Date: Wed, 07 Oct 1998 06:45:26 -0400
From: Daly <jdaly@friend.ly.net>
Subject: Re: [MYSTARA] - Blackmoor

You made some excellent points.  And I would add to it with the following...

You asked why Thonia was placed where it was...Originally Thonia was exactly
where it is.  On that peninsula on Skothar.  It was placed there during Frank
Mentzer's reign in the Master's set.  Later, the DA series describe how the
original seat of Thonia was elsewhere, and it was the destruction which drove
the pitiful survivors to that far northern area.

So again, not a disagreement, just a little extra detail.

DJ Sahlas wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
>     I can't resist wading into this (it's one of my pet peeves regarding
> authors who simply disregarded previously published facts, creating
> inconsistencies in a previously coherent world)
>
> >> I have always been under the impression that Blackmoor was located just
> north of Glantri.
> >>
> >> am I wrong?
> >>
> >Very much so. The canon place for Blackmoor was set in thonia in the HW
> >boxed set.
> >
> >The "Glantri" setting was brough about because of the position of the NoS,
> >and by an erroneous placement of the traveller's Inn.
> >
> >But AFAIK, Thonia is the official place.
>
>     The original setting for Blackmoor was the Broken Lands.  This is
> according to the first published material to say so:  DA 1 - Adventures in
> Blackmoor.  This is why the Inn Between the Worlds is in the middle of the
> Broken Lands (it was in the middle of Blackmoor, the Gate in the IBtWs
> transports people through time but not through space).  This is also why the
> Broken Lands are "broken" to begin with (Blackmoor blew itself up, leaving
> the devasted terrain of the modern Broken Lands and obscuring most traces of
> itself in the process).  Furthermore, this is why the NoS is under Glantri
> City (it is where the Beagle was stranded, and where the final malfunction
> of the engines caused them to heat up and sink into the ground - leaving no
> access tunnel).  Astute paleogeographers will note that the distance between
> the IBtWs and the Beagle in the Blackmoor era is about the same as the
> distance between the IBtWs and Glantri City in the modern era.
> (Triangulating based on the differences between the north/south axises
> (axes?) in ancient and modern times allows for calculation of the degree of
> planetary tilt that resulted from the explosion and the Great Rain of Fire).
> Finally, the reason that a common tongue of sorts exists at all on Brun, and
> the reason PCs are able to communicate with ancient Blackmoorians (who spoke
> Thonian) is that modern Thyatis-based "common" is derived from ancient
> Thonian.
>
>     GAZ 3 - The Principalities of Glantri was later published and is
> consistent with this.
>
>     The Hollow World Boxed set was published later still.  In it, Aaron
> Allston places the Empire of Thonia way the heck out on Skothar.  (Why this
> was done, given all of the previously published facts mentioned above, is
> completely unclear to me).  Some have taken this to represent canon
> placement of Blackmoor and Thonia on Skothar.  I consider this an error,
> regardless of what was published.  As is the case with other examples from
> Allston's previous work for Mystara, the newly published material almost
> directly contradicted what was published previously.  A way I developed to
> deal with this (being obsessive and neurotic about details almost to a
> fault) was to create an explanation that would allow for the seeming
> contradiction to actually be true.  In this case, I reasoned that the Empire
> of Thonia (which was indeed quite vast) actually extended as far as a corner
> of modern day Skothar.  The collapse of the Thonian Empire that paralleled
> the rise of the Blackmoor era led to the preservation of only the
> farthest-flung outpost of the previously mighty Empire of Thonia as a
> distinctly Thonian region, (and then only as a province of Blackmoor).  This
> even explains the north/south inconsistency in the HW boxed set - we're not
> talking about the original Empires after all.  Subsequent generations
> throughout the centuries would understandably confuse the placement of the
> original Empires, making the location of the NoS even more obscure to the
> modern Mystaran mage.
>
>     Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.  ;)
>
>     Jim Sahlas