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View Full Version : Dragonlance as a campaign setting for actual play



Yora
2020-11-13, 05:32 AM
I've never been a Dragonlance player myself and don't really know anything about it except kenders, tinker gnomes, gully dwarves, and Raistlin. (And something about dead or not dead gods.)
But over the years, I've frequently seen people go all "ohh" and "ahh" about Dragonlance, and how much they loved reading the novels. And I also often see people saying the original adventures were quite bad and the setting is nothing special. And it's really not unusual to hear both things from the same people.

From doing a bit of research, Dragonlance seems to have been planned as both an early adventure path and a novel series from the very start, and both the adventure modules and novels came out at the same time during 1984 and 1985. Which is very different from Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms, and I guess the reason why there never seem to have been any Dragonlance campaign setting boxes and only one really obscure book for 3rd edition.

So I am wondering, was the popularity and appreciation always for the books? Did the adventures have any real success, and where they mostly played by fans of the books? Did it ever get any traction as a setting for GM made campaigns?

Glorthindel
2020-11-13, 05:41 AM
My problem with Dragonlance is I've always considered it a 'novel' world more than an 'rpg' one.

By this I mean that a lot of the world doesn't work if you are not following the linear journey of a specific group of story-book characters; the settlements are weirdly arranged in a way that would make real-world communication and travel either impossible or utterly bizarre (to facilitate characters going sequentially from one to another as the novel story progresses), civilisations seem locked in weird situations that have persisted for bizarrely long periods of time unchanged (the Elves and Knights of Solamnia fall into this category nicely), and literally everywhere get tied into the continent-spanning plot, so unless you roll the timeline on a good chunk of time, you are struggling to move around the shockwaves/events of the books.

That said, there are some features of the setting I really like, and its one of the few older settings where Dragonborn (OK, Draconians) feel fully integrated into the setting, rather than just tacked on. You have to take a large hammer to the map and shift the timeline 100 years to make it all work, but there is some good stuff there.

Misereor
2020-11-13, 06:41 AM
So I am wondering, was the popularity and appreciation always for the books? Did the adventures have any real success, and where they mostly played by fans of the books? Did it ever get any traction as a setting for GM made campaigns?

Much like the Star Wars universe, I think Dragonlance worked best if you shoved the novels (movies) to the background and concentrated on doing your own thing with the setting.
The source book "Drangonlance Adventures" was quite useful in that regard (much like Forgotten Realms Adventures and Greyhawk Adventures), in that it helped flesh out the setting.

Jason
2020-11-13, 08:55 AM
Dragonlance pretty much created RPG tie-in novels. There were a few Gord the Rogue books before it, but after Dragonlance it seemed like every RPG needed a series of tie-in novels. So you can thank (or curse) Dragonlance for all the Shadowrun and Battletech novel series FASA put out, and all the D&D fiction that followed. There would have been no Salvatore without Weis and Hickman. Since the overprinting novels was in part responsible for the fall of TSR you can partly blame the success of Dragonlance for that too.
Something unique about Dragonlance at the time was that everyone who played the modules would be playing the characters from the books, and the modules together formed an epic storyline. Modules before then had sometimes tied in with each other, but only about 3 at a time, and they weren't written for a specific group of characters.
Dragonlance had a hardcover sourcebook for 1st edition, and it had quite a few changes from the baseline rules. So Dragonlance was the second published campaign world, after Oriental Adventures, that was very different from the baseline rules. It was much more popular than OA, and started the trend of incompatible campaign settings that also was a factor in TSR's demise.
So you can see why WOTC would have been cautious doing more Dragonlance. It was a pretty unique setting and experience, it started trends that were bad for business, and wasn't for everyone.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-13, 11:30 AM
While I was a young enthusiast of the Dragonlance setting, I was not enthused by the RPG products. They did a very poor job of conveying a sense of place, and so if the novels didn't cover it, it was very vague feeling. The mechanics, IMO, were also fairly lacking... they didn't do a really good job of integrating the campaign setting books into the 2e mechanics, which made them more of a mess. The later Saga materials (the card-based RPG which had big mechanical problems) were a lot better about setting, but it was way too late to save my love of the setting.

