Key Elements of My Mystara

I gotta say that while I identify
with them dark-skinned natives --
they've got a crappy Armor Class
and are going to get killed, man!

Mystara has a hold on my imagination, as well as a strong (and well-deserved) association with D&D.

Paramount in the list is GAZ 1: The Grand Duchy or Karameikos. Several aspects of this setting that I love are:

•  the two clashing / merging cultures that characterize the humans of that land -- the Thyatians and Traladarans;
• the Vyalia and Callari Elves (who encounter problems with the Shadow Elves during the War of the Immortals);
• the Black Eagle Barony;
• a home for the locations of modules B2: Keep on the Borderlands and B5: Horror on the Hill;
• the Grand Duke and his family and the Karameikan court (which is filled with interesting characters).

Next in the list are the modules X1: Isle of Dread and X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d'Amberville). Both modules that I absolutely enjoyed due to the implied break and expansion of the 'generic' D&D setting. X1 was one of the earliest modules I owned (and absolutely loved due to the lost world feel though I did not yet have that term in my vocabulary). X2 really broke the mold of dungeon crawls for me, and though I never played or ran that damn module, it really gave me a sense of history and story just be reading through it.

A lot of other modules in the B-series of modules and the Gazetteer series round out my list, which I should probably visit in more posts in "Mining Mystara" series.