origins of the the Known World/Mystara campaign, their inspirations, and their creative process. </p><p></p><p>From Cook's interview, beginning on Page 5:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"We didn't set out to create a classic. I'm not sure you can ever intentionally do that, and for Tom and me, that thought didn't even cross our minds. We were focused on the mundane business of filling up a box. The Basic Set had an adventure therefore we needed one in the Expert Set. More importantly we needed an adventure that could teach novice DMs how to create and run a wilderness game. Something self-contained (an island) with lots to explore (hexes!) filled with random encounters (tables!) and a simple storyline that could work with almost any campaign (dinosaurs and lost worlds!). Plus, we needed to write it fast.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: #3d8eb9">"So, we spent a several months with our heads down writing what was meant to be a solid example of how to create, populate, and run a wilderness setting. With two writers and little time for playtesting or revision, we drew on what we knew. Our shared love of pulpy lost world stories gave us both a common theme to write about. It wasn't even cliché since no one had created such an unashamed lost world module before. Tom's desire to get dinosaurs into the rules somehow filled out the wilderness with new monsters and challenges. My fondness for ancient cults and bizarre foes added the final threat at the center of the island.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"In hindsight the design never should have worked, what with two hands and brains creating one adventure at their typewrites at the same time. Since we were still creating our jobs while we were doing them, nobody told us you shouldn't design an adventure that way, so we did. And we got it done in time. We were happy. It was complete and it played fun even if the story was not profound. There were no deeply detailed NPCs, complex plots, or earth-shaking foes. There was a map, a boat, and a lot of jungle filled with monsters to kill and treasure to find.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"Most of all, we didn't know that we were sowing the seeds for the whole of Mystara. The island needed to be somewhere, and we forged that into the proto-Known World. There was a thought that we might place future adventures into the map, but never a great plan to create a complete campaign setting that Mystara became. We didn't even know how to create campaign settings at the time."</span></p><p></p><p>And from Lawrence Schick's interview, beginning on Page 7:</p><p></p><p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"In early '74 Tom came back from an SF convention with Dungeons & Dragons in its original white box edition. He DMed a session, I DMed a session, and suddenly we knew what we were going to create together: a fantasy world setting for D&D.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: #3d8eb9">"Most fictional fantasy worlds, of course, are based on aspects of our own world and its history. For example, all the states in Robert E. Howard's Hyborian setting are based on real-world cultures, simplified and boiled down to their easily-recognized essences--clichés, in other words, but in tropes that were instantly familiar to Howard's readers. We decided we could do the same thing, adapting from historical sources, so our first task was to make a list of world cultures that would be useful templates for fantasy gaming. The list looked something like this:</span></p> <ul style="margin-left: 20px"> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Norse</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Ancient Mediterranean (Greece/Rome)</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Ottoman Empire</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Mongolian Tribes</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Aztec Mexico</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Han China</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Celtic Wales</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Pharaonic Egypt</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Hanseatic League Baltics</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Carolingian France</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Ancient Persia</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Dutch Republic</span></li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">Mughal India</span></li> </ul> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"We decided to plot out a single giant Pangea-type continent on which there would be fantasy-fictionalized versions of each of the above cultures. We also added homelands for the nonhuman races: Orcs, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Lizard-Men, Deep Ones, Kzinti Catfolk, and Barsoomian Tharks, as well as a pirate kingdom, and areas where prehistoric creatures were the norm. Plus, in every land there would be hidden cults that worshipped Lovecraftian Elder Gods.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"We dubbed this setting the "Known World," to imply there was more out there yet to be discovered, because we didn't want to paint ourselves into a corner. It was our intention to use the Known World in ongoing open-ended campaigns run by multiple DMs in which player characters could go back and forth from one DM's game to another. Moldvay and I were already running our own campaigns this way, and we hoped to bring other DMs on board as well, so we'd all be playing in the same giant sandbox.