Thoughts/Advice on War of the Lance campaign?

[Murg]

It has been suggested by some of my gaming buddies that we try running the 3.5e War of the Lance campaign. None of us have ever played in the Dragonlance setting before.

I would probably be DM, and I have book 1 of 3 (Dragons of Autumn) plus the Campaign Setting. I do not have the next 2 campaign books, and apparently I also need the War of the Lance splatbook too. So before I invest the $$$ and reading time in the remaining books for this campaign, I want to ask...

To those of you who have played or DM'ed it, what were your thoughts? Anything I should be aware of, any advice you can give? Was it a good campaign? Any other books I would need or that you'd recommend?

After looking through what material I do have I see a few potential issues:


1. What to do about the lack of available healing early in the campaign?

2. The Dragonlance Noble base class seems to rely too much on DM deus ex machina. Any ideas on how to fix this class, or am I misreading this? Otherwise I was just gonna ban it.

3. The story seems to involve more railroading than usual. Like, what's the best way to handle the part in the middle of the adventure where the PCs are required to be captured?

4. Party balance. There's two tier 1s (Raistlin and later Goldmoon) in a party that otherwise consists entirely of tier 4s and 5s. I have my own ideas about this, but I was wondering how other people handled it.

5. The Xak Tsaroth boss fight. A difficult battle apparently becomes trivial because of the Crystal Staff, cheapening the players' victory. Then they get a free divine intervention resurrection out of it, seriously?! And what if the players are unable or unwilling to put their squishy cleric within melee range of a very scary, very dangerous black dragon? This whole fight could easily end in either a TPK or a trivial victory driven by plot-device cheese. I was thinking of knocking the age category of the dragon down a few notches and making the Crystal Staff less formidable in this fight. But then again, since this is supposed to be this huge event that profoundly affects the world, maybe this is the time for divine intervention after all??? Your thoughts on this?


Any tips or advice would be much appreciated, thank you!

[Kuulvheysoon]

Honestly, it would be easiest to ban the Dragonlance Noble, so I am all for it. It's a bit of a mess, and what parts aren't DM Fiat are about Warrior level good.

Yes, the NPC class.

[ViperMagnum357]

I second ignoring the Noble class; when those characters become relevant, just give them equivalent levels in Rogue (for social characters) or Fighter (for characters who talk with their fists).

And don't get hung up on on tiers, unless your group is going to optimize very heavily; it is much more important that you decide how to run the campaign, and how much leeway you are going to give your players. If you are playing fast and loose, and using the campaign more as a guideline, then the important things to keep in mind are fairly standard, like keeping an eye on custom magic items and not letting you players break the campaign world.

If you are going to run the campaign fairly strict, them a few things will jump out. Magic items are scarce, and there are no magic marts around-each item needs to be commissioned or crafted personally if you cannot find it as windfall. Also, most of the campaign is wilderness trekking, dungeon delving, or open battlefields; your characters are not going to put down roots, and will rarely have access to crafting facilities for more than a few days at a time.

Also keep in mind the setting: Divine magic has been absent for centuries, and is only just coming back. Healing is rare and precious. The balance of the world has shifted very far in an Evil tilt, so the champions of good get a disproportionate number of divine handouts and several cases of literal divine intervention; where artifacts are made available or the gods of Light intervene directly.

As for your specific points:

1: Not as huge an issue as it looks. The PCs will encounter very few debilitating conditions like energy drain or ability drain, so most injuries can be slept off on the road. However, the players need to understand this; they have to make time to recover, and cannot afford to play fast and loose in combat. The first part of the campaign is about risk management, not kicking down doors with a one-liner like typical adventures. The campaign is modeled after the novels, where the heroes frequently ran away from superior numbers or a tilted battlefield, and got their teeth kicked in more than once when they stood their ground.

2: See above: the noble class really should be a NPC class, since so much of it relies on DM fiat.

