History: 2013-Present

Mystara ceased publication somewhere between 1993 and 1996, depending on whether you count: the end of its Basic D&D production, which closed with AC1011: Poor Wizard's Almanac II & Book of Facts (1993); the end of its print production, which closed with Joshuan's Almanac & Book of Facts (1995); or the final books pushed out the door as slightly formatted RTFs, the last of which was Orc’s Head (1996). Within a year of that last release, TSR had closed its doors as well, and the setting of Mystara (originally known as "The Known World" or even "The Continental Map" or the "D&D Game World") came to an end as a commercially published setting, absent a few articles in Dragon.

Fortunately, fandom was already there on the nascent internet, talking about Mystara on the Mystara AOL boards or even on Leroy van Camp III's early Mystara Mailing List. The first few websites, also created in the early '90s, roughly collected some of the best material. But Shawn Stanley wanted something more, especially since he was outside of the United States and so didn't have access to AOL. He created his own Mystara Home Page on June 27, 1996. One of his first goals was to collect some of the material from the Mystara Mailing List. Over the years, the Mystara Home Page would continue to accumulate materials, creating a mighty hoard. This included not just discussions, but new Almanacs, Gazetteers, and much more.

The Mystara Home Page jumped from site to site in the late '90s and early '00s, as was common for sites at the time. Along the way, it passed two major milestones. On December 15, 1999, as part of their program of naming official websites for defunct settings, Wizards of the Coast recognized Stanley's website, which was by then known as "Mystara - The Dungeons & Dragons Homepage", as the internet home of Mystara. Then in September 2000, Shawn Stanley was having an email conversation with Travis Henry, who suggested that the website should have a name that was "more concise, catchy and with a Mystara-specific connotation". Henry suggested a number of prefixes and suffixes, of which Stanley particularly liked "Revelations of the Old Ones" and "Vaults of Pandius". He selected the latter, which soon became the site's official name.

Though D&D-focused fanzines are almost as old as the industry, setting-focused fanzines for D&D were a bit slower to appear. The first was probably Greyhawk's The Oerth Journal (1995-Present), a PDF-centric publication. The first Mystaran ezine appeared a few years later, however the Tome of Mystara (1999-2000), didn't mimic the layout of a print publication, but instead was published as web pages. It ran for six issues and today is available at the Vaults of Pandius.

On April 27, 2013, talk of a new Mystara fanzine erupted at the Vaults. It would eventually take on the name of Threshold Magazine, idea courtesy of master cartographer Thorfinn Tait. It had the following goals:

• To provide a venue for community members to present material.
• To promote the Vaults of Pandius and the material there.
• To increase the exposure of existing and new articles.
• To encourage authors to revisit and revitalise existing articles.
• To motivate interest in Mystara in general.

Threshold #1 (September 2013) was edited by Giampaolo Agosta, with layout by Allan Palmer. However, much like the Vaults itself, the magazine was a group endeavor and thus would see a panoply of editors (amidst an even larger editorial team), including Andrew Theisen, John Calvin, Francesco Defferrari, and Joseph Setorus. Eventually Defferrari and Calvin would settle in as regular editors from 2016-2018, before Defferrari became the magazine's regular editor, first alongside Agosta and later with Palmer.

The original plan was for each issue to have its own theme, but the enthusiasm for producing content was so great, in large part due to Threshold's connection to the Vaults, that sometimes a theme continued across multiple issues, such as the Sea of Dread theme that was featured in Threshold #3 (March 2014) and #4 (June 2014) and the Norwold theme that ran from Threshold #6 (December 2014) through Threshold #8 (July 2015).

Originally published quarterly, Threshold dropped back to semiyearly publication in 2020 due to the editorial load being increasingly borne by two regular editors. Nonetheless, it continues to be one of the most extensive and dense publications in fandom. The shortest issue was 150 pages, the longest 294, and the average page count over the first 30 issues was 228.

Palmer became aware of the possibility of making the magazine available not just as a PDF, but also as a POD printable at Lulu, in 2021 and thus produced Threshold #28 (January 2022) in both print and POD editions. The move was well-received and the entire catalog of Threshold issues can now be printed and bound, to appear on shelves right next to the Mystaran books of old.

For more on the history of the Vaults of Pandius and Threshold magazine, see the interview with Shawn Stanley in Threshold #2 (January 2014), "A Brief History of the Vaults of Pandius Website" in Threshold #27 (July 2021), and "Ten Years of Threshold Magazine" in Threshold #31 (June 2023).

Threshold Issues

About the Contents

This indexing is based on the POD editions of Threshold.

This index currently covers the first five years of Threshold. It will be continually expanded, year by year, until it's caught up.

This index is © Copyright 2023-2024 by Shannon Appelcline. It is released under a cc-by-4.0 license, allowing reuse with attribution. Background image by Thorfinn Tait, based on the original from the D&D Expert Rules Set (1983), licensed under cc-by-nc-sa 4.0. Support Thorf's Patreon.