Spiderswims
2020-11-13, 12:48 PM
Dragonlance has always mostly been about the novels first, the setting second and the adventures a distant third. Fans read the novels and then want to play in the setting.

The published adventures....well, they are typical 80's modules. They are not so much different then most the modules published in the 1980's. And by most modern eyes they feel very bland and a set railroads.

Dragonlance did get a couple of box sets back in 2E, and some first party(?) books for 3E.


Most fans just ignored the adventure modules and ran their own games in the setting.

Yora
2020-11-13, 01:34 PM
I believe Dragonlance gets the honor of inventing both adventure paths and metaplots.

Which might be a dubious one.

Jason
2020-11-13, 01:55 PM
I believe Dragonlance gets the honor of inventing both adventure paths and metaplots.

Which might be a dubious one.

Traveller kicked off its 5th Frontier War metaplot with Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society #9 in 1981. Dragonlance didn't launch until 1984.

zarionofarabel
2020-11-14, 03:38 AM
In my early days as a DM my games always took place in the Dragonlance world. My players hated the Realms and refused to even consider Greyhawk. As others have said, it was built around the novels and modules, so it's the Star Wars of D&D settings. My advice would be to do what we did and completely ignore the existence of the characters and plotlines from the aforementioned novels/modules. Like gaming in the Star Wars universe, you need to make it your own.

Personally, I still love Krynn far more than any of the other D&D settings. Though my love is for the Time of Despair and Time of Dragons, with the War of the Lance being the height of the era. No divine magic, dragons being mythic creatures till the time of the war, and the aforementioned Draconians replacing the Orcs of other worlds. Hell I remember my players getting upset the first time I decided to switch things up and run a FR campaign. Mostly they thought Orcs were dumb and wanted me to replace them with Draconians cause they felt Orcs and Hobgoblins were basically the same thing.

😟

Now I wanna run Dragonlance!!!

Tanarii
2020-11-14, 12:56 PM
My experience was Dragonlance everyone read the six novels, then tried to play the campaign setting with dubious success.

That's the exact opposite of Forgotten Realms, which everyone played the campaign setting, then tried to read the novels by Niles and Salvator with dubious success.

Ultimately both are part and parcel of TSR's pivot to trying to blend D&D and storytelling, with all the problems that causes.

Personally I find Forgotten Realms to be more playable, as long you ignore all the lore, books, video games, and modules. Just plunk down your own adventure wherever it fits best and pull in some references from the campaign setting local details. In dragonlance, you can't really do that, it's a post apocalyptic wasteland. Kinda like Dark Sun, just with less environmental disaster.

Corsair14
2020-11-14, 04:52 PM
DL is a great world to base your campaign in. Sure the stuff in the books is going on in the background but there is no reason to have any real contact with it. All the standard tropes exist, treasure hunting, retrieving Mcguffin to save the world, other WoL era BBEGs plotting their own world take overs. Different Dragon Army commanders with their own plans. The campaign world just provides a really nice backdrop with many unique races, interesting magic mechanics, and no monks :P

JadedDM
2020-11-14, 05:38 PM
I've run plenty of games set in the Dragonlance setting, without any issue. In fact, I am currently running two such games right now.

One is just a Dragonlance conversion of Tyranny of Dragons, where the main plotline is centered around the party trying to stop a fanatical cult from resurrecting the dead goddess of evil dragons, Takhisis.

The other one is set about 10 years after the War of the Lance, on the island of Southern Ergoth, and it's basically just a sandbox, where the party can do whatever they want.

Previous to that, I ran a game set almost entirely in the city of Haven during its occupation by Dragonarmy forces during the War of the Lance.

And currently, I'm working on a game that will take place in Taladas, an entirely different continent than Ansalon, which is so different it could well be mistaken for a completely different setting altogether.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-14, 05:53 PM
And currently, I'm working on a game that will take place in Taladas, an entirely different continent than Ansalon, which is so different it could well be mistaken for a completely different setting altogether.

