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I remember once working out a backstory whereby the Dark Sun world of Athas was actually Krynn, a couple thousand years later, in the timeline where Raistlin killed all the gods.
That's actually a pretty good idea. I think I'll steal it.
I sure everyone did they're best, and I've said nothing but good things about everyone involved in the DL3e project. That being said, it worries me that there were several times in which stuff was snuck in that had nothing to do with the novels or any other prior gaming materials.
Now when I saw that stuff I was like "oh my, how clever. But that's not Dragonlance". Many of these things came as modifications of earlier DL Nexus stuff. That is a textbook example of fanon-to-canon.
Do you have any examples? I'm keen to know what these non-DL things are.
See that's what really bugs me. Dragonlance fans were frustrated for 10 years where the only books released were prequels of the WotL, and no modules were released. So when they finally did advance the storyline, any criticism of that storyline is seen as wanting to return to the previous way the brand was managed badly. That's a false dichotomy.
What do you folks really expect?The war of the lance is the iconic part of Dragonlance. Its what made the brand. Without it and much of the fruit it bore, it wouldnt be popular.Much of the SAGA stuff on wasnt that good. And moved away from what made it good. *shrug*
And it was a very nice adventure, too. However, most of the fellows that did Dl3e came from the old DL3e website, so compared to "classic" 'lance, it becomes just like the Magius language or like Noble Draconians: expanded universe aka, largely apocryphal, or to put it in the TVtropes.org way, the Inmates Running the Asylum.
It's kind of crazy that way.
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Hell, most of the old fans that got out of DL don't count the Summer of Chaos onwards, as it was that stuff that alienated them from the setting.
Yet many came back with the War of Souls. Many of the old wounds have healed. And in any setting, some fans go and new ones hop aboard.
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Originally Posted by Draksila
Personally, while not a big fan of the Chaos War, I loved the War of Souls. It shook up the landscape, introduced new religious conflicts and new moral conflicts, and finally passed the torch from the Heroes of the Lance to the new generation. I thought it was long overdue and tastefully done, whereas the Chaos War seemed rushed and half-planned.
War of Souls did many things. It healed many of the rifts in the fan base, creating the foundation for a setting that was whole and complete. The focus was forced off of Paladine and Takhisis. All four types of magic exist at one time. The torch is passed on to new heroes. The political landscape has changed.
As for the Chaos War, it seems rushed because it was a trilogy packed into a single novel. Plans changed with that novel, taking the Chronicles II series down to a single volume, which was Chronicles volume 4. The end result is Dragons of Summer Flame.
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Besides, I absolutely adore the Klingon-esque minotaurs; the Krynnish version has always been one of my favorite D&D races.
For that, they will spare you.
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As for tinker gnomes, well... tinker gnomes have become a universal concept in modern fantasy. Look at Spelljammer and Planescape. Heck, look at World of Warcraft! Tinker gnomes are no longer a strange concept that can only be played for comic relief.
For all the anti-gnome talk, they sure are popular enough. They're everywhere! Beyond your mentions, I've seen them in d20 Modern as well as various other places.
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... I grant you that gully dwarves, however, are comic relief. They've never shown up in my stories as anything else, and so are expendable as a concept at my table. Still, I don't ban them... who knows, maybe some day a good player will get ahold of the idea and impress me with it.
I played a gully dwarf named Bugr (Booger) once. He died in the Dwarfgate Wars just being the servant of another dwarf who got in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We should probably take a closer look at a few things...
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Originally Posted by ferratus
2) Mina replaced both Paladine & Takhisis as goddess of good and evil simultaneously
She did not replace them so much as she is an addition to the setting. Her unique nature means that the Balance is not disrupted.
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3) Shinare replaced Paladine as one of the patrons of the Knights of Solamnia. Shinare is the neutral goddess of trade.
Also a goddess of binding contracts. One such contract would be a social contract - an oath. The Knights of Solamnia highly respect oaths. Ergo, she represents oaths to the Solamnic order.
