The first two Poor Wizard’s Almanacs released for Basic D&D, then branded as Challenger, and detailed, as you’d expect, all the stuff going on in the metastory for the year 1992 and 1993. After Basic was discontinued, the Known World setting carried on as Mystara, for 2E D&D, and the third almanac saw print in 1994. I really enjoyed the first almanac, but the second and third feel very repetitive. If you’re going to put out annual updates for a world in a 240-page book, there better be a lot of stuff going on in the world! That…was not so much the case after 1992.

In 1995, TSR shook up the almanac formula. Instead of a book in an editorial voice aimed at the DM, Joshuan’s Almanac & Book of Facts (1995) is an in-world artifact written by a halfling and a team of correspondents filing from around the Known World. It’s a player-facing book with a chipper tone and seems like a really handy tool for ongoing Mystara campaigns.

Of course, it was the last Mystara product.