Dragonlance Adventure Series
Jester David
Hero
2 out of 5 rating for Dragonlance Adventure Series
The first Adventure Path, and a good fifteen years before Paizo! The foundation of the adventure is solid, but it has not aged well in the intervening 25 years and the lifespan of three (and two half) editions. The tropes and conventions of 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons weigh heavily on the adventure. Every chapter has to have some dungeon crawl, and the plot is heavily on the rails. However, there are very few adventure hooks to keep the party on the rails and quite a few pinch points in the story where the party is expected to do one thing but there’s very little reason for that to happen. The campaign suffers in the places where the story and adventuring ends to make way for sessions of Battlesystem mass combat. The option of having mass combat is nice, but very few concessions or alternatives are made for people who don’t want to use that system. And there are some shaky subsytems introduced in the occasional adventure Because this is a series of dungeon crawls, much of the quality depends on the dungeons themselves. Some are excellent, such as the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth and a few other iconic locales such as Skullcap and even Thorabardin. Others are simply less memorable and suffer from all the problems of 1e dungeons: no ecologies, illogical design, and no sense of architecture. There's one that's meant to be a series of air filled rooms in a sunken building but is really a series of rooms connected by a wandering hallway with lots of negative space (and, ostensibly the home of a wizard despite the absence of food, a kitchen, a restroom, bed, etc). The end is good and the first nine modules are solid, but the last quarter is pretty weak, suffering from the adventure’s reliance on the novels for story. When the novels gave the adventures lots of ideas to work with, the modules are good, but when the novels started focusing entirely on the characters and personal drama the adventures had nothing to work with and really lose steam. It does not help that the last third of the story is a travel adventure of the party slowly going from point A to B at levels when they should have access to teleportation magic. It would be a lot of fun to rework and reimagine the Adventure Path. There's a lot of other places to explore, new ideas that could be incorporated, and modern ideas in adventure design to add. This might be an interesting 5th Edition project, a revised War of the Lance adventure, knowing what we know now about the game and about the world.
The first Adventure Path, and a good fifteen years before Paizo! The foundation of the adventure is solid, but it has not aged well in the intervening 25 years and the lifespan of three (and two half) editions. The tropes and conventions of 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons weigh heavily on the adventure. Every chapter has to have some dungeon crawl, and the plot is heavily on the rails. However, there are very few adventure hooks to keep the party on the rails and quite a few pinch points in the story where the party is expected to do one thing but there’s very little reason for that to happen. The campaign suffers in the places where the story and adventuring ends to make way for sessions of Battlesystem mass combat. The option of having mass combat is nice, but very few concessions or alternatives are made for people who don’t want to use that system. And there are some shaky subsytems introduced in the occasional adventure Because this is a series of dungeon crawls, much of the quality depends on the dungeons themselves. Some are excellent, such as the ruined city of Xak Tsaroth and a few other iconic locales such as Skullcap and even Thorabardin. Others are simply less memorable and suffer from all the problems of 1e dungeons: no ecologies, illogical design, and no sense of architecture. There's one that's meant to be a series of air filled rooms in a sunken building but is really a series of rooms connected by a wandering hallway with lots of negative space (and, ostensibly the home of a wizard despite the absence of food, a kitchen, a restroom, bed, etc). The end is good and the first nine modules are solid, but the last quarter is pretty weak, suffering from the adventure’s reliance on the novels for story. When the novels gave the adventures lots of ideas to work with, the modules are good, but when the novels started focusing entirely on the characters and personal drama the adventures had nothing to work with and really lose steam. It does not help that the last third of the story is a travel adventure of the party slowly going from point A to B at levels when they should have access to teleportation magic. It would be a lot of fun to rework and reimagine the Adventure Path. There's a lot of other places to explore, new ideas that could be incorporated, and modern ideas in adventure design to add. This might be an interesting 5th Edition project, a revised War of the Lance adventure, knowing what we know now about the game and about the world.