I should also clarify that she didn't replace Paladine in the Solamnic Triumvirate. Kiri-Jolith became the primary patron of the Knighthood, Habbakuk is still there (though he has a slightly less presence), and Shinare joined the group as the junior member, so to speak, as the goddess of oaths.
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5) Krynn was stolen and put in a new galaxy, where the gods couldn't find it.
It's in a different point in space. This could mean a different dimension or crystal sphere. However, it was never stated that it was another galaxy.
The Dray. I'd forgotten about the dray. That could work. I'm not so sure about the tieflings. However, as long as the race is changed to fit into the setting instead of the other way around... then that might be okay.
But no gnomes, or orcs. And keep the PoL cosmology away from Athas!
Yeah, the Drey, them. They were actually kind of cool. Partly just because they were like miniature Dragons of Athas.....and that creature was the creepiest dragon I've seen in any setting. It just felt...."wrong", and it was so hyper-powerful, it was sick.
The tieflings, I'm not as sure about.
Other stuff though, would concern me. Like, I wouldn't want to see them inject paladins into the game. One thing I *didn't* like about WotC's innovations in 3E was that any race/class should fit into any setting, even when it was a poor fit. I preferred the 2nd Ed. method of creating some of the flavour in a campaign through limitation. In 4E, it seems like they still want to allow any race or class anywhere.....eladrin in FR? Sure....just replace gold elves, or rules that they've always been there. But by doing that, I think they detract from both FR, and the eladrin. With a race like them, I actually didn't think they were alien enough for 4E. They're supposed to be an otherworldly race of faerie-lords....but to look at their stats, it sure doesn't seem like it.
Wow do you not know what you're talking about. 1986... Drizzt kills a white dragon... go look at how many hit points white dragons had in 1e.
And the DL Chronicles were written when? 2003 with 3E being the current setting of D&D?
No, they were written 1984-1985 and had the same low HP dragons which was around when Salvatore started with Drizzt. Yet in the Chronicles no one solos a dragon without an artifact as backup. The full group had a hard time against one black dragon and the only time when a hero tried to attack a dragon alone he got killed in an instant while only inflicting a very minor wound.
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Originally Posted by Dragonhelm
What traditional sense? Points of light is still a new concept, so there hasn't been any time to establish a tradition. Perhaps WotC wants to expand how we define points of light.
With traditional sense I mean the way WotC defines PoL. Where the commoners don't dare to leave their village as travel is dangerous and every village is for itself and when one of them falls no one will notice unless the PCs visit that village.
Except that does not work. Even after the long years of war Krynn is more civilized than that where city states and kingdoms rule the majority of the continent and the danger does not come from wandering bands of monsters no one (except the PCs) can stop, but from armies trying to conquer the land.
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Originally Posted by qstor
Its more so that they try and shoehorn 4e general stuff into each setting. So now there's tieflings and dragonborn in Dragonlance and the magic system could not revolve around the cycles of Krynn's moons.
Exactly. WotC will try to insert everything from 4E into DL and to do that they will butcher the entire setting as many thing don't fit. It happened in FR and it will happen in DL, except worse as DL is not a kitchen sink like FR and it is even harder to insert 4E mechanic there.
__________________ Everything about RPGs is subjective, so everything I say about them is I my opinion and not hard facts
Having a backstory is good. Using this backstory in game is better. And for that you need background skills.
4E, the game where you play HSMFOS
Heroic
Only good, or at least unaligned adventurers are supported and no monster you can fight is good aligned.
Super-
The PCs become masters in any skill automatically and it is impossible for them to be bad at a mundane task
Mutants
Compared to NPCs of the same strength, PCs poses a ungodly amount of HP and can withstand huge mountains of punishment. That or they can spontaneously regenerate wounds.
From Outer Space
Yet despite no matter how powerful the PCs become, they can never do anything special what the "natives" (=NPCs) can do like animating a skeleton.