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"That meant we were going to need detailed write-ups on each of the various Known World cultures, there there would be consistency in how different DMs depicted different areas. For every culture we needed to specify how it was organized, who ruled it and by what methods, what gods the people worshipped, what their economies were founded on, what other states were their traditional rivals or allies, what their geography and environments were like, key cities and fortresses, important events in recent history, and so forth. Setting out to do this for two dozen homelands was pretty ambitions, but why the hell not? We were college students with plenty of time on our hands.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"Moldvay did most of the initial culture write-ups, whereas I created the leading non-player characters in each homeland; I was also the Name Guy and came up with most of the location names, drawing on Dunsnay, Vance, and Clark Ashton Smith for inspiration. We were also inspired by how H. P. Lovecraft and his circle all drew from each other's works in creating stories set in a common setting. We thought, by imitating that approach, we could create something the sum of which would be greater than its parts. And it would be an open setting that drew in the work and creativity of whoever wanted to contribute to it. </span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">"In early 1979 I went to work at TSR Hobbies as a designer for D&D and other games. I was rapidly promoted to director of the Design Department, and in 1980 I brought Moldvay in to join me as a game designer. At that time, we were preparing a revised version of the D&D Basic Set, as well as a companion box, the Expert Set, which would introduce players and DMs to wilderness adventures in the wider world.</span></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"></p> <p style="margin-left: 20px"><span style="color: rgb(61, 142, 185)">So, we were going to need a wider fantasy world to put them in. Up to that point most of TSR's scenarios had been set in Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk, but we couldn't use that, as it was Gary's personal campaign setting, and was reserved for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game products. I can't remember whether it was Moldvay or me who suggested it, but we proposed dusting off our Known World documents for use as the new, standard D&D campaign setting."</span></p><p></p><p>So there you have it...the story of how the Known World came to be, from the authors themselves, as documented by Goodman Games. (And if you haven't picked up your copy of their Isle of Dread yet, what are you waiting for?)</p><p></p><p>EDIT: Whew. That was a lot to type. Let me know if I should SBLOCK that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="CleverNickName, post: 8523391, member: 50987"] In Goodman Games's "[URL='https://goodman-games.com/store/product/original-adventures-reincarnated-2-the-isle-of-dread/'][B]Original Adventures Reincarnated: The Isle of Dread[/B][/URL]," there are some pretty good interviews in the prologue. Two of them, with Cook and Schick, pertain to the origins of the the Known World/Mystara campaign, their inspirations, and their creative process. From Cook's interview, beginning on Page 5: [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"We didn't set out to create a classic. I'm not sure you can ever intentionally do that, and for Tom and me, that thought didn't even cross our minds. We were focused on the mundane business of filling up a box. The Basic Set had an adventure therefore we needed one in the Expert Set. More importantly we needed an adventure that could teach novice DMs how to create and run a wilderness game. Something self-contained (an island) with lots to explore (hexes!) filled with random encounters (tables!) and a simple storyline that could work with almost any campaign (dinosaurs and lost worlds!). Plus, we needed to write it fast.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=#3d8eb9]"So, we spent a several months with our heads down writing what was meant to be a solid example of how to create, populate, and run a wilderness setting. With two writers and little time for playtesting or revision, we drew on what we knew. Our shared love of pulpy lost world stories gave us both a common theme to write about. It wasn't even cliché since no one had created such an unashamed lost world module before. Tom's desire to get dinosaurs into the rules somehow filled out the wilderness with new monsters and challenges. My fondness for ancient cults and bizarre foes added the final threat at the center of the island.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"In hindsight the design never should have worked, what with two hands and brains creating one adventure at their typewrites at the same time. Since we were still creating our jobs while we were doing them, nobody told us you shouldn't design an adventure that way, so we did. And we got it done in time. We were happy. It was complete and it played fun even if the story was not profound. There were no deeply detailed NPCs, complex plots, or earth-shaking foes. There was a map, a boat, and a lot of jungle filled with monsters to kill and treasure to find.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"Most of all, we didn't know that we were sowing the seeds for the whole of Mystara. The island needed to be somewhere, and we forged that into the proto-Known World. There was a thought that we might place future adventures into the map, but never a great plan to create a complete campaign setting that Mystara became. We didn't even know how to create campaign settings at the time."