Projects & Articles This page explains the projects that I currently have underway, as well as various articles I have written about Mystara and OD&D. Atlas of Mystara Formerly known as Thorf's Secret Project (TM), this is the biggest, most ambitious of my projects, the true nature of which was until recently a closely guarded secret. The project has now been revealed and opened for contributions. Using a community project forum at The Piazza (home of the new Mystara message board), I am slowly building the infrastructure for the project. The aim of the project is to create nothing less than a comprehensive atlas for the world of Mystara. Please come and join in! Atlas of Mystara forums The new home for the Atlas of Mystara project. Here you can find a complete overview of the Atlas including outlines of each section and updates on current progress. The sticky thread An Introduction to the Atlas Project is the best place to start. Geographical Mapping sub-forum Home of the main section of the Atlas: a directory of geographical maps for the world of Mystara. There is a thread for each area at each scale, and the new format allows you not only to get the maps but also to see the decisions behind them - and participate in their making. Other Sections sub-forum Home of the other Atlas sections: Political and Economic Atlas, Gazetteer, Geographic Overview, Cartographic Chronology, and the Appendices. Mystara Database Project The Mystara Database Project aims to create a searchable database of Mystaran facts and figures, which can answer queries and provide accurate information on a range of topics. It started from my settlement list, which I made to check the accents and spelling on my maps. While making this list, it occurred to me that I could use this list to create a database which, with a bit of extra work, could help greatly with my Atlas of Mystara project. Then I heard about Andrew Theisen's NPC database, and the wider project was conceived: a potentially comprehensive database of Mystara. Brian Vendeltorp vounteered to head up the technical side of things, and created a message board specially for the project. The database entered the design stages. With the help of a few other helpful volunteers, we laid out the concepts, and Brian worked to turn that into reality in the form of a workable database. However, Brian and I got sidetracked into something else, and we put the project on hold for two years. With the announcement of my Atlas project, the Database has been resurrected. We are still in the design stages, slowly building the database up on this site. You can now take part in this work by visiting the Mystara Database Project forum at The Piazza. When it gets going, this project has the potential to outgrow even my Atlas project. If anyone is interested in helping out with data entry or with the technical side of things, or just in seeing what we're up to, please come and visit the forums. Brian is in the midst of building an interface, and we will post links to it in the forums when it comes online. OD&D Savage Coast Project It has been said many times that the version of the Savage Coast given in the Princess Ark is quite different from that in the Red Steel/Savage Coast AD&D line. I'm very interested in these differences. I am working on creating an OD&D version of the Savage Coast, kept faithful to the information in the Princess Ark series. Currently I am assembling all of the Princess Ark episodes and info. Once that is done, I will look to Red Steel and the Savage Coast online supplements, and see what new information can be brought over without conflicting with the original material. August 2008 update: This one remains just a plan, for now. Thorf's OD&D Rules Project Mostly in its earliest stages, this is the most personal of my projects. I have always played with OD&D; it's a system that I know very well and like just as much. However, it occurred to me recently that my rules are actually quite different from OD&D as it is written. This project is an attempt to formalise my rules, mostly for my own benefit, although others may be interested too. One of the first thing I will do is define my race/class system, which while rooted in OD&D classes is nevertheless a much freer system. May 2008 update: This project was sidelined when I checked out D&D Third Edition. Add to that the fact that I don't have any ongoing games, and haven't had any for years, and you can see why I haven't gotten round to this project yet. If I ever find another gaming group, I'll probably formalise my rules then - assuming we don't just use Third Edition, that is. Time will tell. August 2008 update: There has been some discussion of this sort in the Classic D&D forum at The Piazza. Japanese Rules Cyclopedia Article An article examining the rather different Japanese version of the OD&D Rules Cyclopedia. This is the first in what I hope will become a series of articles covering the Japanese editions of OD&D products. New articles will appear as and when I can get my hands on the books. May 2008 update: Link fixed! The old article is accessible once again. Fantasy Art Project Formerly known as the "OD&D Art Project". It started out as a plan to catalogue all of the various art - cover art, interior art, box art, map art - that appeared in Mystara products over the years, and scan as many illustrations as possible into the computer at high resolution, thus creating a library of OD&D art. I also laid out a design for incorporating it into the Mystara Database. The project evolved into a more comprehensive collection of fantasy art, with a dual focus on Mystara and Tolkien - my two main areas of interest. It's very much an ongoing project, with me adding images as and when I find them online. I have the whole thing sorted into folders for each artist, although some are more organised than others. Scanning is something I would like to be able to do, but it just takes too long. So I have reached a compromise, snipping the images from my PDF collection of Mystara books. As a result the image quality is not wonderful, but it's good enough for now. Unfortunately it seems likely that this project will remain private, because of the obvious copyright problems.

Created 14th March 2006. Last updated 19th August 2008.