Yet in the Chronicles no one solos a dragon without an artifact as backup. The full group had a hard time against one black dragon and the only time when a hero tried to attack a dragon alone he got killed in an instant while only inflicting a very minor wound.
You mean the companions need to be about 2nd-4th level to take on a black dragon, and they'll have a hard time doing it?
Wow, that seems as if the encounter was tailor made for 4e! A party of that level, facing a young black dragon, would indeed be in a great deal of trouble in 4e.
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Except that does not work. Even after the long years of war Krynn is more civilized than that where city states and kingdoms rule the majority of the continent and the danger does not come from wandering bands of monsters no one (except the PCs) can stop, but from armies trying to conquer the land.
See, I'd blame that on poor editorial control. In the beginning of Chronicles travelling around various nations was very limited. So much so that nobody among the 800 or so refugees knew that Tarsis was no longer a seaport, despite the fact that it was just a couple hundred miles away.
Likewise, nobody knew about the big honking perpetual storm in the Blood Sea among the companions. No one knew the fate of Xak Tsaroth. Elves, dwarves and humans all hated each other, and nobody had entered the respective lands of each other in a couple hundred years. Everything was very mysterious and unknown to the adventuring party.
Later books acted as if the state of the world was common knowledge to people and everyone moved around everywhere. A reboot would be all that is needed to bring the 4e PoL feeling back.
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Exactly. WotC will try to insert everything from 4E into DL and to do that they will butcher the entire setting as many thing don't fit. It happened in FR and it will happen in DL, except worse as DL is not a kitchen sink like FR and it is even harder to insert 4E mechanic there.
FR wasn't butchered because of the edition changes, but the story changes.
Besides, I wouldn't say it is butchered per say. It is still a good setting, with lots of variety and story hooks. It just isn't the same setting that it was.
Also, the person you are replying to, qstor is simply wrong. There is no reason you can't have magic revolve around Krynn's moons. Bonuses to arcana checks in rituals, extra castings of ecounter powers, and bonuses to will defenses are a good translation of "increased level, extra spells, and increased saving throw" respectively. Those are the bonuses you got in 1e when the moons were full and aligned with each other.
Last edited by ferratus; 20th September 2008 at 01:39 PM..
See, I'd blame that on poor editorial control. In the beginning of Chronicles travelling around various nations was very limited. So much so that nobody among the 800 or so refugees knew that Tarsis was no longer a seaport, despite the fact that it was just a couple hundred miles away.
Likewise, nobody knew about the big honking perpetual storm in the Blood Sea among the companions. No one knew the fate of Xak Tsaroth. Elves, dwarves and humans all hated each other, and nobody had entered the respective lands of each other in a couple hundred years. Everything was very mysterious and unknown to the adventuring party.
The plainsfolk didn't travel a lot, but they really never said that was because it was unsafe to travel. The book covered the Companions discovering the world, rather than the world. In many ways it was a bit silly, since many of the companions DID go out and explore greatly alone, and still didn't know much.
IIRC, their choice in Tarsis was because other directions were unsafe due to the army coming in, rather than "it's always been full of goblin raiders".
As they get out more, they meet folks that are more traveled and more familiar with a world map and some of that ignorance is discarded to tell a grander story.
__________________ Why should I listen to you?
You're just a pigment of my imagination.
Like bleen or gurple.
--8Bit Fighter
Who REALLY wants to play through the War of the Lance OVER AND OVER again (yeah.. I bought the updated versions... sure me). )
I don't know if I would ... BUT "War of the Lance" would make a kickass adventure path in Dungeon.
Actually, if all we got was a "War of the Lance" AP that was set in PoLand (which is not the same as Poland ), with continents, cities, and personalities from DL but not explicitly on Krynn, that would be cool with me.
I don't know if I would ... BUT "War of the Lance" would make a kickass adventure path in Dungeon.
Actually, if all we got was a "War of the Lance" AP that was set in PoLand (which is not the same as Poland ), with continents, cities, and personalities from DL but not explicitly on Krynn, that would be cool with me.
