Art of the Genre: Maztica Memories
After taking a moment to pull down the Dragon Mountain Boxed Set, I thought it might be fun to do the same with other lesser known boxes that came out of TSR around 1990. That period was actually the beginning of the end for the role-playing giant, Gygax ousted, sales flagging, and the need for fresh ideas and worlds seemingly all that the company could see as its savior.
As we are well aware, the next wave in the gaming industry wouldn’t come from the RPG table, but instead from cards, ala Magic the Gathering, but still TSR struggled to not only survive but come up with something fresh enough to gather new players.
It was here that we find various new titles rolling hot off their press, but many of the games in that period simply turned into boxed campaign settings along the lines of Maztica, which in itself is set in The Forgotten Realms.
This campaign was written by TSR staff author Douglas Niles, and although not as famed in novel fiction as Weis and Hickman, by 1990 Niles was pleasantly entrenched in the Forgotten Realms with his Darkwalker on Moonshae Trilogy. He also penned the Maztica Trilogy, including Ironhelm, Viperhand, and Feathered Dragon, but I’ve never read these three books so I can’t speak as to their worth for the purpose of supporting this setting.
Niles was challenged in this project to create a Mesoamerican world that mingles with the fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms. In my opinion, after several so-so attempts at reading this set, he fails to deliver on what would make such a setting uniquely cool, ala demi-humans! The work tends to bog down in a kind of repetition of real-world conquistadors waging a campaign against indigenous peoples of the far south continents where the only change in the story line is that the priests actually had working magic.