Thunderfoot
Hero
1 out of 5 rating for Dragonlance Adventure Series
I have never liked the Dragonlance series, I thought the y were poorly written and though the history and characters had potential, they just didn't go anywhere. The modules managed to make the books look like Shakespearean literature. The actual description tells the DM, to ignore any character deaths that may have happened in the previous modules and come up with some reason they are alive. Which as a 1ed AD&D DM made me convulse. Then after reading the whole thing it is pointed out that the characters are not the real heroes but are just supporting the heroes from the books. Yeah, that sounds like Tracy Hickman's style. In a single word - tripe.
I have never liked the Dragonlance series, I thought the y were poorly written and though the history and characters had potential, they just didn't go anywhere. The modules managed to make the books look like Shakespearean literature. The actual description tells the DM, to ignore any character deaths that may have happened in the previous modules and come up with some reason they are alive. Which as a 1ed AD&D DM made me convulse. Then after reading the whole thing it is pointed out that the characters are not the real heroes but are just supporting the heroes from the books. Yeah, that sounds like Tracy Hickman's style. In a single word - tripe.
4 out of 5 rating for Dragonlance Adventure Series
This could be described as the first adventure path - showing us what a long, connected storyline could look like two decades before the term was coined. Indeed, it is reminiscent of contemporary attempts to widen brands, accompanied by NYT bestelling novels and more. Penned in the 1980s, it certainly shows its age - it's too railroady; but then what AP isn't? - but the series contains some truly classic modules, locations, and villains. Xak Tsaroth, the sunken city-dungeon of the first module, Dragons of Despair, is wonderfully realised. Despite its flaws and missteps - and make no mistake, these are there - this adventure path schools us on how to write a truly epic storyline. Floating tombs, Lord Soth, the green dragon Cyan Bloodbane, and adventures in forest, ice, volcanoes, plains, and more. My main gripe would be the attempts to shoehorn in aerial battle rules and mass combat in two of the modules, which were uneasily realised.
This could be described as the first adventure path - showing us what a long, connected storyline could look like two decades before the term was coined. Indeed, it is reminiscent of contemporary attempts to widen brands, accompanied by NYT bestelling novels and more. Penned in the 1980s, it certainly shows its age - it's too railroady; but then what AP isn't? - but the series contains some truly classic modules, locations, and villains. Xak Tsaroth, the sunken city-dungeon of the first module, Dragons of Despair, is wonderfully realised. Despite its flaws and missteps - and make no mistake, these are there - this adventure path schools us on how to write a truly epic storyline. Floating tombs, Lord Soth, the green dragon Cyan Bloodbane, and adventures in forest, ice, volcanoes, plains, and more. My main gripe would be the attempts to shoehorn in aerial battle rules and mass combat in two of the modules, which were uneasily realised.
ShadowDenizen
Explorer
4 out of 5 rating for Dragonlance Adventure Series
And once again, Morrus beat me to the punch !I'll echo much of what he said.Dragonlance was, in many ways, a setting and concept ahead of it's time.The original DL series, hwoever, while dates, is still one of the most iconic D+D series of it's time, and was a large part of my childhood.Unfortuantely, passing time has not been kind to this venerable setting. Remember the "SAGA" edition? Or the "Age of Mortals"?But I'll choose to focus on the positive, and the orignal DL series of modules. While the proto-Adventure Path was certainly a bit rail-roady (as most modules of the time were), there were a TON of memorable characters and location that I remmeber to this day.... Putting aside the Heroes of the Lance, between the Chronicles novels and the modules, we're introduced to such memorable characters as Fizban, Thereos Ironfeld, Elistan the Cleric, and many more. (I even remeber the loathsome Fewmaster Toese and Bupu the Gully Dwarf to this day!)And these modules are still inherently READABLE and etertaining, which is a huge acheivement for any published asdventure. And there's still some worthwhile "OMG" moments in the saga. The party learning about the corruption of the good dragon eggs to become Draconians, learning how to forge Dragonlances, the Battle of the High Clertists tower (The map bundled in DL8 is AWESOME), and so much more!Yes, much of this has been spoiled and become a bit more cliche and liaghable since these modules were published, but I think most current adventures owe at least a littel bit of a debt to Dragonlance for paving the way.