I think that would make me cry. Plus, it's not supporting the Dragonlance brand in quite the way I suspect Hasbro/WotC wants to.
I can also pretty much be sure that they're not going to reboot it. That would annoy more people than you know.
Cheers,
Cam
No reboot then what are they going to do with tieflings and dragonborn??
Mike
__________________ "I am a Ranger. We walk in the dark places no others will enter. We stand on the bridge and no one may pass. We live for The One. We die for The One." Marcus, Babylon 5
No reboot then what are they going to do with tieflings and dragonborn??
Not use them?
As mentioned earlier in the thread, tieflings are already established for DL. Dragonborn can be 2nd generation draconians. We don't use halflings in DL; we have kender. So dragonborn could also be excluded since Dragonlance already has draconians.
I have all three editions of Dragonlance, and there are gully dwarves as PCs in all of them. I haven't had a player select one, but they have played tinker gnomes and kender.
I played a gully dwarf once. It's challenging playing a character race that is so inherently stupid.
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Originally Posted by qstor
So now there's tieflings and dragonborn in Dragonlance and the magic system could not revolve around the cycles of Krynn's moons.
Nothing has been decided yet on the races. As for the magic, it hasn't revolved solely around the moons for many years now. There are two forms of arcane magic, High Sorcery and Wild Sorcery, and two forms of divine magic, clerical magic and mysticism. So adding in warlocks and such will be easier than you think. How the Wizards of High Sorcery deal with the renegade warlocks is the interesting part!
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Originally Posted by The Little Raven
Did you miss that halflings have a +5 bonus to saving throws against fear effects?
Kender have traditionally been immune to fear, both magical and mundane. Only in extreme circumstances have they felt "kinda funny." We've debated a lot on whether the +5 bonus covers it or not.
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Originally Posted by Dausuul
I remember once working out a backstory whereby the Dark Sun world of Athas was actually Krynn, a couple thousand years later, in the timeline where Raistlin killed all the gods.
I sure everyone did they're best, and I've said nothing but good things about everyone involved in the DL3e project. That being said, it worries me that there were several times in which stuff was snuck in that had nothing to do with the novels or any other prior gaming materials.
Now when I saw that stuff I was like "oh my, how clever. But that's not Dragonlance". Many of these things came as modifications of earlier DL Nexus stuff. That is a textbook example of fanon-to-canon.
As the guy behind the Nexus, I take exception to this. There is no reason why new ideas can't make it into DL, especially when those ideas are being approved by the creators of the setting as well as Wizards of the Coast. If those ideas originate from fandom, then that means only one thing - they were good ideas.
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I just think that many of the ol' DL Nexus guys snuck some of their stuff in that had no reference to anything and that was inappropriate.
I also take exception to the idea that we fans-done-good somehow were "sneaking" things in. In some cases, they were requested. The War of the Darklance alternate timeline in Legends of the Twins was requested, for example.
And again, nothing wrong with original ideas, so long as they fit the setting and are approved by the Powers That Be (tm).
I wonder which era the setting will play in, because the era in wich most Dragonlance books are set in is dominated by massive, worldwide wars, most notably the War of the Lance, the Chaos War, and the War of Souls. To allow the heroes to gain any fame, it would have to be set after the war of souls, which isn't very original to the dragonlance setting, or in the Age of Dreams, Light, Might, or Dispair, which would be a copy of the dragonlance time leap.
I wonder which era the setting will play in, because the era in wich most Dragonlance books are set in is dominated by massive, worldwide wars, most notably the War of the Lance, the Chaos War, and the War of Souls. To allow the heroes to gain any fame, it would have to be set after the war of souls, which isn't very original to the dragonlance setting, or in the Age of Dreams, Light, Might, or Dispair, which would be a copy of the dragonlance time leap.
Long live the Lance!
Did you notice the dates on the posts in this thread?