Taladas gets such high marks from so many people that I often wonder if linking it to Dragonlance wasn't a mistake... like, they could have just made Taladas, and left out most of the links to Ansalon. Sure, we have minotaurs in our southwest, but that's just minotaurs, man. Minotaurs are cool.

JadedDM
2020-11-14, 06:03 PM
There's also the largely fan-made Adlatum (https://lexicon.dragonlancenexus.com/index.php?title=Portal:Adlatum) continent, as well. I plan to try and run a game there some day, as well.

Jason
2020-11-14, 06:28 PM
Taladas gets such high marks from so many people that I often wonder if linking it to Dragonlance wasn't a mistake... like, they could have just made Taladas, and left out most of the links to Ansalon. Sure, we have minotaurs in our southwest, but that's just minotaurs, man. Minotaurs are cool.
Well, there's also the giant lava crater in the middle of the continent thst was caused by the meteor strike that created the Cataclysm, which ties it pretty strongly to Absalom. Plus tinker gnomes.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-14, 06:34 PM
Well, there's also the giant lava crater in the middle of the continent thst was caused by the meteor strike that created the Cataclysm, which ties it pretty strongly to Absalom. Plus tinker gnomes.

Sure, but you can say "Hey, this continent has a giant lava crater in the middle of the continent" without needing "It was caused because the gods decided to punish another continent and have bad aim."

KoDT69
2020-11-14, 11:19 PM
My first ever D&D game, and many that followed, were DL set in Taladas specifically. I'd guess the first 4 or 5 campaigns I was in were all set there. I never had issues with the setting as my group's style was a lot more "use the maps and some of the lore, and make up the rest" plus Tinker Gnomes, Dragonlances (the weapons), and the League of Minotaurs. Great setting. Great memories ;)

Corsair14
2020-11-16, 10:04 AM
Ahh Taladas, one of my all time favorite land masses that for some reason I have never used in a game. Such a colorful and vibrant continent in just one book. I still think that Taladas art work with that dragon in the dark is one of the best D&D art pieces of all time.

Jason
2020-11-16, 10:47 AM
Ahh Taladas, one of my all time favorite land masses that for some reason I have never used in a game. Such a colorful and vibrant continent in just one book. I still think that Taladas art work with that dragon in the dark is one of the best D&D art pieces of all time.

Robin Wood "The Music Lover" painted in 1985
It was originally the cover of Dragon Magazine #97 before it was used as the Taladas boxed set cover.

JadedDM
2020-11-16, 04:55 PM
You're referring to this?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/TSR1050_Time_of_the_Dragon.jpg

Jason
2020-11-16, 05:18 PM
You're referring to this?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/TSR1050_Time_of_the_Dragon.jpg

Yep, that's the one.

Palanan
2020-11-16, 08:06 PM
That thumbnail doesn't do it justice, so here's a larger version:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/A1j-eDYotIL.jpg

I can only imagine how long it took to paint those scales.

Corsair14
2020-11-17, 08:37 PM
Thats the one. Love that pic

Palanan
2020-11-17, 09:47 PM
Does the artwork illustrate a moment from a story or incident set in Dragonlance, or is it a standalone work?

There's an interesting ambiguity in how the harpist is positioned--either nearly pinned by the dragon's claws, or settled comfortably between them. Just curious if this is a scene which is developed further somewhere in the book.

LibraryOgre
2020-11-17, 10:10 PM
There's an interesting ambiguity in how the harpist is positioned--either nearly pinned by the dragon's claws, or settled comfortably between them. Just curious if this is a scene which is developed further somewhere in the book.

It's not, but it ties in to the Ortholox dragons... the ones that don't conform to their standard alignment.

Corsair14
2020-11-18, 09:06 AM
If I remember, the dragons that didn't want to take part in the Wars of the Lance both chromatic and metallic retreated to Taladas because of the scorn/revenge from the dragons that stuck around to duke it out.