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D&D 5E Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen... anyone play through it? Any good?

Jack Hooligan

Explorer
I was a big fan of the novels back in the late 80s/early 90s. Didn't really play through the adventures though. I have a passing interesting and revisiting the setting and as a fan of 5e, I'm curious how well this book has landed with players. I understand, being both a sourcebook and campaign, it's got to be pretty high level on setting specifics, but is the adventure any good? How would you rate it against some of the other published adventures?

Thanks!
 

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I haven't played it, but I've read through it several times and am considering running a heavily modified/mutilated version of it.

The adventure is a mixed bag. There's some great setpieces there, but it's a bit confused about who the major bad guy is. Soth is the big selling point, and it's his face (/helm) that's all over the cover, but the adventure only really wants you to distract/divert him while the big final combat in the campaign is against someone else who the PC will probably have never met before. That dynamic doesn't work very well for me, narratively. I very much like the early stages of the campaign, but I've seen other people complain that it's too railroaded and some of the encounters are walkovers. You get to touch a lot of the high points of DL, but often in an abbreviated or partial state. Kind of a whirlwind tour. Meeting Soth and a few other minor canon characters, finding a Dragonlance, flying citadels, the return of the Gods, a Test of (sorta) High Sorcery, meeting a metallic dragon, etc. The campaign is, however, quite tightly constrained geographically to the area around Kalaman. The books travel all over the world, the module doesn't. PCs should be chosen accordingly. A Plainsman PC, or a Thorbardin dwarf, or a kagonesti etc can play through the module just fine, but they're not going to be at all involved in the plotlines of what's going on in their homelands. The book is also heavily focused on the war, rather than the interpersonal stuff and the metaphysics which was the core of the novels. Understandable - personal relationships are too PC-specific to be covered in a general module, and the writers didn't want to step on the toes of Tanis, Raistlin et al who actually did all the big stuff when it comes to putting Takhisis back in her box - but the emphasis won't sync well with players who expect the module experience to be thematically similar to the novel experience. But that's up to the DM to address, really.

There are a few things here that'll bother dragonlance lore/novel purists, but i can mostly see why they were included. Clerics (arguably) before Goldmoon recovers the Disks, the routine use of non-dragon flying mounts, Soth's motivations, dragons existing at the time of the Cataclysm when they should all be asleep, some blurring of the canonical timelines about Kalaman in the War of the Lance etc. How much this annoys you, only you can tell.
 
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Alzrius

The EN World kitten
If it's helpful, there's a fairly in-depth two-part review of the adventure over on The Alexandrian:


 

pukunui

Legend
I'm sure someone posted about their experience running this adventure here in the forums, but I can't find it with a quick search. All I remember is them saying it didn't take their group long to play through it.
 

I'm sure someone posted about their experience running this adventure here in the forums, but I can't find it with a quick search. All I remember is them saying it didn't take their group long to play through it.
Yeah, i can see how that could happen. It kinda soft-recommends milestone levelling, so if your PCs are laser-focused on objectives and don't go off on tangents or get deep into long RP sessions with NPCs, you could plough through it pretty quick.
 


If it's helpful, there's a fairly in-depth two-part review of the adventure over on The Alexandrian:


Excellent posts, thank you for sharing. Some of the discussions in the second post mirror what I’m already seeing (only in chapter 3, and left the book at home while I’m across country for work), and I ruled the first vignette out as-wtiiten immediately due to the timeline. There is other stuff I want to add and clean up so that it matches Chronicles, as one of my goals is to get my daughters interested and invested enough that they actually read Chronicles; they like the world and liked the old movie, but aren’t big fantasy readers. That will definitely require some massaging and making events covered in Chronicles more intriguing, so that their curiosity is spurred.

Also hoping to have my best friend get to join after the first session (girls want first to be just us), and he also loves DL (though has never run a campaign in it), so I absolutely want my regular DM for two decades to enjoy being a player in Ansalon.

Also, I want to end things so that I have a Krynn set right after the end of Spring Dawning so I can let my wife, girls,best friend, and others from our regular group shape the next few years of Ansalon.
 


pukunui

Legend
If it's helpful, there's a fairly in-depth two-part review of the adventure over on The Alexandrian:


Wow. That's harsh, even for Justin. I don't remember it being that bad when I first read through it, but then he highlights a bunch of things that just never occurred to me.
 

Wow. That's harsh, even for Justin. I don't remember it being that bad when I first read through it, but then he highlights a bunch of things that just never occurred to me.

He's not entirely wrong, but I think he's maybe a bit too harsh. Darrett, for instance, is kinda set up to be the Guy In The Chair the way I read it, especially given his role in the campaign prior to Kalaman. The one who organises and coordinates and passes on info, but not the one who DOES stuff. My read of it was that the expectation was that he's pretty diffident and uncertain and that he'd be very responsive and respectful of PCs opinions, given their earlier heroics. He has his opinions, but he's going to request stuff, present possibilities/info, or make suggestions rather than just order everyone around.

It is pretty railroady (though most modules inevitably are). Especially at the end. They're trying to strike an awkward balance here. It's Dragonlance, so they want PCs to have awesome aerial fights wielding dragonlances against evil dragons - but that would require PCs to be of high enough level that they weren't just overshadowed by their mounts. And if THAT was the case, the PC wizard or cleric would just use Teleport or Wind Walk or something to board the citadel without the PCs needing to ride anything at all (spellcasters were few and far between in the old DL stories/modules compared to more modern editions). But that would take a quintessential aspect of Dragonlance away, so they invent a rather unsatisfying half-measure compromise and use dragonnels instead.

Honestly I find the second half of the campaign to be decidedly meh compared to the first half, and if I ran it, I'd probably throw the module out the window round about the point when the PCs find the bronze dragon egg and get them trooping all over Ansalon looking for the origin of draconians instead. Have them see the sights, maybe visit Wayreth or Qualinost etc, fight some minotaur pirates and infiltrate Sanction etc. And by THAT time, they'd be high enough level to get in some proper dragon fights.
 

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