Best of the BECMI Gazetteer series?

[Deleted]

Aug 4, 2021 18:00:17 GMT -6 Punkrabbitt said:

Orcs of Thar and Five Shires are by far the best of the Gazeteers... Thar is a fun romp of playing the bad guys, and Shires makes hobbits a serious option again.

Maybe this is the proper route. I have been gravitating towards a Gygaxian, human dominant world for 3lbb, as befits the rules. It would make sense to incorporate a major tonal shift towards an Orc or Halflings oriented game here.

[makofan]

"Best" is subjective. I had a 7-year campaign that started in Karameikos, and we got the most mileage out of Ylaruam. They got there via module B4 The Lost City (which we did AFTER B10 Night's Dark Terror). I have the original with all the extra levels and the hidden city. Our party's dervish was a cleric of Al-Kalim on the quest for Immortality. We used Orcs of Thar for playable monster races

[Parzival]

Sometimes the Gazetteers have to be considered separately— as a “whole world” they often don’t really fit all that well together. For example, the Republic of Darokin and Glantri are both late Renaissance in culture, very wealthy, and quite urbane in nature— yet they’re essentially on the backside of the world. Karameikos is “in the middle of things”, has a prominent port on a relatively warm water sea, sits on all the major trade routes, but is sparsely populated, rather “backwoods”, and comparatively poor. The layout of the Known World as filled by the Gazetteers doesn’t make logical sense. Karameikos should probably be where Glantri is; Darokin seems more suited to Karameikos’ location, and so on. And then if you start looking at the absurdities of some of the Gazetteers (particularly the Orcs of Thar), they don’t mesh with the more serious tones of others, even when there’s a border. Thar and Rockhome and Alfheim, kinda okay. Thar and Ethengar? Thar and the Northern Reaches? Not as written! Thar is just a big lump of silliness slapped into a circumstance which really shouldn’t be silly. Singularly, it could be a fun campaign environment. But as part of the Known World? Not so much.

So while each is great on its own, allowing for different styles of play and feel, as a cohesive whole the details really don’t mesh well. It’s almost as if in many cases the PCs really shouldn’t cross the borders, or if they do, the DM should ignore the details of the neighboring Gazetteers and just do a “wing it” version more fitting to the nature of the starting Gazetteer.
If you start in Karameikos, make Darokin less like Renaissance France and more like medieval France, and so on. Find a way to have the cultures “flow into each other” in a somewhat more realistic way. Think of it as “Greyhawking” the Known World— giving it all a more general gloss rather than the heavy, conflicting details of the GAZ line.

[tkdco2]

I'm partial to Elves of Alfheim and The Five Shires. I don't have Dwarves of Rockhome, so I should hunt down a copy.

Orcs of Thar can be useful. I enjoyed the silly bits, but my players aren't interested in playing silly campaigns. Still, I can remove the humor and use the character creation to come up with deadly foes for the player characters.

[ratikranger]

For Karameikos I've been thinking of using B10 as "canon" and just bits and pieces from GAZ1. I always thought that B10 does a better job with the atmosphere of Karameikos and by having fewer details it's easier to make it my own. Also if I recall correctly the Karameikos B10 describes is about 10 times less civilized? But my memory may be playing tricks on me.

[calstaff]

Jan 31, 2021 8:32:04 GMT -6 @ampleframework said:

Are they very rare now? Is there not a pdf version? (Of the Trail Maps I mean.)

mystara.thorfmaps.com/tm1-western-countries-8/

mystara.thorfmaps.com/tm2-eastern-countries-8/

[tkdco2]

I still have my Mystara maps, although I haven't used them very much.

[calstaff]

GAZ9 and GAZ10 became available for print-on-demand at DMsGuild. $19 and $20 respectively with +$2 you get the digital copies as well.

[Falconer]

Just wanted to make sure nobody in this thread missed this.
odd74.proboards.com/thread/15256/world-original-od-documents-uncovered