3: Also see above: the campaign is reasonably faithful to the novels, so it is up to you how closely you want to follow it. The story in the novels has the heroes consistently guided by the gods of Light, and get their bacon pulled out of the fire several times where they likely should have been looking at a Total Party Kill, with no clones or resurrections forthcoming. The reason for this is because the gods of Darkness, especially Takhisis, have had their thumbs on the scales for quite a while, so it it a balancing effort. In the latter half of the campaign, when the scales are more balanced, most of the gods take a step back and let things play out in mortal hands; making things much more dangerous for the PCs. As for handling these; not much you can do here. The PCs need to get specific information at several points from enemies they have little or no chance of capturing, and cannot learn other ways, so getting captured alive as high value prisoners moves the story along. Make it clear to the players how hilariously outnumbered and overpowered they are; resistance means death and the complete end of the campaign. They need to survive long enough to rally the forces of light and get those armies in the field and pointed in the right direction; unlike many campaigns, this is absolutely not a campaign they can win entirely or mostly on their own.

4: Not much to say here: in the story, the power of Raistlin is held in check by his extreme vulnerability and later removing him from the heroes entirely. Goldmoon is restricted by her vows to Mishakal, a Goddess of healing who frowns on magic used as a weapon. How much of a problem this is going to be will depend on the DM and the group, like any other tier mismatch.

5: This ties into the above points I made: at least nine times out of ten, an encounter like that is an expected TPK without the DM fudging the rolls. In fact, in the story, it was headed that way until the gods directly nudged things; left in mortal hands, the heroes all die right there. You can play it straight, or downgrade the encounter to something manageable if you want to reduce the impact of divine intervention. You can do other things to tilt the scales; reduce the number of mooks that might intervene, or have some escaped prisoners provide a distraction at a crucial moment.

[Fizban]

Do you mean a published 3.5 module that I'm mostly unaware of (maybe I've heard someone mention it?), or adapting the original older modules, or trying to turn the novels into a campaign?


1. What to do about the lack of available healing early in the campaign?
The usual problems. Status effects can't be removed, a couple unlucky hits at the start of the day mean the party can't seriously continue, etc.


2. The Dragonlance Noble base class seems to rely too much on DM deus ex machina. Any ideas on how to fix this class, or am I misreading this? Otherwise I was just gonna ban it.
Yes it's terrible IIRC, remove it.


3. The story seems to involve more railroading than usual. Like, what's the best way to handle the part in the middle of the adventure where the PCs are required to be captured?
If you mean the story of the novels- a novel doesn't have railroading, it has what happens in the story. Trying to write a 1:1 module version of the exact events in a given story will always be "railroady," because that's the definition of railroading, forcing the players to stay on script and do exactly what you want. Published modules that rely on the PCs being captured exist, and are appropriately regarded as useless in those sections.

Figure out where the party needs to be, have multiple ways they can get there, and make sure they have a reason to do so. Getting captured is one way, but if they aren't then you have other ways to get them there.


4. Party balance. There's two tier 1s (Raistlin and later Goldmoon) in a party that otherwise consists entirely of tier 4s and 5s. I have my own ideas about this, but I was wondering how other people handled it.
Yeah, that's the standard party. The foundational old-school role-based team that the original modules which became the novels ran on. Bluntly speaking, you fix it by getting rid of the notion of "tiers" entirely, because that's not how storytelling works (or in any way a supported viewpoint of 3.x itself, it's pure forum think). The story of Dragonlance absolutely relies on the "superiority" (and rarity) of casters as part of its storytelling, and undermining that or making the entire party spellcasters means it's just not Dragonlance anymore, not in the War of the Lance anyway (some argument can be made that the later eras suggest there are far more casters what with the new magic schools and whatnot, but the Chronicles have very few). I don't expect there's any good way to drag an old-school setting like Dragonlance into tiersville, either the setting breaks or things get "videogamey" or both.


5. The Xak Tsaroth boss fight. A difficult battle apparently becomes trivial because of the Crystal Staff, cheapening the players' victory. Then they get a free divine intervention resurrection out of it, seriously?! And what if the players are unable or unwilling to put their squishy cleric within melee range of a very scary, very dangerous black dragon? This whole fight could easily end in either a TPK or a trivial victory driven by plot-device cheese. I was thinking of knocking the age category of the dragon down a few notches and making the Crystal Staff less formidable in this fight. But then again, since this is supposed to be this huge event that profoundly affects the world, maybe this is the time for divine intervention after all??? Your thoughts on this?
Yup, that's an old-school status-quo artifact-based one-shot adventure for-you, and in the novel version where everything works out, it all just happened to work out.