[/COLOR][/INDENT] And from Lawrence Schick's interview, beginning on Page 7: [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"In early '74 Tom came back from an SF convention with Dungeons & Dragons in its original white box edition. He DMed a session, I DMed a session, and suddenly we knew what we were going to create together: a fantasy world setting for D&D.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=#3d8eb9]"Most fictional fantasy worlds, of course, are based on aspects of our own world and its history. For example, all the states in Robert E. Howard's Hyborian setting are based on real-world cultures, simplified and boiled down to their easily-recognized essences--clichés, in other words, but in tropes that were instantly familiar to Howard's readers. We decided we could do the same thing, adapting from historical sources, so our first task was to make a list of world cultures that would be useful templates for fantasy gaming. The list looked something like this:[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][LIST] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Norse[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Ancient Mediterranean (Greece/Rome)[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Ottoman Empire[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Mongolian Tribes[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Aztec Mexico[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Han China[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Celtic Wales[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Pharaonic Egypt[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Hanseatic League Baltics[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Carolingian France[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Ancient Persia[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Dutch Republic[/COLOR] [*][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]Mughal India[/COLOR] [/LIST][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"We decided to plot out a single giant Pangea-type continent on which there would be fantasy-fictionalized versions of each of the above cultures. We also added homelands for the nonhuman races: Orcs, Goblins, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Lizard-Men, Deep Ones, Kzinti Catfolk, and Barsoomian Tharks, as well as a pirate kingdom, and areas where prehistoric creatures were the norm. Plus, in every land there would be hidden cults that worshipped Lovecraftian Elder Gods.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"We dubbed this setting the "Known World," to imply there was more out there yet to be discovered, because we didn't want to paint ourselves into a corner. It was our intention to use the Known World in ongoing open-ended campaigns run by multiple DMs in which player characters could go back and forth from one DM's game to another. Moldvay and I were already running our own campaigns this way, and we hoped to bring other DMs on board as well, so we'd all be playing in the same giant sandbox.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"That meant we were going to need detailed write-ups on each of the various Known World cultures, there there would be consistency in how different DMs depicted different areas. For every culture we needed to specify how it was organized, who ruled it and by what methods, what gods the people worshipped, what their economies were founded on, what other states were their traditional rivals or allies, what their geography and environments were like, key cities and fortresses, important events in recent history, and so forth. Setting out to do this for two dozen homelands was pretty ambitions, but why the hell not? We were college students with plenty of time on our hands.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"Moldvay did most of the initial culture write-ups, whereas I created the leading non-player characters in each homeland; I was also the Name Guy and came up with most of the location names, drawing on Dunsnay, Vance, and Clark Ashton Smith for inspiration. We were also inspired by how H. P. Lovecraft and his circle all drew from each other's works in creating stories set in a common setting. We thought, by imitating that approach, we could create something the sum of which would be greater than its parts. And it would be an open setting that drew in the work and creativity of whoever wanted to contribute to it. [/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]"In early 1979 I went to work at TSR Hobbies as a designer for D&D and other games. I was rapidly promoted to director of the Design Department, and in 1980 I brought Moldvay in to join me as a game designer. At that time, we were preparing a revised version of the D&D Basic Set, as well as a companion box, the Expert Set, which would introduce players and DMs to wilderness adventures in the wider world.[/COLOR][/INDENT] [INDENT][/INDENT] [INDENT][COLOR=rgb(61, 142, 185)]So, we were going to need a wider fantasy world to put them in. Up to that point most of TSR's scenarios had been set in Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk, but we couldn't use that, as it was Gary's personal campaign setting, and was reserved for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game products. I can't remember whether it was Moldvay or me who suggested it, but we proposed dusting off our Known World documents for use as the new, standard D&D campaign setting."[/COLOR][/INDENT] So there you have it...the story of how the Known World came to be, from the authors themselves, as documented by Goodman Games. (And if you haven't picked up your copy of their Isle of Dread yet, what are you waiting for?) EDIT: Whew. That was a lot to type. Let me know if I should SBLOCK that. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
Original 'Known World' Documents Released
Top