Mystara was a curious setting. Just as Planescape was introducing me to all the possibilities of D&D, here was a setting that seemingly codified all the generic D&D clichés into one setting (which is actually the Known World, created by Lawrence Schick and Tom Moldvay, and originally used as the setting of Basic D&D). I was intrigued, and that curiosity paid off, because Mystara, or at least the monsters that lived there, was damned weird.

The art amplifies the weirdness. Its soft pastels seem like something out of a children’s book, maybe one about King Arthur or some other similarly well-known fairy tale. The approach is familiar, but the execution is strange. Moss men? Giants with a third arm growing out of their chests? Brain collectors? A freakin’ floating ball that disintegrates everything it touches?

I never ran a campaign in Mystara, but I pillaged this compendium for monsters whenever my Planescape campaign visited a strange new world on the prime material plane. I saw the monsters of the Mystara appendix as challenge. Some seem absolutely impossible to use, so I made it my mission to find reasonable applications for them. I was very partial to Thouls.