Bruce Heard: Calidar in Stranger Skies

The history of the Dungeons & Dragons game as those of us who indulged our curiousity into the corporate shennanigans of TSR through its lifetime will know was a victim of a disagreement between the two main creators of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson over royalties for the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons game.

Whilst the dispute went on the Original Dungeons & Dragons game and the Tom Moldvay Purple Basic Set and Light Blue Expert Set were all players had. Eventually the dispute was resolved and Frank Mentzer proceeded to produce the Companion, Masters and Immortals rules sets.

At this time Bruce Heard was given charge of the freelance writing team at TSR and also responsibility for the less popular (although I suggest only in the United States) Dungeons & Dragons. The major innovation was the release of the Gazetteer series which fleshed out a lot of the world that latterly was coined "Mystara" but till then had simply been "the Known World".

There followed "The Hollow World" by Aaron Allston which revealed that Mystara was a hollow world and ancient empires were preserved by the Immortals on the inner side of Mystara's surface.

In the pages of Dragon Magazine Bruce wrote the column "The Voyage of the Princess Ark" about an Alphatian Airship which travelled to previously unexplored regions of Mystara.

These writings were later expaned on in the box set The Champions of Mystara, Red Steel and The Savage Baronies. Eventually with "Wrath of the Immortals" removing the continent of Alphatia from the face of Mystara and depositing it inside as part of the Hollow World setting, we lost our hero.

With the advent of AD&D 2nd edition, Mystara was moved to that rules set, its players went off got jobs, married, had children but the world never went away even once Wizards of the Coast stopped supporting it and even once Hasbro bought out Wizards of the Coast and turned D&D into something unrecognisable from its libertarian origins into something more resembling warhammer.

Bruce tried to get permission from Hasbro to revisit the world of Mystara, but Hasbro would rather leave the IP locked away from its willing audience.

In World of Calidar some of the themes are revisited in a totally new world, where airships are once more at the heart of the game and there is once again a new world to be explored.

I was delighted to support the Kickstarter project; on page 25 my step daughter Olivia Evans is immortalised as Olyffia Efanas (although I had no creative control over her behaviour in the story!), an island to the north west of the great caldera bears the name Pearcelsus Island and in a future publication the Airship the Lady Karevana will carry a crew through the skies or maybe between the planets & moons of the Soltan Ephemeris, we shalll just have to wait and see...

In the mean time Thorfinn Tait, the cartographer of Caldar takes us on a trip around the great caldera.

And through the Soltan Ephemeris to explore the other planets and moons which share a sun with Calidar.

The World of Caldar is available as a pdf or soft or hardcover book from DriveThru RPG.

DEVELOPER'S BLOGS
Bruce Heard's Blog
Thorfinn Tait, Cartographer to the Stars

CALIDAR PLAYERS
The World of Calidar Facebook Chat Group 
World of Calidar on the Piazza Forums

Backed Kickstarter Project: Space 1889

The first kickstarter project I backed was Space 1889. 

Men have conquered the inner planets of the Solar System and are now travelling through the Ether. They discovered the ancient culture of the Martians and the misty wilderness of Venus. Mercury is a world of extremes but rich in valuable raw materials. The Asteroid Belt and the Earth’s moon, Luna, are waiting for further exploration. And there is still a lot to discover on Earth itself.

Under the burning sun of the Martian steppes, the steamy mists of the Venusian jungle, the deadly cold of the Dry Ice Zone on Mercury, or at the banks of the Amazon River on good old Earth – the world of Space: 1889 is full of adventures.

• Everything Jules Verne could have written.
• Everything H.G. Wells should have written.
• Everything A. Conan Doyle thought of but never published because it was too fantastic.
• Everything you need for the adventures of the century.

Originally written in 1989 by Frank Chadwick who still runs a Space 1889 Blog about British Imperialists colonising not only our world but those close to us as well competing with the French, Germans and of course the native Martians.

My own first experience of Space 1889 was on the Amiga as another computer adventure game I never quite completed. These days with the assistance of the internet I have managed to uncover how the game was supposed to end... with you reaching the Asteroid Belt for a climactic final battle with your foe.

Interestingly the renaissance commenced in Germany and this kickstarter was to translate the new German edition into English.

Whilst I still have a few months to wait to receive the rewards for my pledge (I only paid for one lot of postage means I will have to wait a few extra months but it meant an extra stretch goal unlocked).