The Crystal Staff in general is a problem, because it's an uber artifact showing up in a what, 1st, maybe 3rd level adventure? And IIRC the goal is for them to take this artifact up to some statue in enemy territory, where placing it unlocks the ability to have Clerics again? It's been quite a while since I read DoAT and I don't have a copy, but yeah the entire first book is "the gods/DM tell you to do this, so you do it, fixing a limitation the gods/DM put on the setting." If you want a War of the Lance campaign that's about the actual war, might be better to skip that entirely and go straight to the part where people can play the required classes and are actually involved in the war.

[Fouredged Sword]

Yeah, the gods meddle. "Fizban randomly shows up and fireballs things to prevent a TPK" is ALWAYS an option in the Dragonlance setting.

So is "And Fizban shows up and fireballs the party."

[Murg]

Do you mean a published 3.5 module that I'm mostly unaware of (maybe I've heard someone mention it?), or adapting the original older modules, or trying to turn the novels into a campaign?


There was a War of the Lance campaign for 2e, but it was officially updated for 3e and expanded. So the first book of the campaign is:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/12639/Dragons-of-Autumn-35

The campaign is based off of the novels.

1. As far as early healing, I do like ViperMagnum's idea of having the first part of the campaign focus on "risk management" type gameplay. If I really pushed the idea of having limited resources, and a limited time to both heal and complete the objective, I think that could be pretty exciting, sort of like those Lone Wolf RPG modules wherein the story keeps pushing the player forward and they have to make do with little resources or time.

2. Glad I did not misread the Noble base class. Banning does seem like the simplest, easiest option.

3. Although I am not really a fan of railroading or divine intervention, I think ViperMagnum makes some good points about why it exists for this campaign, given the storyline. Gonna have to think about this some more...

4. Unfortunately with my group I foresee the tier 1 classes being a big party balance issue unless I nip it in the bud right away. They're not uber-optimizers and they're not out to deliberately wreck the campaign, but they know enough to be dangerous. But, it's an issue I've dealt with before; a few house rule nerfs should fix it. I am a little bit worried because, as Fizban points out, the power and rarity of spell casters is part of the storytelling in Dragonlance. But I think I can keep the storytelling aspect of it while keeping the nerfs. After all, in the Dragon Age RPG (which had a good storyline) spell casters were also seen by common folk as rare and powerful, but if you were to compare the power level of a Dragon Age spell caster to any of the other character classes the spell caster would not be OP; certainly not a tier 1 level of OP at any rate.

5. I don't know about Xak Tsaroth...my inclination is to make both the dragon and the Crystal Staff weaker, but...BUT...ViperMagnum makes good points about the epic-ness of divine intervention and how it drives the (early) plot. I did find a cool song for that boss battle (or really any boss battle), starting on 33:33:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGzOQ4ScU8c

I could totally picture a group adventurers facing off against a massive black dragon in a ruined city to that soundtrack!

Are there any other 3.5 books that might be relevant to this campaign? I do have Draconomicon and Dragon Magic, which are not Dragonlance-specific but they are kind of thematically linked to the setting...some of the feats and spells from those books I thought might be neat to bring into the campaign...

Anyhow, thank you all very much for the advice, it is much appreciated!

[Fizban]

There was a War of the Lance campaign for 2e, but it was officially updated for 3e and expanded. So the first book of the campaign is:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/12639/Dragons-of-Autumn-35
Hmm, even reasonably priced. Might pick it up myself some time just to tear it apart to see how bogus/not-bogus it is.


4. Unfortunately with my group I foresee the tier 1 classes being a big party balance issue unless I nip it in the bud right away. They're not uber-optimizers and they're not out to deliberately wreck the campaign, but they know enough to be dangerous. But, it's an issue I've dealt with before; a few house rule nerfs should fix it. I am a little bit worried because, as Fizban points out, the power and rarity of spell casters is part of the storytelling in Dragonlance. But I think I can keep the storytelling aspect of it while keeping the nerfs.
Oh absolutely, it's not nerfs that would be a problem, it's "everyone must be T1" that would be a problem. If you already know what you'll be using then good- though the first thought that came to my mind was jiriku's Philospher's Stone (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=11592979&postcount=2). Short version: remove bonus spells for ability score (for an effective -1 slot per spell level), make ranges not scale and reduce them to 20/50/100', cut durations to 1 round/level or flat 1 min, 10 min, or 1 hour, cut areas in half, and no more non-magical-magic SR:no spells.