And once again, Morrus beat me to the punch !I'll echo much of what he said.Dragonlance was, in many ways, a setting and concept ahead of it's time.The original DL series, hwoever, while dates, is still one of the most iconic D+D series of it's time, and was a large part of my childhood.Unfortuantely, passing time has not been kind to this venerable setting. Remember the "SAGA" edition? Or the "Age of Mortals"?But I'll choose to focus on the positive, and the orignal DL series of modules. While the proto-Adventure Path was certainly a bit rail-roady (as most modules of the time were), there were a TON of memorable characters and location that I remmeber to this day.... Putting aside the Heroes of the Lance, between the Chronicles novels and the modules, we're introduced to such memorable characters as Fizban, Thereos Ironfeld, Elistan the Cleric, and many more. (I even remeber the loathsome Fewmaster Toese and Bupu the Gully Dwarf to this day!)And these modules are still inherently READABLE and etertaining, which is a huge acheivement for any published asdventure. And there's still some worthwhile "OMG" moments in the saga. The party learning about the corruption of the good dragon eggs to become Draconians, learning how to forge Dragonlances, the Battle of the High Clertists tower (The map bundled in DL8 is AWESOME), and so much more!Yes, much of this has been spoiled and become a bit more cliche and liaghable since these modules were published, but I think most current adventures owe at least a littel bit of a debt to Dragonlance for paving the way.
Enrico Poli1
Adventurer
5 out of 5 rating for Dragonlance Adventure Series
They experimented so much in this string of adventures!
- It's the very first Adventure Path.
- The story was so good that an entire Setting came out of the novels and the adventures.
- More importantly, first came the story and then the game.
The authors actually changed the way D&D was played, because they successfully tried to bring into D&D the feeling that the players had to "act" like actors in a movie or characters in a fantasy book. The focus of play in D&D changed: in the old days of Gygax, a player wanted to explore dungeons and grow in power; in the days of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, a player wanted to roleplay his character, focus on relationships, and be part of an epic story.
- As a consequence, monsters were treated as NPCs with a personality. Remember the old female Red Dragon in Pax Tharkas that thinks that the kids she's guarding are her real sons?
- Some minor experimental ideas: the Dream experience in Qualinesti; or the wargame that mingled with a sandboxy search for randomly-positioned artifacts in the Tower of the High Clerist, and that could end in a number of different ways...
- That said, the adventures are Average-to-Good; I recently perused them with the D&D 5e ruleset and it all worked amazingly well.
- The attached art goes from the absolutely best-of-the-best (Elmore's and Caldwell's) to meh.
All in all, I give it a 5-star review not because it is perfect, but because of its experimental nature AND as a paragon of High Fantasy setting and adventure.
They experimented so much in this string of adventures!
- It's the very first Adventure Path.
- The story was so good that an entire Setting came out of the novels and the adventures.
- More importantly, first came the story and then the game.
The authors actually changed the way D&D was played, because they successfully tried to bring into D&D the feeling that the players had to "act" like actors in a movie or characters in a fantasy book. The focus of play in D&D changed: in the old days of Gygax, a player wanted to explore dungeons and grow in power; in the days of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, a player wanted to roleplay his character, focus on relationships, and be part of an epic story.
- As a consequence, monsters were treated as NPCs with a personality. Remember the old female Red Dragon in Pax Tharkas that thinks that the kids she's guarding are her real sons?
- Some minor experimental ideas: the Dream experience in Qualinesti; or the wargame that mingled with a sandboxy search for randomly-positioned artifacts in the Tower of the High Clerist, and that could end in a number of different ways...
- That said, the adventures are Average-to-Good; I recently perused them with the D&D 5e ruleset and it all worked amazingly well.
- The attached art goes from the absolutely best-of-the-best (Elmore's and Caldwell's) to meh.
All in all, I give it a 5-star review not because it is perfect, but because of its experimental nature AND as a paragon of High Fantasy setting and adventure.
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