Land of Mist IS what MystarAIN'T

Now that I've grabbed your attention and/or murderous intent with that awful title, I'd like to share something better with you: Land of Mist for Old-School Essentials by Joseph Quinn and BirdEnuf Games, which I picked up on sale recently.

I at some point this year I took a greater interest in OSE. If BFRPG is any indicator, I like more 'traditional' OSR games when they freely blend Basic and Advanced rules, and have a healthy 3rd-party scene that spits out mechanics and ideas niftier or at least better-baked than anything I would come up with on the fly, and OSE does both.

Land of Mist is the first setting written specifically for OSE that I've read, so it's unfair to say it's my favorite (it'd also technically be my least favorite). But I do like it. And that's for a very simple, weirdly specific reason: It's Mystara, without 90% of the Mystara.

For those who need a refresher or never knew to begin with, Mystara was the flagship setting for BECMI. It's set in a world that looks suspiciously similar to Earth a few hundred million years ago, and it's full to bursting with that 1980s flavor of kitchen sink fiction bordering on what we might today call gonzo fantasy. There're feudal kingdoms, magitech elves, a hollow world full of living fossils, a god who used to be a bespectacled nuclear physicist, etc. It's sometimes good, often dumb, and always goofy.

This zero-context art sums it up about as well as anything else can.

Land of Mist is a tremendously slimmed down world in that same whimsical vein. Some reviews say it's too sparse, but I'd say it's more honed to a needle's point. It emphasizes the "lost world" aspect of Mystara that I find more interesting than the surface world, which outside of the occasional gonzo regions is often a whole lot of fantasy counterpart cultures from various points in human history, and theme park versions at that.

The titular Land of Mist is a continent surrounded on all sides by a wall of sentient mist hundreds of feet high that nothing can circumvent. Passing through the mist erases all your memories of the outside (or inside) world until you cross back through the way you came, so the island is completely isolated from the rest of the world. Even information like written words or pictorial depictions get scrambled on their way through. It's a bit like an immaterial, non-malevolent version of the net cast by the Dark Powers from Ravenloft, although the actual motivations of the mist are up to the referee to decide.

Populating the continent (which is just called the Land) are all manner of odd folks, alongside the presumed existence of humans and standard demi-humans. There are aquatic elves, nonevil drow who venerate the moon while still remaining mostly subterranean, beastfolk who are descendants of the progenitors of all humanoid species like orcs and goblins, gremlins who have an always-on AoE aura of chaos and shenanigans, and somewhat uniquely for an OSR game, human variants that still gain access to most of the classes and options as regular humans: the Lilliputian bittles and their Neanderthal-adjacent brute rivals.

Folks familiar with Hollow World, the Mystara sub-setting dealing with the, well, hollow world, might recognize the beastfolk as a take on the beastmen. They are the exact same type of extremely mutable ur-humanoids, except here they weren't fashioned from the souls of evil people by a god, they aren't Inuit-coded, and they aren't locked in magical cultural stasis underground by a different god the way TSR's were.

Speaking of gods, LoM uses the same system of mortals ascended to become Immortals as in Mystara. There's even a guide halfway through the book for creating your very own cult and ascending to join the pantheon, assuming you can survive the Save vs Death and get the other Immortals of your alignment to vouch for you. And you don't even need to slog to 36th level to take a crack at it.

Classes available to humans (or certain other species using Advanced rules) are also dead ringers of old Mystara content. These include the Mystic (a monk by any other name) from the Rules Cyclopedia, the Forester (arcane woodsman warrior who's buddied up with the elves) from Dawn of the Emperors boxed set, and the Rake (a non-thief thief with some swashbuckling flare) from the same. There's a pacifistic Desert Druid too, but I don't know what that's a reference to, if any. There's also a whole subsystem for Hedge Witches that gives very limited casting (max 3rd-level spells) to any character who takes an additive XP cost to level up, similar to the shamans and wokani née wiccans from BECMI; both names even make a return as specific traditions of hedge magic.

There's a host of other optional rules besides hedge witches, including playing a human afflicted with lycanthropy, playable "enlightened" monsters who gain levels, mist dragon riding, oft-maligned underwater adventuring, craftable spell runes similar to specialized scrolls/potions, and spiritual totem animals that anyone (including NPCs and commoners) can spend HP to summon for a brief time, similar in spirit to but more overtly magical than the animal totems of the Atruaghin Clans.

The language for summoning a totem animal is a little ambiguous to my eyeballs, but I asked about it on Drivethrurpg and Joseph Quinn clarified that you spend HP on a 1:1 ratio to give a summoned spirit animal that much, up to the max they could have from their normal hit dice. You also then share any hit point loss that the animal takes while summoned. This makes it a poor mechanic for creating say, a beefy animal companion like a bear to fight alongside unless you're comfortable with putting yourself very close to death. But it also works quite well for summoning a temporary distraction or a pseudo-familiar, especially handy for small or stealthy animals you'd only need to spend 1 or 2 HP on.

Outside of these rules, a few new spells, and some artifacts, the book is quite light. This is because it foregoes the massive chapters of lore and gazetteering that Mystara was famous for. The island is broken up into a few regions and the populace into a few broad cultural groups, each with just a paragraph of fluff attached. The rest is up for the referee and their table to fill in as they see fit.

I get why that's a big negative for many people, I do. It makes the world feel emptier or less thematically concrete than something with more world-building right out the box like we're used to. But it's also somewhat freeing to not have to pick through hundreds of pages of history and demographic data about Glantri, Karameikos, or Thyatis to find the bits useful for your particular game.

LoM is more of a sandbox, but not in a truly trackless, empty way. I'd compare it to one of those fancy backyard sandboxes the neighbor kid whose dad was a contractor played in; one that has shapes or topography or fake dinosaur fossils embedded in the bottom, that offer guides and contours for you to then play around or on top of. And it's still 123 pages of content with illustrations and a collection of short stories for an easy $12 or less ($9 in my case), so even without deeper world-building I didn't feel cheated.

Speaking of the illustrations, the book has a pretty regular mix of old public domain sketches and commissioned art by Emily Eastman, Finny, and Tara Quinn, the other half of the Quinn duo. I like each of them for the different feels they evoke with their art; Emily and Finny have a style that reminds me of the better 3rd-party d20 books of the early 2000s before the Gold Rush hit, while Tara's creations  are real stand-out showstoppers that I can only describe as grotesquely cute. Or maybe cutely grotesque?

Gamblers? More like in shamblers.
... Alright, I apologize for that one.

All in all, I like LoM. It's a fun setting that does what it sets out to do and then leaves you space in which to easily drop your Tower Silveraxe or what other pulp adventures have you.

To answer the question I implied with that lazy pun back up at the top: Land of Mist is svelte.