As far as I am aware, WotC will be announcing their new setting very shortly at Gen Con. Dragonlance is one of the favourites, but it is all speculation at this point.
__________________ Embrace the chaos!
Pathfinder RPG (no hearts were broken in the making of this product)
There have been two Cataclysms, although the second is really not a thing like the first, and the first took place before the events of the first trilogy. Indeed, the gods left the first time before the first trilogy began, so if you want to be a stickler for all of this the setting has (since its inception) had three major wars, one of which ended with a world-shaking event (gods leaving, revealed to be the world stolen by Takhisis), and another with the death of one god and the demotion of another to mortal form.
It's somewhat overstating it to attribute constant world-shaking disaster to Dragonlance given that it's not exactly happened that often during its almost 25 year history. Worse has happened to the Forgotten Realms.
Cheers,
Cam
The War of the Lance series paints a believable picture of a damaged society slowly recovering from the Catalcysm and then adapting to the shock of the War of the Lance.
Whereas, the Chaos Wars and War of Souls completely fails to suspend my disbelief. It was atrocious the way it glossed over the impact of so much trauma and upheaval. It's simply heart-wrenching the way the people of Krynn were betrayed in such a short time span.
Imagine if we, in the real world, were just recovering from a subprime loan crisis and recession, and all of a sudden, we face World War III and governments across the world are replaced with tyrants, immediately followed by World War IV, while God/Allah/etc. officially withdrew from humanity and then returned and then withdrew and then returned again, destroying the faith of every member of every church and synagogue and mosque and temple in the world, and meanwhile, major new discoveries in science and technology turned out to be wrong and inoperative, and entire career paths and organizations (clergy, scientists, government) turned upside down. But after all these crises in war and religion and mutations in the very fabric of society, we're still kind of OK and society remains more or less functioning.
As for the Forgotten Realms, it was never really believable to begin with.
War of the Lance was a believable fantasy setting though until the Fifth Age hit the fan.
The War of the Lance series paints a believable picture of a damaged society slowly recovering from the Catalcysm and then adapting to the shock of the War of the Lance.
Whereas, the Chaos Wars and War of Souls completely fails to suspend my disbelief. It was atrocious the way it glossed over the impact of so much trauma and upheaval. It's simply heart-wrenching the way the people of Krynn were betrayed in such a short time span.
The Chaos War was a generation after the War of the Lance. The War of Souls was a generation after that. While I agree that more could have been done to emphasize the aftershocks of these events, I don't buy into the "short time span" thing.
Think about it. If the War of the Lance was World War II or 1945, then the Cataclysm happened in 1600. The Chaos War would have happened in 1986, and the War of Souls in 2025.
The Chaos War was a generation after the War of the Lance. The War of Souls was a generation after that. While I agree that more could have been done to emphasize the aftershocks of these events, I don't buy into the "short time span" thing.
Think about it. If the War of the Lance was World War II or 1945, then the Cataclysm happened in 1600. The Chaos War would have happened in 1986, and the War of Souls in 2025.
Cheers,
Cam
Oops, I guess you know much better than me about the timeline. When I read the books, it didn't seem as if much time had passed, since the surviving Heroes of the Lance still bridged the gap between trilogies and had not aged that much, so it all seemed to be happening to me within a couple decades.
Nevertheless, in the Age of Mortals, we are talking about major trauma to the very fabric of society. People often argue that African nations never truly recovered from colonial times, and that's just the consequence of war and slavery and politics. Now imagine an alternative timeline where every African believes that God is Dead and that their culture and tradition and science has changed overnight, and then do that all over again 40 years later, in the midst of tyrannical rulership and continental warfare. How long would it take that African society as a whole to return to a semblance of normality? That could be comparable to what happened in Dragonlance.
Anyway, I didn't intend to get bogged down with real life comparisons, but I want to emphasize how believable and evocative was the War of the Lance, and how the Age of Mortals felt like a bunch of baloney to me, IMO.
Last edited by NoWayJose; 10th August 2009 at 08:27 PM..
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