The range and duration reductions take the game back to a scenario where tactical efficiency and coordination actually matter again. Instead of being able to cast spells from so far away the spot check is -20 or more and bows can't even hit you, you have to be close enough that you're actually in danger. Even a javelin only takes -6 to hit 100', -4 for 50'. Instead of effects that start out long enough to finish an entire dungeon and then approach all-day-every-day, you need to get stuff done quickly: no all day Mage Armor, no casually wandering around while Invisible, etc. All that extra "training wheel" room goes away and you need to actually be good just to hit par. Meanwhile a lot of OP core spells can remain pretty OP, because using them does require being in range: the wizard feels a lot squishier when they actually can be hit (and if they can't because the fighter was standing in the way, congratulations, a significant team role). And the comprehensive reduction in spell slots means that much less room to spam, more pressure to use those consumables.

The main thing I would add (aside from the usual lists of sufficiently broken spells that need outright bans regardless), is the 3-minute rule. If you run Search by the rules, basically any time the party stops to loot a body or search a room for secret doors or traps, unless they deliberately check only a specific square or two, it's going to cost them a good 2-3 minutes. Thus, every combat ticks off at least 3 minutes of duration. If the players sit around discussing things for longer than that, it takes longer. And with those reduced durations, that means no minute spell ever lasts for more than a single combat, and even a 10 minute spell requires rushing from fight to fight with no discussion to squeeze in 3 battles, unless you leave the loot behind unguarded.

The main problem is that the reduced durations make it make it significantly harder for the Cleric to do their job of preventing certain monsters from just killing you. Death Ward should probably be kicked up to 10 minutes, for example.

But yeah. If Dragonlance is old-school, and old-school combat was tactical and risky, then hacking those spell ranges and areas and durations down to "actually in combat," and "not in fact all of the enemies," while leaving the classically OP Webs and whatnot the same in their effect, should mean that the Wizard is terrifying- if they get the drop on you, or aren't busy with someone else, or the guy who tried to shoot them to stop the spell failed. But they're perfect in a dungeon environment with a team.


After all, in the Dragon Age RPG (which had a good storyline) spell casters were also seen by common folk as rare and powerful, but if you were to compare the power level of a Dragon Age spell caster to any of the other character classes the spell caster would not be OP; certainly not a tier 1 level of OP at any rate.
I mean, I just started watching a playthrough of Dragon Age, and with weapon users that can just walk up and spam stuns at you or make AoE attacks from the beginning, yeah magic isn't all that impressive. Speaking of, natural question of how well ToB can be fit in. Depends on how jazzy your table narrates it.


Are there any other 3.5 books that might be relevant to this campaign? I do have Draconomicon and Dragon Magic, which are not Dragonlance-specific but they are kind of thematically linked to the setting...some of the feats and spells from those books I thought might be neat to bring into the campaign...
Examples?

The Dragonlance setting books made their own dragon-buffing feats (such as Strafing Breath) and don't really need Draconomicon- and if you're worried about the party getting killed by dragons, optimizing them with splatbook upgrades doesn't make sense anyway. The only dragonblood I recall seeing are Draconians, which again have their own feat support, so I don't see much to be added that wouldn't obviously break from cannon (like giving non-winged Draconians the Dragon Wings feat), and Dragonfire Adepts are quite out. Dragonlance is a setting with dragons in the name and all the major wars, but isn't actually anywhere near as dragon-happy as the dragon splats. I'm not sure kobolds have even been mentioned, nor do I recall reading of any half-dragons. Unlike every other DnD and related product that can't handle the cognitive strain of humanoids casting magic without books and thus must make them all wacky bloodline powers, in Dragonlance, Primal Sorcery was unlocked by the Greygem, a fragment of chaos. It's just a thing that exists after that point, no connection to lol dragonblood at all (that I'm aware of).

So while there's usually some mechanical content that can be pulled from any book, I don't really see the zomgDragons! books being particularly significant for a Dragonlance game.